Posted on 04/19/2016 1:26:22 PM PDT by daniel1212
THE Headstart Technologies Company of Great Neck, L.I., has introduced two new personal computers equipped with CD-ROM drives, becoming the first maker of personal computers to offer low-cost CD-ROM technology to the home, education and small-business markets...
CD-ROM stands for compact disk read only memory, a laser-based system of storing and replaying large amounts of text, graphics or sound on a single five-inch platter. For example, one CD-ROM disk can hold the entire contents of an encyclopedia, or a shelf's worth of other reference books.
For $2,999, Headstart is offering the Headstart III-CD, which differs from the LX-CD in that it has a more powerful 80286 microprocessor, one megabyte of working memory and a pocket-size external 2,400-baud modem.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Its all relative. But actually, in the most basic task of file access, opening folders and launching Notepad, i have never known a Windows OS to be as fast as Windows 9x in so doing, despite the inferior hardware. Maybe it was the Fat32 file system.
Oh no, that would only be if i choose to open all my bookmarks at once!
But upon launching Firefox, and choosing the session (yes, there are many) from Session Manager, then they are ready for access quite quickly, and open in about 2 secs upon clicking on them the first time. I choose "Don't load tabs until selected" (Firefox Options>>General) and am not even using hardware acceleration (Firefox Options>Advanced>General). Yet an SSD would make it even faster. Thank God for options.
I didn’t use cards much (except for one customer) ,, mostly card image tape files.. kids these days have no idea..
LOL High Tech.
And I had to upgrade to a 64G drive because a SAS build is 20G now.
I enjoyed using DOS to run all those cool old games. Duke Nukem 3d, as well as 1+2, and full versions of Apogee's older games on the same CDROM for five bucks. Talk about lucky day, 1996!
“Looking back, it’s hard to believe that there were versions of word processors and spreadsheets that would run in less than 1MB ram, and could be stored on 360KB disk drives!”
Yeah, but that is how the best programmers were made, because they had to make sure every single line of code was as efficient as possible. Nowadays they have the luxury of being able to write bloated code because the computers are so fast with so much memory that it doesn’t affect performance that much.
Sorry I didn't make myself more clear on this... When you mentioned the IBM 360, that took me back to the days when I did a bit of programming in IBM 360 OS Assembler and JCL. Though in those days I did use a key punch and I quickly learned never to carry a deck across the room to a feeder without at least 1 rubber band...
But THIS is the "Green Card" to which I was referring... (though mine was actually a bit later and a yellow booklet, but it was still referred to as a "Green Card."
Mark
Ever use the 96 column cards?
Liquid cooled, over clocked 6 core CPU, 256Gb of RAM, 15Tb RAID array...oh the list goes on.
Yeah, the outfit I worked for had some of those and a few Crays. Not that they let me anywhere near them.
My 1998 IBM Aptiva sits in the garage with a 2 ton tower waiting for proper burial.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- but did Gates really say it?
But how many (later) AOL disks did you save?
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
I've heard some real doozies. I used to work for HP and when they came out with their first 486 Tower I asked when the desktop version would be available. The response was "no one would need that much power on the desktop!". I think I actually laughed out loud.
We actually had our users booting Windows off the server. They didn’t even have Windows on the machine. That was using dual 300 meg drives.
I later paid $3000 for a 3 gig drive so we could back up 72 desktops.
Wow, a client of mine did exactly the same thing! It was back during the days of MSDOS 5.0 & Windows 3.1. And engineering firm, they needed to be able to run both Windows 3 applications AND Autocad 11 or 12.
There was a huge problem, as Autocad used a memory manager that hated with memory manager used by Windows, so they had originally booted from different floppy disks to the network, depending on whether they were going to use Windows apps or Autocad. And they'd have to reboot the computers to switch! And finally, Autocad was OMG slow performing redraws across the network.
When we went in, we sold them additional RAM, bumping their computers all the way up to 4MB, sold them the QEMM memory manager, which worked wonderfully with both ACAD and Windows, and set their TEMP directory on a 2MB RAM disk we set up for them.
No more having to reboot to switch apps, and ACAD ran really quickly. We had offered to get rid of their floppy drives for them, but they would have had to get new Ethernet cards, as their cards didn't have the boot roms to allow remote boot directly from the network. And network cards were pretty expensive back then (the early 1990s.)
Mark
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