[AccessD] The good times!

John W. Colby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu May 6 10:26:19 CDT 2004


>Wow, quite a history...after reading through that, I think the gist of it
was, you're an old fart! LOL

LOL, Yup!

>I know it was DOS, but I wonder how fast Windows would load off of a 'RAM'
disk.  (Non-Volatile of course)

On that PCXT I mentioned, I wrote an application that "spoke" text files.
It used a "database toolbox" from Borland to store words and the
corresponding phoneme string.  After entering about a thousand phoneme
strings for various words I realized I needed to break words down to prefix
/ suffix / root to save
data entry time (and dictionary).  I wrote a function that found and
stripped off the prefixes and suffixes using a brute force method.  My "acid
test" was AntiDisEstablishMentArianism.  The time to compile / parse a
paragraph I used for testing dropped from 3.5 minutes to 20 seconds when I
added a 2mb ram disk and used that to run Turbo Pascal.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of
DWUTKA at marlow.com
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 11:01 AM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [AccessD] The good times!


Wow, quite a history...after reading through that, I think the gist of it
was, you're an old fart! LOL

Just kidding JC. The first programming I got into was DOS Basic, and that
was on an 8088.  My Dad worked for IBM when I was growing up, so we always
had an IBM PC (starting with that 5100) in the house.  I remember when VGA
came out, we thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread! LOL.
However, the most impressive gadget (even to this day), was when my dad came
home with a PCMCIA 10 meg solid state non-volatile RAM drive.  He put it in
his laptop, and turned it on.  The computer beeped that it was ready, and
his screen was still scrolling through DOS commands.

I know it was DOS, but I wonder how fast Windows would load off of a 'RAM'
disk.  (Non-Volatile of course)

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of John W. Colby
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 10:19 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: RE: [AccessD] The good times!


In 1977 I was building my first computer from board kits that I ordered from
ads in the back of Popular Electronics.  The standard of the time was the
S100 backplane and the Z-80 or 6800 microprocessor.  I went with a 1mhz z80
that could address a whopping 64kb or Ram, bought (2) 4 KByte static ram
boards, then an 8 KByte board, and finally a 16 KByte board.  By the time I
got out of the Navy in June of 1978 I had the system with all but one of the
4K ram boards running for a grand total of 28 Kbytes of ram.  The video
board of the time had 80 x 32 (I think) character display with crude
character graphics, and a serial port for loading a cassette tape.  I hooked
it up to my stereo cassette deck and used that to load the Zapple 16K basic
(no relationship to Apple AFAIK) which took 3 minutes to load.  Which of
course left me with 8 Kbytes for my programs.  Never really did much with it
other than learning how to program in Basic.  The Zapple basic wasn't very
stable and crashed a lot.  Of course it may very well have had something to
do with only having 8K to work with and running out of memory.

But I used that and tinkered until about 1982 when I worked for a graphics
company called Megatek in the "Silicon valley of San Diego", Sorrento
Valley.  A group of 5 of us purchased the same SBC (Single Board Computer),
a 16mhz 80186 based computer with 256 kbytes, 2 serial ports and a dial
floppy interface.  It ran CPM which was pretty much the OS of the day.  It
also had the option of soldering a second RAM chip over the top of the first
chip, bending up one leg of the chip (RAS I believe) and doubling the ram
which I promptly did so I had 500 kbytes.  A tiny startup by the name of
Borland had just published a radical language called Turbo Pascal which I
purchased.

At the time I was a bench technician fixing the graphics systems for
Megatek, and one day I found 4 perfectly good engineering prototypes of
their latest and greatest (but low end) graphics workstations - in the
dumpster.  Of course I promptly brought them back in to the building and was
going to take them home.  I was politely informed that they HAD to go in the
trash (tax regulations apparently) but I persisted and finally got them to
allow me to sign a paper saying I wouldn't resell them and that I could have
them.

Holy smoke batman!  These were 1024 x 768 x 256 color vector graphic
engineering workstations, with rotation, translation, scaling, hidden
surface elimination, phong shading (all the hot graphics stuff of 1983).
And I had 4 of them (I promptly gave three to my cohorts who had built the
same SBC I had).  A good friend who worked in Engineering writing the
drivers for these machines came over to my house and got me started writing
drivers for this thing to interface it to my SBC, and a year later I had
written a complete driver set for every instruction that the workstation
had, and had programmed a 3D sphere using squares (thinking back I don't
know why I didn't use triangles), which I could rotate, scale up and down,
translate (move back and forth in any plane) etc.  Not terribly useful but
by then I was a pretty competent programmer and soon after made the jump
from fixing computers to programming them.

Believe me, it was quite a step down when in 1986 I decided that CPM was
dying and I had better get on the DOS bandwagon.  I purchased a 12mhz 8088
PCXT which was several times slower than the SBC I was running, but it did
have a 20mb hard disk and I could also buy 1mb memory expansion boards for
extended memory.  Plus I bought Lotus 123, DbII and Word Perfect (still
programmed in Turbo Pascal though).  Dog slow, but thoroughly modern!

Yea, those were the good old days.  And MAN were computers expensive!!!  My
first (and last, come to think of it) "store bought" was a 20mhz 80386 with
4 mbytes of RAM and a 40 mb disk for $3,500!  That would be about 1988 I
think.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of
DWUTKA at marlow.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 3:57 PM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: RE: [AccessD] The good times!


That was my first (almost) computer system.  Of course I was five or six,
but I remember playing Star Trek on there, and also a little game where a
'ship' went across the top, and one across the bottom, you could shot
'phasers' and torpedos, and you had to try to hit the opposite ship.

To a 5 year old, those tapes were HUGE, in retrospect, I remember them being
about the size of a VHS tape, but from that picture, they look closer to
BetaMax size.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of John W. Colby
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 8:57 PM
To: AccessD
Subject: [AccessD] The good times!


http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html


John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com

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