Re: [OT] Remember when hard disk sizes were in MiB?
On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 12:28:50PM -0500, Mike Dresser wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Doug MacFarlane wrote:
>
> > When PC DASD (Hard-Drives) hit $1/MB, I was in shock. Now it's $1/GB.
> > When PC RAM hit $1/MB I was really in shock. Now you can get 1 GB or RAM
> > for a little over $100 . . .
> >
> > I hate being old.
> >
> > madmac
>
> I've got a 16 kb module for my ZX81 that cost somewhere around 500
> dollars. 40+ dollars a K.
$500? Chicken's tits. The US distributors must have been ripping
people off bigtime. In the UK, I think the original ZX80 cost 80
pounds, and neither the ZX81 nor any of its accessories went for more
than that.
Personally, I loathed the ZX8x. I'd been used to a Commodore Pet with
a whole 16k, with a built in monitor and a sturdy metal case, so I
ignored Sinclair's vile contrivances. The BBC Micro, now that was a
brilliant machine, designed for hackers. "Wordwise" would still handle
most of my word processing needs today.
I loved that 6502 chip. It was more or less a RISC processor. Unlike
the Z80, it was hardwired, not microcoded. I found it very noticeable
that while home computers with Z80s and 6502s ran them at the same
clock speed, the 6502 machines went like shit off a shovel compared to
the Z80 ones. When you got BBC Micros with 4MHz 6502s in, that was
racetrack stuff.
Only thing wrong with the BBC Micro? Can't extend. I'm not talking
about hardware expansion or anything, I built loads of extra bits for
mine. It was an error message. Anyone who encountered it will know
what I mean, and scream inwardly. Or scream outwardly and bang their
head against the nearest wall.
Games - I always hated games, I still do. But I was impressed by the
programming of Elite on the BBC Micro, both for the really fast wire
frame graphics with hidden line removal and the way it reprogrammed
the CRTC two thirds of the way down the screen to display the control
panel in a different mode from the view out the front of the spacecraft.
Later, I worked in a company that had a few PCs and a lot of Apple
Macs. What hideous pieces of shit those Macs were. No hard drive;
getting a word processor up involved switching floppies about 20
times. Then when it was up you got the same sort of abilities as you
got from some DTP stuff on the BBC Micro, except the BBC version was a
lot quicker. And an operating system apparently programmed by monkeys.
Could it be worse? Yes, cos Microsoft went and sort of copied it.
I was so glad that my work was on the PC where I had a whole 20 megs
of HD!!! And that lovely Borland Turbo C 1.0. Well, that's something
I've still got, more or less - called rhide.
What else used to be good? Proper clicky-key IBM keyboards. I loathe
these squidgy rubbery things you get these days that feel like poking
a fresh corpse. I'm typing this on a genuine IBM PS/2 clicky keyboard,
which I treasure.
More low-bandwidth nostalgia - I remember being on a VAX 11/780 Unix
box where one of the other users decided to email a few megabytes of
something to America. This was considered such a heinous crime that
external email access was cut off from normal users altogether. This
screwed up my bulletin board, which could be read and posted to
remotely via email. So I figured out how to use uux to send mail as a
suitably privileged user. Tee hee...
That was actually the only bit of "dark side hacking" I ever did
(apart from using uux to get a root shell just to see if I could, and
deleting it without using ot for anything... no, really, I did!) and
it was in place for a few months and didn't get noticed. On the other
hand I did get in trouble a few times for stuff other people had done
with my ID, having first hacked my account. This is fairly typical...
Now? Well, the side of my PC is permanently removed to allow me to
muck about inside and to give space for all the SCSI drives I got from
the local junk shop. But when I program a PIC microcontroller, I'm
still amazed at how much functionality you can get out of 2k of code.
And at how much source you need to write to get anywhere near the
limit. Shame my PIC C compiler (Hi-Tech) is so buggy.
Pigeon
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