Speed now & then (Space and time?)
Jon Elson
elson at pico-systems.com
Thu Mar 29 21:00:35 CDT 2018
On 03/29/2018 04:24 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I posited that 2 decades ago in a wired article. My CP/M
>> machine booted
>> in seconds while waiting for
>> the winders box to decide if it would/could.
>
> "The new machine is so much faster, that it can almost get
> out of its own way!"
>
>
From 1978 or so, I had a Z-80 CP/M system running on the
S-100 bus. In about 1980, I got a Memorex Winchester drive
on it. It really made CP/M fly.
In 1982-1984 or so, I was trying to build a 32-bit machine
very loosely patterned after an IBM 360, but would have used
a 360 user-level instruction set. It became obvious that it
would take years to have an OS, compilers, utilities, etc.
(I did not know about Unix 360, which I almost certainly
could have gotten a copy of, we had a PDP-11 Unix license at
the university.)
So, I cloned a Logical Microcomputer Co. Genix system with
the Nat. Semi 16032 chip. It was an absolute DOG! It took
several minutes for Emacs to load. Even vi (which I
detest!) was horribly slow, like 10X slower than the CP/M
editor.
Then, in 1986, I bought a MicroVAX-II CPU board from a
broker, and a bunch of 3rd party peripherals, and made a
copy of VMS 4.7 (Might have used something earlier for a time.)
I was in 7th heaven! A REAL computer at LAST!
Jon
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