[aklug] Re: CPU/RAM on older hardware

Kevin Miller said, on 09/04/2010 03:24 PM:
> On 09/04/2010 02:56 PM, Christopher Howard wrote:
>> Hey, those of you (really old people) who had PCs back in the MS-DOS
>> days: what were the CPU speed, RAM, and hard drive size of your PC?
Cool thread idea - the geezers are going to come out of the woodwork.
:-) While some of us remember punch cards, I don't go back quite that
far ...

My first machine was a Compaq Deskpro 8088, 4.77MHz, 10M Winchester hard
drive, 640K RAM, one 5 1/4 floppy. What's really cool is that it still
works! (I may have mentioned it here before?) Back in '06, I figured
out how to get it on the web - DOSLynx working with an ancient TCP/IP
stack (that could only be pinged when actively passing traffic, I kid
you not!) and drivers for a 10base2 NIC. See attached.

Sorta responding to the 'DSL too large' thread: I followed the ELKS
project for a while to see if I could get something Unix-like on it, but
the project has been stalled for a while. Screenshot of basic boot is
attached. It would be great to try to help out with the project, but
it's hard to motivate when people are throwing out machines 200x faster.
:-/ It's a bummer that ttylinux requires 486, though I completely
understand why; all modern OSes rely on 486-era memory management, etc.
that you'd almost have to start from scratch to go without it.

I fired up the Compaq last week to dink with a couple of Infocom games
after a bout of nostalgia brought on by something I got in the mail.
It's GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures. A guy went all over
the place and interviewed the original authors of Zork, etc. - a real
labor of love. I haven't watched it yet; I was hoping to find other
interactive-fiction fans to watch it with. Let me know off-list if
you're enough of a Zork fan to actually want to watch such a thing, and
I'll let you know when we're doing it.

Royce

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Received on Sat Sep 4 17:21:25 2010