[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer
Scott Castaline
hscast at charter.net
Sun Dec 12 14:04:38 EST 2004
How about 128k memory and 10.2MB Hard Drives. These drives had one
permanent platter and one removable platter and were often referred to
as cartridge drives. Also the 128k of RAM was not in a PC since the MPU
didn't exist. Oh also the RAM was core memory and not CMOS chips. Core
memory used tiny iron cores that were shaped like donuts, wrapped in
wire and either a negative charge was applied or a positive charge was
applied for your 0's & 1's. Also you really didn't have to worry about
brown outs causing memory loss as you could literally unplug these
boards and move them to another system and the data would still be
there. Of course the down side was that these suckers would get pretty
damned hot, and could probably fry an egg even after being turned off
after 15 minutes. Also we still had paper tape readers and card readers
for input devices.
Geoffrey wrote:
> Brian J. Dowd wrote:
>
>> My first home computer (1975) ran a Teletype ASR33...
>> Now that was a kick. Stood on an attached stand and was shipped to
>> me bolted to a wooden palette. Sounded just like a newsroom at 110
>> baud :-)
>> Is anyone else ancient on this list or are the other geezers still
>> running DOS or Windows?
>
>
> I suspect that some of us are older than you. :) Although 1975 was
> only a year after I graduated from high school. We've discussed old
> hardware on the list in the past. 300 baud acoustic couple modems and
> such. :) UNIX computers with 4 meg of memory and two 75 meg hard drives..
>
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