Bits and Bytes (1983)
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Just finished watching Episode 6 on computer languages. Made me wonder about when operating systems come into the picture.
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished watching Episode 6 on computer languages. Made me wonder about when operating systems come into the picture.
They don't necessarily. In 1983 they were relatively uncommon. The early really popular OSes were CP/M which was the granddaddy of DOS, and AmigaOS in the home computing world. In the Commodore 64 and Apple ][ era, people didn't run operating systems. They treated computers way more like an old video gaming console - you had to turn on the machine and boot into the application (often a game) that you wanted to use and turn it off when you were done.
Operating systems weren't popular until computers were powerful enough to switch between tasks and storage was permanent (hard drives) or people had large floppies. The utility of CP/M or DOS was super low unless you had crazy powerful machines.
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Today, running with an OS feels totally crazy. But at the time, it was a layer of complexity that just wasn't needed.
What computers do today is so much more complex. From needing libraries, windowing systems, GUIs, graphics, networking - all things that you normally get from your OS and don't reinvent every time for every application.
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Episode 7 Complete. I'm curious at to how common it was to have computers in the classroom back then. Anyone who are up in the 80's know if it was a regular things to be dealing with computers in classes?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 7 Complete. I'm curious at to how common it was to have computers in the classroom back then. Anyone who are up in the 80's know if it was a regular things to be dealing with computers in classes?
We had a computer lab. one classroom of computers.
Mid to late 80's, small town (~10,000) southern Illinois.
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My parents bought us a TI 99/4A around 1983. I know some of the local schools had the TI's at the time as my parents actually bought a couple more 2-3 years later from a school that was getting rid of them. I don't remember having the TI's in class though. I do remember having three Apple IIe's in my eighth grade classroom (87-88). I distinctly remember trying to spell out an acronym like this:
M - Multi
L - Letter
A - AcronymLined up perfect on the screen, but was all messed up when it got printed. That was my first introduction to the need for WYSIWYG (the young'uns probably never heard of that acronym!).
At Tennessee Tech as a freshman in 1992, I got introduced to the VAX system, which was already quite dated. Not long afterwards, they got a lab of brand-new 386 PC's that booted to a menu, from which you could pick the application you wanted to run (choices included Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro). A couple of years later, we had a lab with NT 3.5. I think there may have been a Windows 95 lab before I left, but by then I wasn't living on campus, and had my own PC I had built.
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Episode 4 done. Wondering if you have to put a stop command in a program or is there a specific way to do it?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 7 Complete. I'm curious at to how common it was to have computers in the classroom back then. Anyone who are up in the 80's know if it was a regular things to be dealing with computers in classes?
I was in school then and in the 81-85 years they were just starting to show up. In the CLASSROOM they were rare, but SCHOOL they were common. We just had dedicated computer labs, not computers in random classrooms (mostly.)
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Episode 5...The Source sounds like the 80s version of Google lol
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 5...The Source sounds like the 80s version of Google lol
It was, to quite some degree.
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@scottalanmiller is there still limitations on the amount of computers you have on a network?
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller is there still limitations on the amount of computers you have on a network?
So yes and no. Yes those old networks still exist and have those limits. And "modern" Internet accessing (aka IPv4) has some complicated limits, the numbers are huge.
What's different today is two fold...
- We deal in both networks and internetworks today. So while one network might be limited to 20 computers, you might also have a limit of 20 networks networked together in an internetwork. So we have the concept of routing stuff from one network to another. This makes discussions of "network sizes" very different than they used to be.
- Sizes of networks have changed completely. We used to have limits like "5", now we have limits like "2,000". So we perceive the limits very differently.
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Episode 6 done. I wish I was exposed to Logo as a kid. It actually looked fun. That kid's story about the triangle baby turtle was epic. The look on that teacher's face
.Wondering if we still need compilers for translating program language to machine?
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@scottalanmiller what happens when you go over the limit?
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@connorsoliver we had one computer lab that had a bunch of Apple computers that used the disks in plastic. The majority of what we actually used them for was a typing class, pretty lame. I wish they offered more back then.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 6 done. I wish I was exposed to Logo as a kid. It actually looked fun.
You can still get it today. It's built into most Linux desktops. On yours it is likely called KTurtle. You'll need to install it.
sudo dnf install kturtle -
@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller what happens when you go over the limit?
You can't. Imagine you have a 5 computer network...
To add a computer to the network, assign a number from 1 to 5.
What happens when you try to join the sixth machine? Nothing, because trying to use the number 6 is the same as "not trying to join it to the network". Conceptually you can't try to add too many machines, because the act of attempting to add can't happen.
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There are other kinds of limits, like trying to have too long of a cable. Unlike having "too many hosts", a "too long cable" is far more likely to not work or fail, but to have performance issues and get worse and worse as it gets longer.
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@scottalanmiller I thought signals move close to the speed of light? How does the length change that?
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller I thought signals move close to the speed of light? How does the length change that?
They move at the speed of light. Since it is EM radiation whether light or not. So that speed is constant (although EM moves nominally faster in glass or air than in copper.) But the longer the cable, the more time it takes to travel the length of it and the more decibels of degradation are experienced. So if, for example, you can only handle a 10db drop and the cable gets too long and causes an 11db drop, you will start missing bits. Or if you have a 1ns relay time window and it starts taking 2ns, it might start ignoring packets.
