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I remember CP/M with fondness. My father gave me an Osborne 1 for my first computer when I was 12 (41 years ago). It came with CBASIC2 as well as MBasic, and I managed to find a Lisp (I forget what flavor). To put the Osborne 1 in perspective, the stats:

* 64kb memory (yes that's kilobytes)

* 2 5 1/4 floppy disks

* No hard disk

* 5" monochrome green screen monitor

* 4 MHz CPU

* 37 watt power supply

* weighed ~25 pounds



4mhz CPU?

Luxury super computer!


3.5-4Mhz was standard for most Z80 based systems.


Still, it didn't perform much better than a 1Mhz 6502 due to its design.


Elite on the Spectrum ran much faster than Elite on the C64.


Technically correct. Its ~6fps on C64 and ~8fps on Spectrum.


Yeah, the difference definitely doesn't match the quadruple clock speed.


Plus an RS-232 for your modem and an IEEE 488 for your printer.

That CPU lacked a multiply instruction, so you had to implement that yourself.


The multiply instructions on later CPUs were implemented as microcode programs on the silicon, so sometimes it was faster to write your own or a specialised routine anyway.





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