Ron61 & Excaliber, you are no longer tops!

[Ronbo]

Oh boy, It's coming back now...

What were they? 2102 RAM chips?

We'd better stop before we alienate someone...

[Ronbo]

And here I thought all the people who wrote in machine language were institutionalized by now...

[xlr8or]

Originally Posted by patrickt

No, the 8086 was a true 16 bit processor, the 8088 dropped the external bus width to 8, but was still 16 bit in every other way. Perhaps you're thinking of the really old 8008, which was 8 bit. The 286 had the ability to address 16 megs of memory by kicking the processor in to protected mode, but hardly anything was written in PM back then. What you could do (and you might remember this) was to referece the first 64k of extended memory even though you were in real mode. You did this by opening the A20 gate and then using a segment register loaded with FFFF to address the memory. It was called the "High Memory Area" and you used to load himem.sys to do that and "Load DOS High." Coming back to you yet?

Remember the MFM drive / RLL controller combo to fake it into thinking the drive was bigger. Got that 40MB disk to look like 60 then put stacker on it and got about 85. It only crashed about once a month.

Ok Stop. The flash back are killing me. I'm going to have to go to bed and reboot.

[wtm442]

Hey
I'm going to report a blatent case of thread hijacking here to discuss the half life of electrons flowing thru silicon.

OK, now where did I put that box of punch cards so I can finish this post. Boy, do I wish my IBM 360 was back from the repair shop.

[Silverback51]

Originally Posted by patrickt

In a 32 bit environment that is the largest number that a single register on the CPU can hold (a doubleword). In other words, it is 11111111111111111111111111111111, or in hexadecimal FFFFFFFF, or in decimal, 4294967295, or "zero minus one." Back in the old days, your 8088 computer (the one with two 5.25 inch floppies and no hard drive) had a processor with registers that only stored 16 bits, or 1111111111111111, or FFFF, or 65535 (the magic 640k limit of real mode computing, because we used "segments" and "offsets" to reference memory and FFFF was the bigest number you could stuff in to a register). So in the old days, his message count would be 65535. It was just a hiccup in the software that stuffed -1 in to his "message count."

I have been lost since this post and on.

[Ron61]

Darn Patrickt,

You guys are bringing back some old memories and not all of them good. I have a couple of the old aluminum cards with the rows of square magnetic dots that some of our first computers used as permanent storage and they had right and left hand words and the left hand words were a pain in the A** as they were broken down into two of the rows. Also the first switching computers used Octal instead of Hex which made things even more difficult as you first had to find the real address and then convert it to the relocatable address which actually had the data in it. As for first computers, do you remember the old Tandy Radio shack TRS series. All the boards were solderer din place and I bought a blazing fast TRS/4 which I think ran at 7 MH and had two 5 1/4 floppies. Had to add a card to use an external modem to get to the bulletin boards as they were the fore runner of the Internet. I remember I had extra memory and had to physically access it as you have stated and what I did was add some lines to one of the files to load stuff that i didn't use often in there on boot up. I think my first actual home computer was a TI that was just a keyboard and I had to buy a tape recorder with it that had leads to plug in and tape whatever I wrote and wanted to keep.Also bought a small TV as a monitor. And of course who can forget the cutting edge Commodore 64.

Ron

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by Rick Parker

Wgas............

PaulP, Ronbo, Jwilly, xlr8or, wtm442, Silverback51, Ron61, over 800 views... you want to rethink that post of yours, Rick?


EDIT -- Uhhh, make that over 900 views.

[trularin]

Patrickt, you are way to excited on this thread.

I thought Jamo kicked that guy off for putting too many posts into the system.

[trularin]

Just to throw a wrench into this.

The 4004 was the first. The 8088 as I recall was muxed to 16 bits.

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by trularin

Patrickt, you are way to excited on this thread.

Yep, and I'm still trying to bait Rick in to exploding on me....

[BMK]

Ron 61



Ok, I'll let you in on the secret Ron.

I have made about 1200 or so Posts, but my number is a lot higher.

Some time ago I mentioned that each time I looked at a photo and rated it, I noticed my Post number went up. As I spend a lot of time sitting in Qantas lounges I find that to pass time I look at Cobra owners galleries....

I usually post a comment or just add a 1 - 10 rating.

When you look through a gallery of photos with 50 or more photos you effectively can add 50 or more posts if you rate each photo.

Must say I'm guilty of increasing my 'Post' number this way with up to a 1,000 added in one 6 hour wait over at LAX.

Bernie

[BMK]

Ron61

Just lifted my Posts by 20 after spending 5 minutes looking through a gallery band rating some photos.

Damn if you can be bothered...

[Ron61]

Bernie,

I know about the post count increasing when you rate a picture. I probably have 40 or 50 that I have rated in my count. I don't pay much attention to who has the most as I just enjoy the posting and joking around. And believe me, I know what it is like to sit around in an airport trying to kill time until my flight.
If I remember correctly I have even rated a few of your pictures, always with a comment about how nice I think the cars or whatever is in the pictures are. I stumbled over the fact it counts as a post about 5 years ago by accident after I made some comments on a picture and happened to look at my cont when I went back to the page. At first I wasn't sure just what happened so I went back to the gallery and found another nice original car and commented on it and then looked and sure enough it had added to my count. So I only make comments on cars and pictures which I happen to see now that I think are really outstanding. Have at it buddy, it doesn't bother me at all. And it is a lot more reasonable than the old PC........ posts that some people used to use.

Ron