[rescue] VAX Pull movie

Sheldon T. Hall shel at cmhcsys.com
Sat Oct 5 19:26:36 CDT 2002


Quoth "Lionel Peterson" <lionel4287 at yahoo.com> ...

> What about the Model II, with it's 8" floppies? ("She just loves my big
> 8 inch, floppy with the CP/M OS" - sorry Aerosmith!)

That was my first microcomputer, circa 1978.  I redeveloped a bunch of
mainframe construction management software to run on one of those.  The
originals were in COBOL, FORTRAN, BAL and TAL II; my version was in
Microsoft's compiled BASIC for TRSDOS.  It wasn't as fast, nor could it
handle as much data, but it didn't cost US$18,000 a month in mainframe CPU
time to run, either.

My development machine was the Mod II, plus the outboard box with three more
8" floppies, plus a Corvus Constellation hard drive.  The Corvus was so big
(a whopping 5 MB) and expensive (over US$5,000) that it was networked to two
other Mod IIs, using a lot of ribbon cable.

Ah, the good old days.  When men were men and hard drives cost $1,000 per
megabyte.

-Shel



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