Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
- Original Message - From: "Jerry Feldman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 9:10 PM Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > When I was in graduate school we ran a business game that included schools > from all over. We had an 8 level TWX and a 5 level baudot code system. > Ancient history. Yeahyou're certainly dating yourself with that use of the term "level" to describe bits per character! :) Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote: > While my first computer was an IBM 7044 mainframe (punch card input > only). after a few years in the Army playing knob dicker to grunts, I > worked at Burger King Corporation. The Burger King POS was a 4K PDP8-E. > No disk, no tape. And the memories come flooding back ... :) When I was a sophomore in high school (Melrose, MA, 1971-2), I got my first taste of computing. The school had four "classic" 110 baud TeleTypes, paper tape punch/reader and all, connected to an outfit in Waltham (located in the former Control Data building on Bear Hill Road, beside 128) called Systems for Educational Time Sharing (SETS). Several other schools were hooked up to them as well; the only ones I recall now are Newton North & South, and Canton High (since we could send messages across the network to each other, I made my first "e-friends" at these schools). The systems they ran at SETS were a PDP-8/E to do the processing itself, and a PDP-8/I to handle the I/O. RS-232C disk, "high-speed" paper tape, those funny little fat DECtape reels, toggles, the works. The school put two of the teletypes in one of the Math classrooms (where the lone "Computer Science" class, offered only to seniors and taught by math teachers who had only taken a brief course on the topic themselves, was held), and put the other two across the hall in the cramped office of the Math Dept. head, a woman named Ruth Tentler. Mrs. Tentler was a saint when it came to putting up with the racket of those horrid machines, as long as someone was learning something. :) Melrose was building a new HS at the time, and preparing to turn the old one into a junior high, so we were on "double sessions" in the older building (grades 10-12 in the mornings, 7-9 in the afternoons). I spent every free period down in that office, and hung around there after school whenever possible. Mrs. Tentler wangled me an invitation to visit SETS on a Saturday, and I got to see the operation from the other end of the wire. I sent away to Maynard for a couple of the manuals that I saw down at SETS, an "Introduction to Programming" book that IIRC centered on BASIC, and a book on PAL III, the assembly language for the PDP-8 series. I joined DECUS (I'm fairly certain that at that point, I was the youngest member they'd ever had), and set about to teach myself to program. Before long I was getting the hang of things, and sharing this newfound knowledge in the afternoons with those Jr. High kids who also found 'puters intriguing and spent *their* free periods in the Math office. By the end of the year, a couple of them had managed to learn considerably more than was even covered at all in the senior-level "official" course, which only involved BASIC (and didn't go very far even with that). My correspondence with the folks at DEC also got me an invitation to visit Maynard and chat with the folks in the Educational Systems Dept. there, which was run at the time by a tall fellow named Val Skalabrin (any of you long-time DECcers know what became of him?), where I got a glimpse of some of the things they were working on there, and gave them my take on things from an end-user viewpoint. I remember seeing in one of their brochures a tiny version of the 8 that could fit on a desktop, called the PDP-8/A; I remarked that if it weren't so God-awful expensive, I'd love to own one of those - I seem to recall that they found that concept pretty amusing. :) Alas, the following year I was in a different school, with no access to a computer of any sort, and didn't get involved with them again until years later, when I purchased my first Commodore 64 and discovered CompuServe and bulletin boards and the like. In those days, CompuServe was run on DECsystem10 hardware (a.k.a. PDP-10), and once I figured out how to get to "command mode" and saw my first "OK" prompt, I felt right at home. My old friends like PIP and systat were right there waiting for me. :) I have always considered that fact that my first exposure to computing was in a multi-user, multi-tasking envronment to have been a tremendous plus, as was the fact that documentation on the inner workings of that system was readily available. Every kid should have it so lucky, and with the help of the Linux community, hopefully more and more of them will. :) -- Bill Mullen 10:27pm, 2002-08-13 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
When I was in graduate school we ran a business game that included schools from all over. We had an 8 level TWX and a 5 level baudot code system. Ancient history. Richard Soule wrote: > 5 level paper tape? or 8? I used 5 myself. -- -- Gerald Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Computer Solutions and Consulting ICQ#156300 PGP Key ID:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
