;-) Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, Allison J
Parent said:
><>Funny... My CoCo can support multiple users, and it wasn't expensive at
><>all... $xxx for the machine, $yyy for the floppy drive, $zzz for OS-9 =
>And the point was...
You made the point that older boxes were expected to be multiuser because
they were expensive. My point was that not all older boxes that supported
multiple users were expensive. T'was all I was saying.
>I made a subtle point that the older and often smaller machines were not
>short on capability and also didn't lack for understandability.
Must've been too subtle... ;-) I didn't quite read it that way, but... Oh
well, sorry!
>The later is significant. Far to many of the wintel boxen are undocumented
>kluges running a million or more lines of incomprehensable code that
>sometimes** works. After that programming something like PDP-8 with it's
>smaller memory and very small instruction set suggest getting to the
>concise solution was essential. Same so for the early micros were 64k
>of ram and an instruction set that could be remembered.
Other than replacing the sometimes** above with "barely" (or recently for
me, "rarely"), I wholeheartedly agree!
Back to work ;-)
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | Why does Hershey's put nutritional
Programmer, NorthernWay | information on their candy bar wrappers
zmerch_at_northernway.net | when there's no nutritional value within?
Received on Thu Dec 04 1997 - 08:53:22 GMT