virtual memory

[Cliff Rogers]

Cool, I'm, off to watch 'Enough Rope' I'll be back in an hour.

[Auld Bassoon]

I've been fixing computers for 26 years next month )

G'day Cliff,

I remember back a couple of decades (or so!) when I was working for a S/W and H/W reseller when, on the basis of some issues being had by a customer of some construction industry estimating software, a S/W engineer from the S/W vendor pitched up at said customer's site, and proceeded to manually edit the binary code on a production VAX 11/70 on the fly, all whilst the S/W was running...

Gawd only knows what he did right or wrong that day, but it seemed to eliminate the "glitch". It still gives me the shivers to think about the civil liabilities involved, but those were fairly carefree days when anyone who had anything to do with computers were seen as wizards at best, or satan's spawn at times...

I can even remember the very first of the PCs then slowly coming onto the market. Strewth, what a joke they were...

Cheers!

PS And what's wrong with COBOL and Assembler? (only kidding (ish))

[jow104]

Cool, I'm, off to watch 'Enough Rope' I'll be back in an hour.

did you receive the email?

[Cliff Rogers]

...I can even remember the very first of the PCs then slowly coming onto the market. Strewth, what a joke they were.........

I trained on a Perkin Elmer - Interdata 7/32C.
The HDD was a 40Mb Ampex that was the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet & took 2 men to lift it.

All it did was 'key to disk' records, order processing & maintenance records etc.
No rocket science.

The VAX 11/70 came a little later on.

The first commercially available PC in Oz was the Tandy TRS80 & I saw my first one in Brisbane in the Indoorapilly Shopping Cetre in 1977.
I built an S100 Buss system in 1980-81.... soldered the chips onto the PCB, the whole bit.
When I got out of the RAAF in 1982 I was working on Commodore CBMs on twin 5.25" floppy drives & S100 buss systems with 5Mb 8" Winchester HDDs.
In 1983 I moved onto systems like the 'Zilog' (yikes) & I used an ADDS Viewpoint terminal & a 300 Baud acoustic coupler to log onto Bill Bloton's Bulletin Board in Brisbane in 1984.
In my travels, I have actually seen a (for want of a better word) 'system' that booted & ran 'DOS-1' on an dual 8" floppy drive system. The 'A' drive was the 'Boot & Apps' drive & the 'B' drive was the data drive. It had a Green screen, a keyboard & a serial input from a Hotel PABX & it logged telephone calls. Here's the good bit... it was still working & in use in 1996.
The best bit is that there are still some banks here in Oz that have Comms Controlers that boot from floppies.

When it comes to computers, I've seen the Darkside. :eek:

[Cliff Rogers]

did you receive the email?

I got a PM to say you were off to pump something up???? :eek:

Nah, joking, I'll check my e-mail...... Ooooooo.... Is your's the one asking if I "Want to meet SEXY Christians?" :confused: Opps, nope, sorry, here it is... I found yours.