5 level paper tape? or 8? I used 5 myself. There were times when we had to process stuff 'as fast as humanly possible' (for the U.S. Air Force) and it would usually come my way because I could get the message on to the tape faster than the modem could read it. As I was typing another operator would grab the end of the tape and feed it into the modem. While you could make a one or two character mistake in the body of the message (which required you to 'back the tape up' and strike out the mistakes), you could make 0 mistakes in the header and footer. So not only did you have to type fast, you had to be very accurate. (This was in the late '80s, I am only 34!) ;-) Rich "Brian B. Riley (N1BQ) ListAcct" wrote: > > ... hell ... as long as we are reminiscing about the good old days. The > first computer I worked on had a punched paper tape operating system that > paged 128 byte chunks into a 256 byte core memory space. All the "i/o" was > via a Flexowriter. The first major upgrade to the OS was when they started > delivering it on mylar tape so it only had to be replaced once a month or so > instead of twice a week! > >cheers ... bbr > > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 9:57 PM > To: Greater NH Linux User Group > Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > > On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:52pm, Erik Price wrote: > > I remember my first Macintosh. It did not come with a hard disk! Just a > > floppy drive. > > "Why, back in my day, we didn't even have keyboards. We had to chisel the > characters into the screen! And we liked it!" > > ;-) > > ___ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss begin:vcard n:;Richard x-mozilla-html:FALSE adr:;; version:2.1 email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED] fn:Richard Soule end:vcard
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
In a message dated: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 06:18:26 EDT Bill Mullen said: >On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Rich Cloutier wrote: > >> The fact of the matter is, all those programs are Windows based (or at >> least WERE until Linux.) And one kid I know actually complains that his >> P4 system can't play an audio CD, watch TV (ATI All-in-wonder) surf the >> web, and chat with his friends all at the same time. So he wants a >> faster computer. Not because he can't play games; his system is >> perfectly capable of that, but because when he does all that, his audio >> CD skips. And it's because the OS is not real time. How does the problem >> get solved? Throw more hardware at it. A true real time OS COULD indeed >> play that audio CD without skipping and do the other stuff too. Ahm, yeah, an RTOS *could* do all that, but it's not necessary. I suspect that the real problem is either lack of memory, lack of swap, or conflicting configurations of various components. I've seen a lot more done with a lot less computer and it was running Windows NT 4.0, which is *far* from an RTOS. -- Seeya, Paul -- It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing, but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away. If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right! ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
While my first computer was an IBM 7044 mainframe (punch card input only). after a few years in the Army playing knob dicker to grunts, I worked at Burger King Corporation. The Burger King POS was a 4K PDP8-E. No disk, no tape. The modem was a Novation modem card. We did the internal timing for 1200 baud (at that time, baud was equivalent to bps). We developed our own protocol. The PDP8 was a 12 bit machine with data stored mainly as 12 or 24 bit integers. We polled each store nightly from Miami. We had to write the code to strike the hammers on the drum for the printers. Since the PDP8s were core memory, power fail was: save all registers (the 8 only had one accumulator and a 1 bit link). That 4K system could do quite a bit maintaining inventory, cash, hourly sales and a few other functions. The keyboard was not ASCII. We had to read the row and the column to figure out what key was pressed. The code we wrote was extremely tight. The comm routine was vectored so we could transfer a new version. The steps we used were to first transfer a new comm routine to the scratchpad area. When complete, then update the vectors pointing to the comm and scratchpad. Once the new comm routine was running, we could transfer a new program. Normally all our data transfers used physical addresses, which were not very portable. On 13 Aug 2002 at 10:03, Brian B. Riley (N1BQ) ListAcc wrote: > ... hell ... as long as we are reminiscing about the good old days. -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Associate Director Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
... hell ... as long as we are reminiscing about the good old days. The first computer I worked on had a punched paper tape operating system that paged 128 byte chunks into a 256 byte core memory space. All the "i/o" was via a Flexowriter. The first major upgrade to the OS was when they started delivering it on mylar tape so it only had to be replaced once a month or so instead of twice a week! cheers ... bbr -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 9:57 PM To: Greater NH Linux User Group Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:52pm, Erik Price wrote: > I remember my first Macintosh. It did not come with a hard disk! Just a > floppy drive. "Why, back in my day, we didn't even have keyboards. We had to chisel the characters into the screen! And we liked it!" ;-) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
