Re: colors in dos
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jun 24, 2013
- 1728 views
Imagine if Dell or IBM said "Here's a computer, YOU go find an OS for it, and how to use it!". Or "look at all the pins we put on this asic, YOU figure out what those pins do and what to connect them to!" Or "here's three choices of OS, none work properly, we'll give you user feedback on which works best later".
I imagine that if they sold it as a hobbyist option, and sold it for under $80, then they'd get as much demand as the Pi has now.
In relative terms, the MITS Altair 8800 did exceptionally well despite essentially being in the same condition - and originally, you had to solder the thing yourself to boot! http://www.pc-history.org/altair.htm
Not to mention, it was a lot more expensive than a Pi is today.
It is true that this hobbyist option would not appeal to the end users/application users - but something like a DIY Arduino must sound like a dream to the hobbyist who knows how to mess around directly with cpu pins and can create and attach racks of DRAM modules to it... and naturally Dell would continue selling the conventional option to its main market - a place where a C64 would not be able to sell (hey, how do I surf the web on this thing? how do I open up my M$ office document here? how do I check my email?).
OTOH, I have yet to see a manual that describes how to set up a Commodore 64 to use 2GB of RAM. I guess some kinds of versatile simply can't be covered in a manual.
Today, you have to get on the web for this kind of information.
Based on what I was able to find on the web, the maximum appears to be 1MB.
http://www.ktverkko.fi/msmakela/8bit/memory/index.en.html
http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/documents/projects/memory/c64/256kB/index.html
Forked into: [OT]Retro computing
