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