On 10/17/2010 03:47 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
On 10/17/2010 06:59 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The size 4mb were typical from late msdos times, when Win 3.x started, year 1992 or so - and the mos modern cpus were the 386 or perhaps 486 - no pentiums, even less the IV.
Memory lane - my first box (still runs) 386/33 w/math coprocessor, 4 meg. and 120m drive. DOS 4.01 (yea! no 33m partition limitations), Win 3.1& word all installed in less than 4 meg of drive space. Trumpet winsock, handled internet over 2400 baud dial-up, Mosaic had not yet been born and the c-shell/ftp and text-interface to compuserve or bulletin boards were the only game in town.
A big step up from the dual-1.2M/360k drive setups on the 286 boxes at work. And just 2-3 years prior at A&M, the VAX cluster was the only game going. (FORTRAN for numerical methods/common-blocks - yuk!) (we've come a long way in 20 years)
I was at NASA when the first Mosaic appeared ('91?) and at the time there were very few sites, no graphics, just links, but man was that better than hand-typing all the urls....
You are a late-comer. I can remember when 16K was the standard ram, and 64K was the biggest expansion you could get. My Big Board CPM machine came with 16K, and I expanded it immediately. You could get the os and Wordstar on one side of an 8" floppy, and still have space to write a few pages! Oh, yes--the Big Board came as a kit of parts, and you got out your soldering iron and built it. Then you bought a power supply somewhere, and a case, and floppy dirves, and a keyboard and a display. (The rich bought a used terminal.) I think Bill Gates said that no-one would ever want more than 128K! That was a year or two _after_ the Big Board. I think the Commodore and the Atari both came with 16K; I sort of remember that you could expand the Atari. The Big Board ran at 2.5 MHz on an 8080, convertible to a Z80, at 4 MHz, and the two commercial machines ran on a Motorla chip. I don't rememeber the type. (Some guys at the shop had built a mil-spec machine with the Z80, and the QPL version of the chip ran about $ 230! This was earlier, around 1975. ) There was also an Apple II around just about 1980--the screen was only 40 characters wide. What a screw-up, but look how they pulled out of it! And Radio Shack had a machine--I think it also ran CPM, but not sure. The company that I worked for at that time (~1980) was Cardion, and there was just one RS machine that a secretary used with RS's proprietary word processor. They also had some kind of HP machine that ran BASIC, but you had to take a ticket to get on it! The entire engineering department used it. They also had remote access to a mainframe somewhere, by acoustic modem, but that was "modern" at the time-- the first time I used that kind of system was in the late 60's. That dial-up machine ran BASIC and Fortran. Most of us engineers used BASIC, since we were in school before Fortran was taught--only a couple of the younger guys programmed in Fortran. (In 1983 I got really up-to-date, and took a course in Pascal! But the real programmers were doing C by that time.) Well, I've been retired for 8 years now, and I'm just trying to learn some Linux! Altho I've been "fooling" with it for about 15 years. --doug -- Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides. --A. M. Greeley -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org