Is it possible for me to use an old hard drive I have laying around as a micro controller?
Well, i think early computing machines used to use 'reel to reel' tape decks in a manner very
similar to the way ram is used.
With clever use of simple chips, you could probably use sets of home-written subroutines to be
read from the drive, it would require in-depth knowledge of how information is stored and
processed.
I think that even simple subroutines that tried to use a hard drive to shuffle information
around like a microcontroller does, would find that the access times would get ponderous
compared to routines handled by a processor, even a 'slow' microprocessor.
It might be possible to do this, but quite unreasonable ammounts of writing custom sub
routines. One might do a few little easy routines, just to prove it, ... as a bet maybe.
John