> I remember when computers had an absolute maximum of 4 KB of storage, and > that would have cost much, much more than $1,500. No hard drives! > > Any advance? > > Peter.
<yorkshire coal miner accent> Right..... Back when I was a lad (more recently than Peter I think) we had a fantastic computer at Nelson College. It was a cast off from Auckland University. It was hand built, with good old core memory (non volatile too). It had to be bootstrapped from a hex keypad, then you completed loading the os either from paper tape or from a card reader. The card reader was a work of art. You had to glide the cards down manually one at a time at exactly the right speed or they didn't read, and you had to start again from the beginning. If you loaded from tape you got to use a real Teletype with a big roll of paper and an upper-case only keyboard. probably about 110 baud. Mass storage=paper tape. If you went the other way and loaded from cards, you used cards as input and a line printer as output. It ran a very basic basic, we did the good old cricket 1st XI averages programme, Lissajous patterns printed with asterixes (you had to use an 80*80 array as a virtual screen, placing 1 for on and 0 for off, then print it line by line to the teletype) , solving equations, etc etc. It took so long to load a programme and run it you had to get up at 2 am, three hours before you went to bed, just to get the machine to compute the first 5 factorials before bedtime.......... Ahhh those were the days, but tell that to the youth of today and they won't believe you....... </yorkshire coal miner accent> -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