[ This thread seems to indicate that the 'G' in GNHLUG actually stands for Geriatric... ] >As for IBM and the 68K -- one of the initial PC specs >was backward CP/M compatibility. The 8088 seemed a >logical choice to fulfill this unfulfilled "feature:" >everything the 8080 was, and faster, to boot. Those who ever wrote a CP/M program might appreciate this trivia: you can "call 5' (the CP/M equivalanet of a syscall) in a DOS program and it will actually work because at offset 5 in the Program Segment Prefix (PSP, a reserved area) they were careful to code a jump to a jump to a wrapper routine that would leap off into some undocumented DOS code that eventually did something useful. I believe that a number of people had the notion that blind mechanical translation of CP/M binaries into 8088 binaries would be a less trautmatic way to transition customers onto the new platform so they arranged for certain hax to be introduced into DOS to support that. And I think there was also some effort to make some of the 8088 intruction formats, addressing modes and (damn them for eternity on this one) register sets similar to the 8080 to facilitate this same "migration path"... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
Early implementations of MS Windows were horrible. 3.1 was the first version of Windows that had any merit at all. All GUIs demand much from hardware. All are insatiable. "Brenda A. Bell" wrote: > Since the introduction of Win95, absolutely... I was more thinking about > the early 90's when Windows 2 and 3.1 demanded more from the hardware > and everytime it got more, it was never enough... then comes NT which > requires even more because its intended use is a business environment... > none of these were really targetted for gaming platforms, but I believe > their quickly increasing resource requirements paved the way. -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
No, 2K is the lowest I've gone. We have a site license at work, but there is a problem with the key. I prefer Linux. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:09pm, Jerry Feldman wrote: > > You're probably correct. I don't see any benefit for a normal home user to > > get a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 for $700. > > Heh. You've never tried Windows XP then. ;-) -- -- Gerald Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Computer Solutions and Consulting ICQ#156300 PGP Key ID:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Rich Cloutier wrote: > The fact of the matter is, all those programs are Windows based (or at > least WERE until Linux.) And one kid I know actually complains that his > P4 system can't play an audio CD, watch TV (ATI All-in-wonder) surf the > web, and chat with his friends all at the same time. So he wants a > faster computer. Not because he can't play games; his system is > perfectly capable of that, but because when he does all that, his audio > CD skips. And it's because the OS is not real time. How does the problem > get solved? Throw more hardware at it. A true real time OS COULD indeed > play that audio CD without skipping and do the other stuff too. I have no idea if Linux qualifies as a "real time OS" or not, but as luck would have it, as I read your post it occurred to me that I am doing exactly these things at the moment (and, obviously, answering my mail as well) on a system of lesser horsepower than that one (a PIII/667)! And my CD isn't skipping, either. :) I'm running Mandrake 8.2 (stock kernel 2.4.18-6mdk) on it, with 256M RAM, 3 small ATA/33 HDs, an IDE DVD-ROM drive, an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 AGP card with 32M, a SoundBlaster Live X-Gamer 5.1 sound card, 2 10/100 NICs (only one in use, though), a USR PCI voice modem, and 2 mice (a PS/2 corded three-button and a USB cordless trackball, both Logitech). For software, it's MDK 8.2, Xfree86 4.2.0 with the Gatos project's ati.2 driver, kdm, Xfce WM, esd, Xawtv (using the tuner on the card, not either external input), Gaim 0.59 (online w/ ICQ, Yahoo, and two AIM names), Opera 6.02 (viewing pages running Java applets, Java is Sun's 1.4.0), Gkrellm controlling XMMS (and playing from the DVD-ROM), and a couple of gnome-terminal windows, one of which is an ssh session to my server box, running Pine 4.44 from there. Oh, yeah, and Gkrellm is also keeping me apprised of the current weather conditions at the airport down the street from me, and I have the xplanetbg daemon (mentioned in a different thread) redrawing my root window every five minutes. All this going on, and the box isn't even breaking a sweat, much less skipping the audio: moon@tvbox:~$ uptime 6:08am up 1 day, 15 min, 3 users, load average: 0.22, 0.07, 0.02 "Real time" or not, it's a helluva "Real OS", and it makes excellent use of every hardware configuration I've introduced it to so far. Just my $0.02USD :) -- Bill Mullen 6:17am, 2002-08-13 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
