10 Jul
1997
10 Jul
'97
4:40 p.m.
On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Allison J Parent wrote:
Ya but did I get it right??
Allison, I read everything I find from you in every newsgroup I read.
No joke. You are prolific 8-)
From Brett
<danjo(a)xnet.com> who doth spake:
Collecting is! Things to
remember - every community has a town drunk, a town clown,
a town cop, and a town fool. It wouldn'tbe a community without them.
You forgot the town bag lady.... ;-) Seriously I've put may posts here anout the
history and lineages of many
of the old machines. I collect, but I admit is has to make some sense to
me as in useful or have some specific linkage to my place in this
history.
But this is a collectors list 8-) We all collect from that which we know.
[snip]
Another of the battles than and now are the OS wars
and the church of the
highest CPU. There is history in that. Todays machine are built on that.
But is that a *good Thing*? It seems with Wintel anyway - you gain in
speed with a horrendous memory loss. As someone stated - Loading WordStar
under CP/M is blazingly fast - compared to Word in Office under Win95 8-)
Now from me, a woman that uses a Northstar* I souped
up in in the very
early 80s to this day, along with an ampro LB, SB180, kaypro and a PX-8
to do real work. I have memory of porting CP/M-1.4 and 2.2 for my
hardware. I also keep PDP-11s why? A personal thing about classicaly
good archecture that still runs rings around dos boxen. I muck with
PDP-8s too as there is a machine that is the minimalist design that
proves it could be done in less, but makes you work hard to program it
efficiently.
Well, that's true. I always wondered why DEC couldn't sell PDP-11's - but
then with that lousy chip set and poor software 8-) I still get pissed
thinking about how DEC Marketing has messed up every attempt to get into
the *home* market!
History, I've met Gary, and George and the boys at
Intersystems and a few
others to boot. I wrote warm letters of annoyance to Gates, Allen and a
few others too before they were to big to not want my money. I remember
the guys that made claims and then ran with the cash never delivering.
I watched MITS rise with a calculator
You mean the the 7440 I have on the desk next to me?
and then get swallowed by Pertec
when they out ran their cash, it was the story of the time.
^ forgot an 's'
I jumped on
the UCSD Pascal P-system becuase it wasn't Basic in '79. I was using
CP/M as it was a real OS for the systems as everything else was not yet.
I started an 8086 design in 1979 that would in 81 eclipse the performance
of the PC and later the XT! Amazing times, all history and mostly
forgotten.
Not if you tell people about it!
Like I said while on the boardwalk of atlantic sity in
'76
"crazy, who'd have thought I'd be pushing a asr33 down the
boardwalk?".
That was right after hearing Gary talk about v1.3 and the introduction to
1.4.... and think it was only 21 years ago. Something isn't it.
You must have been - what - 8 years old 8-) Great story! I think we all
have one of those - where everybody kinda stares at you - wondering -
What the Hell is THAT? What are you doing with that - THING?
BC