24 Nov
2002
24 Nov
'02
6:47 p.m.
On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, ben franchuk wrote:
For a real word processing you need 80x24 upper/lower
case display,
What's "real word processing"? You must mean What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get.
In that case, sure, an 80x24 screen would be nice, but the same can be
achieved (and was, in fact) on 40x24 screens. And if we want to talk real
"real" word processing, why stop at 24 lines? Why not the requisite 60
lines to get a full page?
By your standard, no computer even today can perform "real" word
processing.
Lowercase? A nice amenity, but the fact again is that even on computers
that didn't have lowercase capability, people came up with effective ways
to get around that limitation. You seem to want to go back and compare
today's state of the art on computer technology of two decades ago. It's
the equivalent of saying that nobody could get from Point A to Point B in
any automobile before 1930 because they didn't have fuel injection, power
steering and AM/FM radio.
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.
So what? People still did useful work on those machines. I wrote a
database program to store my comic book collection on a computer with 2K
of effective memory and a rubber "chiclet" keyboard using cassette tape
for storage. Are you saying this was't real?
Right now modern machines require at least 67108864*
bytes of memory to
run.
Maybe in your Microsoft-centric world.
What will it be in 10 years from now. The first
machine I used had
I don't know, but I suspect you'll argue that real work couldn't be
performed with computers of today because we don't have 4 terabytes of
main memory and a 100 Quadrabyte hard drive.
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?
I have no idea what you are arguing about now. Sure, computers still have
a way to go, but how does that justify your saying that no real work could
be done on old 9-bit computers?????
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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