Juku E5101 (1980s)
The Juku E5101 was a personal computer made in Estonia in the late 80s and 90s. It featured a Russian clone of the Intel i8080A processor, and an 8 bit microprocessor running at 2MHz. They were used in several schools in Estonia. It had 64 kB of RAM, a floppy drive and a tape reader for memory. It had a very bulky keyboard and mouse combination, as well as a monochrome monitor with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels or 384 by 200 pixels. They were produced in a Narva based factory "Baltijets" and later in a factory called "Estron".
Raspberry Pi (2010s)
Raspberry Pi is a line of small computers. There are multiple models with different features and hardware. Raspberry Pi Foundation, the non-profit company that creates these computers was founded in 2009. The first model of Raspberry Pi was launched in 2012. The most recent model Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W was released in October of 2021. These single board computers are more powerful than a microcontroller like an Arduino, but less powerful than a full size computer. However a microcontroller model does exist (Raspberry Pi Pico).
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w/
The most powerful model Raspberry Pi 4, released in 2019, has a quad core processor, up to 8GB of memory as well as onboard Bluetooth, WiFi, an Ethernet port and 4 full size USB ports. It supports running 2 4K monitors at a time and was built as a replacement for a desktop computer. These computers are cheap, accessible and meant to teach programming to young people. The name Raspberry came from a tradition of giving a computer the name of a fruit, for example Apple, and Pi came from the programming language Python. Apart from the microcontroller, the cheapest model is the Raspberry Pi Zero, which costs only $5, but that is without any peripherals, like an micro SD card which is used as storage for all the models.
UltraHLE (1990s)
When the Nintendo 64 released in 1996 people thought that emulating the system on a consumer PC wouldn't be possible. On forums and chatrooms people were spreading fake emulators that turned out to just be viruses. But in 1999 two developers had taken a different approach to developing an emulator and in just 3 months created UltraHLE. Instead of trying to emulate every single instruction as accurately as possible, they had mapped specific instructions like drawing a graphic to existing ones on a Pentium II computer. This was known as high-level emulation (HLE) instead of low-level emulation (LLE).
UltraHLE: https://www.christopherbonhage.com/software/2017/05/31/flappy-bird-nintendo-64-part-1.html
This was very impressive for the time because it could run games like Super Mario 64 and Starfox 64 on resolutions bigger than the Nintendo 64 itself could. However there was a major flaw. Mapping instructions differed from game to game. UltraHLE could only play about 20 games in total.
Sources:
Juku E5101
- https://arvutimuuseum.ut.ee/index.php?m=eksponaadid&id=165
- https://arvutimuuseum.ee/computers/list.shtml?n000
- https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juku_(arvuti)
- http://kalev35.planet.ee/ajaleht%20Maaleht/Maaleht%20nr%2021,%2024.%20mai%201990.pdf
- https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2657
- https://www.raspberrypi.com
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
- https://www.christopherbonhage.com/software/2017/05/31/flappy-bird-nintendo-64-part-1.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NF5sU_n0uk
- https://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/n64/ultrahle.html
