![]() ![]() There was a coupon in the box to fill in if you required 5.25" media, bizarrely still formatted for the obsolete 360KiB drives. Jojopi wrote:Back off topic: When I bought MS VC++ 1.0 in 1993, it came on fourteen 1440KiB 3.5" floppies. Don't go away mad, just go away before you damage your tenuous credibility (and I use that word in the loosest possible connotation) any further. They're nybbles, not nibbles, and it's requirement, not requiroement, BTW, since you're so hot to jump on everyone else's case. No one is impressed, least of all me, especially since I've been doing this kind of work for around twice the time you've been in existence. Your incessant attempts to parse each individual word I type in a derogatory way is only demonstrating how much of a tool you really are. ![]() I was clearly discussing this in the context of MS-DOS and if you've ever worked with an analysis tool that this etching simulates the output of (such as a hex editor) you would have a clue. The requiroement to have even bytes per line comes more from the fact that the native word size is usually a power of two multiple of the native byte. Jim Manley wrote:An even number of nybbles on the left means there has to be an even number of bytes on the right - DUH!An even number of nibbles only means an integral number of bytes. Younger visitors can't believe business types actually hauled those things around on airplanes - they'd be classified as a massive throw-weight nuclear weapon today! At least no one has car-jacked the half of a 1980s Mercedes 500SEL in the microprocessor exhibit (first use of a microprocessor in a street-legal vehicle was for Bosch anti-lock brakes in that model), but the decade is young. They did manage to make it impossible to walk off with the "Lift-a-Luggable" Osborne in its sewing-machine style case - you can reach through a slot in an acrylic box to grab the handled and pick it up. There were other whoopsies the exhibitionists (and that's probably accurate in all of its possible meanings) committed, including leaving enough space for someone to reach around an acrylic barrier and snatch one of the rare early mobile devices on display. ![]() they don't like to think they could possibly ever be wrong, so they just don't ask - we have to play hide-and-seek-the-goofups with them yes, you know what that implies ) the obviously right-brain type art major who was more interested in the typeface than the content managed to get all of the hard part right - the hex code - but only put seven ASCII characters per line on the right side of the panel, instead of the eight that corresponded to the hex codes on the left side! An even number of nybbles on the left means there has to be an even number of bytes on the right - DUH! The staff is heavy on historians and museum curators and light on true geeks, but on any given day, there are at least a dozen Silicon Valley veteran volunteers on-site who could catch that kind of thing in their sleep. ![]() When they etched the MS-BASIC panel (the FIRST time. Unfortunately, there is an error in the tape, which someone noticed back when we were students I don't think the powers that be ever got round to changing it, though, because it was hellishly expensive to get it custom-etched in the first place! Liz wrote:There's a glass wall in the common room of the Computer Lab at the University in Cambridge that has tape from EDSAC etched in it. ![]()
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