Now that's funny.
This wouldn't be nearly as cool but, how about a cassette tape recording of 110 baud serial or modem?
Play it back and maybe it could be a weekend long gag that it's booting all weekend and says hello world right at the end.
"Wow this bash with gnu readline is... hardly any more convenient on this teletype than what we had..."
The first hurdle is, can you fit a program that knows how to pause and restart the tape drive within the first 18k? Which is about when the first side of the first tape will run out, assuming plain jane 30minutes/side tapes.
I've heard descriptions of card access memory from a partner in my company, Howie Wolowitz, who wrote the first versions of filePro (before that, profile, and before that it was "electric file clerk") for Tandy and worked in all manner of banks and things way way back.
I'm not sure if I'm glad, or crushed that I missed out and never had to/got to work on such a horrific contraption.
Can you imagine? A huge crazy looping spaghetti continuous running stream of paper cards as RAM?
I had a nice fully factory refurbished data general nova 4 (or 45?) to myself for several years. wasn't mine but in the family and it's been tossed since I last saw it :(
But I got to boot it & play with it for a few years, do a little basic, rdos, and like the big indian girls in Blazing Saddles, "keep teepee warm in winter!" except better looking. ;) possibly even more fun to play with!
Telephone booth that was about the equal of 1/3 of an original XT in all ways except cubic feet, decibles, and btu's.
But that was practically modern. 8" 1M floppy, 10M hd with the huge alloy platters a foot & a half across, 300 baud tractor feed teletype terminal for the main console, 1200 or maybe even 9600 baud vt-something-or-others. Oh and the shelf of manuals and circuit diagrams that ran the length of one wall and was full end to end with big 3-ring binders with triple fold-out diagrams... Loved that 60's/70's idea of what the future looks like. I wish any of my current omputer hardware looked as cool as that 300 baud teletype terminal with the curviing lines and the textured white mystery material it's made of, accented nicely by the different shades of shiny blue typewriter keys from cobalt to sky...
And that mystery material probably stops bullets, should the need arise.
Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Philipp Thomas"
* James Knott (james.knott@rogers.com) [20080716 00:08]:
Got Linux drivers? ;-)
Reminds me that AFAIK, IBM once had the idea for a trade show (after their S/390 port) to bootstrap the kernel from punch cards and discovered that given the size of the kernel, it would take ages to do so and so dropped the project :)
Philipp
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