Russell McMahon wrote:
{Quote hidden}>
> From: William Chops Westfield <
.....billwKILLspam
@spam@CISCO.COM>
> > And if people weren't hung up on saving every little bit of
> RAM, it
> > wouldn't be a problem now, either.
> >
> >I don't think RAM had anything to do with it. Going to a
> 4-character year
> >would have used up an additional 2.5% of the available columns on
> the
> >punched card, and taken away characters from some other field.
>
> I'm pretty sure memory was a major issue. The "youngsters" amongst us
> probably don't appreciate how much the price of RAM has fallen and
> the amount has risen. My first home built system had 256 bytes afair
> and useful commercial systems with 4K of core were common - I think
> the PDP8 at the engineering school in 1970 (big as 2 closets - 2
> doors walk in) with less power than an original IBM PC had 4K.
>
> With this sort of memory every bit counted - something like using a
> PIC :-).
>
> regards
>
> Russell McMahon
My first Z80, S100 system had a whole 64kB of RAM, built wire-wrapped,
of 4k by 1-bit RAM chips ($30 apiece IIRC? times 128 or 144 =
$3900+ish!) Most systems had only 32kB. (ZCPR3 ring a bell?) That's
been a while, I don't remember if it had parity or not, now! Do
remember we "Shadow Ram"-ed the ROM on bootup & could run patch.com to
fix any OS bugs, which was handy as we didn't have an EPRom burner at
first, and DID have OS bugs to spare.
Man, THESE are the days, those sure weren't in some BIG ways <G> CPU
power and RAM are almost free nowadays, by comparison!
Mark "I can still change card punch ribbons in my sleep", same as some
others I'm sure! mwillisKILLspamnwlink.com
