Re: Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Antonio Carlini via cctalk]

On 16/07/2020 22:38, Josh Dersch via cctalk wrote:

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 2:11 PM Glen Slick via cctalk 
wrote:



Obviously now you need to pick up a VAX 8000 system.


That does seem to be the most logical next step, yes :).

- Josh



I think I have a load board for one somewhere ... No idea how I got it, 
but if you end with with a VAX 8000 before I do, let me know and we can 
cut a deal :-)



Antonio

--
Antonio Carlini
anto...@acarlini.com

Re: Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Josh Dersch via cctalk]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 2:11 PM Glen Slick via cctalk 
wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:42 PM Josh Dersch via cctalk
>  wrote:
> >
> > I think I may have answered my own question here; looks like it's for a
> VAX
> > 8000 series:
> >
> > https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VAX_8000
> > <
> https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VAX_8000?fbclid=IwAR3QoE8s_7NE3ILHqMIuxGHJ4m_qR_TXn_J5jrczGVtbD8sPY8tWvhPjSzw
> >
> >
>
> Obviously now you need to pick up a VAX 8000 system.
>

That does seem to be the most logical next step, yes :).

- Josh

Re: Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Glen Slick via cctalk]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:42 PM Josh Dersch via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I think I may have answered my own question here; looks like it's for a VAX
> 8000 series:
>
> https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VAX_8000
> 
>

Obviously now you need to pick up a VAX 8000 system.

Re: Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Ethan Dicks via cctalk]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 4:42 PM Josh Dersch via cctalk
 wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:34 PM Josh Dersch  wrote:
> > Picked up a board advertised as a "4mb memory board" for a VAX-11/750...
>
> I think I may have answered my own question here; looks like it's for a VAX
> 8000 series:

That makes more sense than a board that replaces the memory controller.

IIRC, the 11/750 has an architectural limit of 14MB of RAM, but that
might just be because of 8 memory slots (individual select lines), the
implementation of the L0016 memory controller, and that's what you can
hit with 2X 4MB boards + 6X 1MB boards.  I _think_ if you could have
gone to 16MB of RAM, DEC might have made a memory controller that
could control 3X 4MB boards + 4x 1MB boards or 4X 4MB boards, but they
did not.

I installed the extra memory line wire on the backplane of our 2MB
11/750 (and installed the L0011), but we never made that final jump
from L0011 -> L0016.  By the time that was available, we weren't going
to spend that kind of money on that machine.  It still has 8MB to this
day.

-ethan

Re: Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Josh Dersch via cctalk]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:34 PM Josh Dersch  wrote:

> Hi all --
>
> Picked up a board advertised as a "4mb memory board" for a VAX-11/750.
> It's made by Dataram and I'm unsure of the model number, based on photos of
> it.  I just noticed that rather than being a hex-height board that goes in
> the memory backplane, it looks like a board that goes in the main CMI
> backplane.  It also appears to have 16mb of ECC memory on it, rather than
> 4mb.
>
> My thought is either (1) it's not actually for an 11/750 (in which case
> I'm curious what it would go into), or (2) it completely replaces the
> memory controller and standard memory and gives you 16mb in the 750.  (Or
> it could be that it's something else entirely.)
>
> If anyone has any ideas or has a source of information, let me know.  I
> put up a few pictures here:
>
> http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/dataram/
>
> Thanks as always,
> - Josh
>

I think I may have answered my own question here; looks like it's for a VAX
8000 series:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/VAX_8000


- Josh

Help identifying mystery Dataram VAX-11/750 (?) board

[Josh Dersch via cctalk]

Hi all --

Picked up a board advertised as a "4mb memory board" for a VAX-11/750.
It's made by Dataram and I'm unsure of the model number, based on photos of
it.  I just noticed that rather than being a hex-height board that goes in
the memory backplane, it looks like a board that goes in the main CMI
backplane.  It also appears to have 16mb of ECC memory on it, rather than
4mb.

My thought is either (1) it's not actually for an 11/750 (in which case I'm
curious what it would go into), or (2) it completely replaces the memory
controller and standard memory and gives you 16mb in the 750.  (Or it could
be that it's something else entirely.)

If anyone has any ideas or has a source of information, let me know.  I put
up a few pictures here:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/dataram/

Thanks as always,
- Josh

RE: System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Ali via cctalk]

> 
> Please elaborate on what you mean by "the full server OS".

