Re: What does ' (v) ' in menus stand for?


Stephen Calder wrote:

[ ... ]

In 1985 a mainframe computer was considered to have a very large memory
indeed if it could store a megabyte on its drive.

Are you sure you're not confusing memory with hard-disk space? I can't
specifically remember how it was in 1985, but I can remember very well
how it was in 1988, and although that was a period of rapidly
increasing capacity I can't easily believe that small computers in 1988
had more than 20 times the disk space of mainframes of 1985.

The first IBM compatible that I bought (in 1988) had 640 kilobytes of
memory, and 20 megabytes of hard-disk space. The Mac Plus that I bought
in 1989 had 1.25 megabytes of memory, but no hard disk.

My recollection is that about 15 years earlier than your date of 1985
it was indeed true that a hard disk of one megabyte was considered very
big. I remember a conversation I had with someone in the computer
centre at Berkeley in 1970 when I was complaining that my job was
taking too long, and she said that they were having problems with
storage, but that a new disk drive was going to be installed and then
everything would be wonderful. As far as I remember, she said it would
be able to store 1 megabyte (though it may have been 1 megabit, and if
it was 1 megabyte it would have been more that suggests because the CDC
6400 used 60-bit words, unlike the 48-bit words that were common on
other mainframes of the time). This of course was in a machine the size
of a large dishwasher to hold the disk.

athel

.

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