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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : MS DOS 30th Birthday
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James_From_Canb Senior Member  Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
Those with long memories might get a kick out of this interview with Bill Gates. 300MB drive prices getting down to only $10K to $15K, and being enough for 20 people? Wow. I was hoping to find a quote about "no-one ever needing more that 1MB of available memory" but maybe that's just a myth. It makes me wonder what could a development team of 20 could have done with a 32 bit Maximite over a year. James My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
yuor a funny man... oh i have read hard drive.... technicians do it with least resistance |
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| rhamer Senior Member Joined: 06/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 174 |
The real kicker here is that Microsoft didn't even write the first DOS that they sold. Bill negotiated for exclusive rights to an existing product and renamed it. If the original author had only kept a .01% interest in it he would have been a very rich man..... Rohan Hamer HAMFIELD Software & Hardware Solutions Makers of the Maximite Expander. http://www.hamfield.com.au |
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| sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
geeze do you know my old bosses from 1983 or what///greg /phil /rod technicians do it with least resistance |
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donmck Guru  Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1313 |
Bill Gates 1981: [code] I don't read about the TRS-80 any more because it does seem like a long time ago and in comparison it would be pretty easy to make fun of it, but the year or two after we did that project every time we would see somebody disassembling the BASIC or figuring out some little trick we thought it was really exciting. It's the combination. Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way. [/code] Cheers Don... https://www.dontronics.com |
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| aargee Senior Member Joined: 21/08/2008 Location: AustraliaPosts: 255 |
In the very early eighties, I clearly (?) remember buying the Microsoft TRS80 (dis-)assembler, on tape, from Dick Smith Buranda. It was a bit over my head at the time, but I wish I'd kept the tape! For crying out loud, all I wanted to do was flash this blasted LED. |
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| donmck Guru Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1313 |
If I recall, the tape was 13K long, and took 8 minutes to load. Cheers Don... https://www.dontronics.com |
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| sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
geeze looks like i will have to get another evb board to keep up with the mods ...chheers`s don technicians do it with least resistance |
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| sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
geeze i rember the days when a 20 meg "mfm" cost 5 grand..... technicians do it with least resistance |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
My first "PC" was a AT with a 20meg MFM drive. CGA graphics too, it was a weapon! Funny thing is, I think it was faster than the computer I have today 
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
Now THAT made me laugh.  My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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| sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
ok fine ""my first pc was a 10Mhz turbo board ..8 bit machine.. :rtc card" : multi i/o card : twin floppys ds/dd/5 and 1 quarter inch :actully had a :cga card :: :that only ran monochrome..i have an origanal copy of "smart work ..and the manual very useless these days though  technicians do it with least resistance |
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| sparkey Senior Member Joined: 15/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
you would be suprized at my amd 133 running at 200 Mhz and a peltier sitting on top of it ....: : :here is a good one for you i fired up one of old (P-1) mother boards "vx" chipset then once i had the flash program running i pulled out the "vx" eprom ..then plugged in my 486 eprom and flased the chip ...beat that if yu can.. there used to be a test practice site in the states i pulled up 20 a++ hard whare exames got a score of 399 out of 400 up set me so i sat one more test comeing out of it 419 out of 420...beat that .... technicians do it with least resistance |
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| James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
That would have been the high-spec monochrome Hercules video card. Very nice, but there wasn't nearly as much support for games. My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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| grub Senior Member Joined: 27/11/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 169 |
The first computer I ever used was to program cnc machines. You had to boot it by manually changing toggle switches and the i/o was an electric typewriter. It could operate on assembly, basic, FORTRAN and Cobol. Storage was a paper ribbon that had holes punched in it. Even then you could get "girlie" pictures made from ascii characters. That was in 1978. |
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haiqu Senior Member Joined: 30/07/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 152 |
There were two monochrome standards: the original MGA and Herc, which was a 3rd party option. Could have been either. My first personal machine was a Sirius I with the optional 10Mb HDD, which cost me $16k (plus HP charges) and lasted 9 years. This wasn't my first experience with computers however, since I was a computer service manager by that stage (1982) and repairing 28 different brands. I later co-owned a lasercutting business, using it to generate CNC tapes via an ancient teletype with a CAD program self-written in compiled BASIC. By the end I had designed an upgrade to put 1Mb on the mobo and had an IBM PC emulator that could run Fidonet client software and dial into BBSes with a homebrew 300 (later modified to 1200) baud modem. I also made a plug-in that allowed me to record speech via the onboard PWM input and play it back through the speaker. Rob unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep |
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| haiqu Senior Member Joined: 30/07/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 152 |
Hah!! Remember the stainless steel girlie profiles you used to see stuck to the side of Kenworths? I had a tape that could lasercut those. Rob unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
There were a good deal more than that, actually, although they were probably the two best known. I used to have a Wyse 700? (I think 1280x800 pixels), which was excellent for DTP work and schematics, there were a number of other fancier very high resolution boards too, but I couldn't afford them :( |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
My first computer was a VIC20, then the all mighty Microbee. Then I discovered cars and girls, and didn't touch a computer after hours for a few years, though I still had to develope applications for the XT's at work. Back then Telecom ( Telstra now) trained its technical apprentices in BASIC programming, so we spend a lot of time developing databases and stuff. A few years later I bought the AT(286) 2nd hand and played around with DOS apps and games. But the biggest single event I can remember in my computer life was when I was visiting my brother in Brisbane, and he took me to his work place in the cella of some government office. "Look at this, its a new game" he said, and fired up the shareware copy of Doom. I still remember the dimly lit room, the day, the first impression clearly. Within weeks I had a 486 with 4megs of ram, just so I could play Doom. And I must have spent weeks playing it. I still play a lot of video games, Halflife, Portal, Minecraft etc. I even was pretty good at it once. There was a computer gamers group in Mackay many years ago, so I went along to see what it was about. I was mid 30's, and everyone else was early 20's, and looked at me like I was a grandad. We fired up a relatively new game called Quake2, one of my favourites at the time. Deathmatch, where you kill or be killed, and the highest kills ( or Frags ) makes you the winner. In the game was myself and about 6 other people, plus a few "bots", artificial players that are very tought to kill, never miss, and make the game a lot harder to survive in. First to 50 frags wins. After 10 minutes the game finished with yours truley in number one position, followed by the bots, and then the other people coming last. I quietly packed up my PC and went home, and for weeks I heard stories about the old man who came in and kicked their arses in Quake2 and then left, and no one knew his name. 
I miss the deathmatch games, lots of fun. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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vasi Guru Joined: 23/03/2007 Location: RomaniaPosts: 1697 |
I liked both Quake2 and Halflife. But Halflife allowed me to play more without making me to vomit (I wear glasses) and staying for hours sick in bed. It had a better 3D engine. There, I tried hard to save every scientist and to keep alive all guardians found on corridors... I kept alive my DOS for Turbo Pascal 7, DJGPP, a few FoxPro 2 applications, Dune and Dune 2, UFO-Unknown Enemy games. But in time, I lost the motivation. I intended to use it for TurboCNC and CNCPro but now I try to move to USB ports,,, So now, just Linux and Windows and for a short period, Mac OS X 10.4. Some times I use DOSBox for Clipper 5 and Borland C++ 3.1 Hobbit name: Togo Toadfoot of Frogmorton Elvish name: Mablung Miriel Beyound Arduino Lang |
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