Jim Cathey via Mercedes writes:
> Plus, today's software is metric crap-tons less efficient than
> software of yore. You can even see this over the lifetime of one
> computer, such as my old Pismo. That was a machine that was pretty
> fast when it came out, capable of playing DVDs (via software
The only thing this umpty-core 3GHz Mac is even remotely slow at is running
a raspberry pi simulator. Using _that_ environment can be fairly sluggish.
However, running the emacs text editor inside that environment doesn't feel
slow at all. That's ironic, an editor that in its early days was chide
> Yup, and I think a RAM disk might have been faster than the solid state
> "disks" we use now.
Absolutely. These would have been RAM, either directly addressed (Mac)
or indirectly via a bank-selector (CP/M, etc.), which was at full bus speed.
Today's SSD's are indirectly addressed flash EEPROM
On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 15:15:53 -0500 OK Don via Mercedes
wrote:
> Yup, and I think a RAM disk might have been faster than the solid state
> "disks" we use now.
They most likely were faster for writes; not sure about reads/
Craig
___
http://www.okiebenz.com
To
Yup, and I think a RAM disk might have been faster than the solid state
"disks" we use now. I installed a 512KB RAMdisk board into the 8080
machine, I think I was up to DOS 3.1 by then. It was an AVL Genesis PC
clone.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 1:42 PM Jim Cathey via Mercedes <
mercedes@okiebenz.com>
Curt will like the background of this picture of CNN when it began. Look at all
those tape cartridges stacked around the place!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/world/gallery/cnn-history/index.html
-D
> On Jun 6, 2020, at 2:41 PM, Jim Cathey via Mercedes
> wrote:
>
> Any CP/M machine could sup
Any CP/M machine could support a ramdisk, you just needed a bank-switched ram
board (the hard part) and a tiny driver.
I had an original Mac that I bumped up to 512KB, along with a 1MB ramdisk and
later a SCSI port. For a machine that was tuned until floppy operation was
basically
acceptable, a
I had a Kaypro II with a daughterboard populated with a kajillion ram chips to
create a gigantic 1 MB ramdisk. IIRC I ran a replacement OS called ZCPR or some
such which allowed the ramdisk. I was using the machine as a word processor
with WordStar, and the spell check running on floppies would
