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Microsoft's Surface Pro has far less open storage than advertised | 326 comments | Create New Account
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Microsoft's Surface Pro has far less open storage than advertised
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 04:58 AM EST
You are right - it appears you have a better memory than me :)

The screen base address started at 16384 thru' to around 22527.

Update, I found this page!

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk /036/helplne.htm

Nick

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Microsoft's Surface Pro has far less open storage than advertised
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 03:29 PM EST
The CBM PETs (for which Microsoft wrote the BASIC!) had extra memory for the
screen: A 32K PET used the bottom 1024 bytes (addresses 0-1023) for various
system variables, the 6502 stack and buffers, so the user *HAD* 31K (31744 bytes
for user use addresses 1024-32767); the screen was then extra RAM (1000 bytes)
starting at 32768. A 16K pet's upper limit of user space was 16383 (16K-1), but
still had the extra screen memory at addresses 32768-33767!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Microsoft's Surface Pro has far less open storage than advertised
Authored by: Chromatix on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 11:52 PM EST
According to this memory map, the 64K address space of the Z80 was split into 16K ROM and 48K RAM for the Spectrum. A total of 7539 bytes (about 7.3K) are reserved for the screen and various other things, leaving slightly over 40K for the user to work with. That's only about a sixth of the RAM "eaten", and most of it is required by the hardware (which only has one "screen mode"). I think we can agree that is reasonable.

Noteworthy is that the OS - such as it was on a home micro - was entirely stored in that 16K ROM and thus didn't count against the 48K. It required a couple of hundred bytes of the RAM for temporary variables and state, and that was it. And that was perfectly normal at the time. I think the BBC Micro was a bit heavier, but it could also shrink the screen memory to 1K (teletext mode, text only) to make best use of the 32K RAM it came with - while the biggest screen modes required over 16K.

That approximate ratio also applies to my iPhone 3G and my new Android phablet. They use a few hundred megabytes of the internal storage for the OS and firmware, leaving the great majority available for the user's apps, music, photos and other stuff. I never even came close to running out of space on my iPhone, although I ended up not using it as an iPod, which undoubtedly helped. But neither device would be able to store Windows 8 and Office, even in "compressed for installation disc" form.

Of course we already knew that Windows, as with other Micro$oft software products, is horribly bloated. Now, however, it is going to actually impinge on the usablity of a Micro$oft hardware product. It will be entertaining to watch the fallout - from a safe distance.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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