When Worlds Collide: Gates and Jobs on the Same Stage
When Worlds Collide: Gates and Jobs on the Same Stage - Post I.T. - A Technology Blog From The Washington Post - (washingtonpost.com)A memory lane journey on 16K of RAM - the original pioneers of microcomputing are now owned by Gates and Jobs - but these guys did write some pretty amazing stuff before we put gigabytes in our machines.
I remember computers that took cartridges - from the expandable TRS-80 (and clone Dick Smith System 80) that broke the mould giving the user a huge 48K of memory - Commodore PETs were State of the Art before that with 16K or 32K if you were extraordinarily cool and wealthy - the smooth phosphor of the tiny screen in a retro space age packaging is memorable. Catridges were used as a consumer level bus - fixed slot bus extenders featured on the extraordinary SORD (128K RAM was just one of its breakthroughs) of the early 80s (PIPS - its early concept of intelligent pages is a precursor to Javascript and Web pages, even user negotiated content management), the Epson 400 - hi res green screen with graphics to die for (256k RAM I think) - the last machine before the IBM PC (640K RAM) dominated and made Gates a huge fortune. The first attack of the clone IBM PCs ensured that IBM did not benefit as much as Microsoft from the early part of the boom shipping DOS then Windows Version 1.0, 95, 98, 98 SE, XP, and now Vista. Meantime Apple has gone from Appledos, to Mac OS to Mac OSX (a well tamed Linux derivative). I sold the very last IBM AT (the second generation IBM PC - now would be considered so slow and clunky - I sold the very last one sold in New Zealand and probably the world, just as the PS2 came out. The price for the genuine IBM AT was just under $14,000 in 1986 I think. The PS2 broke the mould by nearly halving the cost at $7,000. That was probably why I took up programming.
posted by Nicholas @ 5:03 PM
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