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Like my sibling poster said, a full megabyte would have been the sheerest luxury. After the ROM was mapped into memory on startup, my C64 had 38 kB available fo
by cgh 11y ago
Like my sibling poster said, a full megabyte would have been the sheerest luxury. After the ROM was mapped into memory on startup, my C64 had 38 kB available for programs. It is flat-out amazing what people did with that memory, including office software, networking and of course games.
Keep in mind that the Apple II originally shipped with 4 kB.
- Tloewald 11y agoThe Sinclair Cambridge ZX-80 (sold here as the Timex computer or somesuch) shipped with 1kB of RAM. That said, it wasn't really usable for much beyond programmable calculator kinds of stuff. With a 16kB expansion it was pretty awesome.
- ianmcgowan 11y agoMy first computer! I was programming in Z-80 assembler, typing in listings from magazines, with no way to save the code. So once the machine was switched off, the program was wiped and it had to be entered again. It's one way to learn the importance of accuracy - after hours of typing hex digits, to have one type cause the program to blow up, and have to start all over.
- NewNole2001 11y agoI'm gonna' need you to retype this comment from the beginning as there's a typo and thus, I can't read it.
- alexandre_m 11y agoAre you going to blow up as well?
- kencausey 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 My first computer.
- jandrese 11y agoAs I think back on the hardware, I am amazed that my old C=64 could not only run a word processor, but it could spell check. The machine only had 64 kb of RAM and the disks were so glacial that you couldn't touch them much at all and maintain anything like a usable speed.
- StillBored 11y agoMy IIGS with a transwarp and a CFL disk boots faster than my win7 4.5Ghz machine with a samsung 850 too...
- takeda 11y agoThere are still amazing things being done right now, especially in demoscene. I especially like this: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 [1] Everything (including graphics and music) fits in 200kb (177kb exactly) While it was made almost 10 years ago it is still very impressive. [1] If you can't or are afraid to run executable (antivirus programs might complain due to compression program they used), here's video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMfyrnu3n_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMfyrnu3n_c
- saganus 11y agoI was always amazed by .kkrieger[1] You get an FPS complete with 3D engine... dynamic lightning IIRC (!), music, textures... ... in 96kb. Granted, most of it is procedural but still it's a very very impressive piece of code. I've always thought that demoscene guys were on a whole different engineering league [1] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036