Daniel Burrows wrote:

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 06:03:17PM +0200, Jean-Louis Crouzet <jeanlouis.crouzet@free.fr> was heard to say:

Thanks for your answer. I was you know hunting for free memory since my
system is only having 128MB which tend to be not enough those days (even
with Linux).



Yes, that's sadly not much RAM nowadays.

It almost makes me yearn for the days of my first computer... a TRS-80
Model III that came with 16KB RAM and 16KB ROM which I upgraded to the
max of 48KB RAM and 16KB ROM. Then I remember that that machine, at
twice the price of todays low end systems, had no hard drive, no floppy
drive and I saved my programs and data on a cassette tape. Can we say
slow and unreliable? When I upgraded the memory, I also put in two
floppy drives (160K 5-1/4") at a cost of $800. That was the third party
price - Radio Shack wanted that much for just a single floppy drive.


Maybe the 'Good old days' weren't so good, after all.

--
Marc Shapiro
mshapiro_42@yahoo.com




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On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 10:56:07PM -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote:
> Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 06:03:17PM +0200, Jean-Louis Crouzet
> ><jeanlouis.crouzet@free.fr> was heard to say:
> >
> >>Thanks for your answer. I was you know hunting for free memory since my
> >>system is only having 128MB which tend to be not enough those days (even
> >>with Linux).
> >>
> >
> > Yes, that's sadly not much RAM nowadays.
> >
> It almost makes me yearn for the days of my first computer... a TRS-80
> Model III that came with 16KB RAM and 16KB ROM which I upgraded to the
> max of 48KB RAM and 16KB ROM. Then I remember that that machine, at
> twice the price of todays low end systems, had no hard drive, no floppy
> drive and I saved my programs and data on a cassette tape. Can we say
> slow and unreliable? When I upgraded the memory, I also put in two
> floppy drives (160K 5-1/4") at a cost of $800. That was the third party
> price - Radio Shack wanted that much for just a single floppy drive.
>
> Maybe the 'Good old days' weren't so good, after all.

Yea but if you have an old box that runs very reliably, its a shame not
to be able to use it. For my old boxes where the ram or disk-space is
too tight for Debian, I run OpenBSD which runs like a charm on my old
486 with 32 MB ram on a 512 MB drive.

Doug.


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On 6/5/08, Marc Shapiro <mshapiro_42@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It almost makes me yearn for the days of my first computer... a TRS-80
> Model III that came with 16KB RAM and 16KB ROM which I upgraded to the max
> of 48KB RAM and 16KB ROM. Then I remember that that machine, at twice the

Mine was (if you don't count the TI-59 a TRS80 Model 1 w/16K,
stringy floppy tape.

I knew this hardware guy who helped later on stuff in a 64k RAM and we
could burn our own custom ROMs, and added a few extra touches, like a
speedup switch so it could run twice as fast.


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On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 06:24:47AM -0700, David Fox wrote:
> On 6/5/08, Marc Shapiro <mshapiro_42@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > It almost makes me yearn for the days of my first computer... a TRS-80
> > Model III that came with 16KB RAM and 16KB ROM which I upgraded to the max
> > of 48KB RAM and 16KB ROM. Then I remember that that machine, at twice the
>
> Mine was (if you don't count the TI-59 a TRS80 Model 1 w/16K,
> stringy floppy tape.
>
> I knew this hardware guy who helped later on stuff in a 64k RAM and we
> could burn our own custom ROMs, and added a few extra touches, like a
> speedup switch so it could run twice as fast.
>

Yeah, I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 Z-80 with 64 K ram (if I attached the
add-on ram block). It came with basic built-in (keywords on the
membrane keyboard) but I also learned machine code on it. There was no
assembler program so I did it all on paper and entered it directly into
a memory block and then somehow (I forget) got that to run. Z-80 was a
nice little CPU and easy to program.

Doug.


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