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Join Date: Jul 2000
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kach22i View Post
I'm a little confused, are you guys saying the first PC's had no hard drive?

The flight computer unit I first gave a link to (Verdan) came to the USA under license from the UK (Elliott Brothers) in the military sector.

Link-2:
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1961/1961%20-%200456.html
The first PCs had no hard-drive. In fact, most started out without diskettes. They started with a tape drive using cassette tape. So you started up the machine and to load a program, you put the cassette in, then walked away for 5+ minutes while the program loaded.

At the time I was in high school, the PC to own was an Apple II. Apple pretty much concerned the market. Commodore should have done better, but the PET was limited and the VIC-20 wasn't an improvement. The C-64 was excellent, and that was my first machine. I used it through college.

My first PC was a Toshiba 1200HD in 1988. The HD was for Hard-disk. Mine had a 10MB hard-dive built in. It still fires up, but the display is cracked and only 1/2 works. I upgraded it all the way to DOS 6.1. And I used that machine through the mid 1990's, when I got a color notebook from work. I paid a lot for a combination memory upgrade card and 1200 baud modem. The machine had 2MB of memory!

Remember all of the programs to break the 640K barrier, to allow you to load drivers and parts of the OS into "high" memory so that you could run larger programs in main memory.

My other recollection of those days was that GE was freak'n cheap, and always bought some program that was not the industry standard. SuperCalc5 instead of Lotus 1-2-3, etc.
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Old 05-24-2009, 05:52 AM
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