MS LanMan was Microsoft's networking OS of choice before NT. The base OS I 
believe was based on MS OS/2 1.31. 

Wiki has some more info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_Manager

I have a copy of it somewhere. Here is a picture of the package: 
3.bp.blogspot.com/-KaapV596wY0/WLSlOaIjSJI/AdU/VNNQtD-iqjs7ZkvuQGqD7-vP0vmFbQfUwCLcB/s1600/s-l300.jpg

-Ali

RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Ali via cctalk]

 
> Are you sure that was RAID 0 (zero), /striping/?  I've never heard of
> /software/ RAID 0 (striping) for the /boot/ drive in Windows.  I would
> expect that to be RAID 1 or something other than the drive with
> NTLDR.EXE on it.  I also suspect that the drive with %SystemRoot% on it
> would need to more conducive to loading driver and software RAID
> support
> files very early in the boot process.

Absolutely correct. Proof reading good ;)! It was RAID 1.


> That's one of the reasons that ZFS supports three drives worth of
> redundancy in addition to the data space.  RAID Z1 / Z2 / Z3.
> 

Interesting. Is there an official RAID level for three drive parity? The Areca 
controllers do combined levels (e.g. 60 for two RAID 6 arrays stripped) but I 
don't think they do mirroring of parity RAID levels.

> I think that the CPU overhead / computation time is now largely
> insignificant.  To me, one of the biggest issues is the simple massing
> amount of data that needs to be read from and written to multiple
> drives.  At full interface speed, some drives can take a LONG time to
> transfer all the data.  What's worse is the sustained I/O speed to
> platters of spinning rust being significantly slower than the interface
> speed.

True. That is one of the points the article makes too. Basically, you can't get 
the data fast enough but that would be inherent in both SW and HW 
implementations. The only way to overcome that is to use SSDs I would think.


> Only have a few hundred GB on that multi TB RAID array
> consisteng of multipel 1 TB drives?  Fine.  Only need to check the few
> hundred GB.  It's actually quite fast.


That is nice. I may have to look at it next time I do a RAID implementation. 

-Ali

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Peter Corlett via cctalk]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 08:52:16AM -0700, Ali via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> This is an article (for the layman) written in 2010 predicting the lack of
> usability of RAID 6 by 2019:
> www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/. I found the math in
> it interesting and the conclusions pretty true to my experience.

The author screwed up his maths and also made faulty assumptions.

The article states that "SATA drives are commonly specified with an
unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every
200,000,000 sectors, the disk will not be able to read a sector." and then "2
hundred million sectors is about 12 terabytes." It seems he is using a sector
size of 64kiB. Standard SATA disks have 4kiB sectors.

"At that point the RAID reconstruction stops". Maybe on his garbage hardware
RAID controller with 64kiB stripes which chokes on a single-bit error in a
stripe because it's too dumb to figure out which disk is lying. ZFS is somewhat
smarter than that.

> I am wondering if SW RAID is faster in rebuild times by now (using the full
> power of the multi-core processors) vs. a dedicated HW controller (even one
> with dual cores).

Not only is software RAID faster now, but this has been the case for at least
15 years. The necessary calculations are trivially vectorisable and are usually
limited by memory bandwidth. Which is several orders of magnitude faster than a
hard disk.

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Grant Taylor via cctalk]

On 7/16/20 9:52 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote:
I have never used a SW RAID solution (except for a RAID 0 on Win2K3 for 
the boot drive)


Are you sure that was RAID 0 (zero), /striping/?  I've never heard of 
/software/ RAID 0 (striping) for the /boot/ drive in Windows.  I would 
expect that to be RAID 1 or something other than the drive with 
NTLDR.EXE on it.  I also suspect that the drive with %SystemRoot% on it 
would need to more conducive to loading driver and software RAID support 
files very early in the boot process.


and have used HW controllers in my more recent systems (I am particular 
to the Areca Controllers - cheap but effective with a good feature 
mix).


I've completely lost track of hardware RAID controllers.  I'm now more 
interested in I.T. HBA controllers to use with ZFS based software RAID.


What I find problematic with RAID (specially RAID 6) is that with 
the larger drives we have in use today build (or more importantly 
rebuild/recovery) times are extremely long. Long enough that you 
could have a second drive failure during that time based on statistics.