- Original Message - From: "Derek D. Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "gnhlug" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 11:56 PM Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- > Hash: SHA1 > > At some point hitherto, Rich Cloutier hath spake thusly: > > > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. > > > > ...and I have to disagree to some extent with that. > > > > While the gaming industry has forced hardware manufacturers to push the > > limit on 3d rendering and animation speeds, which translate into fast GPUs, > > and hardware acceleration, it is the GUI environment (Windows) that has > > pushed for acres of screen real estate, ie., 1600x1280 desktops, multiple > > monitors, and so forth. > > I still have to disagree with this. It was the gaming industry that > pushed the early PC graphics adaptors from CGA to EGA and then to VGA, > with the desire for ever sharper and more colorful game details. In the beginning, that may be true. However, Windows, for those who don't remember, was initially just a GUI front end to a Desktop Publishing program called Pagemaker, which was not even developed by Microsoft. Game developers, at that time, were torn between whether to use raster graphics or vector graphics. It was Microsoft's desire to have a graphical OS like the Xerox PARC system and the Mac, that forced every PC manufacturer to put in higher and higher resolution video cards to support the colorful desktops. > It > was the gaming industry that created a demand for sound cards with > respectable digital sound effects and music synthesis at commodity > prices. It was the advent of first-person shooter games, like Castle > Wolfenstien in 1992 and Doom in 1993, that pushed those resolutions to > be fed faster, and then with other games to go further to 1024x768 for > still crisper graphics with the advent of such games as Quake I in > 1996. At that point, I believe the majority of non-gaming Windows > users were still using Windows at 640x480@256 colors or less... The majority of gaming AND non-gaming Windows users are still using 1024x768 @ 16 bpp color or less. Most gamers don't play beyond 1024x768 @ 16bpp. It is the power Windows users who have massive spreadsheets, full page documents and marketing brochures in full color, huge CAD files, and 3d rendering and animation (all converts from UNIX workstations) that demand 32 bpp color and insane resolutions like 3200x1200 on two or more monitors. > > At the time, I was working at UPS in field support, and we'd only just > started to switch people from our DOS-based shipping program to a > Windows one. I installed this product on shipping systems for a fair > number of our customers, and the systems almost always ran at > 640x480x256. Many businesses were still primarily using DOS-based > applications at that time, and were only just beginning to switch to > Windows. Graphics cards of the time which were able to do higher > resolutions were comparitively expensive. > > Even today, if you walk around the office where you work, I suspect > that you'll find a majority of users still use a desktop size of > 1024x768. This has been the case everywhere I've worked, period. > Some users actually still used 800x600, because of eye strain issues. Yes, I'll agree that eye strain is a limiting factor, mostly because corporations are too cheap to buy really GOOD monitors. Even a 17 inch MAG monitor will strain your eyes after an hour or two at 1024x768. Another reason is that most users simply DON'T KNOW HOW to increase the resolution or color depth over what the Windows default installation is (NEVER more than 1024x768 and more often 800x600.) Of course these users and their bosses are NOT the ones buying the GeForce and Matrox video cards or the 19" or 21" CRTs or the 16" digital flat panels. > > For the most part, high-res desktops are still to this day relegated > to Geeks Like Us (TM), or to those with specialized needs (i.e. CAD > designers, publishers, and similar). Were it not for the gaming > industry, decent sound hardware would probably still be substantially > more expensive, being relegated to musicians, sound effects people, > and other similar special needs groups. Here you are correct. Sound cards were developed for, and are used mostly by, gamers. Musicians use specialized sound hardware to reproduce the music; they only use the PC to compose and edit the material. When it comes time for reproduction, it gets fed into very high-end, specialized reproduction equipment. It doesn't come out the sound card. > > > And it is the fact that we do not really have
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Rich Cloutier hath spake thusly: > > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. > > ...and I have to disagree to some extent with that. > > While the gaming industry has forced hardware manufacturers to push the > limit on 3d rendering and animation speeds, which translate into fast GPUs, > and hardware acceleration, it is the GUI environment (Windows) that has > pushed for acres of screen real estate, ie., 1600x1280 desktops, multiple > monitors, and so forth. I still have to disagree with this. It was the gaming industry that pushed the early PC graphics adaptors from CGA to EGA and then to VGA, with the desire for ever sharper and more colorful game details. It was the gaming industry that created a demand for sound cards with respectable digital sound effects and music synthesis at commodity prices. It was the advent of first-person shooter games, like Castle Wolfenstien in 1992 and Doom in 1993, that pushed those resolutions to be fed faster, and then with other