Can’t imagine as to how people worked on this machine?
The first machine i used was probably a P3@400~500 mhz and offered 128 MB RAM
But this machine was probably much better than vacuum tubes and punch cards.
Article:- First encounter: Ohio Challenger 2P (and its 4KB of RAM) | Ars Technica
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/challenger-2p.jpg
Can’t imagine as to how people worked on this machine?
They didn’t - mostly used for experimentation and play 
I remember this era well - I was a youngster reading electronic magazines and yearning to own a Compukit UK101, Ohio Scientific Superboard, or similar.
How about the Science of Cambridge SC/MP kit?
MK14 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I actually got to play with one of these in 1990 (It was owned by the boss of a computer service company I was working at). IIRC, it had some faulty address logic which I had to use a single stepper to assist with the diagnosis and fix.
I can remember when the Sinclair ZX80 came out with all of 1Kb - at the time I, and I suspect many of the purchasers, did not know what the limitations of 1Kb might be because we had never had access to any programmable memory. A year later the rather more expensive BBC Micro was announced to be followed by the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum from Sinclair.
So by the time people had outgrown the limitations of the original RAM, there were alternatives with more storage available.
On 2012-12-22 22:56, john hudson wrote:
> So by the time people had outgrown the limitations of the original RAM,
> there were alternatives with more storage available.
RAM was expensive at the time.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
On 12/22/2012 12:46 PM, vazhavandan wrote:
>
> Can’t imagine as to how people worked on this machine?
> The first machine i used was probably a P3@400~500 mhz and offered 128
> MB RAM
> But this machine was probably much better than vacuum tubes and punch
> cards.
>
> Article:- ‘First encounter: Ohio Challenger 2P (and its 4KB of RAM) |
> Ars Technica’ (http://tinyurl.com/d7mflj2)
>
>
> [image:
> http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/challenger-2p.jpg]
>
>
In many ways I was able to do more on my 64K memory Osborne I than I am able to
do on my dual processor (8 core) host I have today. Sad… but true.
On my Osborne, I had a full featured word process, spreadsheet, database as well
as Cobol, C, Pascal, macro/assembler (for which I wrote a IBM 360 assembler on
top of it), LISP, and on and on. Had a 300 baud pulse dialing modem… but it
was enough. I used to simulate my mainframe labs at school on my Osborne adn
then upload them in one shot via 300 baud in order to save “dollars” on my
computer account at the school.
And yes… thats was with 64K of memory, of which a significant amount was used
for resident OS stuff.
Most all software back then was written at a pretty low level so it could fit
easily into a small footprint (unlike today).
I wrote games for it… some of which were “shoot em up” type games. I’d program
in C and then for the ultra fast stuff, I’d write that up in assembler and call
out to that.
People today have no idea what is possible…
Yeah . People spend most of time browsing and watching videos on computers.
The first computer I used was considered very powerful at the time. The feed tray on which we queued up the jobs on the punch cards was almost 14 feet long.
I think that was in the fall of '66.
So was everything compared with now but, much like cjcox, I did not get any more productivity out of my DOS machine than I had out of my 64Kb CP/M machine and I continued to use CP/M for many things until 2000 when I started using Linux. Indeed, there were some things I could do easily within CP/M which are much more difficult to do within Linux or Windows. The huge leap for me with Linux was vector graphics which I could produce in CP/M but only with a huge investment in time!
Also I did learn a lot about efficient programming from having to work within 64Kb - something for which I am eternally grateful.
Re the cost of hardware, my father bought a top of the range portable typewriter in 1959 for the equivalent of £900 today; though my first CP/M computer cost much more than that in real terms, the productivity gains made it a much more worthwhile purchase.
On 2012-12-23 19:26, vazhavandan wrote:
> Yeah . People spend most of time browsing and watching videos on
> computers.
Time ago I thought that would never be possible in my lifetime.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
On 12/23/2012 12:26 PM, vazhavandan wrote:
>
> cjcox;2512921 Wrote:
>> In many ways I was able to do more on my 64K memory Osborne I than I am
>> able to
>> do on my dual processor (8 core) host I have today. Sad… but true…
> Yeah . People spend most of time browsing and watching videos on
> computers.
>
>
Which we would call “doing nothing”… or at least in most cases “nothing
productive”… certainly browsing can be productive… and that kind doesn’t
require a lot of resources… it’s the “brainless” style that I’m referring to.
Oh yes, and on occasion when I do – guilty as charged! Unless of course it’s a serious work of artistic or dramatic merit.
On 2012-12-24 22:36, consused wrote:
>>> Yeah . People spend most of time browsing and watching videos on
>>> computers.
>>>
>> Which we would call “doing nothing”… or at least in most cases
>> “nothing productive”… certainly browsing can be productive… and that kind
>> doesn’t require a lot of resources… it’s the “brainless” style that I’m
>> referring to.
> Oh yes, and on occasion when I do – guilty as charged! Unless of
> course it’s a serious work of artistic or dramatic merit.
I don’t see anything to feel guilty about. It is similar to watching TV,
but more actively (you search for the programming), or reading a book.
One doesn’t have to be actively doing things all the time.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
Right. I don’t feel guilty, but sometimes am guilty of “doing nothing productive” and watching for pure entertainment. I agree about actively searching and selecting programmes, rather than just having the TV on.
Ok, makes sense if you mean programming and hacking, but I’ve been tinkering with CAD and FEA analysis since the 70’s, and today it is much, much more productive than at that time, mostly because of the easier guy data input and result output. I did wrote a number of weld detailing and 3D visualization programs for offshore oil platforms in, IINM, Turbo Pascal (besides the ubiquitous BASIC, of course), but after AutoCAD 2.17, SAP 80 and Visicalc most of the need for programming was gone.
I can identify with this. I had to use/learn FORTRAN at university (back in the eighties) for engineering analysis. Tasks that could easily be solved with Mathcad and spreadsheet apps these days.
I was just thinking about fairly basic office tasks; there was much more integration between WordStar, SuperCalc and dBASE than there is in so-called office suites. Of course, modern office suites have many more features but the price seems to be that the simple, routine tasks - the 20% that people do 80% of the time - are so much more time-consuming.
The big limitation in CP/M was anything which needed plain 2D graphics - so I didn’t even begin to think about 3D graphics. The revelation in CP/M was the vector graphics program that I used for illustrating SuperCalc results. The graphics modules of modern spreadsheets can do some plots which the CP/M program could not do but I could make many more useful choices about the final output than I can in most modern graphics modules. (The DOS version of SuperCalc included a similarly well featured graphics module with several features not available in modern office programs.)
