Re: [cobalt-users] (OT) Posting to the list In General

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<baltimoremd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Wow...I ran a bbs on a TRS80....it had 256k of ram AND 4 5 1/4 inch
> floppies.  That was a quantum leap from the cassette tape drive.One day
> one of my users brought me a large chunk of iron...it was a 5 Megabyte
> hard drive....so, I knew that some day someone would make
> some off-handed remark about no one needing more than 640k of memory.

Back then software was much smaller, though a 5MB drive wouldn't get you
that far.  My 30 MB drive was on the recommend system for my college
(college of engineering required us to buy a pc), yet all of the required
software we had took up 42 MB.  Thus I had to be creative and delete parts
of DOS, swap out programs and use things like Stacker.  In 1991 Word was
about 7 MB, what is it today?  And I can't think of a single feature in the
most recent version of Word that I really need and wasn't in the version 10
years ago.  Software bloat.

> > CAD program and vice versa, ran files using a compression utility which
I
> > believe was called Stacker
>
> Which had to cut your speed down by at least 50 percent(g).  I still have
> my registration information for stacker...and it's installed on a 386-dx40
> box that runs as a uucp gateway system (g).

It did come to a crawl, but space was more important than speed considering
every week I was uninstalling Word and installing CadKey and vice versa
(from 3 1/2" floppies).  By the time I got to my simulations class (1994)
the pc was nearly useless.  We had to run computer simulations for events
like bank queues and liver donor policies (actually pretty cool stuff to
simulate) and run them over periods of something like 10,000 years.  I
started going to a computer lab with 486s b/c my simulations would run in 2
hours there while the same simulation would take 4 days on my 286!  The
program showed nodes (decision points) graphically as circles - on the 286
one would light up for 5 seconds, then reset, then 5 seconds later another
would light up, on the 486 it happened so fast that it would appear if 2-3
nodes were constantly lit up.  So this is way OT, but it's fun to break from
the norm every once in a while and reminisce.

> So, there are a few of us Olde Pharts on the list.

I'm still in my 20s, I'm not ready to consider myself an olde phart.  ;-)

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/