26 Jun
2007
26 Jun
'07
8:29 a.m.
On 25/06/07, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Depends what you mean by "do more". In the context of a personal
computer, talking late 70s/early 80s, it's users writing their own
programs in BASIC, pretty much. The ZX81 had strings, floating point
maths, and while no full screen editor, it could at least show 32x25
or something characters, so you could edit text, play chess, or if you
believe the ads, run a nuclear power station, as I recall. ;?)
Tony, your HP
sounds like the first single-unit ready-to-use desktop
computer, but that's not the same thing. I bet it was appallingly
expensive, and with a calculator display what it could do would be
very limited - a great deal less than a 1K ZX-81, I would think...?
I'll grant that it was expensive (I would guess about $6K). But it
certainly wasn;t limited and could do a lot more than a 1K ZX81. The built-in display was a 1-line 32 character
alphanumeric unit. Hardly
a 'calculator display'. In general you linked up the 9866 printer if you
wanted a larger 'display' for things like program listings. If you wanted
graphives 9and were rich!), you eitehr linked up a plotter -- there was a
pltoter ROM add-on to BASIC that added useful statements to drive the
plotter -- or you got the HPIB interface, an HP1350 'graphics translator'
(vector display generator) and an HP1311 monitor. I am wondering why you
consider the dispaly to be an important part of the machine, though. This
thing was not designed for games, after all. It was designed for
scientific data processing, data logging, control, and the like. For
which yuo probably don't need more than a 1-line display.
But is data logging or whatever what a /personal computer/ does? The
HP couldn't even display a graph, and if you need to take the price up
into 5 figures to draw one on paper, I'm not sure that's a "personal
computer" any more. I wouldn't like to try to edit a program of even
4K on a 1 line display. Hell, I didn't even buy a Psion Organizer
until it had at least a 4 line display, and that was ludicrously
cramped.
I have no idea what the minimum amount of memory was,
possibly 4K bytes.
AFAIK the maximum on a standard HP machines was 16K. Oh yess, and unlike
Sinclair's RAM, it didn't wobble :-)
:?D Fair point! (But there was always Blutak!)
The BASIC was a lot more powerful than Sinxlair's
offering too, if you
added the option ROMs. You had matrices, string variables, low-level I/O,
etc.
Ahhh, but the price is receding further from the "personal" domain, isn't
it?
Put it this way. I have a ZX81, I also have an HP9830.
I know which I'd
rather use.
(!)
--
Liam Proven ? Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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