That's one of the reasons that ZFS supports three drives worth of 
redundancy in addition to the data space.  RAID Z1 / Z2 / Z3.


I think we are quickly getting to the point, if not past it, where a 
/single/ RAID array can't safely hold the entirety of the necessary 
storage.  Instead, I see multiple smaller RAID arrays aggregated 
together at a higher layer.


I've seen this done by striping / JBODing / LVMing / etc. multiple 
discrete RAID arrays together in the OS.


ZFS natively does this by striping (RAID 0) across multiple underlying 
RAID sets (of whatever RAID level you want).


This is an article (for the layman) written in 2010 
predicting the lack of usability of RAID 6 by 2019: 
www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/. I found 
the math in it interesting and the conclusions pretty true to my 
experience.


I am wondering if SW RAID is faster in rebuild times by now (using the 
full power of the multi-core processors) vs. a dedicated HW controller 
(even one with dual cores).


I think that the CPU overhead / computation time is now largely 
insignificant.  To me, one of the biggest issues is the simple massing 
amount of data that needs to be read from and written to multiple 
drives.  At full interface speed, some drives can take a LONG time to 
transfer all the data.  What's worse is the sustained I/O speed to 
platters of spinning rust being significantly slower than the interface 
speed.


This is where some intelligence in the RAID implementation is really 
nice.  There is very little need to rebuild the yet unused area of a big 
RAID array.  ZFS shines in this as it only (re)builds the area that has 
any data on it.  Only have a few hundred GB on that multi TB RAID array 
consisteng of multipel 1 TB drives?  Fine.  Only need to check the few 
hundred GB.  It's actually quite fast.




--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Grant Taylor via cctalk]

On 7/16/20 9:40 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote:

there was even a version of MS LanMan (the full server OS not the client)


Please elaborate on what you mean by "the full server OS".

My understanding is that Microsoft LAN Manager was an /add-on/ product 
that could be installed /on/ /top/ /of/ an /existing/ server OS.  I've 
seen MS LAN Man in associateion with DOS, Windows (3.x / NT), and OS/2.


There is also IBM LAN Manager.  I can't articulate the differences 
between IBM and Microsoft LAN Manager.  Much like I can't articulate the 
differences between IBM OS/2 and Microsoft OS/2.




--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

NCR 3550 Digital Library Was Re: System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Chris Zach via cctalk]

Now in terms of the most MANLY system I worked on, that would be the 
NCR3550 we had at the IEEE Computer Society. When I arrived in 1993 it 
had been donated, but was doing nothing with 4 486 CPUs in it and a 
weird copy of AT unix. I took one look at the 256 bit interleaved 
memory architecture the 3 levels of cache with affinity, the infinite 
amount of space for disks, and the dual micro-channel busses and fell in 
*love*


We talked to NCR, upgraded it to 512mb memory, 8 Pentium Pro/200 CPUs, 
and dual Microchannel busses with FDDI and Ethernet interfaces. Loaded 
it with disks, installed Windows NT 4.0 on it, and turned it into TALOS, 
the main server for the IEEE Computer Society's Digital Library (which I 
built).


Partnered with Anderson and Netscape to multi-thread commerce server 
(SSL), built an E-account system in Lotus Domino/Notes, and loaded up 
all of our SGML with an SGML to HTML converter (Dynaweb) and a custom 
tool that could convert Tek math to GIFs on the fly. That process could 
take advantage of all 8 CPUs and render complex math articles in real time.


Also did e-commerce for awhile with online credit card processing for 
memberships and conferences (SuperComputing/95 was the first conference 
to do on-line credit cards, I built that too because I was sick and 
tired of keying in the cards myself. Laziness is next to godliness)


It served for years as the CS Digital Library core server with 
30,000-40,000 accounts in active use. Man that thing was a truck, I wish 
I knew what had happened to it.


And to think, it all started with the computer room ceiling collapsing 
from all the RS232 cables from the Vax and crushing our Sun Sparc 20 web 
server that kicked off this whole thing.


I should write a book or an article about that. We did so much that was 
so... new... and all of that could be forgotten like tears in the rain


CZ

On 7/16/2020 11:40 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote:

  Had a full compliment of memory,
max internal disk on the ATA controller,


ATA? That long ago?

Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.


