Last month, Charles and I were discussing progamming in the “olden days”. This is a game that I win, easily.1
Charles made the observation that any conversation about old hardware tends to descend into some variant of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, with the punch line becomes “Ones and Zeroes? You were Lucky!”.
At any rate, the conversation go me thinking of the differences between my current PC and the first PC I owned, the Commodore 64.
| Current Machine | C64 | Multiple | |
| Processor Speed | 1.667 GHz | 1MHz | 1667 + The PC’s instructions do more work + More instructions are executed per cycle |
| RAM | 512Mb | 64Kb | 8192. Let’s not talk about memory access speeds. |
| Secondary Storage | Hard disk – 80Gb | Cassette tape – 36kb per C20 | 2.2 Million |
| Secondary Storage Transfer Rate | 58Mbytes/s | 300 baud | 1.9 million |
| Cost per Megabyte | 0.0025AUD | 25.00AUD (10 tapes) | 10,000 |
| Pixels on Screen | 1,470,000 | 64,000 | 23 |
| Colours On Screen | 16Million | 16 | 1,000,000 |
| Modem Speed (Downstream) | 5Mbit (cable) | 1200 | 4,167 |
| Modem Speed (Upstream) | 100kbit | 75 | 1,333 |
| Cost | 2000AUD | 1100AUD (including TV) | 1.8 |
These numbers are mind-blowing. If your mind has not blown, please go back and look at the numbers again. Contemplate what it means to have 2.2 million times as much storage—or 8,000 times as much memory—at one’s disposal.
Note: C64 stats are taken from Phill’s Commodore Page.
1 I haven’t even had to pull out my trump card yet: I ran my first program on a late model acoustic-coupled teletype (similar to “some of these (pictures of teletypes from the Topeka Museum)” that had a built in basic interpreter. It would have been around 1978 or 79. In fact, I seemed to ‘win’ simply by mentioning that I had worked with 8 inch floppy disks.
And if you think I am being petty making a competitive game out of a simple conversation, you need to read this.
Comments
Yes, that's a win. Both acoustic couplers and 8" floppies are things I have only ever seen in the movie "War Games".
Note that you're shorting the poor C64 - with most monitors, you could blend colours to get MUCH higher colour numbers. :)
We actually had an 8inch floppy drive when I started work here at HPD in the early '90s, as well as free-standing tape drives that actually took loose(ish) spools of tape.
We even had to use them, on occasion, when delivering updates to particularly slow-to-upgrade clients.
The disks were for the Wang/VS series of mini computers, and the tapes were for both the Wang and early IBM AS/400s...
"When I were a lad", my first computer (Acorn Electron) had 32K ram - equal to the size the cluster size on most peoples hard disk.
Reminds me of the Sinclair ZX81 I got one Xmas. I remember unwrapping it and writing a BASIC program that exceeded its 1K of RAM that same night.
Floppy drives? Luxury.
I started off on a PDP-8 and we used either DECtapes or paper tapes to feed into an ASR-33 teletype. At college I "upgraded" to punch card decks to feed the Control Data mainframe.
Ah, but did you ever bootstrap a PDP-8 using the toggle switches on the front panel? You set each 8-bit instruction with 8 switches, and then depress the ninth to place the instruction in memory and advance the address counter. The papertape driver was just a few dozen instructions long, I think.
And of course there were the teletypes in the basement of Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley in the mid-70's, hooked up to I-dont-know-what (more PDP-8's?). I used to go there as a kid and run programs that would use impact overprinting to create images -- Snoopy, Nixon, etc. Some of them were quite elaborate. We'd tape the Nixon pictures to the bottom of the toilet seat :-)
A C64 was my first computer, too. I actually remember doing some coding in it -- probably the last time I really understood anything about programming. I never took the time (nor had the interest) to program anything on a PC, except what I was forced to learn in high school and college.
Ahh, the C64. That brings back some great memories.
I started off in the computer field yonks ago (in fact so long ago that I think it may have been around the time when i used to use the words Yonks all the time) with a Commodore VIC 20, including the external tape drive and big chunky power pack (remember the cheese wedge thingy?).
Wow !!!
I had that for about a year before I stepped up to what I thought was the greatest thing on the market at that time, yes the Amstrad CPC 464, with a massive 64mb of RAM. Couldnt afford the 128 :)
Thanks for this page, I'm gonna look to see if I can find any games from this era :)
John
I stumbled on this from Google and wanted to say thanks for posting
Does this form work like a guestbook?