OSNews

Very impressive collection, much "standard stuff", but interesting highlights, too. Without wanting to be braggy (I hope it's the correct translation), I find it nice to see that I've got some of this stuff around here, too. :-) Unfortunately, my collection does not include important "standard stuff" such as PDPs or VAXen (but at least a DEC VT101), most stuff is from the GDR (robotron), along with Atari, Amiga, CBM, IBM and other stuff everybody usually knows. My personal favourite of the CIO slideshow is the IBM console. If it wasn't a stupid idea, I'd like to wire one up to a normal PC. :-)

Anyone remembers 20 MB Bernoulli disks? Or disks for the Schneider Joyce? Or even PDs?

I like these kind of articles on OSNews that remind us about how all the stuff we take granted began in the past. Knowing about what stuff programmers and operators did with 256 kB RAM makes us think about the (non-financial) value of the machines we're glad to be able to use today.

I was kind of shocked not to see a few of Atari or more of Commodore's computers there. He has a C-64, but most of his stuff from that era were Apples.

The whole time I was looking at the slides, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, if you took all of those computers, somehow clustered them together, it still wouldn't even be as fast as my quad core CPU is.... but then after putting Vista on my quad core, the cluster would easily out perform it "

It's sad really, that when you look at the software that was made for the 8-bit and 16-bit era computers, and how the programmers just squeezed every bit of performance out of them, that we now are in the state of affairs, where the computers are so fast and have so many resources, that the software just isn't as optimized as it could / should be, so we really don't see any difference in the speed that things run.

Honestly, the first reaction I had when I went from a 16Mhz Atari Mega STe to a Pentium 75Mhz with Windows 95 was "It unzips things fast." Everything else seemed way slower.

Modern Operating Systems are so bulky and complex these days that I tend to spend more time playing around with settings than I do actually using applications. Of course, I'm weird like that, and like to explore the way the OS works, which is probably why I like reading OSNews so much

But there is a part of me that longs for the day of the slim OS that is just there to run the Applications, instead of needing the time to set it up and keep it working. Windows is horrible in this regard. Linux is a bit better, but then I still always tend to switch Distributions all too often, looking for that perfect mix. Although for the first time ever, I think Fedora 10 is going to keep me away from a Debian based distro! But that is for a different topic....

Too bad DEC went away, they made some cool stuff....

Anyone remembers 20 MB Bernoulli disks?

I don't "remember" them, but I did come across an Iomega Bernoulli dual drive - the thing weighs about 30 lbs.