Funny story about that - I just setup a Systempro XL at home to play with. It 
is fully decked out w/ dual processor 50MHZ 486s (not DX2), 512MB of memory, a 
4GB SCSI Boot Drive and six 2GB SCSI drives in RAID 5. The Compaq systems came 
standard with what Compaq called the IDA (Intelligent Drive Array). It was IDE 
based but did not use standard IDE drives. I think it could do RAID 0, 1, and 3 
(or the equivalents there of). Compaq even had a few iterations of the 
controller and cached ones. Interestingly the Systempro XL had a SCSI 2 
controller on the MB mainly used for the tape dive or CD while the base config 
came with an IDA 2 controller and could have up to eight drives. In addition 
you could install extra IDA controllers for even more drives or to drive 
external boxes. Or you could upgrade to a SCSI array - which is what I have 
running in my Systempro XL.




What OS, just out of interest?


Target OS was WinNT 3.1 initially and then 4.0. 2K was also supported but the 
machine really was not meant for 2k. You could also run OS/2, Novell Netware, 
Compaq DOS, and supposedly there was even a version of MS LanMan (the full 
server OS not the client) for the Systempro that allowed SMP.

-Ali

RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Ali via cctalk]

> With modern hardware, it's easier, cheaper and more flexible to build
> and manage arrays in software, using modern filesystems such as ZFS,
> Btrfs, or MS Storage Spaces on Windows Server.

I have never used a SW RAID solution (except for a RAID 0 on Win2K3 for the 
boot drive) and have used HW controllers in my more recent systems (I am 
particular to the Areca Controllers - cheap but effective with a good feature 
mix). What I find problematic with RAID (specially RAID 6) is that with the 
larger drives we have in use today build (or more importantly rebuild/recovery) 
times are extremely long. Long enough that you could have a second drive 
failure during that time based on statistics. 

This is an article (for the layman) written in 2010 predicting the lack of 
usability of RAID 6 by 2019: 
www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/. I found the math in it 
interesting and the conclusions pretty true to my experience. 

I am wondering if SW RAID is faster in rebuild times by now (using the full 
power of the multi-core processors) vs. a dedicated HW controller (even one 
with dual cores).

-Ali

System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Ali via cctalk]

> >  Had a full compliment of memory,
> > max internal disk on the ATA controller,
> 
> ATA? That long ago?
> 
> Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.

Funny story about that - I just setup a Systempro XL at home to play with. It 
is fully decked out w/ dual processor 50MHZ 486s (not DX2), 512MB of memory, a 
4GB SCSI Boot Drive and six 2GB SCSI drives in RAID 5. The Compaq systems came 
standard with what Compaq called the IDA (Intelligent Drive Array). It was IDE 
based but did not use standard IDE drives. I think it could do RAID 0, 1, and 3 
(or the equivalents there of). Compaq even had a few iterations of the 
controller and cached ones. Interestingly the Systempro XL had a SCSI 2 
controller on the MB mainly used for the tape dive or CD while the base config 
came with an IDA 2 controller and could have up to eight drives. In addition 
you could install extra IDA controllers for even more drives or to drive 
external boxes. Or you could upgrade to a SCSI array - which is what I have 
running in my Systempro XL.


> 
> What OS, just out of interest?

Target OS was WinNT 3.1 initially and then 4.0. 2K was also supported but the 
machine really was not meant for 2k. You could also run OS/2, Novell Netware, 
Compaq DOS, and supposedly there was even a version of MS LanMan (the full 
server OS not the client) for the Systempro that allowed SMP.

-Ali

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Chris Zach via cctalk]

ATA? That long ago?


Sorry, IDE like. Forgot the terminology. You could put 4 drives on a 
controller, then two controllers per unit (EISA was cool).



Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.

What OS, just out of interest?


I think it was SCO Unix.


A single box? Oh dear.


We were so silly back then :-)


I've had catastrophic hardware failures, but luckily, none that took
out a RAID controller. I've just heard the horror stories.


I remember pulling it. There was a hole where one of the ASIC chips was. 
Pretty amazing to be honest, but oh well. Compaq took it back to the 
factory for review.



I finally left the support business in about 2011, but by then, it was
fairly standard practice to install VMware (the free VMware ESX
hypervisor if the company didn't have a paid vSphere site licence) on
all new boxes, then install the OS in that. Even if it was a dedicated
machine that only ran 1 OS ever. Because that way, if the machine
died, you could restore the backup onto a new, totally different box,
so long as it was running ESX, and it would Just Work™ with no driver
or activation issues -- the virtualised hardware was the same.


