G
Gene E. Bloch
I guess that's possible.
CRNG doesn't seem to need this, but some others might: Please laugh -
the above was meant as irony.
CRNG doesn't seem to need this, but some others might: Please laugh -
the above was meant as irony.
G
Gene Wirchenko
Actually, the keyboard was memory-mapped, too.
Memory-mapped I/O is still I/O. The term "memory-mapped I/O" has
been in use for many years.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
C
charlie
Floppys were around, starting with a large size 8"? that later was
downsized to the ones RS, Apple, and others used.
Think PDP 8, SWTPC, 8080, and so forth.
(I still miss the toggle switches)
G
Guest
Well, I'm sorry to take away all the fun about this issue --- but,
according to a "technician" in India or whereever -- if she really
ever understood my questions -- it really took a while --- like
enduring 6 disconnects and an hour of trying to explain what
I needed (i.e. HP Win 7, 64 bit drivers for the machine we bought
for my wife , she told me it was impossible for me to downgrade
because no such drivers were available for this machine.
So it's back to the madness of trying to learn Win 7 and Win 8
at the same time.
according to a "technician" in India or whereever -- if she really
ever understood my questions -- it really took a while --- like
enduring 6 disconnects and an hour of trying to explain what
I needed (i.e. HP Win 7, 64 bit drivers for the machine we bought
for my wife , she told me it was impossible for me to downgrade
because no such drivers were available for this machine.
So it's back to the madness of trying to learn Win 7 and Win 8
at the same time.
P
Paul
We put dual 8" floppies on a computer we built at work.charlie said:
No hard drive in the beast, just floppies. But a *huge*
amount of memory, at 256KB or so
The next generation, got storage like ST506, and that meant
we could change to just one 8" floppy.
The first generation of 8" floppies, had a strong software
component. The driver was written in assembler, and some
time constants were hand-tuned in assembler loops. If we
shipped a faster processor, the developer who wrote the
code, had to tune it again
Years later, the final 8" floppy design shipped, was the "deluxe"
version. The floppy was connected to something that was
close to being a SCSI bus. And storage operations were
virtually completely independent of the rest of the box.
You no longer had to worry about interfering with floppy
operations, and could continue working while files were
written to it. By that time, our box was probably unique
in having a 8" floppy drive. The drive was arranged in
such a way, that it could be flipped out of the way, so you
couldn't see it. So if having a floppy drive embarrassed you,
just close the door on the computer and it was hidden.
I had a collection of around 110 of the 8" floppies in my desk
drawer. Just to show how much storage I needed for
day to day work. I also stocked a couple floppy drive
cleaning kits, with the "fake" white fiber cleaning
floppy, and the little packets of alcohol you wet them with.
Occasionally, the drive needed a cleaning.
One funny aspect of the 8 inch floppy, is the drive motor
was AC powered. It meant the computer needed AC wiring
inside the chassis. In the picture here, the AC powered
motor is the one in the lower left corner. It's possible
the final version we shipped, was DC powered like most
other conventional computer storage now. As the final
8" floppy drive was a bit thinner than the originals (Shugart).
I think the motors started to spin, as soon as the AC was
turned on. The motor never stopped.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Floppy_Disk_Drive_8_inch.jpg
The 8" floppy was a PITA, because they needed to be calibrated.
We tuned all our computers in the department, to a single
"golden" floppy. All the computers had to be able to read that
floppy, before being issued to users. Which is no way to run
a peripheral... It also meant, if carrying data between home
and work, you formatted the floppy on the work machine, to
guarantee that files written by the home machine, would be
readable at work.
Good times.
Paul
P
Paul
The only gating item, is laptop style drivers (for when the
LCD panel is connected via LVDS, to the video).
For virtually every other driver issue, there is a solution.
You simply:
1) Do a backup of the original OS.
2) Have at it.
Where is your spirit of adventure ?
Again, this is why we have backups. So you never
have to say you're sorry. You can do anything
you want to the computer, as long as you have
backups to restore from.
Paul
K
Ken Blake
We put dual 8" floppies on a computer we built at work.charlie said:
No hard drive in the beast, just floppies. But a *huge*
amount of memory, at 256KB or so
Floppies were developed in the late 1960s, and yes, the first ones
were 8". I remember their being used for loading microcode on the
first IBM 370s--around 1970.
R
R. C. White
Hi, Ken.
Yep. The 8" floppies came first. When Shugart produced the 5.25" versions
they were called mini-floppies.
