20 Years

Hendo · Guru

20 Years

dorian · Guru

I used to work on these:

https://www.google.com/search?q=mainframe&tbs=isz:m,itp:photo&tbm=isch

Whenarewethere · Guru

All the things may fit in your pocket but you almost need to replace it every year.

Gundog · Guru

Remember when mobiles first appeared for it was a brick or bag phone, over the successive years they got smaller and smaller, my smallest was a CDMA Hyundai flip phone by 2000 they were begin to get bigger again eventually my biggest Nokia was the N97 flip the display up and a full Qwerty keyboard was underneath. Now we have folders and flippers that are getting bigger and bigger even my Moto is bigger and heavier than my old Samsung S8.

Its funny My laptop that I continue to use, it's 11 or 12 years old still runs well on windows 7 origional with zero upgrades, sure its as heavy as a brick 18" screen 2x 1GB HDD's internal, TV Tuner and plenty of other goodies, why havn't I replaced because it doed everything I need it to do and that goes for my MS Office Pro 2007.

Craig1 · Guru

www.google.com/search Wrote Dorian.

I worked for a construction company, Austin Anderson, in Sydney in 1972. We had to fit out a George St, or close by office building, two whole floors, to accomodate the computer.

Floating, insulated floors, special interanl wall lining, special air conditioning etc etc. The budget was close to building a whole smallish office block in Chatswood that we were also building at the time.

86GTS · Guru

A lot of things get smaller with age.

dorian · Guru

It's not only that things have been shrinking, but there are plenty of examples where more technology has been crammed into the same form factor.

For example, in 1990 a 3.5" PC hard drive had a capacity of 20 megabytes. Today a 20 terabyte hard drive occupies the same space. That's 1 million times the capacity.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/664AAOSwDUpi5Hv2/s-l1600.jpg (20MB)

https://external-preview.redd.it/JVPOHOj--mfTnt5c6x1R5rIzlOIzMeYCbYLJakvHbhY.jpg?auto=webp&s=b0e8efdb7f859b253ecac7c112fb91c1f1ccbd6d (20TB)

mixo · Senior Member

Them the days...

Gundog · Guru

My computer was an IBM XT with twin 360k 5.25 FDD's. I later removed 1of the 5.25 and added a 3.5 FDD.

Then I add my first HDD a 5mb MFM HDD with an 8 bit HDD controller

KevinJ · Senior Member

Our first office computer was a Digital Rainbow with one 5.25 FDD (floppy disk drive) and 16K of RAM (Memory). Later we put a second FDD in and I would write the programs to go on the first drive and the data would reside on the second drive. Later we added a 5MB HDD (hard disk drive) and upgraded to 64K RAM.

The operating system was CPM which pre dated DOS.

-- Edited by KevinJ on Wednesday 19th of October 2022 10:21:44 AM

dorian · Guru

My first computer was a 16KB Microbee. It was supplied in kit form, and we had to solder all the ICs ourselves.

Mike Harding · Guru

Cor! You lot were posh!

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 which I built from a kit - an 8k ROM, containing BASIC, and 1k of RAM. I learnt to programme on that machine using Z80 assembler which went like this:

A - Write the mnemonics on paper to create the desired computing result

B -Using look-up tables ascribe hexadecimal codes to each mnemonic

C - Write a programme in BASIC to "poke" the hex bytes into memory

D - Copy the hex bytes from paper into an array which BASIC could access

E - Run BASIC programme

F - Run user programme

G - Observe user programme didn't work

H - Establish whether fault was in logic, look-up table, written hex, BASIC programme or something else

I - Correct fault

J - Goto B and repeat, seemingly forever, until user programme works

But, boy!, did learning to write software that way stand me in good stead over the years.

To this day I still know many of the Z80 op-codes by heart: