31–40 of 50 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And expensive, really expensive.
Not to mention the weight, power demands and (to some extent) noise! At one point I did have two hardcards plugged into my Amstrad 8086 machine which felt pretty decadent. (Or maybe it was a hardcard plus the internal hard drive?) In total it wasn't even 100MB of storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laugh about that, but when you look at when the whole thing was designed and came out, and how much it would have cost to have a "pimped out" system that pushed the limits (if even possible!) it becomes much more reasonable. Nobody expected this silly machine to be relevant and affecting computing 44 years later! It came with 16KB of RAM! 640KB would have been 40 times as much - that's the equivalent of a mode…
What you say is true, but I'd also like to ask (people in general) if you have to design a memory map for MS-DOS that doesn't have the 640K limit, what would you do? Your constraints are: - The total address space is 1MB, and that's a CPU architectural limit (which is only "broken" many years later, and in a rather unsatisfying way). - You need somewhere to map the RAM, and because of CP/M quasi-compatibility, that n…
Most people first experienced it long after it was seen as a crippled chip, which is not what it originally was.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved the HP200LX just for that reason - it was a hand-held 90s palmtop that was a full-fledged 186, with DOS 5.0 and "multitasking" and about a meg of RAM - and it could run ANY of those 80s programs, including a full Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. That power - phenomenal, especially in the early Internet age.
Wasn't power management an issue with early portable computers? I feel like it wasn't until Windows 95 and beyond that machines were properly sleeping in between tasks— before then you were likely to end up just spinning the processor in an idle task. This kind of thing can even be a problem trying to virtualize DOS stuff: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/idle-dr-dos/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX
30-40 hours but it worked out to basically "it was always good to go".
Sound Cards with IDE ports for CD-ROM drives were definitely a thing back then
Sound Cards with IDE ports for CD-ROM drives were definitely a thing back then
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laugh about that, but when you look at when the whole thing was designed and came out, and how much it would have cost to have a "pimped out" system that pushed the limits (if even possible!) it becomes much more reasonable. Nobody expected this silly machine to be relevant and affecting computing 44 years later! It came with 16KB of RAM! 640KB would have been 40 times as much - that's the equivalent of a mode…
> that's the equivalent of a modern laptop (which comes with checks Apple 16GB of RAM) going up to 640GB of RAM 640GB of RAM doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laugh about that, but when you look at when the whole thing was designed and came out, and how much it would have cost to have a "pimped out" system that pushed the limits (if even possible!) it becomes much more reasonable. Nobody expected this silly machine to be relevant and affecting computing 44 years later! It came with 16KB of RAM! 640KB would have been 40 times as much - that's the equivalent of a mode…
What you say is true, but I'd also like to ask (people in general) if you have to design a memory map for MS-DOS that doesn't have the 640K limit, what would you do? Your constraints are: - The total address space is 1MB, and that's a CPU architectural limit (which is only "broken" many years later, and in a rather unsatisfying way). - You need somewhere to map the RAM, and because of CP/M quasi-compatibility, that n…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory#Expanded_Memor...
(And IIR, Bill Gates had plenty of company in denouncing EMS while announcing official support for it.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you say is true, but I'd also like to ask (people in general) if you have to design a memory map for MS-DOS that doesn't have the 640K limit, what would you do? Your constraints are: - The total address space is 1MB, and that's a CPU architectural limit (which is only "broken" many years later, and in a rather unsatisfying way). - You need somewhere to map the RAM, and because of CP/M quasi-compatibility, that n…
For those too young to remember that "unsatisfying way" of breaking the 1MB limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory#Expanded_Memor... (And IIR, Bill Gates had plenty of company in denouncing EMS while announcing official support for it.)
> ... was missed for years simply because no one had a PC with more than two hard disks. Thats a hardware limit: Early mainboards only had a single IDE / parallel ATA port. Each port has two pins for drive select, so you had a maximum of two addressable drives, the master and slave drive. With a secondary ATA port you got another set of master/slave, pushing the limit to 4 drives. That's where the "primary master" te…
You're jumping ahead a bit... early motherboards didn't have drive adapters at all, let alone IDE or PATA. And it wasn't really limited to two by the board and expansion slots nearly as much as the physical form factor and cost. "Full-height" 5.25" drives are double the height of what you think of for say a CD drive bay or later floppy drive bays. There were two in the XT/AT cases that were common. Hard drives went f…
Sound Cards with IDE ports for CD-ROM drives were definitely a thing back then
There were also a number of sound cards that had two or three ports because a lot of early CD-ROM drives weren’t IDE. You’d have a Sony, a Panasonic, and something else on your card in the early days. IDE on a sound card was an actual improvement.