OT: Rip Van Winkle Effect

[zuikologist]

Gene

A good read before bedtime and thought provoking. There does seem to be a point where we all arrive at "good enough" technology - in the UK, text messaging on low speed cell phones has stifled 3G high speed cell phone growth because it is cheap and also a good enough communication medium for the largest number of users (teenagers?). It is, I suppose, a Rip effect for the younger generation. Good night all.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Would you believe that the first film scanner that I used had a PDP-8 as its controller? It filled an entire lab and we used it to scan x-ray spectrographs. I miss heavy metal.

DOS is still alive and supported, and often used in realtime device controllers.

 

[Kin Lau]

DOS is still alive and supported, and often used in realtime device controllers.

Would you believe that the boot loader for Canon Digital camera's uses an autoexec.bat, yes it's DOS based.

 

[GeneW]

Vince, that's a harrowing story -- grim, but well told. Thanks.

Brian, is the embedded DOS from Microsoft or is it a variant of FreeDOS?

Zuikologist, thanks!

Gene

 

[Sonnar Brian]

IBM PC DOS 7.0 is still sold. We bought a number of PC104 computers with MS-DOS 6.22. The a/d boards, data acquisition boards, digital io boards that we use all have DOS drivers. I'm using 486 class CPU's on PC104 boards to drive custom electronics and optical components. Still use a lot of assembly to get the extra speed, and some instructions that the C/C++ compilers can't generate. Interrupt Handlers operate much faster under DOS than they do in "protected" mode. As if Windows is a protected mode...

I can still pull out assembly code written over 20 years ago and remember how it worked.

 

[Scarpia]

Hey, I bought my son a Commodore 128 because it ran CP/M as well as the Commodore OS. Last year I threw it out. He and my daughter learned, however and are both highly computer literate today. These "artifacts" brought us to where we are today and where we will be tomorrow. They certainly served their purpose.
Kurt M.

 

[GeneW]

Brian, I'm impressed you can understand assembly code you wrote 20 yrs ago. I can barely make out the Perl scripts I wrote last year.

Kurt, those early microcomputers were a wonderful exposure to computing. You were more under the hood back then. I had a CP/M Osborne so-called portable (anyone remember when it was the hot ticket despite its 30lb weight?) that came bundled with WordStar and Ashton-Tate's dBase II. Them was the goods! 😀

Gene

 

[Sonnar Brian]

> Commodore 128 because it ran CP/M as well as the Commodore OS. Last year I threw it out.

I just gave an Atari 800 to my 10 year old nephew. It is a great machine for learning graphics and programming. Plug into a TV, Turn it on, Basic ready to run. Just start typing. I think it's easier for a kid to learn on a machine like that instead of Windows-Based Development "Environments". For me, Half the work on Microsoft Visual C++ is getting the monster libraries, compiler options, and linker options to work.