Re: tiny COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

Thomas Koenig wrote:

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> schrieb:

A C64 had 64K 8-bit bytes of RAM,

>
Indeed (tho, IIRC 8kB of those were hidden by the ROM, tho you could
change the mapping to hide different 8kB at different time and thus
access the full 64kB of RAM).

 For doing highly useful things like changing the name of the BASIC
commands:  It was possible to PEEK from the ROM and POKE to
the underlying RAM.
 

>

and the floppies held about 1.2MB but they were a
whole lot cheaper than 1311 disk packs.

>
IIRC they held only ~170kB.

 And were extremely slow - around 300 bytes per second, comparable
to a card reader.  But fast loaders could improve on that up to 10 kB/s.

They did that by reading every 1/2 sector, then reassembling after 2 rotations, instead of having to wait a full rotation between every sector read?
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"