VMWare was *great*. I started using it on a small IBM box, then once I 
realized it was like a true mainframe OS we bought a pair of IBM 366's 
and a DS4300 SAN. Then upgraded the CPUs on them (4 CPUs). Then a set of 
DS4700 SANs (redundant arrays of arrays with 2 controllers per array). 
Then got a third so we could always run 2/3 of the cluster as opposed to 
50% (for failover, see SystemPro). Then 3850's and 3950's with QPI 
memory sharing. God that worked, I was able to get 70-80 servers per box 
running away


Much cheaper to run systems there than in the cloud. But everyone loves 
the cloud, so off we go.


C

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Grant Taylor via cctalk]

On 7/16/20 5:36 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:

It gets very complicated but it's also very powerful and flexible.
Dedicated hardware just can't do stuff like this any more.


I largely agree for data stored on the systems.

However, PCs and compatibles, have long had an issue /reliably/ booting 
across multiple drives.  Especially with a soft failure on the primary 
boot device.


As such, I find it much more convenient to have a hardware RAID 
controller for at least the OS boot files.  Then use all the fancy 
feautes like you mention for data files.




--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2020 at 14:09, Chris Zach via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Funny story about that: In 1990 I installed a Compaq systempro for
> Hechinger's that cost over $100,000.

I just about remember the SystemPro machines. One of my bigger clients
in my first job got one, but they hired a full-time guy to customise
their app for it, and he also became the sysadmin. A very early
example of devops, I suppose. So I never got to play around with it.
:-(

>  Had a full compliment of memory,
> max internal disk on the ATA controller,

ATA? That long ago?

Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.

What OS, just out of interest?

> and two external boxes of disks
> with the smart SCSI-ish controller. Massive system running Sybase SQL.
> Designed to replace a 24*7 mainframe and expected to be up all the time.

A single box? Oh dear.

> Got a call 2 months later: The system had blown a hole in one of the
> disk controllers and was down. Called Compaq, they got someone on a
> plane with a spare controller from the west coast and I drove out to
> meet them in the middle of the night so we could get the system up by
> morning.
>
> That was pretty insane. And pointed out that "mainframe" PC's didn't
> have anywhere near the redundancy or support of true mainframes.

Oh yes indeed.

I've had catastrophic hardware failures, but luckily, none that took
out a RAID controller. I've just heard the horror stories.

I finally left the support business in about 2011, but by then, it was
fairly standard practice to install VMware (the free VMware ESX
hypervisor if the company didn't have a paid vSphere site licence) on
all new boxes, then install the OS in that. Even if it was a dedicated
machine that only ran 1 OS ever. Because that way, if the machine
died, you could restore the backup onto a new, totally different box,
so long as it was running ESX, and it would Just Work™ with no driver
or activation issues -- the virtualised hardware was the same.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Chris Zach via cctalk]

And of course, if your server dies, then the array can be mounted on
any other box with the same OS and you can retrieve data from it --
which is far more difficult if a hardware RAID controller dies, in
which case you might need the same firmware revision etc., and
possibly onboard controller config info.


Funny story about that: In 1990 I installed a Compaq systempro for 
Hechinger's that cost over $100,000. Had a full compliment of memory, 
max internal disk on the ATA controller, and two external boxes of disks 
with the smart SCSI-ish controller. Massive system running Sybase SQL. 
Designed to replace a 24*7 mainframe and expected to be up all the time.


Got a call 2 months later: The system had blown a hole in one of the 
disk controllers and was down. Called Compaq, they got someone on a 
plane with a spare controller from the west coast and I drove out to 
meet them in the middle of the night so we could get the system up by 
morning.


That was pretty insane. And pointed out that "mainframe" PC's didn't 
have anywhere near the redundancy or support of true mainframes.


C

Re: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Liam Proven via cctalk]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 at 22:09, Ali via cctalk  wrote:
>
> > There is no good use case for them in 2020, which is why they're all
> > suddenly
> > quite cheap.
>
> Peter,
>
> Why do you say that? Not disagreeing per se but just wondering the reasoning
> behind it.

Happily for me I don't do stuff like build production servers any
more, but my understanding is this:

With modern hardware, it's easier, cheaper and more flexible to build
and manage arrays in software, using modern filesystems such as ZFS,
Btrfs, or MS Storage Spaces on Windows Server.

