[TheForge] OT - Telcom stuff

[Andy Vida]

"Walter L. Mullett" wrote:
> 
> ...6502 ....  I thought you were younger Andy!  

	Hey, 46 isn't old.  Besides, emotionally, I'm about 2, and
	mentally I'm 17 at best.

> As an architect, I just wanted something I could draw with.  The 6502
> couldn't do it but the apple III with SOS (sophisticated operating system)
> had some potential at the time since it had no program size limits.... no
> 64k problems.  (Microsoft took how long to fix that problem...?) 

	A good 15 years I suppose.  Dan the Genius is now pretty high
	up the foodchain at MS.  High enough to call meetings with Gates.
	He has many good justifications for why the OS sucks ass, but
	some of them don't cut the mustard.  The best one he gives, and
	it is a truly legitimate reason, is that you can load that OS
	on any machine made anywhere in the world and it will run.  That
	is a VERY difficult task to do, even poorly.  That they do it
	as well as they do speaks pretty highly of their skills as
	designers and implementors. Gates chose a very very difficult road
	to tread when he decided that Winders had to work on every machine
	ever made by anyone.

	Imagine a self configuring blacksmith shop that had every tool
	and gadget known to man and would tailor them all to a given
	smith.  Hammer weights, handle diameters, treadle height,
	hammer controls, tongs, punches, fullers, vises, files, dividers...
	all perfectly tailored automatically to your tastes and desires
	and reconfigurable at the drop of a hammer?  Tall order.

> Since the
> largest hard disk you could get for the III was 5 meg and it cost 2K, you
> didn't waste space like they do now.

	In 1984 I had a complete Cascade II CAD system on a IIE at the
	school where I was a teacher.  It cost the board of ed almost
	$20K, $4K of which was the 4M hard disk.

	I had a SuperPet.  Dual CPUs, a 6502 and 6809.  bank switched
	memory and six languages including Pascal, FORTRAN, BASIC, 
	assemblers for each CPU and APL of all things.  I wrote a very
	basic editor in APL and used to show the code to my students.
	They'd glare at the cryptic symbols and walk away shaking their
	heads in non-comprehending disbelief.  Assembly language makes
	more sense than APL.
> 
> (darn -
> why didn't I work on that connection at the time)

	Woulda, coudla, shoulda... I've trod that road many a time.