Ranting about Microsoft and Tech Support in India

I waited for the prices to come down and went with an i7 chip. Good performance, and the price didn't kill me. But there were two generations better of the i7 available, as well.

If we're gonna talk old machines though... Oi. I think everyone remembers the Commodore 64. A nice little machine and a sort of benchmark in home PCs for plenty of people. But before I had that, I was using a Zenith Heathkit. A built it at home, including soldering, job. It had 32k internal memory. 3 5.25" floppy drives. One drive was your OS disc. One was your currently running program. And the third was your storage location. I learned COBOL on it.

The first company I worked for, doing system upgrades, bid a job to replace a Catholic school's computers. They went from a bunch of XT/AT machines on an IBM server with a token ring network. The job was to upgrade them to 386 DX2's. A nice little job, the company massively under bid the project, because they had a buyer lined up for chips out of the XT/AT's. Turns out you can't buy those chips brand new at the time, they weren't manufactured any more. But they were in use in some large heavy duty mainframe machines. To keep those mainframes up and running they needed chips. The company I was working for was reselling the chips out of the XT/AT's for a good profit.

Made a fair bit off of reselling the copper and metal frames too.

If we're gonna talk old machines though... Oi. I think everyone remembers the Commodore 64. A nice little machine and a sort of benchmark in home PCs for plenty of people.

Oh yes, lovely machine. My brother bought both the Vic-20 and then the Vic-64 a few years later, than a few years later i bought a C=128. All three currently resides with that 286 i mentioned, and of course the Amiga i upgraded to later.

I sooo miss that kind of computers, so simple to use and so easy to have fun with. Not to mention that learning to program on them wasn´t so darned troublesome.

But before I had that, I was using a Zenith Heathkit. A built it at home, including soldering, job. It had 32k internal memory. 3 5.25" floppy drives. One drive was your OS disc. One was your currently running program. And the third was your storage location.

Ah, never heard of that one. Oldest brother started my "life with computers" when he purchased an Acorn Atom in the very early 80s, and then proceeded to build a bundle of his own circuit boards for it (he was studying electrical engineering at the time), i dont think even he himself managed to keep track of what all the extra parts did in the end.

Thing looked like some sort of Frankensteins monster, with flat cables coming out through sawed up openings in the chassi, and various smaller or larger circuit boards hanging attached everywhere, and with a second, homebuilt transformer providing power for the additional parts.
Still, it played Ballistics very nicely.

A nice little job, the company massively under bid the project, because they had a buyer lined up for chips out of the XT/AT's. Turns out you can't buy those chips brand new at the time, they weren't manufactured any more. But they were in use in some large heavy duty mainframe machines. To keep those mainframes up and running they needed chips.

Lol, yeah. Always troublesome to keep older systems properly running, and when noone is around that is capable of porting the software to something newer...

Hi guys

I'm not into hardware at all

My first PC was an Apple II
with 64k bytes and
two 102K 5.25 inch floppies.

BUT

?? Has anyone here ever heard of FORTH ??

I has FORTH running on my Apple II which had
the following
full FORTH language system
assembler for the Apple's 6502 chip
disk accessing with demand paging
AND
the whole thing took up LESS than 8K RAM !!!

I LOVED it !!!

R
.

In 1969 I was using Fortran punch cards in a house sized valve mainframe to do tasks that my calculator would laugh at now. Operation half life was about 7 hours. At that point half the calculations had aborted due to a blown valve.

In the 16 years ive been able to appreciate computers, I have played with everything from a commodore 64 to the latest and greatest. That commodore was my dads old one after he upgraded to an apple II, and it broke when I was 8 or so. That was gut-wrenching for me. pac-man, missile command, centipede, great games.....

It's one of the great shames of the computer industry that while hardware has progressed, and we can compute a such high levels now, performance has not kept pace. Or rather, it has, but we bog down the systems with so much other 'junk', that you see no appreciable change in end user results.

I always loved the DOS environment, the Linux/UNIX as well. I could tinker with the boot up parameters, adjust anything and everything my little heart desired. Sometimes, like when I did a Linux install back in 1995, it didn't come out too well. I was running a Redhat build that was all manual set up, and put in some improper numbers for the video card. Oopps. Burned up the video card, AND the CRT monitor as well!

Expensive mistake, especially then.

But I really liked learning the systems and monkeying with the world. Everything from COBOL, Basic, all the way up to JAVA.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but it seems that I'm not getting much improvement on my system performance. Programmers have so much hard drive space and hardware to work with, that they get ridiculously code heavy and processor heavy needs.

One of my favorite all times games is one called The Summoning. Made by SSI, it came on one high density 3.5" floppy and one low density 3.5" floppy. About 2MB of compressed data, came out to almost 7MB when uncompressed. The game was very similar to Diablo 1, with lower graphics and sound. But the same top down, mouse interaction system. 100+ game play hours. A story line, hack and slash, magic game system. Played the heck out of it. A few years later I purchased Baldur's Gate, it came on 7 CD ROMs, and had better graphics, but the interface was horrible, the music wasn't that great and I beat the entire main story line in about 20 hours of play. I was very unhappy with that product.

It seemed that SSI produced a much better quality game, despite the limitations of hardware and coding for the time.

I would say its not so much the perfomance that isnt keeping pace, but rather that the ways in which the programs are being made. Todays games, despite being far bigger then those of yore, are overall not as likeable for me as they focus too much on graphics and effects, and not enough on the plot and controls. rollercoaster tycon probably takes up a tenth as much disk space as some of the latest games, but has a far higher playability level as the game design, the ideas within and the abilities in game were focused on, not the graphics, which still look good even today. Like a lot of modern action movies nowdays actually: all the budget goes on effects, and the story is sort of an addtion to a show dedicated to the special effects guys.....

Fireflair wrote:It's one of the great shames of the computer industry that while hardware has progressed, and we can compute a such high levels now, performance has not kept pace. Or rather, it has, but we bog down the systems with so much other 'junk', that you see no appreciable change in end user results.

I always loved the DOS environment, the Linux/UNIX as well. I could tinker with the boot up parameters, adjust anything and everything my little heart desired. Sometimes, like when I did a Linux install back in 1995, it didn't come out too well. I was running a Redhat build that was all manual set up, and put in some improper numbers for the video card. Oopps. Burned up the video card, AND the CRT monitor as well!

Expensive mistake, especially then.

But I really liked learning the systems and monkeying with the world. Everything from COBOL, Basic, all the way up to JAVA.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but it seems that I'm not getting much improvement on my system performance. Programmers have so much hard drive space and hardware to work with, that they get ridiculously code heavy and processor heavy needs.

One of my favorite all times games is one called The Summoning. Made by SSI, it came on one high density 3.5" floppy and one low density 3.5" floppy. About 2MB of compressed data, came out to almost 7MB when uncompressed. The game was very similar to Diablo 1, with lower graphics and sound. But the same top down, mouse interaction system. 100+ game play hours. A story line, hack and slash, magic game system. Played the heck out of it. A few years later I purchased Baldur's Gate, it came on 7 CD ROMs, and had better graphics, but the interface was horrible, the music wasn't that great and I beat the entire main story line in about 20 hours of play. I was very unhappy with that product.

It seemed that SSI produced a much better quality game, despite the limitations of hardware and coding for the time.

Spacekiwi wrote:In the 16 years ive been able to appreciate computers, I have played with everything from a commodore 64 to the latest and greatest. That commodore was my dads old one after he upgraded to an apple II, and it broke when I was 8 or so. That was gut-wrenching for me. pac-man, missile command, centipede, great games.....

IIRC the computer that went to the moon with Apollo had the capacity of a commodore 64. Scary thought, eh?

And for you Amiga-heads remember, IIRC, guru meditation time? For the rest, Amiga-speak for a crash.

Northstar wrote:

Spacekiwi wrote:In the 16 years ive been able to appreciate computers, I have played with everything from a commodore 64 to the latest and greatest. That commodore was my dads old one after he upgraded to an apple II, and it broke when I was 8 or so. That was gut-wrenching for me. pac-man, missile command, centipede, great games.....

IIRC the computer that went to the moon with Apollo had the capacity of a commodore 64. Scary thought, eh?

And for you Amiga-heads remember, IIRC, guru meditation time? For the rest, Amiga-speak for a crash.

I have a graphics calculator that is more powerful then a 64, and a phone that is more powerful then that...... 0.o technology marches on i guess. but still, my phone could be used to do a moon landing!

One of the problems we're running into now with performance is our ability to compile and run heavily multi-threaded programs. We have big multi-core chips but the available compilers just aren't designed to make use of heavy multi-threading. I figure they'll improve them sooner or later but I'll be happy as long as they don't tell me I have to start programming in LISP again.