games to go further to 1024x768 for still crisper graphics with the advent of such games as Quake I in 1996. At that point, I believe the majority of non-gaming Windows users were still using Windows at 640x480@256 colors or less... At the time, I was working at UPS in field support, and we'd only just started to switch people from our DOS-based shipping program to a Windows one. I installed this product on shipping systems for a fair number of our customers, and the systems almost always ran at 640x480x256. Many businesses were still primarily using DOS-based applications at that time, and were only just beginning to switch to Windows. Graphics cards of the time which were able to do higher resolutions were comparitively expensive. Even today, if you walk around the office where you work, I suspect that you'll find a majority of users still use a desktop size of 1024x768. This has been the case everywhere I've worked, period. Some users actually still used 800x600, because of eye strain issues. For the most part, high-res desktops are still to this day relegated to Geeks Like Us (TM), or to those with specialized needs (i.e. CAD designers, publishers, and similar). Were it not for the gaming industry, decent sound hardware would probably still be substantially more expensive, being relegated to musicians, sound effects people, and other similar special needs groups. > And it is the fact that we do not really have a true Real Time Operating > System that has caused massive increases in CPU horsepower, disk speeds, and > gobs of RAM in order to play back audio and video files without skipping, > making it SEEM like we have real time capabilities, when in fact we do not. Use DOS. It might not be a truly real time OS; but since it doesn't multitask, close enough. The reason CPU power has increased so quickly is again, because of the gaming industry. If this were not true, why did processors on other platforms (Unix systems, for example) which do not typically play games grow so slowly by comparison? Only fairly recently, after realizing that PCs had gotten so powerful as to be able to outperform their expensive hardware have Unix vendors' CPUs started to catch up to PC CPUs. It's all about the games baby! =8^) - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9WIN3djdlQoHP510RApn5AKCE25xcj7fEldkr+HDWmr+k/VFjvACgsaqs Sq5iZAPKQDSb1FF28LDWiiM= =C1Zn -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 21:15:57 -0400 (EDT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > To put this in > perspective, at the time the IBM-PC was introduced, 64 kilobytes was seen as > a fairly good sized main memory for a home microcomputer. My first computer came with 8 Kilobytes as standard and I bought it with a monnster memory board which brought it up to 24 kilobytes. Also had a single 5.25 floppy which provided all of 80 kilobytes of disk storage. OSI MF4P Then the IBM PC came out. I remember booting my first PC and looking with awe at 640K memory showing during the boot sequence. Ed Lawson ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 7:16pm, Ken Ambrose wrote: >> In Redmond's favor, any GUI is going to be somewhat of a memory hog. > > My first Amiga, the A-1000, a truly GUI/multitasking box, came stock with > 256K RAM, and ran fine. Oh, yeah, that reminds me: PC/GEOS, the core of GeoWorks Ensemble. A multitasking, multi-threaded, GUI, single imaging model, pervasively object-oriented operating environment, running well in 640 KB on an 8 MHz 8088 processor. It took up less than 10 MB on my hard disk (good thing, too, since it was only a 20 MB disk). I even hacked it down to the point where it would run off a single 1.44 MB floppy. It was slower than hell, and didn't do very much, but it ran. The Amiga had a much better hardware design than the PC, of course. I would expect it to do better. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote: > In Redmond's favor, any GUI is going to be somewhat of a memory hog. My first Amiga, the A-1000, a truly GUI/multitasking box, came stock with 256K RAM, and ran fine. I got the add'l 256K so I could have a RAM disk. ;-) In other words, a GUI doesn't necessarily require memory hoggishness, though it certainly does seem par for the course. As for IBM and the 68K -- one of the initial PC specs was backward CP/M compatibility. The 8088 seemed a logical choice to fulfill this unfulfilled "feature:" everything the 8080 was, and faster, to boot. While I imagine that there were probably a few CP/M emulators for 68K boxen, they a) probably didn't work that well, and b) the 68K itself, in '81, probably cost a small fortune. -Ken ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
- Original Message - From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 9:57 PM Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > > "Why, back in my day, we didn't even have keyboards. We had to chisel the > characters into the screen! And we liked it!" > You had a SCREEN??? We had teletypes and console switches (PDP-8) :oP Rich Cloutier SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES President, C*O www.sysupport.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
