[AccessD] [OT] OMG!!!!!!

My first IBM PC had a WHOPPING 30MB hard drive.  I can still remember
thinking that I'd NEVER fill that sucker up.  :)  Hell...now....I might
have a single Excel file that big.  LOL

Keith E. Williamson | Assist. Controller| kwilliamson at rtkl.com

RTKL Associates Inc. | 901 South Bond Street | Baltimore, Maryland
21231-3305

410-537-6098 direct | 410-276-2136 fax | www.rtkl.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 7:59 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] [OT] OMG!!!!!!

>In 1987 I purchased ... a 80188 running at 12mhz (PCXT clone) running
DOS,
with a 5gb disk  

LOL, Epson was sooooo ahead of the times to have a 5 GIGABYTE disk back
in
1987.  We are so used to gigabytes now my fingers are just trained to
type
that.  In fact it was megabytes and stored everything I owned with ease,
Dbase III+, Lotus 123, WordPerfect (all of the essentials back then) and
of
course my Borland Turbo Pascal compiler and all my projects.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 2:31 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] [OT] OMG!!!!!!

CPM?  Newcomer!

In 1972 the US Navy trained me to fix computers.  The "trainer" was a 12
bit
wide instruction with 512 words (12 bit) of CORE memory.  You loaded the
computer program in via spring loaded switches with light bulbs inside
of
them, loading machine language instructions and data into a register.
The
contents of that were transferred to a core memory location when you
pressed
a "store" switch.  To SAVE the program you loaded a roll of paper tape
onto
a tape reader / punch and then the machine would punch holes into the
paper
tape.  You would carefully roll the paper tape up and carry it around
with
you since you could then read that paper tape back into the machine if
you
wanted to. 

The trainer ran at the startling speed of 125 K instructions per second.
I
learned to fix that (and subsequent machines) down to the transistor
level,
though in fact we just replaced the entire little card, each card would
have
a flip-flop or a couple of and gates.  It took entire rows of cards just
to
build up a register.

My first personal computer was an "s-100" based Z-80 machine with 24K
bytes
of static ram.  When I bought the computer it came with "zapple basic",
which when I look at the name makes me think perhaps it was a z-80
translation of an apple basic language.  At any rate, the interpreter
was
12K so I had 12K free for my program.  Zapple basic came on a cassette
(the
music kind) and I connected my stereo cassette deck to the board to load
the
program.  IIRC it used a serial data stream at 300 baud to read from the
cassette tape.  At any rate, it took over 3 minutes to load Zapple Basic
into the computer.  Once that was done I used a dumb terminal on a
serial
port to display the programming prompt and the terminal's keyboard to
type
in my program.  BTW I BUILT all of the boards in the system from kits I
ordered from advertisements in the back of Popular Electronics, this was
about 1977.  Yep, with a soldering iron and schematics.

In about 1982 I built my first REAL personal computer, a "single board
computer" (SBC) from a kit.  It used the 80186 uP at an incredible 16
MHz
clock and had room on the board for 256K bytes of dynamic ram.  By
placing
another dynamic ram chip on top of the first, carefully bending up the
RAS
pin of the dynamic ram, soldering all the remaining pins to the ram chip
below, and then running a wire from the bent up pin down to a pad on the
board, I "piggy backed" the memory and doubled my ram to 512 Kbytes.
This
SBC had 2 serial ports and a built-in floppy disk controller.  For about
$700 I purchased a dual 8" floppy drive, each drive could store 1 mbyte.
This computer ran CPM-86.  I purchased a 1200 baud modem which attached
to
one of the Serial ports, and since  at that time I worked for a graphics
terminal company called Megatek, I scrounged an old color graphics
terminal
which I attached to the other serial port.  A REAL computer.  I then
purchased a Pascal compiler from a brand new startup by the name of
Borland
and I was on my way to a successful (?) programming career.  Until 1986
I
continued to fix electronics for a living, but eventually I switched to
programming in around 1986 and never looked back.

In 1987 I purchased my first brand name assembled computer from Epson of
all
companies, a 80188 running at 12mhz (PCXT clone) running DOS, with a 5gb
disk drive and 2 mbytes of ram (1 on the MB and an add-on card for EMS).


BTW, the only other preassembled computer I ever purchased was a 20mzh
PCAT
clone in around 1989.  From that point on I purchased parts and just
kept
upgrading.  I still buy all my components and build my own boxes.  My
most
recent server is a dual core AMD with 4gb ram and a 2 terabyte raid6
array.
In about 6 months I will be building a machine using a dual cpu
motherboard
(the AMD 4X4) using the quad core CPUs from AMD, which HOPEFULLY will be
available by mid summer.  Eight cores on a motherboard.  That should
make a
fine SQL server for the big database I am working on.

In 1984 I DREAMED of owning a VAX 11760 with 2 mbytes.  Now I have a
machine
(in fact several) that is a thousand times more powerful, all that power
being sucked up by Windows.  ;-)

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

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