Wapsi Square Forum

Heh. My first co-op project during college ('74 or so) was to help implement a small microprocessor-based document and form-entry system... a first-generation "word processor"... which used a 6800 CPU chip, and one of those big first-generation 8" floppies.

All of the normal operating code was in ROM. I think it had 1k byte of RAM (maybe 2k?). I had to write an auxiliary "setup" program for it, for which there was no room in ROM and far too little in RAM. I had to break up the program into about a hundred code "overlays" of no more than 256(?) bytes each, write one overlay to each sector on a program disk, and then swap code in and out of RAM on the fly (even doing "subroutine calls" between routines in different sectors, overlaying during the call and then again during the return). All in 6800 assembler. Good times... it rather amazed my co-op boss when he saw it working.

Terabyte hard drives? Half-terabyte SD cards? Friends, we are all incredibly spoiled these days!

I remember - back in the 80s, i think - some Highly Respected Financial Expert saying that there was absolutely no way the Dow Jones would ever break a thousand.

But does it run DOOM?

Aed wrote:I asked an engineer working on the project what the next size up in hard drive was and he opined that users would probably never fill up a 10 MB hard drive so there was no need for anything larger.

He don't know us very well, do he?

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Heh - when i was working at AMI a forty-meg drive was huge and IDE drives were just becoming available.

earliest one i ever worked on was in high school, a PET 8032, some machines had the 5.25 Floppy drive and other had the cassette drive, and i don't remember if we had any that had a hard drive or not... at home my dad had a Commodore VIC20 and later upgraded to a C64...

Hard drives were referred ta as "Winchester" drives - the disk controller cards we used at AMI in 1990 - 92 had the HD connector marked "Winchester".

The name was a nickname for the very first HDD, developed at, i think, IBM, which had two platters, each holding thirty meg.

First PC i ever worked with didn't even have a keyboard, had 10 switches on the front and used machine code. Interesting thing though was the remotes we had at work (military) were touch screens. Of course this was back in the 70's

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Hard drives were referred ta as "Winchester" drives - the disk controller cards we used at AMI in 1990 - 92 had the HD connector marked "Winchester".

The name was a nickname for the very first HDD, developed at, i think, IBM, which had two platters, each holding thirty meg.

More than just two platters -- the IBM RAMAC!

Fun stuff back in the day... and now we sneer. Those who forget the past, etc.

Atomic wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Hard drives were referred ta as "Winchester" drives - the disk controller cards we used at AMI in 1990 - 92 had the HD connector marked "Winchester".

The name was a nickname for the very first HDD, developed at, i think, IBM, which had two platters, each holding thirty meg.

More than just two platters -- the IBM RAMAC!

Fun stuff back in the day... and now we sneer. Those who forget the past, etc.

Too be fair only a group of us lived through even some of that (kids never even seen an Altair or an original Apple home computer) and most will not be taught about it without a college level intro to computers course (Assuming that they do a complete history of computers in it.)

Atomic wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Hard drives were referred ta as "Winchester" drives - the disk controller cards we used at AMI in 1990 - 92 had the HD connector marked "Winchester".

The name was a nickname for the very first HDD, developed at, i think, IBM, which had two platters, each holding thirty meg.

More than just two platters -- the IBM RAMAC!

Fun stuff back in the day... and now we sneer. Those who forget the past, etc.

Ah - i remembered incorrectly. It was the development codename of the IBM 3340, which used two removable data modules, and was originally designed around 30 meg packs. "30-30", hence, Winchester.

naaaa... yer actually remembering right, while the 30-30 was the source of the 'Winchester' code name, the later HDs were also ref'd to as Winchester drives...

TazManiac wrote:naaaa... yer actually remembering right, while the 30-30 was the source of the 'Winchester' code name, the later HDs were also ref'd to as Winchester drives...

That's what started this whole routine - i pointed out that disk controllers in 1990 - 92 when i was working at AMI had the connector for HDDs labeled "Winchester"

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

TazManiac wrote:naaaa... yer actually remembering right, while the 30-30 was the source of the 'Winchester' code name, the later HDs were also ref'd to as Winchester drives...

That's what started this whole routine - i pointed out that disk controllers in 1990 - 92 when i was working at AMI had the connector for HDDs labeled "Winchester"

Amazing what us old farts can remember about the before times.

Mark N wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

TazManiac wrote:naaaa... yer actually remembering right, while the 30-30 was the source of the 'Winchester' code name, the later HDs were also ref'd to as Winchester drives...

That's what started this whole routine - i pointed out that disk controllers in 1990 - 92 when i was working at AMI had the connector for HDDs labeled "Winchester"

Amazing what us old farts can remember about the before times.

Yeah, farming got a lot easier after those kids invented dirt...

Not to mention having to carve all those electrons by hand, and THEN you had to use a little bitty funnel to get them in the wire. If you spilled any on the carpet (hard not to, really), you'd get a shock from walking and touching something metal.

I swear, the kids these days -- How little they know.

Atomic wrote:Not to mention having to carve all those electrons by hand, and THEN you had to use a little bitty funnel to get them in the wire. If you spilled any on the carpet (hard not to, really), you'd get a shock from walking and touching something metal.

You had a funnel? And a carpet? And metal?!?

Luxury. Why, when I was young, we had to bang the electrons out of the rocks (insulators, mind you) by hitting the rocks repeatedly with our heads. The only way we could get metal to make a conductor was to bleed ourselves, and then smelt the hemoglobin down to refine the iron out.

These days you just go down to Radio Shack (assuming they aren't bankrupt yet) and put it on your credit card. Decadent, is what it is.

You tell kids these days that and they won't believe you!"

Dave wrote:You had a funnel? And a carpet? And metal?!?

Luxury. Why, when I was young. . .

Psh, y'all had youth? Why, back when I wasn't a kid. . .

Anyway, I never even saw a computer until I was an adult, and didn't have one of my own until the late 1990's. So I got to miss out on most of the early glory days. Of course, in a few years kids will probably be listening in awe and horror to my tales of having to use a keyboard and mouse, or the arcane mysteries of DOS prompt commands.

Not DOS, CP/M...

TazManiac wrote:Not DOS, CP/M...

Huh. We had to enter the boot loader hex machine code with toggle switches to load programs with paper tape readers...

(Really - PDP-8 that Micromeritics built into some of their high-precision lab instruments in the early 1980s.)

That's right folks -- you had to manually set a row Octal switches, then press Load, (lather rinse repeat) for 8-10 steps or so, just to start the Boot process.

In other words, you had to manually install the code, one Register step at a time, to tell the computer where to find the startup instructions! Several minutes later (if you were lucky), it would respond to console commands, and your system was now ready for use.

And now you drum your fingers impatiently waiting for the login prompt. Hehehehehe.....