Re: [CentOS] Octet
On 06/03/2011 13:44, Always Learning wrote: I also saw Honeywell upgrading a L66 machine so it would run faster. The engineer pulled-out a PCB and took it away. That 'upgrade' cost over 1 million NLG (Dutch guilders). Very annoying those big iron companies. We had two banks of ICL Eagle drives (10GB in five full height filing cabinet sized boxes). We upgraded to Albatrosses (20GB) for a mill or so (don't know the actual price). All the engineer did was swap a couple of jumpers and told us to reformat in M2FM instead of MFM. Definitely worth the money. The other one, much later was a 3 x 1GB upgrade for a GA mini. £3k we were quoted when we could buy the drives for about £250 each. The supplier said 'fine but we're still charging £3k for the authorisation code' Now the nearest to specialised hardware we use are Dell servers so we can't be held hostage. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet
On 06/03/2011 13:44, Always Learning wrote: I also saw Honeywell upgrading a L66 machine so it would run faster. The engineer pulled-out a PCB and took it away. That 'upgrade' cost over 1 million NLG (Dutch guilders). Very annoying those big iron companies. We had two banks of ICL Eagle drives (10GB in five full height filing cabinet sized boxes). We upgraded to Albatrosses (20GB) for a mill or so (don't know the actual price). All the engineer did was swap a couple of jumpers and told us to reformat in M2FM instead of MFM. Definitely worth the money. In case of NC machines it was quite common that the amount of memory usable was just a configuration setting. After you paid a horrible amount of money a service engineer came, entered a special code, reconfigured the amount of memory and that was it. With a modem connection it could even be done remotely :) Simon ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet (was: IP6 Anyone?)
On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:32:34 + Always Learning cen...@g7.u22.net wrote: On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote: Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember byte being a synonym for bit field and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines. PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters. Baby? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 BR, Bob ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet (was: IP6 Anyone?)
On Sun, 2011-03-06 at 14:36 +0100, Bob Marcan wrote: On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:32:34 + Always Learning cen...@g7.u22.net wrote: PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters. Baby? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 I never saw any DEC installtion :-( Working exclusively on Honeywell for over 30 years I was a bit biased. Saw the Amstelveen (NL) computer centre of KLM. It had over 400 hard disk drives! I also saw Honeywell upgrading a L66 machine so it would run faster. The engineer pulled-out a PCB and took it away. That 'upgrade' cost over 1 million NLG (Dutch guilders). With best regards, Paul. England, EU. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet - off topic
Larry Vaden wrote: I have always hoped to find someone who was involved with COBOL back in the days to ask this question of: What influence did Commander Grace Hopper have on COBOL? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
[CentOS] Octet (was: IP6 Anyone?)
--On Saturday, February 26, 2011 9:04 PM + Always Learning cen...@g7.u22.net wrote: Are you sure 'octets' is correct? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Octet_%28computing%29 Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember byte being a synonym for bit field and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines. The PDP-11 and microcomputers used 8-bit bytes, and their popularity meant most people using computers at home or in small businesses assumed that that was the only size a byte could be. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet (was: IP6 Anyone?)
On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote: Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember byte being a synonym for bit field and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines. PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters. The PDP-11 and microcomputers used 8-bit bytes, and their popularity meant most people using computers at home or in small businesses assumed that that was the only size a byte could be. Those *were* the days. With best regards, Paul. England, EU. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet
On 02/27/11 5:32 AM, Always Learning wrote: On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 04:12 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote: Those of us who've used older mainframes (such as the PDP-10) remember byte being a synonym for bit field and a byte could be any number of bits, typically from 1 to 36 (on a 36-bit-wide machine). 7-bit and 9-bit bytes were quite common on such machines. PDP being a 'main franme'? Baby mainframe perhaps when compared to Honeywell's (later Bull's) Level 66? Level 66 had 36 bit words which could be used as 6 BCD characters or 4 ASCII characters. the PDP-10 was in fact considered a mainframe in the 1960s. They were more commonly called DECsystem-10, or KA10, KL10. the CPU was multiple cabinets, the KL10 supported up to 4 megawords of ram (where a word was 36 bits). They were commonly used as timesharing systems which was relatively uncommon in the late 1960s ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet
--On Sunday, February 27, 2011 10:48 AM -0800 John R Pierce pie...@hogranch.com wrote: the PDP-10 was in fact considered a mainframe in the 1960s. They were more commonly called DECsystem-10, or KA10, KL10. the CPU was multiple cabinets, the KL10 supported up to 4 megawords of ram (where a word was 36 bits). They were commonly used as timesharing systems which was relatively uncommon in the late 1960s https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PDP-10 I used them at MIT in the early 80's and also at Systems Concepts, which designed a clone. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet
On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 10:48 -0800, John R Pierce wrote: the PDP-10 was in fact considered a mainframe in the 1960s. They were more commonly called DECsystem-10, or KA10, KL10. the CPU was multiple cabinets, the KL10 supported up to 4 megawords of ram (where a word was 36 bits). They were commonly used as timesharing systems which was relatively uncommon in the late 1960s What type of memory did it have? At my second computer job in 1967 on a Honeywell H-120 (a baby machine with 3 tapes which took 1 hour to do a Cobol compilation ... and then another hour for a recompile to correct the 400 errors the Punch Room had mysteriously added to 'verified' coding sheets) the memory was magnetic cores using 3 wires physically through each hollow core or ring. The memory total was, I think, octal 3. I can still read punch cards held upto the light to see where the holes are :-) -- With best regards, Paul. England, EU. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Re: [CentOS] Octet - off topic
On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:38 -0600, Larry Vaden wrote: On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Always Learning cen...@g7.u22.net wrote: At my second computer job in 1967 on a Honeywell H-120 (a baby machine with 3 tapes which took 1 hour to do a Cobol compilation ... I have always hoped to find someone who was involved with COBOL back in the days to ask this question of: What influence did Commander Grace Hopper have on COBOL? Don't know. Grace was occasionally mentioned in the computer press for getting awards in the USA (I think she was in the USA Navy) but we programmers, new to a new world of computing, just wrote programmes, debugged them, did some systems analysis and ventured into assembler coding and system programming. Grace never ever influenced me or anyone else I knew who did Cobol. She was just a name to the majority who programmed in Cobol. I used to think it took someone 2 years of writing in Cobol to become efficient in using it and visualising solutions which could be implemented in it. Well written Cobol was easy to maintain but some clowns never properly used the self documenting features of the language (i.e. meaningful data names - contrast with add csum to itotal). The alternative was longer data names, for example inv-gross-total, inv-delivery-cost and overdue-3-mths-total etc. Many programmed in Cobol but fewer used the language to its designed extent. The worse thing about Cobol was the long windiness of it before one came to the Procedure Division. Later on Picture became Pic and very useful string handling was introduced (the alternative was refining the same field multiple times). It used to be my favourite language, after Easycoder and 6502 assembler, then I discovered PHP. -- With best regards, Paul. England, EU. ___ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
