20140131

Computer historical notes

Listened to latest The Talk Show, and had a couple of thoughts about it.

1) the hole punch for floppy disks had to do with pretending disks were double-density, not with write protection. All discs bought blank had a movable tab to affect writability. If you wanted to overwrite a Bard's Tale disc (which probably didn't have that tab), you'd just tape over the hole where the tab would go.

2) The note about Apple being ahead of its time was interesting. A case could be made that X-Windows belongs in that conversation as well. It's underpinnings (the X protocol) are largely the same, and it was first introduced (as W, for Windows; a later upgrade changed the name to X, since that was the letter after W) the same year.

3) I remember having to do OS installs (particularly OS/2, though windows was a bunch as well. And slackware was also quite a few) from stacks of floppies. Man, that was painful. I went through nerdgasm on my first OS/2 (Warp, I think) install from CD-ROM. Two minutes of configuration, and half an hour of waiting, rather than changing disks ever few minutes.

4) Talking about application languages, surprised he forgot that assembler was used before C or Pascal. With so little memory, it was about impossible to avoid.


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