My first apps pushing real memory requirements, "hundreds of KB to MB", were on Unix systems. The second was Windows 95. The peculiarities of PC memory issues were just running config tools to get Tie Fighter running. Seeing it spelled out so painfully makes me glad I missed all that. #history#ComputerHistory#programming#RetroComputing From 0 to 1 MB in DOS
My first was an Apple IIc with 128 KB of RAM. The machines I learned Pascal on were my school lab's Mac 128s, 512s, and one Mac Plus, and their XT class machines. The next semester I graduated to the local University's Unix servers over a VT100 terminal. I really didn't have to push memory limits in a substantial way until several years later but by then it was all unified memory models on Unix and Windows (thank god).
@doomsdayrs Ironically the Apple IIc could boot to the Applesoft BASIC prompt almost instantly. Loading stuff off floppies on the other hand could take awhile...
@goatsarah My first programming experience ever was 6502 as well, BASIC not assembly though. I never got too fancy with the graphics or memory requirements. Even my first structured programming on the Mac and PC using Pascal and then C were small enough programs to make worrying about all that memory segmentation
stuff on either platform, albeit far less complicated on 1980s Mac. As I think of trying retro computing challenges I may end up experiencing it eventually.
@hankg Assembly on the C64 was no problem. You had all 64k to play with.
The issue was with BASIC. They ended up shipping the VIC-20’s BASIC interpreter shoehorned in because the fancy pants one with graphics and sound stuff they were making wasn’t ready. The interpreter they shipped didn’t understand anything about accessing RAM paged under ROMs and memory mapped IO, so you were limited to 38k, and despite the C64 having bit map and sprite graphics, as well as a really nice sound chip, there were no BASIC commands to access any of it.
@goatsarah Fascinating history of those times and how scrappy everything was. Although I was an Apple not Commodore user back then I still read all of Brian Bagnall's books on the soup to nuts history of the company and its products.
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