On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote: > On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:04, Joost Roeleveld <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sunday 03 April 2011 15:13:09 luis jure wrote: > >> on 2011-04-03 at 10:47 Neil Bothwick wrote: > >> >It's been done on a C-64, but I think a 3.5KB box with no mass storage > >> >might be a little too challenging. > >> > >> 3.5? wow, i always thought that the name meant it had 20K... like the > >> C64 and C128. but no. now, almost 30 years later, i learn that it had > >> 5K, 1.5 of them used by the system (you wouldn't want to leave the > >> system without ram, would you?) > >> > >> i never had a vic-20 (my first computer was the atari st-1040 in 1988), > >> but a friend of mine had one in the early 80's and i always wondered at > >> all the things you could do with the thing. i couldn't program, so i > >> used to sit next by him telling him my ideas for a program for > >> algorithmic composition, that he tried to code. > > > > Nice, a walk down memory lane :) > > The first computer we had at home (apart from an IBM my dad borrowed a > > few times) was an Atari 1040 ST. > > We got it in 1986 and I can't even remember all the things I did with it. > > It came with a copy of GFA Basic. This was a bit like C or Pascal, but > > then with Basic commands. > > No line numbers, a decent editor and a compiler and linker. I could mix > > machine-code, basic-code and C-code into a final program to get a faster > > result. > > > > The machine still worked last time I tried it and is currently still > > stored at my parents with strict instructions not to throw it away :) > > Oh, the nostalgy... :-) > > My first computer I believe was an Apple ][, a hand-down from an > uncle. It ran only for 1-2 weeks before it went to the Bit Bucket in > the Sky.
That's sad, only 2 weeks... A friend of my dad got us an apple-emulator, had a game I played a lot untill I found out that the game was incomplete and would always crash at the same point. It was a point-click adventure... > Then my parents got me an Atari 800XL. That's where I cut my > programming teeth with its built-in BASIC. Yes, the old days with Basic. I wonder if I still have the old programs... The 3.5" floppy-disks are still around somewhere.. > When its floppy drive (5.25") gave up the ghost, I got another > hand-down; a PC-XT compatible no-name with a huge (at that time) 20 MB > hard disk. 2nd one we had was a 386sx-16mhz with 2 mb ram and 40mb harddrive. I did try to install linux on that once, but the network-install took forever. The NIC could do 10mbit half-duples (coax), but effective speed was less. Symptoms: download 1KB at full speed card crashed driver resets after 5 minutes ... repeat... That was in 2.0.x kernels and I think I saw a change-log where that driver finally got fixed in 2.6.0 (could be mistaken on that. It was an Intel Etherlink-16) I don't have that card anymore. > Again, it died after serving me & my brother for a couple of years, > and we got a "PC Brand 486 SLC" desktop. And there I dabbled in Pascal > and ASM, making replacement drivers for MS-DOS :-P ... I still > remember tuning QEMM386.sys trying to eke the last bytes of Low > Memory... What's the most low-memory you could get it and still use it? I managed to get low memory to around 634KB (If I remember correctly) using the memory-tools that came with Norton Utilities at the time. > Afterwards, I started university, and its a blur of PC clones (and > Windows 9x)... and I shifted mental-gears to become a network engineer When did you switch to Linux? I switched when MS Windows 95 crashed once too many and decided to delete some files along with it. I didn't bother fixing that installation and eventually reclaimed the diskspace and removed it from /etc/lilo.conf. -- Joost
