That was my exact first computer with the CGA graphics, GEM Desktop, Locomotive Basic etc. All the software came in 4 360KB diskettes. The diskettes had each it's own beautiful color. There were 3 sample Basic programs that seemed to me quite advanced. One sample was a document management system. Another was a drawing program where you could draw with a mouse.
Didn't know that GEM Desktop was made by Digital Reasearch. It was a very good windowing system. I believe it was based on MS-DOS. There was also a CP/M OS.
So much software in only 1.2MB.
replyExactly, thanks for sharing.
replyI dearly remember the keyboard's warm red Caps Lock light and my sessions of running Print Master and writing BASIC programs on it.
replyYou can quite literally run Doom on it. This isn't new either; here's a video from 8 years ago demonstrating that, and the author mentions not being the first person to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6PP_IBbOTY
replyNewer models like the ESP32-P4 are substantially more powerful, running dual cores and with all sorts of computational acceleration built in.
We will see the day your toothbrush has more compute than the original IBM PC.
replyPretty sure we have, e.g. [0], "TI's MSPM0Cx MCUs featuring Arm® Cortex®-M0+
core with 24 MHz CPU, 32-bit structure, 4 to 16
KB Flash provide cost-effective designs for electric
toothbrush and shaver applications." - compared to the 5150[1], it's 4x the bus width, 5x the CPU clock, albeit with fewer RAMs.
replyThat insane new Dyson toothbrush definitely. It has on-device AI analyzing 28 fps video from its camera.
replyAt 8mhz? I'd imagine it rivals at least the Pentium III
replyWell, probably not, but maybe a plain Pentium?
replyThe Pentium III was a superscalar core that scaled up to 1.4 GHz. This microcontroller is max 240 MHz and does less work per cycle.
Probably, I was use this example because I feel youngers can't imagine how much we could do with such MS-DOS class computer, even within its limitations.
replySo naturally an ESP32 can do so much more.