Very interesting. In 1978 I bought a system HP 2000 (running RTE III) for my Institute. It cost $175 000 and had a 15 mbyte hard drive the size of a washing machine, a reel to reel tape drive, a paper tape reader and 196 kbytes of memory. To do a 256 x 256 FFT -- masking -- and back TTF took most of a day. I can do the same (but 512 x 512) processing on this PC in the time it takes to press the return key. I do have to use the mouse to make the mask and that might take a minute or two. The *ist D has more processing power. The computer was housed in two 18" cabinets 6 feet high.
However -- here's a question. What happened to the young fellow from whom Gates bought the MS DOS operating system? D Bob W wrote: >>> "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>> >>>> Just thought I'd share this one - a quick snap I took >>>> a few hours ago at the Computer History Museum. >>>> >>>> http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/BillAndJohn.jpg >>>> >>> being a computer history museum, i hope there is a footnote >>> >> somewhere >> >>> there about statements like "640k ram is enough for anyone" and >>> > "the > >>> internet is just a passing fad"... :)) >>> >> Hardly. See, for example: >> >> http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00.html >> >> >> > > Yes, it sounds just too much like the apocryphal remark attributed to > IBM's Thomas Watson (a 1.0 version of Bill) that 5 computers would be > all the world needed. > > My first job as a programmer in the early 80s was at a site running an > ICL 1901T mainframe (http://pink-mouse-productions.com/icl/1900.htm) > which was almost 20 years old at the time, which we programmed in > assembler, and which didn't have an OS, just an executive. Input was > on paper tape only (not even cards) and output was to a paper > teletype, 2 very fast chain printers, mag tape and 2 enormous > exchangeable disk packs. > > There was great excitement one day when we took delivery of an extra > 640k (24-bit words, not bytes) for it. It was the size of a double > door - just big enough to get into the machine room - and apparently > cost close to £250,000. > > They have an example in the Science Museum here in London. In fact, I > was rather taken aback to see how much stuff in the museum was stuff I > had worked with in the past, and could probably still operate if I had > a mind to. > > -- > Bob > > > > -- Dr E D F Williams www.kolumbus.fi/mimosa/ http://personal.inet.fi/cool/don.williams/ 41660 TOIVAKKA – Finland - +358400706616 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
