On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:37, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC > v20 CPU. The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better > microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup. It had 640K RAM and two Seagate > ST-225 MFM HDs. I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another > megabyte of RAM. AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk, > 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could > use it. (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used > apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things > that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up > Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could map unused video RAM > to DOS. I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be > mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM. > Performance was acceptable, thank you.
That sounds like a *very* seriously tricked-out XT-class machine! Wow! MS OSes were always a work thing for me. My own computers went Sinclair -> Amstrad PCW (the last new CP/M computer) -> Acorn Archimedes. For £800 – probably under $1500 at the time – I had an 8MHZ RISC computer with 1MB of flat unsegmented RAM in 1989. And none was used for the OS, because it ran from ROM chips. When my Archimedes died, I got a 486DX 50MHz notebook -- not a DX/2, just DX -- and I ran OS/2 2.0 on it. Even though it only had 8MB of RAM, it ran well. > The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an > automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz. It has 20GB RAM, and boots and runs > from a 256B PAnasonic SSD. Performance is lovely. There are faster > machine out there, but since I'm not doing things like heavy video > editing or compiling a large application from a source tree, it's > moare tyhan adequate for what I do. That is a pretty good spec! O_o Yes, I find that since the point at which quad-core CPUs were affordable, performance no longer matters much. I buy used kit if possible, mostly laptops now, according to things like keyboard quality and screen resolution. So long as it has, say, a Core i5 and enough RAM or the RAM is cheap to add, it will do. I still have some Core 2 machines in use; they're fine for light use, despite being over a decade old. Koomey's Law has truly supplanted Moore's Law now. -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
