OT: computer nostalgia (was RE: Rapid once deployed too)

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, May 05, 2006, Walter Vaughan wrote:
>Kenneth Brody wrote:
>>(This assumes that my memory of it having 512K memory and 8MHz CPU is
>>accurate, of course.)
>
>As an owner of a running Tandy 16B with Profile16, I think that the memory 
>is 768K in the card-cage. I'd have to fire it up this weekend to get the 
>exact number. Maybe you are thinking that after the kernel and sundry OS 
>services, the ProfileVM only had 512k left for itself and multiple users. 
>I'm thinking a 6000 might have had 1024k.

You could stretch a Model 16/6000 using Bob Snapp's modified memory boards
(I first met Jim Asman when Snapp referred Jim to me to get the boards :-).
I was always amazed that Snapp's boards worked, given the mess of soldered
wires on them.

I went from the Tandy 6000 to an NCR Tower which seemed very fast by
comparison, but the NCR was slow compared to the Tandy 4000 running Xenix.
I think my first Tandy 4000 had 4MB RAM on a 386-16 with no cache.

On the other hand, code has bloated to the point that it requires much
faster machines with more RAM to do equivalent jobs.  We ran Caldera
OpenLinux 1.3 on a Pentium 75 for e-mail, dialup uucp, and HylaFAX for
about eight years, finally retiring it about three months ago.  The only
reason I replaced the machine was that the hardware was getting very tired.

The IBM ThinkPad 600 I'm using to type this e-mail won't run anything later
than SuSE 9.2 Professional as it only has 223MB RAM available, and SuSE
10.0 gets confused on interrupts so it doesn't see any CardBus PCMCIA
cards.  It still does everything I need though so I'll probably keep using
it as is until it totally dies.

Bill
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