Why Early Processors Spent Most of Their Time Waiting

1위@roysutton57719 hours ago

I built my first digital computer in grade 9 with 12 flip-flops that would add and subtract from a rotary telephone dial. My Altair 8800 kit arrived for $439 in 1975 and had 1/4 K RAM. With it I toggled in an RTC real time clock. When the cat broke a photocell beam the Southwest Tech 40 column printer would show “Here comes the cat 12:34:56” Real programmers used toggle switches and LED lamps.번역 보기

2위@jlholmes83 days ago

A little trivia for you: the only digital storage media we know of that have a lifespan of more than 50 years are paper tape (or vellum tape) and punch cards. CDs/DVDs start to decay in about 10 years, and magnetic disks in about 20-25 years. Paper/card we know are good for 60+ years; cards probably in the 80+ range, and vellum should be readable well past 100 years. Now finding something (or someone) that can read them is a different issue.번역 보기

3위@Pericles_Vicente3 days ago

My first computer with a cached RAM was a 386/33MHz with 8kbytes of external cache, with 2Mbytes of RAM, an SVGA card and a 41Mbytes "Winchester" (Seagate), using a Samsung Syncmaster 3 video monitor (interlaced!) and a Xerox inkjet printer. Without an FPU. That was in 1992. But it was way faster than my Commodore Amiga 500.번역 보기