Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/19/meet-the-megaprocessor-a-16-b.html
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"I didn’t plan on ending up here.
Often said, seldom understood.
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Well, he’s terrible at Tetris, but he has a macrocomputer so I guess he’s ahead overall.
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I don’t know about the Amiga, but if I recall correctly the Mac Plus came in at a blistering 8MHz. Even the Commodore 64 already did 1MHz (albeit on an 8-bit processor - the MOS 6510)…
Ah nostalgia. You never forget the specs of your first computer, right?
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20kHz? Man, that thing must whine when it’s running - if your ears aren’t more that thirty years old.
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if you can hear it you’re too young to appreciate such a machine. now get off my lawn.
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“Neat. So why didn’t you build it in VR instead?”
{lengthy pause}
"[long series of expletives]"
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The Amiga’s MC68000 was clocked at 7.16 MHz. The amusing thing was that the Mac emulator on the Amiga ran Mac apps faster than the Mac due to offloading the I/O, graphics, sound, etc to the custom co-processors.
But yeah, the author is off by several orders of magnitude when it comes to speed. And when it comes down to it, the MC68000 was, internally, a 32-bit CPU.
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Many years ago, I was attending some factory training. They showed a new machine. When it was performing some operations, I could hear the motherboard vibrating, a very faint high pitched whine. I asked the instructor if the CPU was running at 20kHz or so, which he confirmed. I told him I could hear it.
Nowadays, I can’t hear above, I don’t know, 10kHz.
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I once worked in a department which had a development board that could be clocked down to DC. If you wanted to, you could spend a whole day doing a single fetch-execute cycle.
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i must really be taking good care of my ears. i can still hear sounds in the 18-19 khz range. i recently did a “test how old your ears are” utility on a website and it said my ears were 28, i’m 55. i don’t know how that’s worked out that way, i’ve been to plenty of concerts and baked in headphones on many occasions.
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Next up: tubes and delay lines.
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How many FPS can it get playing Crysis?
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He’s a terrible tetris player.
Maybe 5fpc
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Actually, the NTSC C-64 ran at just under 1 MHz, while the PAL one ran just over.
This takes me back to the Traveller Roleplaying Game, where computers were measured by their mass in multiple tonnes of displacement.
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The ZX Spectrum ran at 3.5MHz. We win! 
Seriously though, the Spectrum vs C64 holy wars were stupid. Just like all other computer holy wars.
If could be half as large if we took out the fibre optics, but then you’d be vulnerable to nukes.
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That’s about what I got in that carrier bit.
I might have suggested to the developers that a freeze-ray was maybe not the best major weapon in a game that would force most users systems to their knees.
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