Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris
My first real computer experience was on a ZX81, a simple processor (a Z80) and a default of 1 KB of memory, no internal disks of course. I did have the whooping extension pack to 16KB memory. On that machine I learned programming.
|
The first computer I used was an IBM mainframe at a bank. The first one I had at home was an AT&T 3B1, a single user Unix workstation. (I still have it.) A PC didn't join the family till rather later.
Quote:
My first PC was a Commodore Colt, a 8088 CPU with 640 KB memory. We upgraded it later with a 20 MB (or 10, I can't recall) hard disk. That was a huge investment then. The disk was just a slow as a floppy...
Ah, the early days of home computing.
|
I was aware of Commodore's PC line, but never used them. I
did log time on Commodore 64s, which were neat conceptually but hobbled by design-to-cost decisions. As the name implied, they had 64K RAM, but they had 16KB of ROM, as well, with an 8K OS kernel in one ROM chip and an 8K Microsoft Basic v2 interpreter in the second. The 6510 CPU it used could address 64K, max, and the ROMs were normally mapped into the space. It was possible to select whether RAM or ROM was mapped into the corresponding address, and one app I used would stash BASIC code and data "under" the ROMs, then flip the ROMs out of the map to access the code. You had to be careful you weren't trying to call a kernel routine or execute BASIC code while the corresponding ROMs were mapped out, but it worked fine and was one of the cleverer bits of programming I saw.
The 20
MB Seagate ST-225 drives I had cast about $200 each. These days, I can get 6
TB SATA drives for less than that. The ST-225s were a good bit faster than the 360KB 5.25" floppies, however.
______
Dennis