Vintage Computer Festival 8.0

Sellam Ismail writes "The 8th annual Vintage Computer Festival is being held on November 5th & 6th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The highlight of this year's event is a Homebrew Computer Club retrospective featuring a panel of original members of the Club including Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, and others. VCF 8.0 also brings the return of the Nerd Trivia Challenge, a game show style trivia contest for hardcore computer history buffs, and for the first time is hosting the award presentation ceremony for the International Obfuscated C Code Competition."

Comments

Re:I could have participated too..

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, what model IBM PC had 1MB RAM and a 36MHz CPU in 1981?

Answer: NONE. The IBM PC-XT was released around that time, and had a 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU. As I recall, it came with 64KB RAM.

You're probably thinking of an 808486/33 MHz CPU... and if you bought one in 1991, then you were a few years late, as they were first released in around 1989, as I recall... and 1MB RAM would have been on the low side by then - 4MB would have been standard, with 8 or 16 more common.

Re:I could have participated too..

[Mr Z]

4MB was still a lot of RAM in 1991, unless you were plonking down $4000 for a PC. Then you might get a capacious 8MB or 16MB system. My approx $2000 386SX25 system came with 4MB of RAM, and that was summer of '92. It also had a 1MB video card (ET4000 based).... Ah, the bad ol' days. It even briefly had an out-of-date 68MB ESDI drive in it, but that was quickly swapped out for a 120MB IDE drive. 486s didn't really become popular outside of servers until 1992 or so, and they were still rather expensive. I bet AMD made a lot of money selling 386DX40s in that time period.

I remember a couple years later paying $475 for 16MB of RAM for that system. (By then, it was upgraded to a 486DX33.) $475 was considered dirt cheap at the time, having come down from $600. Ah, 1994.

--Joe

Re:Beauty of the old machines: simplicity

[Arandir]

But darn it, the machine could actually *do* something with a couple thousand bytes of code!

Actually, modern computers can actually do something with a couple thousand bytes of code too!

There are three main factors contributing to modern "bloat":

1) Error checking. It takes resources to detect error, and further resources to recover from them.

2) Abstraction. Programming in a high level language is not as efficient as programming hand tuned assembly. C is a good compromise, but even there you run across the next problem:

3) Common code. Common shared libraries, by necessity, always do more than you need them to do. Consider "printf" for example.

4) User Interface. Textual interfaces bloated software, but they were nothing compared to GUIs. I'm writing a piece of software now that is probably 95% GUI code. I can't see any way to trim it down without losing user friendliness and ease of use.