The more things change....

[thepassenger]

Not so much an issue but it dawned on me just how much technology has changed.
My first PC was a 386sx33 with a mighty 120MB HDD combined with a stunning 2MB of RAM. I even upgraded to 4MB so I could play Syndicate. As much as I tried I could fill the drive and the machine even managed to pull of Windows 95 at a decent clip. And yes I even sprung for a Tseng Labs graphics card to replace the Trident it came with.

And here I am sat infront of a Dell XPS laptop, 2.26Ghz processor, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb HDD... the graphics card in this thing has more memory than my original HDD. It has enough processing power to emulate in memory every machine my old school had (RM Nimbus 80186 based... yes... a HDD controller for a CPU) and still chug along at a nice clip in XP.

Things have changed indeed. But then again here I am sat in front of this awesome beast of a machine looking at an Out of Memory error in Poser. Perhaps things haven't changed all that much over the years; whatever you've got is never 'man enough' to do everything you want it to. Wonder how much 2x1Gb DDR2 SO-DIMMS would set me back...

[FunkyNige]

It seems software writers used to make software to fit the confines of the systems they would probably run on, nowadays they write the software and expect people to upgrade in order to use it.
Obviously Word XP won't work on a Pentium 100, but how much more advanced really is it compared to Windows 95?

[puggit]

My first PC was a 286 with 20MB hard drive

[thepassenger]

FunkyNige said:

It seems software writers used to make software to fit the confines of the systems they would probably run on, nowadays they write the software and expect people to upgrade in order to use it.
Obviously Word XP won't work on a Pentium 100, but how much more advanced really is it compared to Windows 95?

Word XP will work on a Pentium 100. It'll be slow to start but no reason other than the installer and underlying OS complaining. And I did used to think along the lines of "lazy programmers" when it came to system requirements and such but. Back in the days of the 386, what was the nearest thing to say Poser?

Perhaps it's not simply that software is bloated and/or people are writing it expecting us to upgrade. It's because the hardware has become so cheap that the same software product will be installed on multiple generations of hardware within it's own life span so the software has features that do kinda work on the most common system but are utterly astounding on the bleeding edge system. SMP used to be the domain of high end machines, as was multiple core on a single CPU. Now you can pick up a dual core CPU from anywhere for a few quid more than a single.

$350 for 2x 1Gb sticks of RAM to go in to my laptop. 2Gb of RAM in a laptop... just wow.

[esselte]

29 years ago ,when I first started in the business,I was a computer operator.We ran a Burroughs B2800 mainframe which had the heady amount of 128k core memory and a 5mb disk drive.All this fitted into a room 30 feet square.We ran all sorts of programs from purchase ledgers to stock systems for lots of large companies in the area.The programming had to be precise and economic due to the lack of memory.When I look at my laptop and realise the difference in the two systems and realise that there's only 30 years between the two I wonder where it will end.

[Jinx]

puggit said:

My first PC was a 286 with 20MB hard drive

8086 with a 5 and a quarter inch floppy - though it did have EGA graphics

Edited by Jinx on Thursday 5th October 07:46

[Podie]

Jinx said:

puggit said:

My first PC was a 286 with 20MB hard drive

8086 with a 5 and a quarter inch floppy - though it did have EGA graphics

8088 with twin 5 1/4 floppies... followed by an 8086 with 30MB HDD and twin 3.5" drives...

In fact I remember a PC mag wanting to rename 3.5" disks as "crunchies" because they didn't flop...

[road2ruin]

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

The one thing I have noticed though is with all this new power we have where are all the killer games? Give me Manic Miner anyday or the Original Elite on BBC Micro.

[Podie]

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

Remember those suitcase size things where you dropped down a keyboard at the front, had a tiny green screen and two 5 1/2 drives... and had to plug it in..?

[Podie]

Worth a giggle - http://pc-museum.com/

[jamieboy]

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

Yep, we had a sewing machine at my work as well although ours was a Compaq Portable Plus - their adverts were "It's like IBM, only Compaq".

34lbs!



edit - I took the image from here - worth a look.

Edited by jamieboy on Thursday 5th October 10:12

[puggit]

jamieboy said:

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

Yep, we had a sewing machine at my work as well although ours was a Compaq Portable Plus - their adverts were "It's like IBM, only Compaq".

34lbs!



edit - I took the image from here - worth a look.

Edited by jamieboy on Thursday 5th October 10:12

Dad had one of these - horrible green screen.

We called it the Compaq 'luggable'

[road2ruin]

jamieboy said:

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

Yep, we had a sewing machine at my work as well although ours was a Compaq Portable Plus - their adverts were "It's like IBM, only Compaq".

