[geeks] Education [was: [rescue] Mainframe on eBay]

der Mouse mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA
Sat Sep 24 22:03:50 CDT 2005


> Maybe we need to teach a good dose of history.  Computers today (for
> example) are really not that impressive when you see what people did
> with the machines of a couple of decades ago.

This is *so* true.  I have been working, on and off, with the arcade
game Tempest from 1980.  The entire game is in 24 kilobytes of ROM, and
it's one of the best games I've ever played.  24K doesn't even hold a
*bootloader* today, much less a full playable game.  (Of course, the
game has some specialized vector-generator hardware.  I'd even go so
far as to allow double the code size - 48K - for a general-purpose
machine.  That's still less than the bootloader on my desktop machine.)

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