<showing my age here>

When I remember all the stuff you could do on an AppleII (and a BBC Micro) with their tiny four odd thousand transistor cpus and 4 whole KB of ram - and consider how much time I spend waiting for this laptop with it's billion-or-so transistor cpu and 16 GB of ram - it's almost enough to make you weep about the profligate waste of resources of the entire software engineering profession... ;-)

I sometimes think that. I am amazed at when I look back at the BBC Micro and think of the software I used to run on there, and how they did it with such tiny amounts of RAM.

I do realise that the last 20 years of GUI progress has stalled and that you could take a Mac from yesteryear or PC from ~1991 and know your way around it without any trouble at all.

Of course software development strategies have changed and languages now let us express ourselves in previously unimaginable ways, but we've come so far and not far at all.

I am particularly struck with the craze over the last 5+ years with regard of "cloud" and shoving data to the other side of the world, particularly given the microcomputer revolution and the lack of need to shove your data elsewhere. That's what the microcomputer is for!

Well, it's a pretty simple CPU. It only had 56 instructions, 40 pins, and 8 bytes of registers. It assumes direct, single-cycle access to memory. It was originally supposed to have a ROtate-Right instruction, but it had a bug, so the instruction was not included in the manual. Also, invalid instructions are not detected, leading to the discovery of ROtate-Right and some accidental instructions, as well as the creation of some cool extra-instruction-trapping hardware.

The LGP-21 [0] has the fewest transistors for any mass-market computer I've read about - 460, and 300 diodes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30#LGP-21