34lbs!



edit - I took the image from here - worth a look.

Edited by jamieboy on Thursday 5th October 10:12

Thats the fellow, brought a tear to my eye. Oh sorry was just wind.

[TheExcession]

Podie said:

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

Remember those suitcase size things where you dropped down a keyboard at the front, had a tiny green screen and two 5 1/2 drives... and had to plug it in..?

I used to borrow one of these when I was about 18, my Dad used to bring it home from work.

Taught myself Lotus 123 Macro language on it and wrote some extremely nifty spreadsheets. A few years later I managed to get hold of a copy of TurboC and taught myself C programming.

When I went to work at ICI Pharmaceuticals at age 18 we only had the old 286s.

I can still remember when the first IBM PS1 arrived on my desk



with a whopping 120MB hard drive. The lads in IT hadn't realised that the rest of the disk needed to be partioned into 32MB chunks, so by the end of the day I had an 'A', 'C', 'D', 'E' and 'F' drive.

The whole family are [url]here|www.csdm.qc.ca/pec/codes/ibm.html[/url]

Remember the old HP Pen Plotters, with the littel carousel for all the pens?








Heady days indeed.

[zumbruk]

I do wonder what the software writers are up to these days, given that I started on these;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_St

www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retrospect/
(Scroll down to the screen shot about half-way down, then remember the date it was produced).

A proper windowing system & multitasking, Ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG word processor & spreadsheet, email, shared documents, file servers, object embedding - 10 years before Microsoft, etc., etc., etc. In 1981. Some of it is still superior to what's available today; AD has only very recently caught up to what Xerox Clearinghouse could do, the Xerox print servers were superior to what's available now (they would automatically download and install fonts they didn't have locally from a font server, for example). And all with 1Mb of memory and a 1MHz processor. No wonder I can be heard to snort disbelievingly when Gates talks about innovation. And yet, Xerox pissed it all away.

Nostalgia's not what it used to be, is it?

[TheExcession]

zumbruk said:

I do wonder what the software writers are up to these days, given that I started on these;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_St

www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/retrospect/
(Scroll down to the screen shot about half-way down, then remember the date it was produced).

Reminded me of GEM, and a quick google tells me that GEM was written by one Mr. Lorenzen who had just left Xerox PARC.

Full story here

[thepassenger]

road2ruin said:

The one thing I have noticed though is with all this new power we have where are all the killer games? Give me Manic Miner anyday or the Original Elite on BBC Micro.

Must admit thanks to STEEM I finally completed Dueteros after erm... 16 years or something? I'm current;y trying to work my way though Magic Fly and find a disk image of Millenium 2.2. More processing power than God and I'm using it to emulate a 16bit motorolla cpu from the 90's. Alternativley I've a full screen DOSbox session open rampaging around in Jazz Jackrabbit whilst wondering where my copy of One Must Fall has gone lol

[onomatopoeia]

I remember buying Elite the day it came out and playing it endlessly until I got the floppy drive upgrade for my BBC micro and buying it again on floppy disk. Mind you before that I also used to play "1K breakout" on the ZX81, so named as it ran in 1K of RAM...

thepassenger said:

(RM Nimbus 80186 based... yes... a HDD controller for a CPU)

With no apology for stone age geekdom, the 80186 was a microprocessor, the 82064 was the HDD controller and 8272 or 82072 FDD controller (although those were basically a copy of the NEC PD765).

I really do keep a copy of the "Microprocessor and Pheripheral Handbook (1987)" published by Intel on my desk, which has datasheets for all the old Intel chips.

[thepassenger]

onomatopoeia said:

I remember buying Elite the day it came out and playing it endlessly until I got the floppy drive upgrade for my BBC micro and buying it again on floppy disk. Mind you before that I also used to play "1K breakout" on the ZX81, so named as it ran in 1K of RAM...

I could never get the hang of Elite. Although I did enjoy Elite 2 despite all of its bugs.

thepassenger said:

(RM Nimbus 80186 based... yes... a HDD controller for a CPU)

onomatopoeia said:

With no apology for stone age geekdom, the 80186 was a microprocessor, the 82064 was the HDD controller and 8272 or 82072 FDD controller (although those were basically a copy of the NEC PD765).

No need to appologise, after all these years I should have looked in to what exactly a 80186 actually was rather than taking the word of the CompStudies teacher who thought a 386sx was superior to a 386dx.

[Marki]

road2ruin said:

I had an old IBM errr laptop! at work back in 1989, only it was the size of the desk with a flip down keyboard 5 1/4 inch floppy to boot from and save to, a green screen and the grand total of 4Mhz processing power. Still got lotus 123 to run on it though.

i sold loads of them the good old P70