[Oberon] General - Xerox PARC 1970

[Tomas Kral]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2017 03:30:24 -0700
Douglas G Danforth <danforth at greenwoodfarm.com> wrote:

> She showed me the Alto when I visited PARC.  Its hard drive was a
> large platter which, iirc, held only  of data.

14MB given the enthropy of information may seem like today's 14GB, as I
see similar stuff on Alto's screen as on mobile displays, say from
a higher level of perspective, so to speak. That is 1970.

I remember a decade after (1982 ZX/ATARI, etc), popular 8-bit home
computing, 64K of RAM was unheard of limit, possible only in mainframes
before.

Then `1984' - Orwell's Big Brother was chosen as the main theme of
Apple's marketing campaign, for their computer released 1984.    

Workstation's like Alto, were a dream, also the price $40.000,
something like that. Which was not a market price just the cost of
development, probably?

I am lead to believe, that what maters is relative performance.

Between various releases of today's user s/w, I usually notice, slower,
more complicated and requiring faster h/w, but that could well be my paranoia as I get older :-)

-- 
Tomas Kral <thomas.kral at email.cz>