by Jack Ganssle
An embedded system was one that used a microprocessor to control something. Embedded systems were physically large, due to all of the support circuitry, but logically tiny, cramped by small address spaces and insanely limiting development tools. When I started in this field our primary product used an 8008 with 4k of program, all written in assembly language, of course. The tools used paper tape for mass storage, which was fed through an ASR-33 teletypewriter at a blistering 10 characters per second. It took three days to assemble and link that program. Obviously, a bigger chunk of code would have taken prohibitive amounts of time to convert to a binary image. Yet in the real computer world of mainframes and even minicomputers developers used high level languages and crafted programs that were enormous by comparison. COBOL/Fortran programmers were like the gerontologists compared to us pediatricians building embedded products.

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