simonsellick
New member
Hi there,
I found this site whilst searching for somewhere to dispose of an old home computer - but the site looks interesting in its own right, to an old fogey who remembers the bad old days when you had to pay for compilers and a 4MHz Z80 was considered quite fast. Not that I believe that any chip can actually do anything useful in a third of a nanosecond, but just keeping the clock running reliably at that speed is quite impressive. Things have obviously moved on a little since I designed hardware...but on the other hand, it still seems to take the same amount of time to get started or to accomplish anything, it's just the ambition that has increased - getting legible characters on to a screen was sufficient achievement in 1980; now they need to have font, size, colour, spacing etc specified as well. I'm not really complaining, though; Windows is really pretty good now - almost as capable as Unix was in 1975, and a lot prettier. Shame that it seems to have leapt backwards to one thing at a time with version 8, though.
Hmm, I seem to be rambling. Anyway, I look forward to joining in with some of the interesting discussions.
Simon.
I found this site whilst searching for somewhere to dispose of an old home computer - but the site looks interesting in its own right, to an old fogey who remembers the bad old days when you had to pay for compilers and a 4MHz Z80 was considered quite fast. Not that I believe that any chip can actually do anything useful in a third of a nanosecond, but just keeping the clock running reliably at that speed is quite impressive. Things have obviously moved on a little since I designed hardware...but on the other hand, it still seems to take the same amount of time to get started or to accomplish anything, it's just the ambition that has increased - getting legible characters on to a screen was sufficient achievement in 1980; now they need to have font, size, colour, spacing etc specified as well. I'm not really complaining, though; Windows is really pretty good now - almost as capable as Unix was in 1975, and a lot prettier. Shame that it seems to have leapt backwards to one thing at a time with version 8, though.
Hmm, I seem to be rambling. Anyway, I look forward to joining in with some of the interesting discussions.
Simon.