- Original Message - From: "Derek D. Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "GNHLUG mailing list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 8:40 PM Subject: Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > I have to disagree. While I think they may have had an influence, I > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. > They're the ones pushing the graphics accelerators into the gagillions > of pixels per nanosecond range... and the average home/business user > STILL has no need of anything more powerful than a Pentium 200MHz > running Windows 95. Except for games. > ...and I have to disagree to some extent with that. While the gaming industry has forced hardware manufacturers to push the limit on 3d rendering and animation speeds, which translate into fast GPUs, and hardware acceleration, it is the GUI environment (Windows) that has pushed for acres of screen real estate, ie., 1600x1280 desktops, multiple monitors, and so forth. And it is the fact that we do not really have a true Real Time Operating System that has caused massive increases in CPU horsepower, disk speeds, and gobs of RAM in order to play back audio and video files without skipping, making it SEEM like we have real time capabilities, when in fact we do not. Rich Cloutier SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES President, C*O www.sysupport.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:52pm, Erik Price wrote: > I remember my first Macintosh. It did not come with a hard disk! Just a > floppy drive. "Why, back in my day, we didn't even have keyboards. We had to chisel the characters into the screen! And we liked it!" ;-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Monday, August 12, 2002, at 09:16 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: > There was also the m68000 (unless you meant the 68000 when you wrote > 6800 above). The Macintoshes started on them (with 128k of RAM!). Sun, I remember my first Macintosh. It did not come with a hard disk! Just a floppy drive. Erik -- Erik Price email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:09pm, Tom Buskey wrote: >>> My Sparc 20 had a memory error for a month because I was too lazy to shut >>> it down & reseat the simm. Can PCs do error correction like that? >> >> Sure, with ECC RAM. :) > > Which is in (just about?) every Sun system. It's harder to find in a PC. It was a question of market and cost: Sun hardware was targeted at fairly high-end uses, where pretty much anyone would want ECC RAM. When the whole system costs $10,000, spending $500 more on ECC RAM only makes sense. When the whole system costs $1500, spending $500 more on ECC RAM is a harder decision to make. Today, though, ECC is fast becoming the standard in PCs. Memories are so large that (1) it is silly not to and (2) you pretty much need to. More memory makes the chances of errors statistically more likely. > I've seen "Real Weasel" (sp?) for PCs. It looked pretty cool. It was > also expensive. Yah, the PC Weasel and descendants were designed to retrofit serial console support onto systems that did not have it but really needed it. Most of the time, you just buy a motherboard with onboard serial support. > I'm not sure, but I think NetBSD can do serial console (& install?) on a > PC. I think you still don't get the BIOS stuff. I know LILO, GRUB, and Linux all support serial console. > Another advantage of Sun is no interrupts. I think Macs have this too. Er, um, pretty much every general purpose computer I know of has interrupts. I know the Mac sure does. If you mean "manual configuration of interrupts", those went away with the ISA bus. (People who persist in using the ISA bus deserve what they get.) How else will hardware signal the processor it needs attention? -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
One interesting development on the programming side is the popularity of interpreters. Interpreters usually have about a 1:10 performance relationship to pure in-line code. Their advantage is code density. You can cram an incredible amount of functioanlity into an interpreted object whereas inline code takes up a fair amount of memory space. Of course 'tricks' are played to improve the performance of interpreted code such as 'Just in time' optimization but still, if you've used a large Java program, and most of the Java IDEs are built almost entirely in Java, you notice quite a performance degradation unless you have a) lot's of RAM and b) a fairly powerful CPU with the latter being less important. -Alex - Original Message - From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 9:15 PM Subject: RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers) > On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 8:36pm, Brenda A. Bell wrote: > >> The 640 KB limit arose from the original IBM-PC design, circa 1980. > >> Since the 8086 didn't even have a memory manager, hardware needed to be > >> mapped directly into physical memory space, and IBM thought 640/384 was a > >> good place to draw the line between software and "reserved" memory. > > > > Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I > > believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need > > more than 640K RAM in a personal computer". > > "640K should be enough for anybody" is widely attributed to Bill Gates. > Since Bill actually had nothing to do with the 640/384 boundary, I suspect > the remark is either (1) apocryphal (2) made off-hand. To put this in > perspective, at the time the IBM-PC was introduced, 64 kilobytes was seen as > a fairly good sized main memory for a home microcomputer. Ten times that > might well inspire a "should be enough" remark. > > > As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe Redmond is > > greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows > > 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they > > needed to to keep up. > > I think it is more correctly described as a positive feedback loop. > Bigger software demands beefier hardware; more powerful hardware means > software can grow larger. The process reinforces itself. > > -- > Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | > | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | > | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | > > ___ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss > ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
