Re: OT: In Praise of Dos-Based Word Processors

  • From: Kari Eveli <lexitec@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 17 May 2014 09:44:10 +0300

I think there should be some kind of adjustment for the memory / disk space needed by operating systems at the time. A raw comparison is not very illuminating. DOS does not need and cannot use TB disks or gigabytes of memory, they are not meaningful. Modern systems need much more just to start.


To run MS-DOS 6.22 you need:
RAM:                    512 KB
Hard disk space:        5 MB

To run Windows 8.1 you need:
RAM:                    1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
Hard disk space:        16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)


Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx

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16.5.2014 16:59, Bill Troop wrote:
Since my first hard drive (for the NorthStar Horizon) in 1983, hard
drive prices have dropped one-million-fold. That's not a guess, it's a
calculation based on the $1,000 I paid then for 20 megabytes vs. the
$100 you pay now for 2 TB.

That's already a bargain compared to the reported $3500 Apple charged
for a 5MB HD, or $700,000 per MB, in 1981. The hard drive was then
already 25 years old, so you could get even more impressive factors by
delving back to the first manufactured models and adjusting prices.

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