View Single Post
  #7   (View Single Post)  
Old 5th August 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
You need to understand, eine -- none of this stuff was "personal computing" by any stretch of the imagination.
This is probably one thing forgotten by those who have used computers only in the last 20 years or so. Early computers and their IO were terribly expensive, so they were always shared resources. The IT departments who managed them were rather despised, because they guarded the computer temple as high priests, and they let the commoners know it.

For example, your account was limited to a certain total cost, unless you wanted to buy more. This was a way to manage the limited resource, but computing time was very expensive. In graduate school one fellow did not debug a big computational (finite element) program with enough care, and it had an endless loop. He drained the computer budget for the entire lab of a dozen people for that semester. We could not afford to purchase more. This is not an unusual story; everyone from that era has their own similar tale.

That changed with the IBM PC. While Apple and many others had computers earlier, it is the IBM blessing that caused business to move to PCs. They could do many of the simple things that people did (and the killer application was Visicalc, a spreadsheet), but the motivation was largely to get rid of the restrictions forced on users by the centralized IT hierarchy.

The rest is history, as they say.
Quote:
A Zylog Z-80 (Intel 8080 clone plus some additional capability)
The last I checked these were still made and used for embedded applications. They are/were decent CPUs.
Reply With Quote