Jerry Feldman said: >When the PC was designed, there was a rather small market. You had the >Apple II with 16K, and a few other 8080, z80, m6800, or 6502. The PC used >the 8088 (which is the 8 bit version of the newer 8086 line. Coming from 8 >bits to 16 bits was a big move. There was also the m68000 (unless you meant the 68000 when you wrote 6800 above). The Macintoshes started on them (with 128k of RAM!). Sun, Apollo, HP, and others based thier workstations on them. There's some rumors that IBM considered it for the PC but rejected it because Motorola was the only source. . \ -- --- Tom Buskey ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
> > As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe > > Redmond is greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have > > today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the > > hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up. > > I have to disagree. While I think they may have had an influence, I > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. > They're the ones pushing the graphics accelerators into the gagillions > of pixels per nanosecond range... and the average home/business user > STILL has no need of anything more powerful than a Pentium 200MHz > running Windows 95. Except for games. Since the introduction of Win95, absolutely... I was more thinking about the early 90's when Windows 2 and 3.1 demanded more from the hardware and everytime it got more, it was never enough... then comes NT which requires even more because its intended use is a business environment... none of these were really targetted for gaming platforms, but I believe their quickly increasing resource requirements paved the way. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 9:09pm, Jerry Feldman wrote: > You're probably correct. I don't see any benefit for a normal home user to > get a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 for $700. Heh. You've never tried Windows XP then. ;-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > > Just adding a bit more fuel to the fire... ;-) > How rare on the GNHLUG :-) I think this a useful thread of course. > >On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, at 8:39pm, Tom Buskey wrote: >> One advantage Sun (& Apple) have always had over PCs is quality. They >> are well built. > > With the IBM-PC platform comes choice. That includes bad choices. There >are a great many OEMs out there selling all manner of crap products. Some >of it is so badly designed or manufactured it actually causes harm to person >and/or property. However, there can also be found fair, good, and excellent >quality products. With single-source solutions (like Sun and Apple), you >always know what the vendor is giving you, since you only deal with one >vendor. Of course, if you happen to *dislike* what the vendor is giving >you, you are screwed. I might add that a similar situation exists in the >software world today Absolutely. Certain combos don't work well either. For instance, Windows NT/2000 runs very poorly on VA Linux boxes. Or it did on the ones we had ordered at work for our lone NT guy (of a group of 20 unix bigots^H^H^H^H^H^Hguys). I'm just pointing out good brands :-) > >> My Sparc 20 had a memory error for a month because I was too lazy to shut >> it down & reseat the simm. Can PCs do error correction like that? > > Sure, with ECC RAM. :) Which is in (just about?) every Sun system. It's harder to find in a PC. Early Macintoshes didn't have parity ram, let alone ECC. >> you can install with a serial terminal > > Assuming you have hardware with serial console support, and an OS that can >handle it, this is quite possible on IBM-PCs as well. I've seen "Real Weasel" (sp?) for PCs. It looked pretty cool. It was also expensive. I'm not sure, but I think NetBSD can do serial console (& install?) on a PC. I think you still don't get the BIOS stuff. Another advantage of Sun is no interupts. I think Macs have this too. There's advantages to different platforms. PCs have the latest & greatest releases because that's what everyone develops on & uses. I remember when, in the Unix world, SunOS was the most common. Everything else was ported from the SunOS version. PCs usually give the best cpu/$$ for integer performance too. Do they do it in floating point nowadays too? btw - my desktop system, where I ssh to my servers, browse, read email, etc. is a laptop running Linux fwiw. I like to have all the toys installed. -- --- Tom Buskey ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii You're probably correct. I don't see any benefit for a normal home