On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 00:23:21 +0100, Stephen Kellett
<snail@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In message <a467mvc43cqjdek5m93u62toemvt6asqq1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Roedy Green
<roedy@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes
>> The PDP-11 started out simply enough when 64K seemed like infinite
>> RAM, but it got a little hairier once you tried to crack that barrier.
>
> 64K, when I was a lad, I had 5K, well thats what Commodore advertised on
the box. Nasty marketing folks, I had 3.5K! 0.5K had gone to the screen and
the rest to the OS, but if you knew where the cassette read buffer was you
could poke a nifty assembler routine in there too. Vic=20 time!
>
> Anyone else?
In High school, my first programming course was in Fortran on a Honeywell
100/5.
It had an optical card reader, punch card reader, card puncher, a printer,
and two
disk drives. Taught myself asm, so I could disassemble the security
system, and
modify it a little<g>. 16kb Ram, no registers. Everything done in ram.
It had
a couple of switches on the front, that you could set physically, and
check the
position of, in your program. Also had a single step button, so you could
trace
through the instructions as they executed, using a small display on the
front,
with inividual lights for each bit, showing the current instruction, and
two
absolute addresses. If you pulled out a ram card, you could see the iron
cores
for each bit. They were about a 64th of an inch in diameter. This was
1975.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
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