It was in 1984 that I commenced working with MEPS. At that time Italy Branch received two units of it: MEPS 17 and MEPS 52 and a MEPS Setter. MEPS had 4 floppy-disk drives. Its large diskettes had 720-Megabyte capacity. Its hard disk capacity was initially 72 MB, then 144, and finally about 400 MB, divided in volumes: Volume 5: Text Entry; Volume 6: Composition; Volume 8: Configuration, etc. The MEPS terminal (GWS) looked like a single magazine composed page because it had been designed to support mainly the composition, although it was also used for text entry. Initially up to 4 MEPS workstations designed by the Society could be connected to MEPS. The cost was high, and the brothers developed afterwards a short software called PC Text for translators to handle text entry. By means of Ethernet, up to 50 workstations using IBM Personal Computers or PCs could be hooked up to MEPS server running MDOS 2.x whereas PC Text software ran with IBM DOS 2.x from various PC workstations. I started using PC Text 2.5. IBM PC (using Intel 8086) was slow and limited. It had two floppy disk drives and had the speed of 4.77 MHz. The floppy disk had the capacity of either 180 Mbytes or 360 Mbytes. Its monitor had 512 Mbytes RAM and later on reached 640 Mbytes RAM. Then the Society stopped producing MEPS hardware. It rather benefited from the commercial developments of IBM, Microsoft, Intel or Compaq. In time we also used the IBM Turbo XT machines having Intel 8088 and a built-in 10-MB hard drive then IBM AT 80286 at 6/8 MHz (better known as 286 machine with a 20-MB built-in hard drive.) We kept up with the later processors such as Intel 386, Intel 486, and Intel 586 or Pentium, then Intel Core 2 Solo, Duo, Quad, and Intel Core i3, i5, and i7. Our internal software improved with PC Text 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.91, 2.92 basing on ASCII characters. Later on, we abandoned IBM DOS 2.x and adopted MS-DOS 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, and eventually we also abandoned PC Text. The brothers in Wallkill developed the new Release 10, and I started with Release 10.052, then Release 10.06, 10.07, 10.08, 10.09, 10.091, 10.092. Finally MEPS software came into picture and we have been using it ever since. I used MEPS 1.0, 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. Releases 10 ran on Novell servers, and later on, MEPS 1.0 ran on Compaq hardware with IBM OS/2, then Windows NT 4.0. Now MEPS software runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 8 Midori, or Windows 8.1. At the beginning monochrome monitors Cornerstone were used for composition but now any color monitors can be used for composition- and/or translation-purposes with MEPS software. This is a quick 30-year history of MEPS.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:01:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015