Interesting point of history— the H8 processor is the MCU that powers the original Lego Mindstorms RCX. In high school I wrote some assembly language for it when making a robot that ran on BrickOS:
That is a really wild design
“The concept for the device emerged from social research conducted in six countries, which identified a need for digital communication among youth. … a radio protocol was patented. This protocol allowed up to 3,000 Cybiko devices to form a network without using auxiliary stations.”
Fascinating!
Smartphones can form mesh networks with WiFi, but neither of the duopoly OSes have this as a built-in feature, it's left to apps, and that fragments the potential. The most powerful radio isn't user-controllable, it's strictly pay-to-play and operating a base station is heavily licensed, no peer-to-peer activity is possible.
This is something I'd like to see disrupted, although I'm not holding my breath. I don't like that grid failure or (more likely) government order can knock smartphones off the network so easily as they can.
I was never directly involved with said project, btw, but I knew all of the people who were. Nowadays, I live near Amsterdam and will get 1 gbit symmetric fiber internet soon (most of NL already has access to it). I use a Wireguard tunnel to connect via any network (LTE/NG/WLAN) via my home network which runs Pi-Hole. My point being, security has improved, but there is a constant: wireless internet usage can be triangulated, eavesdropped, and clients can be tracked. It is something we need to live with. Every time I leave my smartphone at home even for something as small as picking up my kids at school or sports I feel good. However I can easily be tracked by all the doorbell cameras in the street.
We are done with subversion on the internet. It is over, a done deal. I've given up many years ago, and eventually I also embraced the thought of such. If you want some private time together go to some cave in Turkey or whatever.
The HP Prime G2 released in 2018 is about the only mainstream device that happens to have hardware FP, and that’s for a device more touted for CAS features. The FPU is more just something that comes for free with the commodity SoC chosen.
More importantly, IEEE 754 floating point ISA is not great for calculators - they don’t require the speed a personal computer does, and calculators work hard to hide the fact numbers such as 0.45 can’t be represented as IEEE 754 floats.
> Q - "What does "H Eight" mean?"
> Matt [Bellamy]: Using a microcomputer (Hitachi H8 / 3048F) which can be built into the industrialmachines, you can learn and understand the inputs /outputs of the microcomputer as a basis of robot control and conduct theexperiments by C-language for steppingmotor control, servomotor control (PWM control) and serial communication. H8 model, a 16-bit microcomputer consists of 32-bit registers, has a flash ROM of 128KB, a RAM of 4KB (SRAM) with external extension of 128KB and 78 I/O terminals with the built-in A/D and D/Aconverters. H8 is a microcomputer usually built into a TV, VTR, mobile-phone and car navigator. Since it has ample I/O terminals, H8 microcomputer is also used as a brain of a small robot.
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160406073458/https://www.micro...