[Vm-dev] historical memory sizes (was: PICs)

[Phil B]

I must have been lucky with my clients... never had too much trouble
getting them to pony up for RAM and disk... just as long as it was running
DOS/Windows... ugh.  Getting them to fund innovative projects on the other
hand was pulling teeth.

You're describing pretty much the exact DOS hell I lived with too. (The
config.sys/autoexec.bat reboot driver dance etc)  Couldn't get the majority
of customers to consider Unix or Mac's so Windows became the defacto
solution, unfortunately.

On Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 5:13 PM tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

>
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 12:38 PM, Phil B <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> >   And I went into 1990 on 16mb PCs (I was a day 1 adopter of Win 3.0 as
> it was the easiest sell to get business people off of DOS... to all human
> beings who have suffered as a result: sorry, but as bad as Windows is/was,
> DOS was worse).
>
> In the early 90s when I was at ParcPlace we had all sorts of fun with
> customers that screamed bloody murder about having to fit an *entire
> megabyte* of memory in their PCs. Something about it reducing the amount of
> money available for executive bonuses IIRc.
>
> To develop the Windows VW VM back then we had to have multiple
> autoexec.bat files so that one could test and run a (really crappy)
> debugger by not starting up the networking drivers. Then after it crashed,
> swap the autoexec.bats around, reboot, wait.... wait.... connect to the
> file server, move files around, edit C code, move files around, swap the
> autoexec.bats around, reboot, wait... wait... run the (Green Hills?
> Lattice?) compiler, move the autoexec.bats around, reboot, wait, run the
> debugger, etc etc etc. It was *awful*.
>
> At least the Macs could avoid all that stuff, even if the cost was using
> MacApp (or MacPal, or something like that) and having a damaged mind as a
> result. Oh, and when I started at PP there was no makefile for the Windows
> VM, so I had to hold my nose and cope with writing a makefile for the
> horrific 'nmake' system. Blech.
>
> I did however have my own personal Acorn Archimedes to play with though,
> with a colossal 4Mb of ram and a *20Mb* disk! And networking! And it was
> several times faster than a 386! And *not Windows*.  Still got it
> somewhere, though not powered up since maybe 2000. These days a Raspberry
> Pi runs Smalltalk about 500 times as fast for less than the cost of the
> power lead back then.
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Security announcement - as of next week, passwords will be entered in
> Morse code.
>
>
>
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