Ian:
I learned programming on a HP 2100 mini computer. Our first assignment
was to write an absolute paper tape reader. You entered the program
from the front panel, in split-octal notation. The Ford Motor Company
had donated this computer to the university. It had spent it's life at
Ford running one program, a robot welder. It had 4k of genuine core
memory. You know, the magnetic doughnut kind.
We had the DEC Rainbows in the accounting office where I used to work.
I believe they ran CP/M 86, rather than MSDOS. We eventually upgraded
to a 5 MB (wow!) hard drive. For some reason (firmware?) we still had
to boot from the diskettes. The disks were single-sided, quad density,
and cost like they were made of gold.
At one time we had the DEC Rainbow, the Texas Instruments Professional,
and the (original five-slot) IBM PC. The DEC and the TI were both
superior machines, but were not 100% IBM-compatible. I ended up in
charge of buying PCs for the office, and endured much abuse from the IT
manager for not buying the TI PC. They (TI PC) emulated a TI 931 CRT,
and hooked up to the TI 990/10 mini computer. DX-10 anyone?
Bill Stanke
Ian BManners wrote:
>
> Hi Tom
>
> >Actually, it was 64KB of RAM.
>
> That was in 1979/1980 before the advent of the IBM PC :-)
> I think it was in relation to Boot Basic on various Altairs etc,
> and is also why the boot Basic had a RAM access limit
> of 64K.
>
> The prerelease statement from IBM was that 128K would
> do for many years to come.
>
> Late 1982 Bill Gates made another statement about the 640K
> limit, and why it wasnt justified to rearrange the hardware to
> access anything above that limit.
>
> Digital Equipment Corp on the other hand, released the
> DEC Rainbow 100a which was designed to access 920K
> of RAM with the help of a memory daughter board, the
> Rainbow 100b could access 960K, every bit ended up
> being counted with the advent of spreadsheets in the
> hands of accountants :-)
>
> DEC did this piece of magic by using address space to
> access the graphics, while the IBM PC used a RAM allocation,
> as did its BIOS. (My memorys old on this but I think its sort
> of right).
>
> Cheers
> Ian B Manners
>
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