-> Ain't that the truth, David! I still look across the computer room at
-> my Commodore-64 and 128, and marvel at what came "standard" in their
-> operating system: BASIC, color, NTSC, graphics, sound, etc. Heck, the
-> C-128 came with three operating systems! (C-64, C-128 and CP/M - all
-> built in and ready to go.) I even used my VHS VCR to do a huge tape
-> backup one day. What also amazes me to this day is how much could be
-> accomplished with a simple 64K or 128K memory limit. There were some
-> really great programs put out in those days, from games to word
-> processors, databases and spreadsheets. We didn't even know what a
-> hard drive was back then, nor did we have to talk about things in
-> terms of megabytes or gigabytes of storage or memory. A really "huge"
-> program meant it covered more than one 360K single-sided floppy! :)
Yes.
Of course, this is surprising only if you expect a linear relationship
between memory size, for example, and utility. So a machine with ten
times the memory of another should be ten times as useful. But clearly
this is not so. I would guess that some sort of log/log law would be
closer to the truth. Multiplying memory by ten increases the utility of
a computer by a factor of, maybe, 1.1 - i.e. ten percent. The same sort
of thing is true of processor speed, disk space, and so on. So, although
it is certainly true that modern machines are more useful than those old
ones, they are not *that much* better. We could certainly do amazing
things with very little hardware back then.
                           dow
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