A type down memory lane.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
(64K RAM, one off 160KB floppy, monochrome text-only monitor, and a keyboard) was priced at around US$3,000. A top of the range model with EGA monitor (16 colours text, 320x200 graphics in any four colours of your choice from the available 16, and a printer) was US$4,500.
Go ahead and take a look what a TRS-80 Model 3 or 4 would have cost. These were still typical workhorses at that time. Edit: Model 4 came later, that still leaves us with Model 3: 1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, priced from US$700 to US$2500.
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CodeWraith wrote:
1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, priced from US$700 to US$2500.
Amazing how much the price dropped in the next couple of years...my parents bought us a TI/99-4a at the end of '83 (I think) for around $100. No monitor, just hook up the console to a TV! Also, no HDD or even a floppy...cassettes! I still have it in the box! :laugh:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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This cartoon: UserFriendly[^] got me thinking: 36 years ago this month, the PC was released to the world for the first time. I was in the industry when it happened, and it didn't really make a splash immediately, but IBM made some huge mistakes back then: they made it extensible, expandable, and ludicrously expensive. Seriously: the basic usable machine (64K RAM, one off 160KB floppy, monochrome text-only monitor, and a keyboard) was priced at around US$3,000. A top of the range model with CGA monitor (16 colours text, 320x200 graphics in any four colours of your choice from the available 16, and a printer) was US$4,500. You could buy expansion cards to get more RAM - up to 640K! Two floppies! You could swap out the 4.77MHz processor for a slightly faster working (but same clock speed) V20 one, or buy a floating point processor and plug that in! So clones appeared. And boy, have they progressed! There are (from what I see on t'interwebs) well over 2 billion PC's in existence and working today. And every single one of them is thousands of times more powerful than the computers that got man to the moon and back in 1969. We - nearly all of us - owe our whole job to that tank of a PC (heavy? Nah - the keyboard alone weighed in at only 6lb) and I've been coding on or for the damn things for well over thirty years. Perhaps August 12th should be a worldwide public holiday? [edit]CGA, not EGA! :doh:[/edit]
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I remember those days well. I was still in gradual school at the time. The original PC had a cassette tape or a floppy drive as options actually. You could also get your choice of CP/M or PC-DOS on it. Once 1-2-3 came out CP/M faded quickly. One amusing thing - the original v1.0 PC-DOS didn't even have directories. That wasn't until v2.0. :omg:
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Quote:
These 'rules' are for those who are to dumb to understand at which point something becomes problematic.
For those of us who haven't used a GOTO in 20 years, we can say the same thing about you.
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Dave KreskowiakI did not want to offend you. It's just that I met enough people who could recite all kinds of rules as if they were holy commandments, but had not the slightest clue why it's not always a good idea to use these things. I don't think that those people are dumb. They have been made that way by training them to obey rules without questions.
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CodeWraith wrote:
1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, priced from US$700 to US$2500.
Amazing how much the price dropped in the next couple of years...my parents bought us a TI/99-4a at the end of '83 (I think) for around $100. No monitor, just hook up the console to a TV! Also, no HDD or even a floppy...cassettes! I still have it in the box! :laugh:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
The prices dropped constantly as memory got cheaper and the competition got stiffer. The TRS-80 Model 3 was intended to be a professional machine with the best reasonable hardware options. Lots of memory, multiple disk drives, modems, large printers - all stuff that you did not find in a small home computer.
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You're right! EGA was the high res one that came later! Well ... 16 colours, up to 640x350! The first computer I bought for myself at home was EGA - the Amstrad 1640DD, with 640K RAM, twin 360KB floppies, Power supply built into the monitor ... and a MOUSE! I bought it a 32MB hard disk (a "hardcard" where the disk was mounted on the HDD controller card) which cost £400 and had a seek time of ~100ms! :omg:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
This [^] was my first laptop. Twin 720k floppies, 512k of memory, b&w cga screen. It would run for 5 hours on its battery which was handy because it would take 3 1/2 hours to compile and build a star-trek based computer game I was developing which left me an hour to actually do the coding and testing. I used to have a 4 1/2 hour train commute from Preston to London each week; down on Monday morning, back on Friday evening - spent the weekend with my wife. This worked perfectly for me for a couple of years.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I did not want to offend you. It's just that I met enough people who could recite all kinds of rules as if they were holy commandments, but had not the slightest clue why it's not always a good idea to use these things. I don't think that those people are dumb. They have been made that way by training them to obey rules without questions.
The user can't update the up: we update it for them (Choice in the CP poll)
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This [^] was my first laptop. Twin 720k floppies, 512k of memory, b&w cga screen. It would run for 5 hours on its battery which was handy because it would take 3 1/2 hours to compile and build a star-trek based computer game I was developing which left me an hour to actually do the coding and testing. I used to have a 4 1/2 hour train commute from Preston to London each week; down on Monday morning, back on Friday evening - spent the weekend with my wife. This worked perfectly for me for a couple of years.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Am I remembering wrong or did they have a full-sized expansion slot? I seem to remember trying to get one as our EPROM programmer at the time ran on a dedicated PC card and a big thick cable.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Am I remembering wrong or did they have a full-sized expansion slot? I seem to remember trying to get one as our EPROM programmer at the time ran on a dedicated PC card and a big thick cable.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I also haven't used GOTO for many, many years. Not because of any "rule", just because my nicely structured code has never needed one - I haven't missed it.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
As it should be, but unfortunately not always is. The last time I saw that was a highly specialized and optimized core, around which practically all the company's products were built around. The normal (C++) compiler optimizations were not enough and time was really money in this case.
