I think a lot of the anxiety i get is that our industry is still young enough (it existed for a while but the huge boost in number of people working came in the 90s-10s and most of those people haven’t yet reached retirement age) that I don’t actually know a lot of people who retired. I’m 43 and know a few people in my profession in their 50s and a handful in their 60s.
I know nobody older in my profession (when I started 20 years ago the oldest people at work were maybe 20 years older than me at the time). I occasionally chat online with my first boss from early on in my career - I estimate he is in his mid to late 50s and still works as a programmer. My brother in law is 60 and is probably the oldest working programmer I know.
I literally cant think of anyone I worked with who retired while I was working with them- I think this lack of familiarity makes it seem scarier than it should be.
Had to look it up, but instagram had 13 employees when they sold to Facebook for $1 billion (for some reason I remembered them being 9 people). I know multiple gale devs who had single digit (or low double digits) staff when they were already making many millions in revenue/profit.
The difference being that editing the source code was the point of the BASIC examples provided with DOS/QBasic/GW-Basic (they’re there to teach you programming!)
The 8-bit monolithic CPUs of the seventies all had a few thousands transistors.
The first generation of true 16-bit CPUs, i.e. Intel 8086, Motorola MC68000 and Zilog Z8000, had almost an order of magnitude more transistors, i.e. in the range of 15000 transistors to 50000 transistors.
The first true 32-bit CPUs, like the National 32000 series, Motorola MC68020 and Intel 80386, had a few hundred thousand transistors.
By the end of the eighties, the second generation of 32-bit CPUs reached 1 million transistors.
I think there were actually 68000 transistor positions. In the ROMs and PLAs not every potential transistor is populated but the missing ones were counted as well. But the number of actual transistors is only slightly smaller so it doesn't really matter.
I do not remember the exact number of transistors in MC 68000, but I think that it was less than 40000, so not just slightly smaller. In any case, it had more than twice as many transistors as Zilog Z8000, which was super-optimized for size (a very bad decision of Zilog, which lead to a too long time-to-market and to many initial bugs), and slightly more than 4/3 times as many transistors as Intel 8086.
The 68000 transistors number claimed by the Motorola marketing was close to what you get by dividing the die area to the area of one transistor, so it did not correspond to actual transistor positions.
The MC68000 die had large areas occupied with microprogram ROMs, and there as you say only a part of the array of transistors are active, depending on the stored bits. Nonetheless, a significant part of the die was occupied with random logic, where all the physical transistors are used and a part of the area does not have any transistors.
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