Hi Will, I thought of the labeling thing like this, earlier than 80186 cpu
desk top computers wore "micro computers" and 80186 and newer are "miny
computers" I think I read it some whear, but am not sure.
Any ways whear I am going whith this is the teacher at the one school I
went to insists the pentium computers are "micro computers", well, I think
that's wrong, I geus it doesn't mater, rite?
Pete
On 1999-05-30 [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
>I first encountered DOS in 1984 when I used Wordperfect to edit
>COBOL programs at college. Prior to that, I had already been
>working on minicomputers (what some might mistakenly call
>mainframes) for a few years (and still do). I then owned a
>Sinclair ZX81, then a Color Computer 2, before I got my first IBM
>PC compatible in 1989. When trying to learn how to use desktop
>computers, I remember thinking that the 'desktop computer paradigm'
>might be easier to learn for those who had *not* already been using
>mainframes or minicomputers. I think it had something to do with
>the fact that mainframes are a 'transaction-based' environment. In
>other words, most mainframe programs read, write, or change
>discrete records in a file. On desktop computers, however, I
>thought it was strange to start Lotus, or a word processor, and
>then load a whole file to change discrete records, and then
>remember to 'Save' the file when I was finished with it. That, at
>first, seemed awkward to me. That's why it occured to me that
>desktop computers might have been easier for me to learn if I had
>not already had experience with mainframes and minicomputers.
>BTW, when I got active on Compuserve, and BBS's, in 1989, or so, I
>got frustrated when communicating with people who would talk about
>'PC's, when what they really meant was 'desktop computers'. There
>*was* a difference in my mind. "PC" was really, I thought for a
>while, a trademark, or at least a designation that should only be
>used for the IBM version of the desktop computer. All the other
>desktop computers, like Atari, Coco, Commodore, TRS-80, Mac, etc.
>should only be referred to as 'desktop computers', *not* as PC's.
>Now, of course, the term 'PC' is used as a generic term for desktop
>computers, but I still prefer my way of thinking.
>I just remembered something. I used an IBM (pre-MS-DOS PC) desktop
>computer briefly in 1979 or so. I believe it was called the
>'Desktop 64', or something. It only had a couple floppy drives, no
>hard drive.
>When I wrote my first PC-compatible shareware program, in 1990, it
>uses a 'mainframe' paradigm. I.E., when the user enters, changes or
>deletes records, it just operates on one record at a time. In other
>words, they don't load a whole file first, then save it when
>finished. In reality, since most desktop computers (and mainframes,
>I presume) use buffers, the program really changes records in the
>buffer, and then the OS reads or writes them to/from the HD in
>groups, transparently to my program. I remember my first users
>being confused that the program didn't ask them to 'Save' the file
>when they exited the program. Because of the presence of the
>buffers, the 'Loading', 'Changing', then 'Saving' a whole file
>still seems redundant to me, since, in many cases, the whole file
>then probably exists in 2 places in the PC's memory.
>-- [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] USA
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