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My two Atari STs have both problems with their floppies. In one the belt that spins the disk may have snapped and the other one's ejection button does not work anymore. I hope I get something at FleaBay. I did not want to buy anything there anymore.
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Luckily(?) I've got a HDD in the A1200.. There are a couple of groups for Commodore computers on Facebook - it might be worth checking ST ones (did they use the same drives as Amigas?) to see if anyone know where to get spares (or have some themselves they'd be willing to sell). The CBM guys are pretty helpful, sure the Atari groups would be the same.
Now is it bad enough that you let somebody else kick your butts without you trying to do it to each other? Now if we're all talking about the same man, and I think we are... it appears he's got a rather growing collection of our bikes.
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I did not want to offend you. It's just that I met enough people who could recite all kinds of rules as if they were holy commandments, but had not the slightest clue why it's not always a good idea to use these things. I don't think that those people are dumb. They have been made that way by training them to obey rules without questions.
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No worries. We're good. :) I stopped using GOTO because I started thinking more about the structure of my code and getting into finer compartmentalization. This made my code more reusable and extendable. I stopped because I started thinking through the problems to be solved better. I didn't stop using it because of some code apologist or evangelical corner of the industry coming up with "the rule". It was a side effect of overhauling problem analysis and better algorithm generation.
System.ItDidntWorkException: Something didn't work as expected. A guide to posting questions on CodeProject
Click this: Asking questions is a skill. Seriously, do it.
Dave Kreskowiak -
CodeWraith wrote:
1980: July - Radio Shack introduces the TRS-80 Model III, priced from US$700 to US$2500.
Amazing how much the price dropped in the next couple of years...my parents bought us a TI/99-4a at the end of '83 (I think) for around $100. No monitor, just hook up the console to a TV! Also, no HDD or even a floppy...cassettes! I still have it in the box! :laugh:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
I bought the TI99-4a in 1983 for $100 as well. TI had announced they were getting out of the small computer business and they all went on a fire sale across the country world. It was a great way to get into the game for a small price. I have some empathy for the people that bought it 6 months before for several times that, though.
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Luckily(?) I've got a HDD in the A1200.. There are a couple of groups for Commodore computers on Facebook - it might be worth checking ST ones (did they use the same drives as Amigas?) to see if anyone know where to get spares (or have some themselves they'd be willing to sell). The CBM guys are pretty helpful, sure the Atari groups would be the same.
Now is it bad enough that you let somebody else kick your butts without you trying to do it to each other? Now if we're all talking about the same man, and I think we are... it appears he's got a rather growing collection of our bikes.
Brent Jenkins wrote:
did they use the same drives as Amigas?
Technically yes, but the ejection button also has to fit into the case. I may even have some in my box, but I have to look.
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CodeWraith wrote:
I also learned the magic command GOTO.
Yes and now we're being told to forget it :laugh:
I don't have a problem with GOTOs that jump backward (to a lower line number in the source file) in code. It's the ones that jump FORWARD (to a higher line number) that I hate.
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Quote:
machineguns got almost boring
...but not quite. There is nothing like the first time you fire a real machine gun. :omg:
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
My first machinegun was this one: Rheinmetall MG 3 - Wikipedia[^] Just look at the rate of fire. :-D TakkaTakkaTakka! (That's exactly NOT what it sounds like)
The user can't update the up: we update it for them (Choice in the CP poll)
-
This cartoon: UserFriendly[^] got me thinking: 36 years ago this month, the PC was released to the world for the first time. I was in the industry when it happened, and it didn't really make a splash immediately, but IBM made some huge mistakes back then: they made it extensible, expandable, and ludicrously expensive. Seriously: the basic usable machine (64K RAM, one off 160KB floppy, monochrome text-only monitor, and a keyboard) was priced at around US$3,000. A top of the range model with CGA monitor (16 colours text, 320x200 graphics in any four colours of your choice from the available 16, and a printer) was US$4,500. You could buy expansion cards to get more RAM - up to 640K! Two floppies! You could swap out the 4.77MHz processor for a slightly faster working (but same clock speed) V20 one, or buy a floating point processor and plug that in! So clones appeared. And boy, have they progressed! There are (from what I see on t'interwebs) well over 2 billion PC's in existence and working today. And every single one of them is thousands of times more powerful than the computers that got man to the moon and back in 1969. We - nearly all of us - owe our whole job to that tank of a PC (heavy? Nah - the keyboard alone weighed in at only 6lb) and I've been coding on or for the damn things for well over thirty years. Perhaps August 12th should be a worldwide public holiday? [edit]CGA, not EGA! :doh:[/edit]
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I remember putting together a 3pc network on those days costing $40,000, and the sales commissions were outrageous, something like 40%. I think they work on about 5-7% these days.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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I did not want to offend you. It's just that I met enough people who could recite all kinds of rules as if they were holy commandments, but had not the slightest clue why it's not always a good idea to use these things. I don't think that those people are dumb. They have been made that way by training them to obey rules without questions.
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CodeWraith wrote:
all kinds of rules
For many years I did not even realise there was a "rule" that you should not use GOTO (or GOSUB). when I moved to .net (from vb6) it just never needed to be used, there were better structures available.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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CodeWraith wrote:
all kinds of rules
For many years I did not even realise there was a "rule" that you should not use GOTO (or GOSUB). when I moved to .net (from vb6) it just never needed to be used, there were better structures available.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
And then one day (hopefully not) someone came and told you what you can or can't do - because Mr. SoAndSo said that. Basta. I just don't need code monkeys. I don't want to become one myself and I don't try to make anyone a code monkey.
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My first machinegun was this one: Rheinmetall MG 3 - Wikipedia[^] Just look at the rate of fire. :-D TakkaTakkaTakka! (That's exactly NOT what it sounds like)
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