user to get a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 for $700. Games certainly do drive the system. But, people tend to load up with applications and leave them hanging around all the time (but most of that resides in swap space). "Derek D. Martin" wrote: > I have to disagree. While I think they may have had an influence, I > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. > They're the ones pushing the graphics accelerators into the gagillions > of pixels per nanosecond range... and the average home/business user > STILL has no need of anything more powerful than a Pentium 200MHz > running Windows 95. Except for games. - -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Exmh version 2.5 12/25/2001 iD8DBQE9WFwz+wA+1cUGHqkRAlu5AJ4gT+yh1+VyhmaQWpjlwQlMf61LIACggpL+ dBcVPS+/kWotBFGnhZiKwiE= =k+3p -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, at 8:36pm, Brenda A. Bell wrote: >> The 640 KB limit arose from the original IBM-PC design, circa 1980. >> Since the 8086 didn't even have a memory manager, hardware needed to be >> mapped directly into physical memory space, and IBM thought 640/384 was a >> good place to draw the line between software and "reserved" memory. > > Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I > believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need > more than 640K RAM in a personal computer". "640K should be enough for anybody" is widely attributed to Bill Gates. Since Bill actually had nothing to do with the 640/384 boundary, I suspect the remark is either (1) apocryphal (2) made off-hand. To put this in perspective, at the time the IBM-PC was introduced, 64 kilobytes was seen as a fairly good sized main memory for a home microcomputer. Ten times that might well inspire a "should be enough" remark. > As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe Redmond is > greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows > 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they > needed to to keep up. I think it is more correctly described as a positive feedback loop. Bigger software demands beefier hardware; more powerful hardware means software can grow larger. The process reinforces itself. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
Much goes back to the design of the 8088 chip and its implementation in the original PC. The larger onboard memory really required the 386 chip (although the 286 changed some stuff). The other limitation was DOS, which operated in realmode. Essentially, Windows 95 started the ball rolling on that. In Redmond's favor, any GUI is going to be somewhat of a memory hog. My programming background is on the old IBM mainframe's with 32K or on 4K PDP-8s. When memory is constrained, the programmer uses many memory saving tricks including using the subroutine return slots (on the 8) as temporary data stores or using an instruction as a mask. When the PC was designed, there was a rather small market. You had the Apple II with 16K, and a few other 8080, z80, m6800, or 6502. The PC used the 8088 (which is the 8 bit version of the newer 8086 line. Coming from 8 bits to 16 bits was a big move. "Brenda A. Bell" wrote: > Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I > believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need > more than 640K RAM in a personal computer". I don't think anyone knew > what was going to happen in this space. As much as I hate to give them > credit for anything, I believe Redmond is greatly responsible for the > kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people > wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up. -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Brenda A. Bell hath spake thusly: > Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I > believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need > more than 640K RAM in a personal computer". Actually that was Bill Gates... Except that he denies it. > As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe > Redmond is greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have > today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the > hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up. I have to disagree. While I think they may have had an influence, I think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry. They're the ones pushing the graphics accelerators into the gagillions of pixels per nanosecond range... and the average home/business user STILL has no need of anything more powerful than a Pentium 200MHz running Windows 95. Except for games. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9WFWIdjdlQoHP510RArLgAJ9ezBOJekE5kOrrk05wwtHwROzeKQCfdjtL VTCz1VHtQ43DOpHXcRKH3rs= =xxag -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: 'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)
> The 640 KB limit arose from the original IBM-PC design, > circa 1980. > Since the 8086 didn't even have a memory manager, hardware > needed to be > mapped directly into physical memory space, and IBM thought > 640/384 was a > good place to draw the line between software and "reserved" memory. Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need more than 640K RAM in a personal computer". I don't think anyone knew what was going to happen in this space. As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe Redmond is greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