My original TRS-80 in December 1977 had NO disks at all. Just that audio
tape cassette recorder. We could just take a music cassette, pop it into
the recorder and the 4K BASIC-in-ROM would SAVE our program on the same
cassette. (Kind of like we can record a movie nowadays on a DVD-RW,
overwriting our only backup of our Quicken data. :>( )
My "Preliminary Instruction Manual" for Disk Basic Version 1.1; TRSDOS
Version 2.0 is dated July 7, 1978. That's when we got the first
mini-floppies for the TRS-80. They were single-sided, 35 tracks, ten
256-byte sectors per track, for a total of 87.5 KB per diskette. Yes,
that's KILOBytes! The directory was on Track 17, right in the middle of the
diskette, leaving only 34 tracks (84 KB) for our use. Of course, if you had
only a single disk drive, you had to keep Disk Basic on that one diskette,
too, leaving only about 55 KB for the user's programs and data. The
transfer speed to/from the diskette was 12.5 K bytes per second - a BIG jump
up from the cassette speed! ;<)
I never used 8" floppies. The TRS-80 Model II used a pair of them, but that
monster was a "business machine" and I never used one of those.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) in Win8 Pro
"Ken Blake" wrote in message
Floppies were developed in the late 1960s, and yes, the first ones
were 8". I remember their being used for loading microcode on the
first IBM 370s--around 1970.
Yep. The 8" floppies came first. When Shugart produced the 5.25" versions
they were called mini-floppies.
My original TRS-80 in December 1977 had NO disks at all. Just that audio
tape cassette recorder. We could just take a music cassette, pop it into
the recorder and the 4K BASIC-in-ROM would SAVE our program on the same
cassette. (Kind of like we can record a movie nowadays on a DVD-RW,
overwriting our only backup of our Quicken data. :>( )
My "Preliminary Instruction Manual" for Disk Basic Version 1.1; TRSDOS
Version 2.0 is dated July 7, 1978. That's when we got the first
mini-floppies for the TRS-80. They were single-sided, 35 tracks, ten
256-byte sectors per track, for a total of 87.5 KB per diskette. Yes,
that's KILOBytes! The directory was on Track 17, right in the middle of the
diskette, leaving only 34 tracks (84 KB) for our use. Of course, if you had
only a single disk drive, you had to keep Disk Basic on that one diskette,
too, leaving only about 55 KB for the user's programs and data. The
transfer speed to/from the diskette was 12.5 K bytes per second - a BIG jump
up from the cassette speed! ;<)
I never used 8" floppies. The TRS-80 Model II used a pair of them, but that
monster was a "business machine" and I never used one of those.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) in Win8 Pro
"Ken Blake" wrote in message
We put dual 8" floppies on a computer we built at work.charlie said:
No hard drive in the beast, just floppies. But a *huge*
amount of memory, at 256KB or so
Floppies were developed in the late 1960s, and yes, the first ones
were 8". I remember their being used for loading microcode on the
first IBM 370s--around 1970.
P
Paul
We also did interfaces for stuff like this, but this was sharedKen said:We put dual 8" floppies on a computer we built at work.charlie said:
No hard drive in the beast, just floppies. But a *huge*
amount of memory, at 256KB or so
Floppies were developed in the late 1960s, and yes, the first ones
were 8". I remember their being used for loading microcode on the
first IBM 370s--around 1970.
by entire departments, and was too big to sit in somebody's
cubicle.
http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/Media/Diskpack3-2L.jpg
My memory is fuzzy now, but I think the drive looked like this.
It ran off 220V wiring.
http://home.ntelos.net/~donbryan/Don/Pics/my_disk.jpg
I trusted ours so much, I kept duplicate copies on floppies,
rather than store my only copy on that thing. It was actually
pretty reliable, considering the tech used (platter area that
opens to the atmosphere for maintenance).
We also did a 9 track tape drive interface, and that's where the
backups were supposed to go. But that didn't show up, until later.
So our product line, was "half desktop" and "half mainframe", using
mainframe-like technologies at the departmental level, and
PC technologies (ST506) at the desktop. We had a lot of fun building it,
because the end result sat at your desk. If you did a bad job,
you ended up owning a bad computer.
I didn't really get to work with an actual PC, until later.
In another group, I asked for a PC one day, because the software
I got for hardware development, only ran on a PC. And I was
given an old 6MHz boat anchor PC. Worked admirably well, but
still seemed so out of place (because nobody would buy us
a modern PC). I think at the time, I was using Kermit or something
similar, to get my files from my regular computer, over to the
6MHz PC. Over a serial link
Smokin performance. Might havebeen all of 9600 baud.
Paul
A
Activeac
You might want t
wait for the next Win 8 update to see if they've improved the O
enough to make you happy with it
D
Dominique
C
choro
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Will the bolding hold with the minus sign? If not I am repeating it below...
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