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How's your DOS ?
DavidA:
Andrew,
You are so right.
DOS 6.2 is more or less set in stone. And it is very versatile.
I have forgotten most of what I learned years back, but it soon comes back if I need it. With DOS and GWBASIC you can rule the world.
It's nice to work completely off line in a self contained computing environment. No GCHQ or NSA snooping into your files. Not as though there is anything of interest to find.
And, (wait for it) there are HARDCOPY MANUALS to come to the rescue. Big books with real indexed information to hand.
No Stuart, they are not also known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Dave :thumbup:
awemawson:
I well remember loading up a very early Windows release - possibly Windows 2 - not sure, and it taking SO long to do anything on my 286 machine we thought that it had crashed !
Every release of a new operating system, (and this isn't confined to Windows) seems to deliberately use more and more system resources thus demanding more memory, more disk space and faster processing power. OK modern versions of Windows allow you to be very much more productive, but unfortunately the designers and programmers have lost the art of packing high performance into tight spaces.
When I think that back in the 1970's the CEGB National Grid Control Centre ran on a Ferranti Argus machine with 56Kb of CORE store, and that monitored the entire UK power distribution network and put up graphical displays. Another example was Eastern Electricity Board's white goods distribution warehouse at Waltham Cross. Again a 56K Argus with a 1Mb Sperry DRUM backing store, and that ran all the automatic high aisle picking cranes as well as holding the actual stock and doing order picking for shops that they had in virtually every East Anglian high street.
Current programmers would have kittens working within the same constraints - now they just demand more memory, and more processing power to make up for their inefficiency.
//OK rant mode off //
DavidA:
Andrew,
Years back, post dinosaur; but not by much, I had an NEC/APC I still do, and can just lift it off the floor. But I do recall typing in a program that provided elevation and azimuth for the AMSAT satellite. It wasn't a long program and the display showed maybe five columns and five rows of angles and times.
When you ran this program you could literally watch it doing it's stuff as presented each line on the screen; with a pause in between.
I then moved on the an Amstrad PCW8256 (Very useful machine. Pity about the Mallard Basic) and the same program was about twice as fast (Z80 processor)
A TRS-80 was about the same, (same processor ) and it wasn't until I started on machines with 8086 processors that things really began to improve.
Of course, the only real improvement was the clock speeds. I was using some version of BASIC on all the machines.
A few nights ago there was series called 'Girls can Code'. And was looking forward to computing's version of Carol Vordermann showing us that at least in this realm, women are as good as men at byte slicing. It was quite disappointing to see that they really were just using applications, not coding from the grass roots upward.
Still, if it wasn't for the Countess Ada and Jacquard, where would we be ?
Dave.
mcostello:
I know of at least one complex 6 story forming machine using DOS 1 for the last 25 odd years.
jcs0001:
My first computer course involved printing out a series of punched cards, putting them in a reader (after lining up with a bunch of other students for long time) and then finding that there was a glitch and it wouldn't run.
Next was a desktop with two 720 mb floppies - I figured I had the world by the tail and used dos a lot. Once I got it my wife figured she was a "computer widow".
Things have sure changed.
John.
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