I hung out at Otto Schmitt's lab at the U. a little before that time. He got the first Altair (dip switch booted and cassette tape) but I didn't get much time on it. The color monitor was quite a marvel. He also worked on 3D renditions and proposed medical home care applications. He had more great ideas than he could handle. Of course he invented digital electronics. A wonderful time had by all. The Epson QX-10 was my first gem. Only two 256K floppies, but it excelled over Apple with a hi-res graphics daughter-board. In real mode, long (10 minutes) programs made you want to kick the computer to see if it was still on. The screen was blank until people would say, "Ahhh" and a 3D picture would slowly emerge. Apple Basic was quite powerful, and interfacing the system transformed scientific instrumentation. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< On 10/29/01, 9:11:38 PM, Jack Ungerleider <jack at jacku.com> wrote regarding Re: More Old "War Stories" (Was: [TCLUG] vi vs. emacs): > On Monday 29 October 2001 10:57, you wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 12:35:14PM -0500, Daniel Taylor wrote: > > > On 27 Oct 2001, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > > > > Andrew Nemchenko <drew at usfamily.net> writes: > . > > > > > The command line was a line number based BASIC interpreter or worse. > > > 480x320 graphics was really good, and only used by scientists and > > > gamers. The IBM PC with MSDOS wasn't due till 81. > > > > You've forgotten entirely about Altair and all the CP/M systems out there. > > > One of the coolest CP/M systems I ever used was put out by Sony. It had great > graphics for its day. I built a "Booth Locator" system for the National > Association of Broadcasters convention in '84 on one of these. It was > programmed entirely in BASIC. The system had 64K of RAM, I think, and two > 3.5" Floppies that held... gee I don't remember but it wasn't the 720K that > we associate with PC/MS-DOS DSDD 3.5" diskettes. > > > In the 70's Harddrives were spec'd out in small numbers of Megabytes, > > > memory was allocated by the Kilobyte, and 9600 bd was fast. > > > > Yes, but they weren't bloated -- one could implement an accounting > > package for a mid-sized company in 8k of memory. Really! > > > One of my first programming jobs that paid was to cleanup an "ATM Simulator" > for one of the big banks in the Philadelphia area. We used a 6502 board > designed as a video card for an 8088 system. It originally had 2K RAM and a > 2K character set EPROM. The maker modified the board to accept a card with 2 > or 3 additional 2K EPROMs. We did it with room to spare. ;-) > > > > Phil "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" Mendelsohn ;) > -- > Jack Ungerleider > jack at jacku.com > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list