[mdlug] OT: C64 anniversary

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Jeff Hanson

> Thought some of you old geezers would be interested.  I don't have
> much experience with C64 because I followed the Atari and Apple II
> paths in my early years.
> http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/07/c64/index.html


 TI99/4A here. Nice machine in some ways, but... quirky.

> I wonder if Vista will run on it.  How many floppies that would take?

 Well, you wouldn't want to run Home Premium or anything like that. For
just "Vista Home Basic", it wants a "20GB hard drive with at least 15GB
of available space". Let's be generous and assume it only uses 15GB.

 Now, the most common C64 floppies could hold ~170KB of data per side.
So, let's see:

 15GB / 170KB = 92,521.4 floppy sides. So, round up and divide by two
for double-sided floppies, and you've got 46,261 floppies. Now, the data
rate for a 1541 floppy drive, with accelerator software and/or hardware,
could approach 4KB/sec. So, each floppy could be loaded in no less than
42.5 seconds. Assume some overhead, add 5 seconds to pop out the floppy
and either flip it over or exchange it, and you've got around a minute
per floppy. So, it could boot up in a mere 771 hours, or 32 days.

 But, of course, it doesn't *really* use all 15GB. Assuming you just
want it to boot, Vista Home Basic claims it'll run in 512MB of RAM.
Of course, my machine was swapping with a full 1GB, but let's assume
that's the minimum. 512MB/170KB results in a mere 1,543 floppies
(with one empty side), and it would load in just 25 hours.

 Now, making a C64 with that much RAM is left as an exercise for the
completely insane reader.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                                 (313) 227-2317

 "[L]ook at how they describe their customers. For the content industries,
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