9 Apr
2013
9 Apr
'13
5:41 p.m.
On 10 April 2013 01:00, Kelly Fergason <kfergason at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
<jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
You do have a point. Interesting architecture & so on, but...
registers in external DRAM? Really?
They were appallingly slow. My experience of them is from school;
bucking the British nationwide trend to buy the excellent but
expensive BBC Micro (usually with Microvitec CUB monitors and possibly
some Econet-networked floppy drives, if you were lucky), my school
"upgraded" from 4 Commodore PET 4032s with a single shared IEEE-bus
dual-5?" floppy drive to a room full of TI99/4as with black & white
portable TVs and cassette recorders.
It was right at the end of the 99/4a's life and I suspect that they
were /really/ cheap.
If they'd invested in the Extended BASIC cartridge for them all, they
might not have been quite so bad. Monitors would have been nice, too.
But as it is - gods, they were awful. Slow, terribly slow, a pretty
poor BASIC, sluggish storage. Nice keyboards, though.
They weren't bad /looking/ but they were not fun to use.
I did my 'O'-level Computer Studies homework on my Spectrum at home. :?)
IIRC, looking back 30 years, I think I wrote a text-mode orrery
program, followed by a text-adventure game, complete with save-game
functionality, movable objects and a basic two-word-command parser. I
was quite proud of that.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
To complement the thread "The ten SEXIEST
computers of ALL TIME * The
Register", we have
Any such list is necessarily very subjective, but I can think of lots of
machines that were worse than the ones indicated here. And not all of
them would be consumer computers either - just because you paid a lot
for something didn't mean it would be good.
Still, I liked the presentation.
-- Jecel
Worse is subjective as you say, but here is my example.
TI 99/4a. Cliff Click gave up in disgust trying to program this
thing. nuf said.