8 bit vs other Computers.

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Mon Nov 25 02:12:00 2002

It was thus said that the Great ben franchuk once stated:
>
> 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.

  Ah well ... I was able to write papers and columns on a 32x16 upper case
display (okay, I had 64K RAM and a floppy drive) but hey, if you say so ...

  And I consider Linux to be close enough to a real OS for government work.

> Right now modern machines require at least 67108864* bytes of memory to
> run.

  Odd, I only have 33,554,432 bytes in my main development machine. My
webserver has 20,975,616 bytes (and it handles email as well).

> 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?

  Depends upon what you do. For word processing, yes, what we have is a bit
overkill, but now a days I can keep an editor, my email client and a web
browser going. Email because I'm addicted, and the web browser so I can do
research using Google. While you can get an IP stack for the C-64, TCP is a
bit of a heavy-weight protocol and I'm not sure if you can have that, and a
browser (even text based) in 64K of RAM.

  It was supposedly said that LISP didn't get interesting until you had a
megabyte of memory and that's the second oldest language there is ...

> Ben
> All computers wait at same speed.

  I thought all user interfaces run at 9600 bps, reguardless of speed ...

  -spc (Seems that way sometimes ... )
Received on Mon Nov 25 2002 - 02:12:00 GMT