Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Fri Nov 18 12:38:23 CST 2011
I first got involved with a Commodore64 computer. The main chip was a 6510 MOS CPU not to be confused with a 6502 as it had four registers in the BIOS that were none volatile. A programmer could actually use a total of 128K...a massive amount of memory. For us geeks we would cycle through the base 64K and copy the entire OS up into the secondary memory storage area, seed the non-volatile registers and then reboot. The 64K would be repopulated but the system would reset through the register and run the system from the hidden RAM. The 1541 disk-drive had a huge storage capacity (160K). With a little bit of soldering, these drives could be stacked as the IO channels could be set from 8 to 12. The most units that I ever attached together was 3. (A toggle switch could be setup to top of the drive to hot-swap IO channels. The biggest thrill I ever got was when I assembler coded a driver which could stop and start the floppy drive and position the heads on any location on the floppy surface. That was the beginning of a hard coded fixed length database that could access any record within one second. Eventually, I hand coded, in assembler, a video store program. That application took months of work and it was all done so I could get free movies for us and the kids. I learned how to code search routines, sorting routines and build data compression algorithms (very important when you have little storage capacity). After that, I learned my lesson and never programmed another app in assembler. A company in Britain, quite independantly, build a database along similar lines called SuperBase...absolutely brilliant and in its time was unsurpassed in performance. The company survived into the Windows age but has disappeared as it had no advertisement budget. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbase_database) Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 5:12 AM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: [dba-Tech] What got you interested in technology? IT's rich and famous share their memories Luminaries Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, Stephen Elop (Nokia), William Gibson, Noel Sharkey (Professor of AI and Robotics at the University of Sheffield), Richard Stallman and others reminisce about their early computing experiences: http://www.silicon.com/technology/hardware/2011/11/16/what-got-you-intereste d-in-technology-its-rich-and-famous-share-their-memories-39748104/ -- Arthur Cell: 647.710.1314 Thirty spokes converge on a hub but it's the emptiness that makes a wheel work -- from the Daodejing _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com