Larry, tell me 'bout the good ol' days

Followup of sorts.

If you've been employed by any technology company, it's really amusing to find some of the old stuff.

Well, Justin Kestelyn at Oracle found a copy of the proceedings from Oracle's 1983 International User Group Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

One of the presentations: "A High-Level Interface Between Personal Computers and Mainframe ORACLE" (Martin Gardner, STSC Inc.)

Now think back and remember what this means. At that time, a personal computer was probably made by IBM, was running the PC-DOS operating system, and featured white letters on a black background. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could use stars and other symbols to make patterns on your screen. And the PC was really powerful - take a look at these stats:

NAME
PC XT - Model 5160

MANUFACTURER
IBM

TYPE
Professional Computer

ORIGIN
U.S.A.

YEAR
1983

END OF PRODUCTION
Unknown

BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Microsoft BASIC

KEYBOARD
Full-stroke keyboard with numeric keypad and function keys
84 or 101 keys

CPU
Intel 8088

SPEED
4.77 MHz

CO-PROCESSOR
Socket for a 8087 math co-processor

RAM
From 64k to 640k, depending on models

ROM
64 kb

TEXT MODES
80 x 24 / 40 x 24

GRAPHIC MODES
CGA modes : 320 x 200 / 640 x 200

COLORS
16

SOUND
Tone Generator

I/O PORTS
eight internal slots (five 8 bit ISA), RS232c, Centronics

BUILT IN MEDIA
One 5.25'' FDD, 360k (3.5'' on later models)
10Mb or 20Mb hard-disk

OS
MS DOS

POWER SUPPLY
PSU built-in

PERIPHERALS
Numerous IBM and third-parties expansion cards, i.e. the QuadRam 512 KB RAM card

PRICE
$8000 (Complete version with 640 KB RAM, 10 MB HDD, colour display)

But don't forget - this computer had a hard drive! Go crazy in those 10 or 20 megabytes.

And if you really want to date yourself, note that "STSC" stood for Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (how's that for a concept?), which eventually renamed itself to Manugistics, which eventually became part of JDA Software ("the enduring demand and supply chain partner to the world’s leading retailers, manufacturers and suppliers"). Don't think you can buy a time slice on a JDA system, though.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

Sphere: Related Content