Posted on 05/29/2014 6:45:54 AM PDT by C19fan
I remember Apple IIe’s having 5.25 floppies when they first arrived. 3.5s became common later (boy, did we think 1.44MB was just the cat’s meow! LOL).
IBM compatible became standard because of the open architecture, which made competition for hardware monies a way for the business managers to save a few dimes.
JMHO, of course - I am not a tech historian. I’m just an aging engineer in the aerospace computing industry! LOL
My father in law still uses his old Apple IIe. And he still writes programs for it for his business.
I'm not sure why virtualization wouldn't work. It's probably just "we don't want to support it".
I've used Virtual Box for Windows desktops, Windows Servers, Linux (as many as 6 of them at a time on a laptop). It's also nice to be able to snapshot a VM and revert if I need to back out a change.
Today's smartphone has more computing power than the computers used on Apollo 11.
The funniest thing I remember about them was what is termed now as garbage collection.
If you were creating, resizing or deleting arrays you had to be sure to run the garbage collector your you would run out of memory fast. Even re-assigning variable values used up space so you always had to reclaim it.
I was a IIc addict too. I can still remember most of the machine code for the 65C02 microprocessor and some of the memory map for the IIc. In fact, I still have mine in a storage unit, along with AppleWorks and my ImageWriter dot matrix printer, my Texas Instruments TI2500 four-banger LED calculator, and a “brick” cell phone.
One of these days, maybe I’ll open a technology museum.
While Apollo 11's computers were state at the art at the time, they weren't particularly powerful. They were soon eclipsed by the first widely available PCs. What made Apollo's computers unique at the time was the compact size and weight.
If you want to compare to a modern smartphone, it's more appropriate to use an late 90's era supercomputer. The iPhone 5S is competitive with even a top-of-the-line Cray supercomputer from 1999, using a benchmark in common use at the time.
Most “popular” computer languages use garbage collector algorithms. Without garbage collection, a language REQUIRES the programmer to deallocate every variable they allocate.
Hence the popular languages of today are dumbed-down, as any real programmer will always deallocate what they allocate.
If something is allocated but not deallocated, and the program stop using the thing and thus effectively loses track of it, that is called a “memory leak”. It is memory that the program allocated but can’t use any more. With enough memory “leakage”, a program can be a huge drain on system memory.
In an effort to “help” idiots who were bad progammers, “garbage collection” was introduced as a language feature. The language runtime library will try to detect these situations and then do the deallocation for memory that can no longer be accessed. Once the memory is deallocated, it can be reused, i.e., used to satisfy another allocation. Determining whether memory is no longer in use by a program can be tricky, however, since if the garbage collector deallocates something that IS referenced again the program will produce an error when the deallocated memory is referenced.
Mine just keep saying “Do ... you ... want ... to ... play ... a ... game?”
I remember being mesmerized by the first T.I. calculator I ever saw in 1973. Didn’t take me long to figure out that it could type out “boobs” and “hello” upside down.
I couldn’t afford the $99.00 price tag so I got a “Willard Instruments” knockoff. But I went broke because the damn thing had me tipping 50% of my restaurant checks!
In fact, I still play some of the strategy games on my Galaxy S3 with an Apple //e emulator (Candy Apple).
-PJ
> The 8-bit Apple computer featured a green and black screen and a floppy disk drive for 3.5-by-5-inch media.
The Apple II didn’t come with a monitor, iow eventually Apple had an Apple-branded monitor it sold, but the Apple II would hook to any TV using an RF modulator. Pretty much all those computers of that era would use a TV, either with an RFM or even had one built in.
The cassette commands (SHLOAD for example) were built into the II and II+, and I think even early IIe ROMs; the Shugart 5.25 disk mechanism (the design for which was ‘borrowed’ by Matsushita) had to have a DOS, and that was written in a few weeks by a subcontractor. At hundreds of dollars, the price seems ridiculous, but remember, not many years later the first 1 GIG hard drives were ten grand.
The first Apple II floppy was a 5.25 floppy; the 3.5 floppy came along mid-1980s.
The Apple II was designed with expansion in mind, which reflects the interests of the engineer (Woz) who designed the thing. That approach was deprecated and eventually dumped in favor of the insular, closed-off Mac. Subsequent attempts at a more expandable designs have repeatedly lost out to the closed-off models.
Thanks C19fan.
I loved the SE30, probably the best classic one-box Mac ever made, despite the small b&w screen.
The Amiga had a dedicated graphics chip, which was a huge advantage. Never had the software base to thrive as a product though.
The 1.44mb 3.5 floppies didn’t become standard on the Apple II, those were 800K. 1.44mb came along on the Mac (which had 800K floppies by then) only after it took over the PC market; some third-party Apple II drives supported the 400k (single sided, original Mac style), 720K, 800K, 1440K, and 1600K capacities.
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