[hpsdr] computer memory added question

[George Medakovich]

In a scant 20 years all things digital have become possible.
In 1971 this was done by running a keypunched card deck on a mainframe,
taking the resulting tape to another computer (in a different building,
typically), running the tape through a d/a and creating 5 second
segments of audio tape that you could then edit with a razor blade
and tape.  10 years later you could do it, still in batch mode,
on your desktop, or buy an expensive dedicated processor to do it in
real time.

George, ae5ci

Tony Langdon wrote:
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> At 10:26 PM 7/16/2007, michael taylor wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>>This is a good example why we weren't playing with SDR twenty years
>>ago, it was not just the cost/availability of high performance A/D
>>converters, but also the availability of low cost yet sufficient
>>computing resources necessary to decode signals in "soft" real-time.
> 
> 
> Well, I can tell you what it was like using 20 year old 
> technology.  During my uni years, I studied some DSP at an 
> introductory level, but we did get to do a bit of practical stuff 
> like implement filters and basic things like tone decoders.
> 
> We were using 12 bit A/D and D/A (some proprietary data acquisition 
> boards) and 10 or 12 MHz 80286 based machines (what would have been 
> state of the art in 1987 :) ).  Software wise, we were using C, which 
> was compiled using Borland Turbo C under DOS.  Only one of the 
> machines had an 80287 math co-processor.
> 

 1184619164.0