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Since I always seem to do things backwards, I bought MS before a computer. My current box is a 10MHz 8088 from 1985 which sells a Goodwill for $45. Everyone laughs but I managed to skip the 286-486 development cycles.
In case anyone wants to know what the MS tech support group suggested, here it is. In order to buy an optimum machine for MS6.0, the tech guys recommended the following in order of importance:
4 Gig hard drive, 12 msec or faster access, 1 Gig or smaller partitions,
48 Mbytes DRAM (S is faster than EDO),
Fastest processor possible,
17 inch monitor,
Cache effects were unknown (my personal opinion is a large cache will have little effect on performance).
Interesting that published benchmark tests indicates doubling DRAM has the same effect as increasing Pentium clock speed by one level (i.e.. 166 Vs 200 or 200 Vs 233 etc.).
Here is what I ordered:
5 Gig 12 sec hard drive,
64 Mbytes DE DRAM,
200MHz K6 processor (throughput equivalent to 233MHz Pentium),
17 inch monitor,
56k modem (for future data base speed increases),
color bubble jet printer (for future hard copy color support).
I also ordered Excel for spreadsheet investigations. My goal is to download weekly and explore maybe 6000 securities at a time. Is this too ambitious?
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