25 Nov
2002
25 Nov
'02
2:12 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great ben franchuk once stated:
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
Ah well ... I was able to write papers and columns on a 32x16 upper case
display (okay, I had 64K RAM and a floppy drive) but hey, if you say so ...
And I consider Linux to be close enough to a real OS for government work.
Useful in what context? I wrote nearly every
paper for high school and
college, plus a humor column [1] on an 8-bit computer [2], and I had a 2nd
cousin (Mom's cousin) that wrote a few books on an 8-bit computer [3].
Okay, you might not be able to effectively run more than one application at
a time, but that might not be such a *bad* thing, if you want to get work
done 8-)
For a real word processing you need 80x24 upper/lower case display,
full keyboard (compared to the membrane keyboards of some computers)
a good printer and at least 32k of memory, and floppy disks. The IBM
PC had all the above features, but most 8 bit systems like S100
bus,apple,C64 Coco did not as a base system. Sadly the PC still does
not have a real OS,but then I am a OS/9 fan. Right now modern machines require at least 67108864*
bytes of memory to
run.
Odd, I only have 33,554,432 bytes in my main development machine. My
webserver has 20,975,616 bytes (and it handles email as well).
What will it be in 10 years from now. The first
machine I used had
4096 words of memory.(* really more but my calculator can't display 256
* 1024 * 1024.) Somehow don't see the new computers a better machine for
word processing, than the 8 bitters. For getting work done I think
we took a wrong turn in computer design. Has anybody done a real
feature/function compare of software with the 8/16/32 and now 64 bit
machines?
Depends upon what you do. For word processing, yes, what we have is a bit
overkill, but now a days I can keep an editor, my email client and a web
browser going. Email because I'm addicted, and the web browser so I can do
research using Google. While you can get an IP stack for the C-64, TCP is a
bit of a heavy-weight protocol and I'm not sure if you can have that, and a
browser (even text based) in 64K of RAM.
It was supposedly said that LISP didn't get interesting until you had a
megabyte of memory and that's the second oldest language there is ...
Ben
All computers wait at same speed.
I thought all user interfaces run at 9600 bps, reguardless of speed ...
-spc (Seems that way sometimes ... )