Ron61 & Excaliber, you are no longer tops!

[02roush]

OK, I can't wane my curiosity.

Why such a high #? What am I missing?

[patrickt]

Originally Posted by 02roush

Why such a high #? What am I missing?

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."

[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