Do I not understand 64-bit OS's correctly?

Hah, I remember when my "disk drive" WAS a cassette player.

My first computer was one of these:



I remember it had a whopping 4K of memory. We eventually got it upgraded 16, and had Extended Basic installed on it, and man was it screamin' then.

It didn't have a monitor, just plugged into a TV, no hard drive at all, and instead of a floppy drive, it had - that's right - a cassette recorder, which plugged via RCA cable. To load a program or file, you had to sit there and wait while it would scan through the whole tape to find what you were looking for. Tons of fun.

HOLY MOLEY!!! you had a trash 80...lmao...well...mine was an atari 800xl....if you could call it a computer

I have a 8.5 inch floppy disk on my wall (from a ibm mini computer) I had the chance to buy the drive also, but the thing was about the size of 3 xbox 360's stacked on top of eachother

my first home computer did have the ability to use cassette (apple ][e) but dad went all out, we had the monitor, floppy disk drive, maxed out memory and a applied engineering 512KB ramdisk which was battery backed by the time it was all over

my first personal computer had a 20 meg hard disk in it

8 inch. Thanks for reminding me. I have a whole box of 8" discs I need to give to a friend for his PDP-11.

yea 8 inch (my bad), its kinda neat having a old style floppy disk the size of a record tho

and man i wish i had the space for a pdp 11, closest i ever got was a MAI basic 4 which is just a mid 80's server thing

heres a pic

http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/c-basic48000.html

cept i only had one of the towers (shown left) and mine was blue, and the tape drive, which was cool cause it only used 1 reel and sucked the tape into the machine via vacuum to an internal drum

but its been like 10 + years since i had that

I loved my Atari 800. I did Forth on it. It was great. It's on the shelf in the closet. I only had a black and white TV for a monitor most of the time, which was a shame, because I had a light pen and a drawing program, but it needed a color TV for the light pen to work properly with the drawing program.

You could buy the source code for the operating system, and it was small enough to read the whole thing and simple enough that I could understand most of it and write intercept routines. That was cool. I had the Action! language cartridge; I like that. Programming the display list. '

Those were good times for having fun with the computer, not surfing the internet or using a program, but just playing with the computer itself.

I had an Atari 400, 800, 1200XL, and followed Jay Miner to Commodore for the Amiga 1000, 3000, and 500 before Jack Tramiel and Irving Gold committed mutual corporate suicide of Atari and Commodore.

I never had an Amiga. I don't think I ever saw an Amiga in real life. Maybe in store.

I wanted an Amiga so much.

It was every bit as cool as you imagined, back in good old 1985.

Youngsters. Whelps. I cut my teeth on a PDP-8. (A LINC-8, more precisely, a dual CPU hybrid monster.) 4K 12-bit words minimum, expandable to a whopping 32K! Mag tapes and paper tape drives.

The OS for this computer was so advanced, it stored the year in 3 bits, added to 1960 IIRC.

Well, if they're going to do planned obscelence, at least it's nice to know what their time frame is...

LOL

Honeywell timeshared system with all the terminals multiplexed over a single 300 baud international link, then the first computer I actually got to touch was a Canon monstrosity with 13-bit words, THEN I upgraded to a PDP-8...

They came up with a hack for the date on the -8 later on, using a few leftover bits from the file access permissions.

OMG...300 baud modems, and BBS's...LMAO We have come a long way since then....

I met my wife on a BBS. She thought my 1200 baud modem and real dedicated 80x24 Zenith-29 terminal (below) was Da Bomb after her Atari 400 and 300 baud modem.

Irving Gould. May he rot in his grave! Him and Mehdi Ali!

I started off with a Commodore 64. I still have it somewhere, I think - or maybe my brother swiped it. Either way, I still have a bunch of old C64 floppies. I'm not sure if any of them are any good anymore, since my old 1541 drive was perpetually knocking itself out of alignment! I later bought an Amiga 2000, originally with a whopping 1MB of memory and a 52MB hard drive. Yes, those are MEGAbytes! I still have that Amiga - though it's now tricked out with about 650MB of hard drive storage (the hard drives, unfortunately, have finally succumbed to age), 9MB of memory (1MB chip, 8MB Zorro-II "fast", a 50MHz processor, and a 24-bit VGA card.

Flip those switches and feed in the paper tape.

Ah boot up was fun.

--- Rema

My father used to tell stories of what it was like to use a gymnasium sized punch card computer at MIT in the 1960's. If I remember right, he said you'd prepare your cards in advance by hand, then you'd stand in line to insert them into the machine, and finally you'd come back hours or even days later to stand in line again to pick up your cards and a print out of your computed results. If so much as a single hole in a card had been punched wrong, you'd have to do the whole thing over again. Fun stuff.

I also remember when I was in middle school in the 80's, and had to buy my first calculator, he told me of the first one he ever bought, some 20 years earlier. He said he had to apply for special approval for it from his department, since it was such an unusual item at the time. It cost $400 (equivalent to roughly $3000 today), was the size of a brief case, and all it could do was add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

Luxury! We had to write up our code on coding pads and send them out to a service bureau to get them punched. Actually punching cards was considered by management to be an inefficient use of engineer time. Some of us "kids" tried to convince the PHB that we'd be more efficient if we could get more than one test run a day done, but the older guys insisted that we needed to learn to desk-check our code better.

Yes, I remember the 15-instruction RIM loader one had to occasionally hand-toggle in to be able to read in the paper-tape BIN loader. One had to do that more often when one had bugs in their programs that clobbered high memory! Ah, the days, ....

Ha ha, you guys are old.

Please pass the Geritol.

Argent wins, though. I never had to "send out" for punch cards to be punched! (We did use them first year in college, but never had to after that.)

The worst case for expensive mistakes and bad turnaround was on my first job, where the microcontroller we were programming was "so fast", they didn't make reprogrammable eproms that speed. So, every time we wanted to try new code in the device (a piece of networking gear), we had to burn a whole set of PROMs, costing a few hundred bucks. Fortunately, we had one simulator that used RAM instead of PROMs, so we only had to burn new sets for the other elements in the network.

However, you could, after burning, burn a 1 into a 0 (but not the other way around). So, we got good at learning to patch programs by only turning 1s into 0s. Gee I miss those days!

I think this "so fast" processor was 4 MHz.