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Back in the early days of computing, __________________.


Omega-TI

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We had a Wang system where I worked back in the day. Had a 5M hard drive that was upgradable to 10M.

So, one day they decide we need more space and we call for the upgrade (which I'm thinking was in the $5k range, but might have been more..).

 

The tech comes out, powers the system down, opens the case for the drive, uses some type of key, and powers up and runs a command.

(There might have been more or less to that, it's been a while)

Violla! 10M! Turns out all the 5M systems were 10M drives that just had the other 5M locked. Cost wise, the 10's cost them less in a batch, and they knew most customers would eventually upgrade. ;-)

 

desiv

Edited by desiv
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he actually never said that BTW

 

that "quote" popped up in the early 90's like a goblin fart and as a "quote" there is a hundred different versions and not a single shred of evidence outside of myth.

 

I am sure he said something that involved 640K at some point in history, but whoever started this little meme at best was half drunk on a ultra loud convention floor looking at some other booth when it happened to hit their ear half sideways as it never existed before computers had multiple megabytes of ram standard

Edited by Osgeld
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... some people said some really short sighted and ridiculous statements...

gallery_35324_1027_5170.jpg

 

 

That's supposedly a myth:

 

quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/

 

 

And if he did say it in 1981 at a trade show, the quote doesn't say "640K ought to be enough for anybody until the end of time."

 

 

Here's a related remark:

 

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates

 

The comment wasn't asinine. It is very easy to look back and say that it was stupid, but at the time, it was a very reasonable statement. Can you think of any reason for personal computers to have terabytes of RAM? Probably not. But maybe in 15 years, there will be a reason, and most PCs will have terabytes of RAM. The only reason you probably wouldn't make the same mistake right now and say, "no one will ever need terabytes of memory" is because you've already seen how predicting the future worked out for Bill Gates and have learned from his mistake.

 

But even that guy gets it wrong by saying that Bill Gates made a mistake. The Bill Gates 'quote' doesn't say that no one will ever need more than 640K. If the quote is real, Bill Gates was talking about a moment in time, not eternity. At the time, 640K should have been enough for the common man. Whatever modern computers have in them right now should be enough for most people. What is enough today will not be enough 5 years from now, but a statement about today doesn't make you wrong in the future.

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... some people said some really short sighted and ridiculous statements...

gallery_35324_1027_5170.jpg

I remember my dad getting a 1 gig hard drive and saying "It's all you will ever need it would be impossible to fill that". It did take years but i did prove him wrong!

 

I also remember the school librarian having a drawer full of mouse balls to replace the ones that were constantly getting stolen.

Anyone remember cleaning the little wheels in your mouse or better yet trying to use a paint program with a dirty mouse.

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If someone from today could go back to 1970 with a PC, an LCD monitor, a printer and whatever else they could manage to take with them, could science nerds replicate any of it?

 

 

About the first post, I didn't even touch a mouse until the early 1990s. Until then, my computers just had a keyboard and a joystick.

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It was (and probably is) fairly common that mainframes and midrange machines had more inside than what you thought. Often it was easier to just ship the full capability box and enable what the customer had paid for, so some upgrades were just as simple as enabling the extra hardware.

In my experience though, it was usually main storage (aka RAM) and CPUs (multiprocessor mainframes were pretty much the norm by the 80s).

 

Additional to that, a lot of equipment was leased anyway, so essentially it was the manufacturer's property which you were paying for the use of.

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I have several things from the 'early days' of computers I don't miss at ALL:

 

1) Manualy flipping DIP switches on your sound card to find the right settings to get game X to work.

2) Running MEMMAKER in DOS 6 each time you wanted to play a game that required one type of memory

3) The slow speed of modems and how easy it was to get booted from being online!

4) The really high prices for how much everything was.

5) Tweaking Autoexec and Config files to get game X to work.

Edited by SoulBlazer
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It was (and probably is) fairly common that mainframes and midrange machines had more inside than what you thought. Often it was easier to just ship the full capability box and enable what the customer had paid for, so some upgrades were just as simple as enabling the extra hardware.

In my experience though, it was usually main storage (aka RAM) and CPUs (multiprocessor mainframes were pretty much the norm by the 80s).

 

Additional to that, a lot of equipment was leased anyway, so essentially it was the manufacturer's property which you were paying for the use of.

 

It's similar today with the ERP (accounting) software that I support for my job. Most of the modules and functionality get installed by default. A client receives a registration key that activates the functionality and users that they pay for. If a client wants additional features or users we just send them a new registration key. (i realize that you can't truly compare hardware and software - just making an analogy.)

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..when you got the Jerusalem virus it meant going through all 100+ floppy disks you owned with F-Prot (which was probably itself infected.)

 

I never got that virus, but apparently most of the non-write-protected floppies in my collection in the early-to-mid-1990s had the NYB virus on them. I didn't figure it out for a while because I was using MS-DOS 4.11 without any anti-virus installed (and the virus never actually showed any signs of its existence), but as soon as I put one of the disks in a Windows 95 machine the copy of McAffee that was on it identified the problem. Then I had to go back through all my floppies and remove it.

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