Modern Apps on Old Machines

Most people were running altairs and the like in 78... I was a friend started with one in '76. But in 78 he decided a H-11 bas a better deal. H-11 was a DEC LSI-11 cpu card with heathkit made boards around them that were DEC look alikes and a OS that was RT-11 look alike. All of a sudden minies weren't too big or out of range. That was true even of most PDP-11s. What the -11 (most minies) had were more efficient IO even if it was floppies. This is a problem for me with the 486dx/50 and 33.6 modem. Most fo the images unless compressed really do not require much processing (GIFs). I've been using h-19s, vt100s for years to get past the TV displays that generally are low res. I could cut and past using editors for cp/m back in '80. Cut and past is an editing feature not a system capability. PCs running windows make it latent on the screen all of the time, thats the difference. When some one said a home machine in say...'80 it was appleII, trs80, S100 or SS50(6800/6809). At that time people that had PDP-8s, -11s, DG novas were scarce. By '86 most of the minies were old and getting accessable cheap and not all were large either!. Move to 1990, people are collecting vaxes (the 780 was new in '78) as most of the 7xx series systems were going to junk. the 730s/750s though slow were small enough to consider for a home. What's forgotten is by 1990 a lot of stuff was over 5-10 years old. Now in 1997, microvaxes (ca 1986-7) are for dumpster diving and these little gems are not slow nor are they under powered and they had VGA or better capabilities and they are collectable. Now what you said is true of many systems. I'd never try to run a modem program on my TI99 at faster than 1200 as it will not keep up. Then again it was by the standards of the time very very slow! It was neat. My systems for the late '70s were s100 for flexibility and speed. I found myself looking at canned systems like TRS80, apple and felt most fo the time like I was running a fuel dragster compared to that. But I was running networks and the like in '81 because I knew of them and could design my own to save a buck (they existed for home computers but were expensive). I got my first PDP-11 in '83 for FREE because the lsi-11 boards and memory were old! It was my first save! The -11 introduced me to small minies, and big performance. Some required a scope and series debugging to get them going but the cost offset that (free). It would be years (1991) before PCs would eclipse the power of the various PDP-11s (many of the 11/23 design) and the software maturity behind it. Many computer consumers knew they wanted performance. It was minies where more could be found. I'd point out that many of the minies were disguised. Alpha Microsystems(ca 1977) had the same chip set as the LSI-11 with a slightly different instruction set modification and was s100, still the same capability. There was the Western Digital Pascal Microengine, Marinechip (PDP-11 in s100), pdt-11/150, Pro350 to name a few that were either pre-pc or on the PC introduction cusp.While home computing was commodores and apples and trs80 they were the appliance machines for many. There was always a core of those that felt they were nice and had good ideas but, they wanted more. Allison