Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/03/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]If you have not read "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson you REALLY need to put it on your list. Amongst the SF writers I know it's considered his best and although set present day Sinclair Z-81s play a substantial role. From his description of jet-lag on it's a compelling work. Give it a shot. Has good parts about film and viral marketing too, but written about 3 years ahead of the game. AB On 3/18/07, Henning Wulff <henningw@archiphoto.com> wrote: > >My first "real" computer was a DEC PDP-11/23. It had 64K(!) of RAM and > >a huge, I say HUGE, as in VAST 5 MB hard drive. Of course the entire > >operating system footprint was 4 KB, 8 KB if I elected to use the > >non-overlayed version. Later we had the PDP-11/70 on a chip (the J11 I > >think it was called) and it address 4MB of RAM that cost at least $4k. > > > >Today even small drivers take 4k and just the space lost in formatting > >a typical hard drive totals more than the entire disk capacity I owned > >in the first 10, no make it 15, years of computing. > > > >I wish I had kept the VAXstation I had which was a wonderful machine > >with a rock-solid OS (VAX/VMS). Ah well . . . the good ol' days. > > > >Adam > > Obviously a step up from the Sinclair Z-81 with the huge 16K > expansion memory module I had at one point. > > On the other hand I took a 'computing' course in 1963, the first one > offered to undergraduates at the University of Alberta. Ahh.. the > agony of spending a whole evening and the better part of the night at > a punch card machine, only to be so groggy when stepping outside that > I slipped and fell and scattered all the decks into the adjacent > snowbanks. > > The good old days. > > Maybe not. > > -- > * Henning J. Wulff > /|\ Wulff Photography & Design > /###\ mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com > |[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >