Gone extinct

On 04/29/2012 02:41 PM, ben wrote: Not quite true or complete. Text editors, Spreadsheets, and databases started to appear before 1978 for many of the machines. The problem was mostly mass storage as cassette tape had one problem, it was not random access nor block replaceable. Back in 1978 a new car was about $5K and a floppy with controller was around 700-2000 bucks (1978-dollars). I even took a Data Structures class at the college and challened the fact that my NS* horizon was with floppy and running UCSD Pascal P-system in early '79 with an Heath H19 terminal with a screen oriented editor. The rest of the class was still punching cards on an 029 doe a Univac-1108. I may have been bleeding edge but not by much. In early 1979 a Northstar* Horizon with enough ram and disk to run P-system was about $2500. What made home computing take off was the cost, software and packaged systems ready to go. The bigger S100 houses, Apple, TRS80, Commodore were very quick to understand that and had success. The rest really did exist int he realm of games and entry level toys. Games were a successful space but one that was very dynamic and tended to push Moore's law to the limit. I find that a rather irrational statement. I started running CPM in '77 with floppies. I considered then as now that mass storage is an element in the chain to making and compute engine go from a controller level to a flexible system. What happened in the mid 80s was the realization that the software in place was getting bigger and the problems people wanted to solve (databases and spreadsheets) were growing and floppies were inadequate storage and 64K of ram didn't fit it all without awkward overlays and all. Sudden realization that by the 80s computing had been around a while? It was. IBM was a legitimizer of something that was more than 5-6 years old by then and most of the software for it was lofted 8bit stuff. Reminder why was the upD78108 (V20) such a big deal, it executed 8080 code directly and allowed a PC to run the already vast library of CP/M and other 8080 code. It didn't hurt that much of that code was freeware or shareware. I was interested in computers from very young as a child as they were amazing machines. By time I'd seen some of the earlier machines in the early to mid 60s I'd a rudimentary idea of what was inside and how they worked. I wanted one! Everything after that was mostly getting to be an engineer and one of those computer for myself.. not in any particular order. As it worked out I was in college when I was tasked with building a then very new 8008 running at a plodding 180khz or about 1khz/$. Everything after that was cutting edge or close to it. As a result most of my collection are machine I had or worked with from "back in the day". Those that were not mine to keep were acquired again at later years as free or cheap to fill the wish of having what I'd worked with. Oh, and I"m still working with cool stuff. Just can't quit yet. Allison I