Doug LaRue wrote:
** Reply to message from "Mark Schoonover" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Wed,
7 May 2008 21:01:30 -0700
I do remember seeing
FreeBSD around 1992ish, and going further back, I did get some
exposure to SunOS around 1990-1991 on a Sparc I.
all the talk about floppies makes me wonder why you guys didn't have
CDROMs in the mid 90s.
We did have CDROMs but the CDs contained floppy images that had to be
copied to a set of floppies. You selected the first image to match your
hardware and selected the remaining images based on what you hoped to
install. Bookstores were selling big Linux books with the CD in a sleeve
in the rear. Later, you could get sets of CDs that would install
directly to your system, but that was several years later.
That was in the days of Windows 3.1 and I converted to Linux at that
time because Microsoft announced, for several years, that they were
going to replace W3.1 with something new and better, Windows 95. After
my experiences with W3.1 I was afraid to use any new Windows system,
which forced me to find an alternative.
Sure I've still got something like 30 floppies
of Concensus UNIX from around 1990/1991 but shortly after CDs were it.
I think I still have my Yggdrasil CD from around 92/93 somewhere around
here. Man, those were the days. Hacking a 386/40 by soldering on new
L2 cache chips and running multi-user with rs232 VTs on that bitch'n 32bit
system.
Sorry, the magnetic core memory days predate me but I've seen some and
they looked really cool.
Magnetic core memory had its advantages, particularly when compared to
what they replaced, acoustic mercury delay lines, big tanks of mercury
with an acoustic device at each end that circulated each bit stream in
parallel. Those things were extremely temperature sensitive and the
worst possible disaster was to have the power shut off because it took
about three days to resynchronize the eight bit streams. Those machines
used vacuum tubes with, on our system, a mean time between failure of
about fifteen minutes (we wrote short programs). The vacuum tube modules
were hot swappable so the power never had to be cut.
James
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