FW: Tandy Silver

[GCC Consulting]

-----Original Message-----
From: GCC Consulting [mailto:gcc at optonline.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 10:58 PM
To: 'Laura Brody'; ''fileProList'"'
Subject: RE: Tandy Silver

 
> >> an old Tandy 6000.  It's 5 hour processing would have been
> more like
> >> 5 days on the 6K.
> >
> > Recompiling my Unify based accounting system was an all day
> job on the
> > Model 16s and takes about ten minutes today on a fairly
> slow machine
> > running OpenServer 5.0.6a.  The Tandy 4000 running Xenix was faster 
> > than an NCR Tower I was using at the time.  Every new
> machine makes me
> > wonder how I lived with the older ones.
> 
> 	When I joined SCC in 1987, the computer we developed v3.0 on was a 
> NCR Tower running at a whopping 1 mhz. There were 4 of us programming, 
> and when one of us  had to recompile the .o librarys and link in 
> *clerk or * report, that person had about 20-25 minutes to kill. Lenny 
> and I (as the new
> hires) practiced juggling during these times. Dave started us off with 
> some basic lessons. At the time, Ken said that he could "kinda" 
> juggle, but never demonstrated it.
> Howie could also keep 3 balls in the air. With the speed (or lack 
> there of) of that computer, I am amazed that we accomplished anything.
> 
> 	A few years later, we got individual PCs networked together. The PCs 
> were something like 386/133s. Juggling time went down to about 10-15 
> minutes.
> 
> 	Around 1993, Ken & Ron managed to get 486s on their desks. I 
> cannibalized parts (HD and RAM) out of two computers so that I would 
> have a PC that could run Windows (slowly) and write the online help 
> files using RoboHelp. When I compiled those files, it would take about 
> 30-40 minuets - I would do the compile once at lunch time and again at 
> the end of the day. There would be a bunch of syntax errors and typos 
> to wade through (some were my errors, but most were RoboHelp created 
> errors such as a space inserted into a hyper text reference). George 
> yelled at me one day around lunch time and asked me why wasn't I 
> working. I explained the situation. His solution wasn't to get me a 
> faster PC, he told me to only do the compile at the end of the day 
> just before I punched out and to correct the errors in the morning. 
> Knowing that *that* solution wasn't going to work, Ken wrote a small 
> utility program for me which would find the errors that RoboHelp would 
> create that I could quickly run several times a day so that when I ran 
> the compiler at the end of the day, I wouldn't have a ton of errors to 
> wade through in the morning.
> 
> 	Ken & I have decided that Alex (now 7), is old enough to learn to 
> program - yes, we will probably start him off with filePro <g>. His 
> computer is a AMD Athlon 1.1 Ghz,
> 128 meg RAM, 6 Gig HD. This childs computer could run circles around 
> ANYTHING we had at SCC. I don't miss working with the crappy slow 
> computers, but I loved the work - a very similar situation to when I 
> worked in the wax room (I removed the seam from a wax duplicate of the 
> finished piece) at the art foundry, Tallix, when it was in Peekskill. 
> I got to meet artists like Anthony Quinn (a total gentleman), and 
> Nancy Graves (a ping pong ball in a wind storm). I also worked on 
> pieces by Remington, Erte, and a bunch of others. I loved the actual 
> work - it was the management decisions and policies that gave me 
> ulcers.


OK Alex is 7.  Let's see, 1987 to 2004; that's 17 years.

When he's 24, I'll bet he will tell someone that he learned to program on this
sloooow 1.1 GHZ computer with only 128MB of ram and a miniclue hard drive of
only 6GB.

More then likely his computer will be 128GHz or better, a couple of tetrabits of
RAM and a couple 100 tetrabits of storage.  This probably be packed into a
computer the size of a palm pilot.  By the way, this may be a portable with 80
hours of runtime.  Video would be projection similar to what we saw in the first
Star Wars.

Be interesting to see if and when this may come to pass.

Richard Kreiss