[vcf-midatlantic] Happy Birthday IBM-PC

[Neil Cherry]

On 8/13/21 3:27 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> On 8/13/21 3:24 PM, Ethan Dicks via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>>> I don't think anyone had GB of anything back in the 80's. I remember back
>>> then when our IBM mainframe was upgraded to 1mb of core memory and that was
>>> serving 3 hospitals with 100's of terminals.
>>
>> When I first started working at Software Results in the Fall of 1984,
>> me and one of the other student workers were marveling at the
>> 32-bitness of the VAX-11/750 (with 8MB of physical RAM in a 4GB
>> virtual address space) and trying to envision how expensive and how
>> large *Four Gigabytes* of RAM would be, and it was *immense*.
>>
>> This same machine (8MB RAM) could handle 70 dumb terminal users, but
>> to be fair, it did swap a bit over 40 users.  The two fattest apps we
>> had were were VMS MAIL and MASS-11 (word processing).
> 
>    I will take this opportunity to point out that that model has a clock
> speed of 3.125MHz.
> 
>    This is what efficient design is all about.

When the AT came out, to much fanfare, I was disappointed to find it could
only run 1 application at a time. I have been so spoiled by OS/9 (Microware
not Apple) that I couldn't understand why the AT (286/8MHz) cost more than
the Gimix Ghost we had (multiuser/multitask, 6809 2Mhz - clocked at 8MHz).

-- 
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry at linuxha.com
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