On Sunday 22 May 2005 13:32, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

On Sunday 22 May 2005 9:24 am, Trevor Warren wrote:

...

What did you run on this baby?. What were the applications one used those days.

1986 - eiko pc, 4.xx mhz, 256 kb ram, one 360 kp floppy disk, green monitor and hercules graphics card - used to run wordstar, quattro pro and borland pascal. Wrote an online billing prog for a pub - prog and data all on the 360 kb floppy

Turbo pascal 6.0 and assembly for tsrs. We used that and some ISA boards to test SMPS, modems, interface to digital meters, grab images from line ccds for optical alignment of fax machines.

My first home IBM pc was assembled in 85. I got the mobo from Golden Computer Plaza H.K. Pc XT 20Mb, 512+64K, Hercules Graphics 720 x 348 afair The PC turbo xt was a 8 Mhz 640Kb beast. It was the workhorse for the accounts dept. It ran dbase progs for inventory, accounting and payroll. The 286 16Mhz with a maths coprocessor was for the gearheads - myself and a few mech engineers - running autocad, circuitmaker (an excellent pcb layout package written by another bunch of gearheads in mumbai), pal and epld design packages. Our productivity jumped 100x inspite of the fact that you ran a EPLD compile or a Design rules check overnight. The accounts dept. would get all worked up knowing that the gearheads had a very fast machine, particularly when we would let the consultant who wrote the dbase-clipper stuff to run on our 286. I had "networked" the machines via the serial port - 19600bps - to cross backup files with 30 mtrs of cable. And a few months later 2400bps dialup Tarapur mumbai - with 10 disconnects for a single transfer - still beat the office boy with floppies. Oh the joy of the gearheads, accounts and purchase depts.

Sob. The good old days. Funny that todays machines do pretty much the same thing a lot slower. Oh we do have better games than pacman and very nice viruses - "good morning joshi" was a bit boring.

rgds jtd