so if you bought the altair and put it away you could sort of sell it
for the same amount of money-worth today.
In a message dated 12/30/2017 5:10:22 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin via cctalk once stated:
> On Sat, 30 Dec 2017, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
> >I was perusing my old computer magazine collection the other day and
> >came across an article entitled: ?Fast-Growing new hobby, Real
> >Computers you assemble yourself?, Dec. 1976. It was about MITS,
> >Sphere, IMSAI and SWT. 4K memory was $500. Yikes! Even more here in
> >Canada. Now this is true Classic Computing. Have a Happy New Year
> >everyone. May the computing gods shine down on us all in 2018.
> >Happy computing. Murray :)
>
> OK, a little arithmetic exercise for you.
> (a 16C is nice for this, but hardly necessary)
Sounds like fun.
> "Moore's Law", which was a prediction, not a "LAW", has often been
> mis-stated as predicting a doubling of speed/capacity every 18 months.
>
> 1) Figure out how many 18 month invtervals since then, and what 4k
> "should' have morphed into by now.
1) 28 doublings since 1975.
(2017-1975) * 12
----------------
18
4K should (had we truly doubed everything every 18 months) now be 1T
(terrabyte):
2^12 = 4K
2^(12+28)
2^40 ~ 1T
> 2) What did Gordon Moore actually say in 1965?
That the number of transistors in an integrated circuit double every 18
months.
> 3) How much is $500 of 1976 money worth now?
It depends upon how you calculate it. I'm using this page [1] for the
calculation, and I get:
Current data is only available till 2016. In 2016, the relative
price worth of $500.00 from 1976 is:
$2,110.00 using the Consumer Price Index
$1,680.00 using the GDP deflator
$2,400.00 using the value of consumer bundle
$2,000.00 using the unskilled wage
$2,450.00 using the Production Worker Compensation
$3,340.00 using the nominal GDP per capita
$4,960.00 using the relative share of GDP
> 4) Consider how long it took to use a text editor to make a grocery
> shopping list in 1976. How long does it take today?
I would think the same amount of time. Typing is typing.
> Does having the grocery list consist of pictures instead of words, with
> audio commentary, and maybe Smell-O-Vision (coming soon), improve the
> quality of life?
For me, not really.
> How much does it help to be able to contact your
> refrigeratior and query its knowledge of its contents?
It could be helpful, but with the current state of IoT, I would not want
to have that ability.
> (Keep in mind, that although hardware expanded exponentially, according
to
> Moore's Law, Software follows a corollary of Boyle's Law, and expands to
> fill the available space and use all of the available resources - how
much
> can "modern" software do in 4K?, and how much is needed to boot the
> computer and run a "modern" text editor?)
EMACS is lean and mean compared to some of the "text editors" coming out
today, based upon Javascript frameworks. It's scary.
> 5) What percentage of computer users still build from kits, or from
> scratch?
I would say significantly less than 1%. Say, 5% of 1%? That's probably
in the right ballpark.
> 6) What has replaced magazines for keeping in touch with the current
> state of computers?
The world wide web, although I do miss the Byte magazine of the 70s and
80s. Not so much the 90s.
-spc (Yeah, I realize these were probably rhetorical in nature ... )
[1] http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
Thanks for the heads up on this S-100 site!
PdP-11 on a s-100 bus even.. Ed#
In a message dated 12/30/2017 5:01:26 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
A good site for what was in the 1975-1980 era.
http://www.s100computers.com/index.html
The answer to my previous question lives in the source code. The D6.0A MTS distribution doesn't have the source on disk, so the files need to be extracted from the *FS tapes. On an MTS system, that's a pain in the ass.
Given the DRIVER file from the distribution, has anyone tried extracting the 6.0A distribution tapes into UNIX file hierarchy, based on the hinted component/sub names? I'm thinking just the raw files - I don't care that they're EBCDIC at this point, so no content conversion required.
--lyndon
> From: Paul Koning
> Here's what it looked like
Not having RT11, I embedded this in a small stand-alone program (which took a
little work, Unix assembler being rather different :-), so I could see it (it
wasn't obvious from the code what it did).
Pretty clever, to get that complex a pattern out of so few instructions.
Although the self-modifying code is, err.... (If anyone wants the source or
.LDA, let me know, I can post/upload it.)
On the Unix machine we had at MIT, I 'stole' a light pattern I'd seen
somewhere else (not the code, just the visuals). The code is considerably
longer, but I didn't try to bit-push it, just wrote something very
straightforward to produce that pattern.
Noel
I have been able to sysgen an RT-11 XM monitor with the idle loop light pattern enabled, and install and boot it on my PDP-11/45. Here?s a video of the idle lights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycADKwgnLpE
I built the latest simh and tu58em from source on my MacBook, then was able to do the sysgen under simh, copy the resulting binaries onto a TU58 image using simh?s TDC device, then use tu58em to copy the binaries over onto my working RT-11 4.00 distribution RK05 pack.
It was pretty fun to get all this working ? I had never seen RT-11's console light pattern before!
?FritzM.
On 12/23/2017 07:24 PM, Chris Elmquist wrote:
> I?m not sure you can smell the difference between failed selenium rectifiers and lutefisk...
It probably doesn't get interesting until you toss in a can of
surstr?mming...
--Chuck
pretty neat... what format material was it stored on!?
Ed#
In a message dated 12/27/2017 6:03:28 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk at classiccmp.org writes:
Hi,
I don?t know if I missed the announcement on this list but I just saw this
article:
https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/27/apple-lisa-source-code-to-be-released/
It features quotes from our own Al Kassow. ;-) Way to go Al!!!
TTFN - Guy
