On 12/30/2017 3:55 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: A good site for what was in the 1975-1980 era. http://www.s100computers.com/index.html Yes you could get 16kb in 1976 is if you looked hard. I can add, I have 10 toes. :) 4K x 64 bit ram? Other than the 6502 and friends $500+ was and still is the price for the cutting edge cpu. I Smell-O-Vision all the time. Sniff Sniff , time to buy new veggies, new meat and wash my socks. How much does it help to be able to contact your I find I want use computers less , 5+ minutes to boot something that then needs to check the net. I use a all valve audio system and tubes are warmed up and ready to go before my music app exits the splash screen. The real problem back the, was the lack of REAL disk I/O, with the high price of 8 inch floppy drives and media. Ben.

On 12/30/2017 07:43 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: 5 MINUTES? My old laptop, with very modest CPU, is logged on, from a cold start, in 15 seconds (including me typing the password). That is with Ubuntu Linux. I don't know how long it takes my desktop to boot up, I think a bit longer, but I just leave it on all the time. I do have solid state drives in both those machines. Jon

One thing that is starting to hurt with larger use of memory is the ability to access and load such large blocks of memory. I'm not saying that access speed haven't gone up but we are quickly reaching a wall, similar to the 4gig clock speed wall for the processors. Throwing more cache layers is of decreasing value. There are things that can be done but are not likely in the near future. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2017 5:30:21 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Computing from 1976 On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 05:43:34PM -0800, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: I reckon if I did a side-by-side cold boot of ye olde Amiga 1000 into Workbench to launch memacs versus firing up my Mac laptop and launching Emacs.app, there'd be not much in it. I also very rarely reboot my laptop. Close the lid, and it goes to sleep. Open the lid -- and perhaps wait 5-10s if it had been asleep for long enough that it decided to suspend-to-disk and needed to pull the memory image back in -- and it's ready to continue where I left off. There's no *need*, just like there's no *need* for computers at all. But since we have computers with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it makes little sense to restrain one's use of them to a fraction of the capabilities, except as an intellectual exercise.

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017, Sean Conner wrote: Except that it seems like it didn't used to take so long to get the machine started up. Really. But, we could also do our web-surfing standing in the kitchen? When a simple peice of software comes on a DVD, because a CD-ROM is no longer big enough, . . . Don't you hate rhetorical questions?

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 02:55:10PM -0800, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: [...] Newton's "laws" are also only an approximate prediction, but they got us to the moon and back. 2017-1976 = 31; 41/1.5 = 82/3 = 27 + 1/3 doublings. 2**(27+1/3) = ~170M; 170M x 4K = ~645G of RAM. My original guesstimate of that power calculation was 140M, but I don't trust logarithms in my head and double-checked with a calculator. The calculation error was at least less than the whole premise of the calculation :) such-and-such period, which I think was initially two years. The Wiki Of A Million Lies agrees. About $2,100, if you trust the US government's official statistics. I'd have gone for $5k myself on the "add another zero every 40 years" rule of thumb that applies to real-world goods rather than the fictional ones used by government statisticians. Write it in Emacs and email it to my phone so I can consult it in the shop if need be. No slower than it would have been in the 1970s, apart from that the phone would have been bolted to my house, and how would one email to it anyway? If I had to fight a modern printer to get a hardcopy to take, sod it, I'll just write it out longhand instead. (This is what I usually do.) Let's take an arbitary example of taking a horrified look at the 2015 election results, going "ugh" at Tory Britain, and upping sticks to another country where one doesn't know the language. I can't think why that comes to mind... That left me functionally illiterate until I picked up the rudiments of the language, and pictures can be useful. My phone contains several apps which are also helpful for learning Dutch, and doing OCR and machine-assisted translation of the bits I've not learned yet. I can text a message home and ask if there's something I need to buy as I'm passing a supermarket. One doesn't need the fridge itself to be smart for the communications technology to be useful. In the 1970s, I could have gone and found a payphone, but a text message is less inconvenient for both parties than a phone call. Less useful, but still useful, is my phone's ability to give a local map and a "you are here" pointer, and public transport times can be consulted. I say less-useful, because these apps tend to be limited to providing a single (and rarely optimal) solution to an immediate need and fail to provide an understanding of the system in general. That's why I still prefer regular maps and timetables, which are sadly becoming harder to get hold of. But anyway, all of that computing power has definitely improved the quality of life compared to trying to do the same thing in the 1970s. On bare metal, you need 8K of page tables just to enable long mode on a modern Intel CPU, so that's not going to fly. The second question is a bit more difficult due to the vagaries of memory usage on modern virtual memory operating systems. The VM I'm logged into to compose this mail has 4GB of "RAM" (which itself is vulnerable to swapping at the whims of the hypervisor) but the VM does a lot more than email, and reports it's using about 1GB of the 4GB allocated to it. My text editor has a nominal size (VSZ) of 144MB, but that number is misleading as most of that is memory-mapped data which doesn't really count because I don't use that functionality so it's never mapped in. VSZ hasn't been a meaningful indicator of memory usage in decades, despite monitoring tools continuing to display it. About 20MB *is* mapped in, and another 4MB is used as heap, i.e. editor workspace. If the machine was *only* used for reading and composing email, I could probably get away with 32-64MB. OTOH, I'm paying ?30/month to rent and host the bare metal hardware onto which I've loaded several similar VMs, and the cost of the "wasted" memory is basically pocket fluff. Or in boomers-whinging-about-milleninal terms, about one avocado on toast per day. The elephant in the room is web browsers, which are the poster child for modern bloated software. My laptop has just decided to run hot at 100% CPU. It turns out that a background Firefox got bored and decided to just burn CPU and RAM for the hell of it. The applications runing atop browsers are even more appalling. There are also the insidious applications that claim to be native, but really just boot up a hidden web browser and display its output. Command-line text-only programs are still fairly reasonable and have mercifully not kept up with Moore's Law. I assemble desktops and servers myself because I don't care to pay the Microsoft tax for a machine that's going to end up running some form of Unix, and also don't want a machine full of lowest-bidder components that the likes of Dell and HP use. Laptops, phones, tablets etc, I obviously have no option but to buy pre-assembled. The number of users who build bespoke machines from parts is probably in the low single-digits percent. Those who use a soldering iron to assemble from discrete components is going to be so small a percentage as to be negligible, but not zero. Not all of them are nostalgic old farts either. The *absolute* numbers of people building computers (at either level) is probably still increasing year-on-year. The Internet, of course. Again, in percentage terms, almost all of it is utter garbage, but in absolute terms, there's vastly more information available than there was in 1976.

On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 9:57 AM, william degnan via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=7wAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA82 Popular Science Dec-1976

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017, Adrian Stoness via cctalk wrote: In those days, they spelled it "M A C H I N E S" Few people know what "macheans" are.