maddog pulls out his old HP-35, brushes up on reverse Polish notation, and takes the measure of modern storage on old technology.

Taking Measure

Article from Issue 123/2011
Author(s):

People with long grey beards often talk about the systems they used to work on, how those systems had only “four kilobytes of memory,” and the wonderful things they used to be able to do with them.

Recently I came across a small (44.5-inch/ 113-cm) segment of paper tape that I used to store programs on one of the first computer systems I ever used: a PDP-8 computer from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). That system had four thousand 12-bit words of memory and no disk or magnetic tape drive. All data had to be read in and punched or printed out to an ASR-33 teletype at the blinding speed of 10 bytes (i.e., 10 printed characters) per second.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News