This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Carlos Villela.
Original Post: How I learned to code, and how I forgot it
Feed Title: That's sooo '82!
Feed URL: http://www.jroller.com/rss/cv?catname=Technical
Feed Description: Carlos Villela's weblog. Everyday life, everyday software development, everyday musings.
After reading Alan Green's post about his C64, I thought I should show some little
bit of history to y'all. So, with no further ado, my 1988 CAF SuperLite
8086 laptop:
I just took this picture. It still works, even after a childhood and a
teen-age of abuses by my part ("Is it 220 or 110 volts? Aw, screw it,
just plug it in, I wanna play Block-Out!" was one of the worst
sentences this poor little laptop ever had to endure). My granpa gave
it to me as a Christmas gift in 1988. I was...hmm, 6 years old.
Obviously, this was quite an expensive toy (I think he paid something
like USD 2,500) for a six-year-old child, so he came up with the excuse
that he needed to work while on travel - at the time, he used to travel
a lot for meetings, yeah, but he never, ever, took this laptop with him.
See the two big scars in the lid? Yeah, man, this veteran has got
stories to tell. I used to write my diaries on it, and I think I still
have them on a floppy lost in my room somewhere. This, and, of course,
play silly DOS games. Lemmings, Block-Out, Maniac Mansion, GP, Life and
Death... damn, those were the times...
Speaking of DOS, this baby has MS-DOS 3.31 built into its ROM. If
something bad happened with your boot, you could just boot with the ROM
DOS and have a chance to fix it - no need for those pesky boot
floppies. Oh, floppies, floppies... who would thought they would be so
small in '88? I clearly remember going to something like 3 or 4
computer supply stores trying to find a 10-pack of 3 1/2" disks, and
giving up, disappointed, because all these stores had were 5 1/4" and
Epson LX-series ink ribbons and special paper. I was happy, though - I
was assured that I had the best of breed in technology in my hands.
I compare this to my actual laptop, and I really don't know how I
managed to get so much out of that little oldie. When sometimes I feel
an urge to curse Eclipse or Ant for being slow, I think about the old
days, when I was reading all I could about x86 assembly cause it had no
compilation step to bother me. Today Rhino is my preferred interpreter
shell...DEBUG was more than enough then. 80x25 was roomy, now even
1280x1024 bothers me. Today I have almost the same amount of cache in
the processor than I had RAM back in the day. Today I can stuff almost
3 times the hard-drive (used to call it winchester, remember that?) of
my 8086 into my digital camera's memory stick.
But still, this VAIO I'm using to write this post takes up to 5 minutes to boot completely. The SuperLite took seconds.
Previous Topic
