The wonderful world of early computing

[Noreen]

Interesting site.
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/01/25/the-wonderful-world-of-early-computing/

[Rik]

Congratulations, Noreen, you just made our 99,000th post.  

Interesting site too.

[Malc]

My worse memory of my early days of computers (around 1994) was trying to get enough base memory and guess the IRQ sound channels for games

[Rik]

1982 - trying to decide how good a graphics mode to use knowing that it would reduce the available 32K of memory!

[Malc]

Not forgetting the hours spent fine tuning the autoexec.bat!

[Rik]

Didn't have one of those in '82.

[Broadback]

Circa 1960.  Computers the size a room, noisy air conditioning, noisy card readers and line printers. I went on a course (pure theory classroom).  Started working, walked into the computer room, I don't know what I expected, certainly not the cacophony of sound that assaulted my ears.
Main memory, in 4K (yes K) word blocks each 4 K block being a matrix of ferrite coils about 2 foot cubed, plus 6 rows of pcbs. Maximum store size a huge 12K.
Then the first disk drives came out, cabinets about the size of a short filing cabinet, with replaceable disk packs, 4 megs each. These were followed by fixed disks, these disks multi layered. Head crashes were frequent, the disks had to be removed and polished back to perfection, several complete 8 hour shifts for each.
The aim of programmers was to reduce the store requirement of their programmes, mathematicians were employed solely to find ways of doing this.  Not a bad discipline, even today, Microsoft could do well to follow! 

[Rik]

The aim of programmers was to reduce the store requirement of their programmes, mathematicians were employed solely to find ways of doing this.  Not a bad discipline, even today, Microsoft could do well to follow! 

Amen to that. I remember Visicalc and early copies of 1-2-3, written in assembler, lean and very fast.