Alan,
I like to share my story:
TM Mak got me my first "PC"(a second hand one!), a $5000 (in 1980)Radio Shack with a 1 M Hz CPU, 4 K RAM (later upgraded to 16K) and a cassette recorder, with no monitor. I had to spend another $3000 for a NEC green mon, and a 110 volt transformer for it. Then I added 2 floopy drives, a "double side, double density" 5.25-inch that costed me $3000 each. The drives are "bare drives" only, meaning no case and no power supply. I needed to learn then to make a good, filtered power supply using a 2-kg transformer !
I remember using that computer to make real scientific computation for my boss, to solve a non-linear differential equation (actually differentiating twicw a 4X4 matrix, each with non-linear terms). The data is so huge that I can only plot the 'data' directly with my $3000 8-pin dot matrix B/W printer, that I programmed to actuate one pin at a time for the high resolution plot.
I remember both the computer and printer sit idle for most of the time, and every 3 seconds, the printer head would be activiated to print a dot on the graph.
The around 1983, my boss bought a 5 MB harddisk for his HP "workstation". The harddis is about the size of the modern day "shoe box" computer case (which is normal at that time) but the shipping cartoon is 1metre by 1 metre by 0,7 metre, with nearly 50 cm of foam on every side of the actual harrdisk!
If that is not enough, there was a label on every surface of the cartoon " if the bos is dropped at a height of 10 cm, the harddisk will be damaged!"
PTS |
發表於 2009-4-9 12:46:12
發表於 2009-4-10 00:28:18
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