8 bit vs other Computers.

From: ben franchuk <bfranchuk_at_jetnet.ab.ca>
Date: Sun Nov 24 16:52:00 2002

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:


> Useful in what context? I wrote nearly every paper for high school and
> college, plus a humor column [1] on an 8-bit computer [2], and I had a 2nd
> cousin (Mom's cousin) that wrote a few books on an 8-bit computer [3].
> Okay, you might not be able to effectively run more than one application at
> a time, but that might not be such a *bad* thing, if you want to get work
> done 8-)

For a real word processing you need 80x24 upper/lower case display,
full keyboard (compared to the membrane keyboards of some computers)
a good printer and at least 32k of memory, and floppy disks. The IBM
PC had all the above features, but most 8 bit systems like S100
bus,apple,C64 Coco did not as a base system. Sadly the PC still does
not have a real OS,but then I am a OS/9 fan.

Right now modern machines require at least 67108864* bytes of memory to
run. What will it be in 10 years from now. The first machine I used had
4096 words of memory.(* really more but my calculator can't display 256
* 1024 * 1024.) Somehow don't see the new computers a better machine for
word processing, than the 8 bitters. For getting work done I think
we took a wrong turn in computer design. Has anybody done a real
feature/function compare of software with the 8/16/32 and now 64 bit
machines?
Ben
All computers wait at same speed.
Received on Sun Nov 24 2002 - 16:52:00 GMT