Red Hat

DOS and older Windows were also quite trauma-inducing. 4 megs of ram which you get 640K of(the rest of it serves mysterious purposes to even more mysterious programs), booting to an empty prompt with 580K left, but your fancy program wants 583. How is 583 even possible!? Time to flail madly and change everything!

Hey, in 1960, 4 k words used to be the size of a small refrigerator, cycled in 4 microseconds. Power supply: external motor-generator. But core held the data through powerdowns, so in place of a reboot, just restart at the right address.

Blimey, we'll be taking this back to a mercury column memory in a minute, then back to man-with-a-flag.

Don't get me started! I only go back to the H800 days: germanium pnp transistors, -5 for a one, pre-printed-circuit, neon light panels, 10 track 555 bpi 3/4 inch 120 IPS tape drives, reels held on by vacuum. There were some odd devices. I though the CRAM was scary: a huge box of plastic cards with magnetic media attached to a drum at speed and read and written like a disk, then removed at speed and shuttled around to the back of the box. Unisys, I think. About as goofy as the tape drives with no reels, just wide tape and deep columns, with little tape cartridges in a huge, robot random access magazine. The rotating film drum with tall light bulbs and many photocells to say phrases was pretty amusing, until you had to buy a replacement bulb $$: 63 x 3 words if you bought it with 3 read stations, else wit just one, 63 words of .5 second (repeated on the film), and 3 words was a phrase, or revolution every 1.5 seconds. Diners Club bought one that said, among other things, "Hold for Credit Manager". I have a 30 inch diameter, 1/4 inch thick disk from CDC in my basement wanting to be a small coffee table. They fit 10 above and 10 below the motors at each end of a huge cabinet to make 300M x 6 bit characters of storage in 1970. We buffed out disk head crashes with tube gauze and alcohol. How cheap is disk this week?