It has been about 25 years ago when I got my first personal computer. It was a Compaq portable computer with 256K RAM running on the Intel 8086 chip. It weighed about 40 pounds and the only indication that it was a portable computer was that it had a handle.
Back then, when people were not as technology savvy as they are today, there was still some confusion about which was hardware and which was software. That confusion was easily addressed with the general rule that if you dropped it on your foot and it hurts, then it’s hardware.
My computer did not have any hard drive. But it did have dual 5-1/4” floppy drives that read double-sided, double density floppy disks with 256K memory. I must admit to being a little aloof then. Most everyone else just had 128K of RAM and only one floppy drive. The Apple (no Macintoshes yet) had about 128K RAM while the Commodore 64 as the named suggested, usually had 64K RAM. Unlike most others at the time, I did not have to master the art of “swapping floppies.” I had one drive for my program files and another for my data files. A double-sided, double-density disk cost about 50 pesos then.
I empathized with my lesser computer geek brethrens. I even dreamt about a day when all floppy disks were double density and double sided. Why did people make single-sided disks anyway? It was much later on that I learned that nobody really made single sided disks. Not intentionally, anyway. It appears that floppy disk makers back then only made one kind of floppy disk—double-sided disks. After the disks were manufactured, both sides of the disk were tested. If one side failed the quality control test, it was sold as single-sided disk. It made sense. Since only one side failed quality control, why waste the whole disk when another side was good enough to store data.
This is not a new practice. Manufacturers sell goods which did not quite make their quality standards as seconds or irregulars.
And this practice still goes on. Do you ever wonder why computer chip manufacturers make computer chips with different clock speeds? Why does Intel make 1.8 MHz Core 2 Duo chips when 2.0 MHz Core Duo chips sell at a premium? Again, Intel does not intentionally make lower clock speed chips. Chip makers just make chips. It is only in the quality control stage where a chip’s clock speed is determined, and subsequently sold as such.
All this leads to one crucial question: Why do parents send their children to De La Salle?
Back then, when people were not as technology savvy as they are today, there was still some confusion about which was hardware and which was software. That confusion was easily addressed with the general rule that if you dropped it on your foot and it hurts, then it’s hardware.
My computer did not have any hard drive. But it did have dual 5-1/4” floppy drives that read double-sided, double density floppy disks with 256K memory. I must admit to being a little aloof then. Most everyone else just had 128K of RAM and only one floppy drive. The Apple (no Macintoshes yet) had about 128K RAM while the Commodore 64 as the named suggested, usually had 64K RAM. Unlike most others at the time, I did not have to master the art of “swapping floppies.” I had one drive for my program files and another for my data files. A double-sided, double-density disk cost about 50 pesos then.
I empathized with my lesser computer geek brethrens. I even dreamt about a day when all floppy disks were double density and double sided. Why did people make single-sided disks anyway? It was much later on that I learned that nobody really made single sided disks. Not intentionally, anyway. It appears that floppy disk makers back then only made one kind of floppy disk—double-sided disks. After the disks were manufactured, both sides of the disk were tested. If one side failed the quality control test, it was sold as single-sided disk. It made sense. Since only one side failed quality control, why waste the whole disk when another side was good enough to store data.
This is not a new practice. Manufacturers sell goods which did not quite make their quality standards as seconds or irregulars.
And this practice still goes on. Do you ever wonder why computer chip manufacturers make computer chips with different clock speeds? Why does Intel make 1.8 MHz Core 2 Duo chips when 2.0 MHz Core Duo chips sell at a premium? Again, Intel does not intentionally make lower clock speed chips. Chip makers just make chips. It is only in the quality control stage where a chip’s clock speed is determined, and subsequently sold as such.
All this leads to one crucial question: Why do parents send their children to De La Salle?
