Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrandish 24 days ago
> The first computer I ever used had 512K

Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future, man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"
2 comments
isr 24 days ago
My first (vic20) had 3.5KB of ram. When I added a whopping 8KB memory expansion cartridge, I genuinely wondered if I could possibly get any of my BASIC programs to use it all.

And when I upgraded from tapes to the 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies), it was like "thats it - I have INFINITE possibilities now"

Simpler times :)

link
mrandish 23 days ago
> the 1541 floppy drive

Ah, the legendary 1541. We used to joke it was the only floppy drive on any 8-bit micro that was actually slower than some dial-up modems. It wasn't actually slower, but it was really slow compared to most other 8-bit computer's drives (unless you added after-market accelerators).

link
isr 23 days ago
Crazy fact: I found out recently that the 1541 had the same 6502 CPU as the Vic20, but was clocked at a HIGHER speed.

Who knew :)

link
jech 23 days ago
> Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

That's not how I remember it. By the time we got data cassettes, we knew very well that floppies were the future.

link