NEW: HP 15C Collectors Edition

[brouhaha]

(05-11-2023 09:16 AM)jklsadf Wrote:  I wasn't aware mask sets were so cheap.

For a recent CMOS process, a mask set costs millions of dollars, but that also consists of more than 75 masks. For old stuff it was under a dozen masks, and usually masked ROM only needs a single custom mask, rather than an all-layers mask set.

Quote:See here, large parts were done in 6502 assembly

Thanks for pointing that out. I guess the 33s stories I'd heard were only about the C portions, as no mention had been made of assembly. But that was just a personal conversation years ago, and it's also possible that my memory of it isn't that reliable.

The description in that thread does sound essentially unmaintainable.

Of course, there are also pure-C code bases that are essentially unmaintainable. It's a lot more about design and style, or lack of those, than about language. It's possible to write highly-maintainable assembly, but there's rarely any good reason to do that now.

It wouldn't be entirely trivial to reimplement the 35s software from scratch, but it wouldn't be too huge a project either. However, it's not clear that any commercial entity is willing to invest even a modest amount of software development in such a thing now.