Bits and Bytes (1983)
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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.
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@scottalanmiller is there a way to give it a boost like half way?
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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 single computer in the classroom in grade school. That would've been between 1985-1991.
Now stop reminding me how old I'm getting, dagnabit.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller is there a way to give it a boost like half way?
To get more power, sure, but boosting ads latency. So it is a tradeoff.
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Wondering if we still need compilers for translating program language to machine?
Yes, absolutely. Compilers are still used every day. The most famous compiler is GCC or the GNU C Compiler or, as it was later renamed, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC is free and, like KTurtle, you can install easily...
sudo dnf install gccGCC compiles many languages and is available for nearly any computer.
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Episode 7 done. It's crazy to see that people were contemplating AI even back then. In a previous episode they equated a computer's speed to ours. We are like stone I think it said? Anyway, does anyone have an actual time reference.? Like 24 hours for us is how long for a potential AI with it's processing time?
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@scottalanmiller I'll be getting that
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@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 7 done. It's crazy to see that people were contemplating AI even back then. In a previous episode they equated a computer's speed to ours. We are like stone I think it said? Anyway, does anyone have an actual time reference.? Like 24 hours for us is how long for a potential AI with it's processing time?
That's not really comparable. First, because AI isn't real yet. It's not like an AI would perceive time for real. So thinking of it that way is not useful.
Right now, no computers are close to the human brain in total processing power. So from a pure "intelligence speed" perspective, it is the computer that would seem slow to us (for now.)
The reason that they talk about old computers and speed is because a computer (no AI) would be looking for input a few million times per second. So it checks over and over... for us to do something. But humans would only check for new input from someone once a second or two.
So from a "speed of looking for input", computers blow us away. But from a "speed of processing" we beat them.
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Finished episode 8. This might be a dumb question, but is DOS still used today?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Finished episode 8. This might be a dumb question, but is DOS still used today?
If "in use" means "as an operating system that anyone you know uses?" Then the answer is "no", the final release of DOS used in a mainstream operating system was Windows ME in 2001, and that was a terribly crappy system that was labeled "for entertainment purposes only." The last serious DOS release was Windows 98 in, not surprising, 1998. And the last truly good DOS release was Windows 95 OSR2 in 1997.
DOS was used with Novell Netware, too. Also long dead at this point.
Today DOS still exists, but basically no one uses it or its direct decendents. For years, it hasn't been the best DOS family product, that goes to FreeDOS, the only DOS-like system still developed. DOS systems are generally used only in utility systems like special "boot to this disk to check your hardware" kind of things. Very rare, but it is out there. DOS might be used in something like a microwave.
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We sometimes refer to "old" Windows as Windows/DOS to make it clear that it is not part of the same product family as Windows as you know it today, which is the Windows NT family (aka OS/2).
Tradition Windows wasn't an operating system, just a GUI layered on top of the real OS which was DOS. Specifically MS-DOS. MS-DOS being a clone of CP/M.
So until Windows 3.11, you had to install MS-DOS first, then Windows was an application that you installed on top. With Windows 95 and later (Windows 95 was the direct sequel to 3.11) they made the DOS installer install both DOS and Windows all at once so it didn't look like DOS was still underneath so much, but it was only the installer that changed.
So when people would run commands at the command line on Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, etc. you were literally just going down the DOS command shell underneath Windows and running the commands directly on the OS. THis is confusing because the command prompt in Windows NT like we have today looks just like this, but is totally unrelated and has no DOS whatsoever.
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The last DOS family member still in production after MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS all died off, is FreeDOS. FreeDOS is, as the name implies, totally free and is also open source. It is way more modern than DOS as anyone remembers it. DOS 6.22 around 1993 or 1994 was the last popular DOS other than FreeDOS which came about later.
You can download FreeDOS today and install it.
FreeDOS just celebrated 25 years. Unlike other DOS products, FreeDOS supports modern hardware. Any other DOS is really just a novelty. But FreeDOS is a modern, usable OS that supports modern hardware, while still being DOS compatible.
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Episode 8 completed, just wondering if back in the 80's updated graphics cards existed to improve graphics.
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@connorsoliver *episode 9
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A little history... MS-DOS was Microsoft's iconic clone of CP/M. CP/M was the main operating system for Intel processor based machines before the PC (PC is a specific system design, Intel personal computers were around more than a decade before the first PC based on Intel came about.) DOS was the OS of choice for the standardized PC world. But for the non-standardized pre-PC business world that included things like Intel and Zilog processors, CP/M was king. One of the biggest CP/M machines was the Commodore 128!
Microsoft announced that DOS was dead in 1987. It took then fourteen years to actually phase it out, which is amazing considering it was first released in 1981, so that six years of momentum ended up carrying Microsoft forward and defining them for the next fourteen years at least and, in reality, tons of that 1981-1987 legacy is still making Microsoft do things today!
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 8 completed, just wondering if back in the 80's updated graphics cards existed to improve graphics.
Not really, no. Someone had to have one, but it was for huge business and special cases. But it's not that they didn't exist entirely, it's that they approached them differently.
For example, they used video "chips" not cards, and people bought their computers around them. Commodore's first major video "card" was so important that their first personal computer was literally named after the video card that it included. The chip was called the VIC=20. So the Commodore VIC=20 was literally their old PET computer, with the VIC=20 video chip added to it in a new box. So even in the 1970s, people were so focused on the graphics capabilities that they were talking about and making decisions based on the graphics hardware that you could get.
The Commodore 64 got its name from the amount of memory that it included, rather than the graphics chip name from its predecessor. The C64 has the VIC=20 2 chip, though, so similar but upgraded from the older model.
The Commodore Amiga line famously always disclosed all of their chip sets and gave them infamous code names. With the Amiga time frame (late 80s) there started to be GPU options, but they were very different from today. But the basics were starting to emerge.
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Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
They mostly used MIDI sequencing to control synths, which were digital by then. Computers/processors could only really handle note data well, audio takes a lot of horsepower compared to MIDI.
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@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
They did, I can't think of any though. But loads of pop bands especially did it. I was a musician a little in the 80s and there were whole publications dedicated to it then. And around 1986 I attended the COUGOR (COmmodore Users Group Of Rochester) meeting and the ACORN group (The Atari equivalent users group) sponsored an all-electronic artist to come and do a whole concert.
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
