Old stuff ..

[Brian Gaff]

I have in my posession, an Atari 8 bit 800xl and disc drive 5.25 inch and a printer interface that all work, and some cart games. The ideal use for an analogue tv. Free to anyone. needs to be collected.

No its not an ad, but it is amazing after the thread about stuff you keep that this particular stuff actually still works, and to be honest if you ran a small database it seems to work surprisingly well according to a sighted friend. Kind of makes you wonder what all these mega gigabyte machines use all their power for. Brian

[John Williamson]

On 21/01/2014 13:36, Brian Gaff wrote: No its not an ad, but it is amazing after the thread about stuff you keep

For running the pretty, graphics heavy, user interface. That and the bloat that's in all modern operating systems. This 1.6 gigahertz Windows

7 computer uses about a quarter of its processing power and 750 megabytes of RAM just keeping Windows ticking over.

[Bill]

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Somewhere in my loft I have the printout of the complete source code for the OS in one of those. About a year ago I spent about an hour or two up there looking for it after someone asked me a question, but the search failed.

[Brian Gaff]

This Atari has a whole 64Kbits of memory, and each disc stores just over 100 kI think. Its all text and controlchars of course. The database front end as I recall was quite pretty, but not mega exciting, it was meant to be useful after all! Sad thing is although it has a serial bus and a centronics printer interface, no modern printer can be used as it needs the old Epson codes to work. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Ah yes, I had some old magazines page 6 was it? It was called that as it used ram in pages and you could hide stuff in page

1. It was quite handy if you wanted to expand it of course.

They were actually ahead of their time in many ways, squeezing performance from an old processor running at under 3mhz I think.

Brian

[John Williamson]

Searching may find a way to persuade a modern printer to accept the Epson codes, but the real problem would be finding a printer that still has a centronics connection. The last one I owned a printer with one of those was a fairly ancient Canon BJ10. I sent an Olivetti sparkjet to a museum a few months ago, and that emulated the Epsons perfectly.

[dennis]

There is something wrong then. My win8 machine runs at about 4% @ ~800 mhz when idling. (it has power saving on so the clock speed varies a bit.)

[The Natural Philosopher]

A lot depends on the graphics GPU if it has one..

[John Williamson]

At this moment, Firefox is using between 30 and 50%, the networking is using another 10 %, and I've also got Thunderbird open, taking up to

10%. The total CPU load is hovering around the 75% mark. It's a laptop, with an Atom processor, and the standard Intel mobile 945 chipset.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Possibly the worst GPU in the world.......^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[polygonum]

Try a nice fast processor and it can waste even more cycles keeping Windows ticking over but with a much nicer low percentage! :-)

I am seeing between 1 and 2% on an i7...

[John Rumm]

Its main gain was from its Jay Miner designed chipset (later he did the first Amiga). It gave it graphics capabilities well beyond many machines of the era.

[John Williamson]

Like I had a choice.... :-/

The Toshiba's a lot better, but this one uses *much* less power, which matters when I'm on the road.