On Monday 29 October 2001 10:57, you wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 12:35:14PM -0500, Daniel Taylor wrote:
> > On 27 Oct 2001, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> > > Andrew Nemchenko <drew at usfamily.net> writes:
.
>
> > The command line was a line number based BASIC interpreter or worse.
> > 480x320 graphics was really good, and only used by scientists and
> > gamers. The IBM PC with MSDOS wasn't due till 81.
>
> You've forgotten entirely about Altair and all the CP/M systems out there.
>
One of the coolest CP/M systems I ever used was put out by Sony. It had great 
graphics for its day. I built a "Booth Locator" system for the National 
Association of Broadcasters convention in '84 on one of these. It was 
programmed entirely in BASIC. The system had 64K of RAM, I think, and two 
3.5" Floppies that held... gee I don't remember but it wasn't the 720K that 
we associate with PC/MS-DOS DSDD 3.5" diskettes.

> > In the 70's Harddrives were spec'd out in small numbers of Megabytes,
> > memory was allocated by the Kilobyte, and 9600 bd was fast.
>
> Yes, but they weren't bloated -- one could implement an accounting
> package for a mid-sized company in 8k of memory.  Really!
>

One of my first programming jobs that paid was to cleanup an "ATM Simulator" 
for one of the big banks in the Philadelphia area. We used a 6502 board 
designed as a video card for an 8088 system. It originally had 2K RAM and a 
2K character set EPROM. The maker modified the board to accept a card with 2 
or 3 additional 2K EPROMs. We did it with room to spare. ;-)

>
> Phil "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" Mendelsohn ;)

-- 
Jack Ungerleider
jack at jacku.com