[Elecraft] Computers in the Stone Age

Wed May 28 13:31:04 EDT 2014

Apple I?? Nice! I had an Imsai 8080 & a Lisa 2...

Maybe he's remembering running DR-DOS on the Apple II? Required a Z80 
card. hi

73,
Josh W6XU

P.S. Sorry, waaay OT.

On 5/28/2014 10:13 AM, Gerry Hull wrote:
> Definitely OT, but interesting!
>
> No, MS-DOS (Microsoft) did not run on the Apple II.  DOS ("Disk Operating
> System") did...
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS
>
> to refresh your memory...
>
> I had the Apple 1 (PC Board & keyboard), An Altair 8800 (with a teletype
> for I/O), and
> a 1st-gen IBM PC when they came out (about $5500 as I recall, with all the
> bells and whistles.)
>
> We have come a long way, baby!
>
> 73, Gerry W1VE
>
>
> Gerry Hull, W1VE   | Nelson, NH USA | +1-617-CW-SPARK
> AKA: VE1RM | VY2CDX | VO1CDX | 6Y6C | 8P9RM
> <http://www.yccc.org> <http://www.yccc.org/>
> <http://www.facebook.com/gerryhull>  <https://plus.google.com/+GerryHull/posts>
>       <http://www.twitter.com/w1ve>
>
>
> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Dauer, Edward <edauer at law.du.edu> wrote:
>
>> One of the interesting pieces of that history, from a retail consumer
>> user's (layman's) point of view, is that the Apple II (I owned a II+ in
>> the late 1970s) used MS-DOS as its operating system before Apple developed
>> its own.  As I recall, the OS was not resident in the early hardware - to
>> use it you first loaded DOS in through a 5" floppy, then used another 5"
>> floppy for data.  (My memory is imperfect, but I believe that was
>> correct.)  The original IBM PC also had 5" floppy drives.  One was for the
>> App (such as WordStar) and the other for the data files.  The 3" disk was
>> a much later development, and a great leap forward.  The IBM PC, which I
>> bought in 1982 plus or minus a couple of years, cost me $5,000 in the
>> dollars of the day.
>>
>>
>> The most significant development, which some folks today don't remember or
>> never knew, is that e-mail and the Internet began as separate systems.
>> E-mail used ordinary phone lines in its earliest days.  I remember well
>> sitting in airport boarding lounges with a set of alligator clips and a
>> screwdriver which I used to remove the cap from the modular telephone
>> jacks so I could dial up other members of our e-mail network.  I don't
>> recall the year, but I do remember that when e-mail was merged with the
>> Internet the whole world changed.
>>
>> The idea of controlling my radio equipment with my computer in the 70s
>> never occurred to me . . . .
>>
>> Do I have that history right?
>>
>> Ted, KN1CBR
>>
>>
>>> Message: 3
>>> Date: Wed, 28 May 2014 06:39:23 -0500
>>> From: Jim Rogers <jim.w4atk at gmail.com>
>>> To: don at w3fpr.com, elecraft at mailman.qth.net
>>> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Elecraft's linux utilities - somewhat OT, or
>>>        maybe not
>>> Message-ID: <5385CAEB.8020607 at gmail.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>>
>>> Actually Don, the Apple II preceded the IBM PC and had a very strong
>>> following. As the owner of a consulting firm that placed some Apple IIs
>>> doing some difficult, at that time, interfacing to main frames we
>>> welcomed the appearance of the IBM PC when it came on the scene. We had
>>> the second IBM PC in Birmingham and after a couple of days of evaluation
>>> recompiled our software and the rest was history.
>>>
>>> 73s Jim, W4ATK
>>> On 5/27/2014 9:31 PM, Don Wilhelm wrote:
>>>> And those computers Tom Watson was speaking of took a large controlled
>>>> environment room just for the various pieces.  It was certainly not a
>>>> desktop computer.
>>>> Desktop computers did not come into being until the advent of the IBM
>>>> PC in the 1980s.  I bought my daughter a new IBM PC with 2 floppy
>>>> drives and 64k of ram for her to use in her college classes. It was
>>>> later upgraded with a 5 MB hard drive which replaced one of the floppy
>>>> drives (3.5 inch floppys).
>>>>
>>>> We have come a long way since that time.  That system cost $2500 at
>>>> the time, now I can buy a computer with a LOT more capability for less
>>>> than $300.
>>>>
>>>> 73,
>>>> Don W3FPR
>>>>
>>>> On 5/27/2014 9:43 PM, Fred Jensen wrote:
>>>>> At sometime in the 50's, the President of IBM is alleged to have
>>>>> said, "The worldwide market for computers is probably about twelve."
>>>>> Apparently he didn't know Doug.
>>>>>
>>>>> 73,
>>>>>
>>>>> Fred K6DGW
>>>>> - Northern California Contest Club
>>>>> - CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
>>>>> - www.cqp.org
>>>>>
>>>>> On 5/27/2014 1:29 PM, Doug Person via Elecraft wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I probably have 15 working computers.
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