8 bit vs other Computers.

From: Lawrence Walker <lgwalker_at_mts.net>
Date: Mon Nov 25 01:44:25 2002

 Well the Micom 2000 came out in 1986 while the Apple was still in
Woz's garage, with a 31x80 display(3 lines were control lines), and
64k memory. It used a NEC D8080 and it's Qume daisywheel printer
attained 55 cps. It could do underline, subscript and superscript, and
straightline graphics ( end of lines were automatically joined if you
over- or under-scrolled) so you could make borders and frames. You
could do cut and paste and merge separate documents and had a
sort feature. I used mine to make a little sales brochure for a
community paper.
 It could also do background communication with it's "Micronet"
(NASA had 50 of them hooked up to their mainframe), interfacing
with mainframes and phototypsetting equipment, something they
called bi-synchronous, and asynchronous to use with modems.
 They also had an "OCR-B" , a bilingual optical character reader
before 1981. It had math ability and it's own version of MS80 Basic.

 Pretty useful 8-bit I'd say. Of course marketers always reinvent the
wheel like MS did with its' plug-n-play "breakthru".

Lawrence

> 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.
>
>
>


lgwalker_at_mts.net
bigwalk_ca_at_yahoo.com
Received on Mon Nov 25 2002 - 01:44:25 GMT