I was recently documenting the use of Btrfs for this on SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server: the benefits of doing it in software are that you
can dynamically migrate arrays between different RAID levels, add new
drives and resize the array to include them or add them as additional
parity disks on the fly, you can mark individual files as having
different RAID levels (for example, you could place the OS' virtual
memory space in a file on the RAID and tell the filesystem not to
compute parity for it, just stripe it, for better performance). ZFS
and Ceph allow for a mix of high-speed (e.g. SSD, NVMe, even NVDIMM)
storage and low-speed but large rotational storage, and use the faster
storage to cache the slower stuff.

And of course, if your server dies, then the array can be mounted on
any other box with the same OS and you can retrieve data from it --
which is far more difficult if a hardware RAID controller dies, in
which case you might need the same firmware revision etc., and
possibly onboard controller config info.

Ceph now basically lets you build arrays of storage servers, so that
you can, say, have single storage volumes comprising local storage in
different countries, or on different continents, for local access
speed and the software syncs it in the background between zones or
regions. So it's no longer an array of physical disks on one server,
it's an array of servers with disks in them -- and the servers and the
disks may themselves be virtualised.

It gets very complicated but it's also very powerful and flexible.
Dedicated hardware just can't do stuff like this any more.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Re: Small C ver 1.00 source?

[Will Cooke via cctalk]

> On July 16, 2020 at 1:57 AM Tomasz Rola  wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 02:30:37PM -0400, Phil Budne via cctalk wrote:> I 
> can't make ANY assertions about version or pedigree of the files(which came 
> to me in 1981 when I was using a PDP-10), but they APPEARto be from Ron Cain 
> himself, from SRI-KL (TOPS-20):
> > ftp://ftp.ultimate.com/pdp10/c80.tar.gz
> > Which contains runtime files from November 1979, and compiler filesdated 
> > June 1981.By pure coincidence I have found the page with many versions of 
> > SmallC. Just in case someone needs them:
> http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c.html
> And this one is claimed to be "SMALL C converted to the 8088 by Bytemagazine":
> http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c/smc88dos.zip
> --Regards,Tomasz Rola
> --** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  As the 
> answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home  directory. And 
> then the C programmer became enlightened...   Tomasz Rola 
> mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **


Hi Tomasz,
Thanks for the link.  I had seen that page but as Jim Stephens mentioned in his 
reply I was looking for the original 8080 version.  Thanks to him and Phil 
Budne I now have it.  They separately provided identical copies that had 
apparently come directly from Ron Cain.  There is also a copy on github that 
was apparently OCRed and corrected.  I am comparing it now to the others.

I intend to create a page on my website dedicated to Small C.  I will include 
the original source and probably a few other interesting ports if anyone is 
interested.  I do think this is an important piece of historical software that 
should be preserved.

Thanks for finding that!
Will

Re: Small C ver 1.00 source?

[jim stephens via cctalk]

On 7/15/2020 11:57 PM, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 02:30:37PM -0400, Phil Budne via cctalk wrote:

I can't make ANY assertions about version or pedigree of the files
(which came to me in 1981 when I was using a PDP-10), but they APPEAR
to be from Ron Cain himself, from SRI-KL (TOPS-20):

ftp://ftp.ultimate.com/pdp10/c80.tar.gz

Which contains runtime files from November 1979, and compiler files
dated June 1981.

By pure coincidence I have found the page with many versions of Small
C. Just in case someone needs them:

http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c.html
This pages V1.0 "Plus" is the first version, but converted to z80. The 
OP was hunting for the 8080 original.


I think this was posted earlier, but thanks for finding.


And this one is claimed to be "SMALL C converted to the 8088 by Byte
magazine":

http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c/smc88dos.zip


I don't know where I got that one, but looks like I grabbed it in 2009.

Thanks to all who responded.  I did a cross port of this compiler to a 
system I had in about 79 or so, when it first came out, and I'm 
interested in it  since it's the first compiler I ever messed with porting.


I sent Will Cook my copies of the 8080, and will let him follow up on 
it.  I've got both the 8080 original source and a version that will run 
on a CPM system or emulator.  I may have to redo my exercise now that 
I've got an emulation of the original system, as well as a CPM system 
emulation.


Thanks
Jim

Re: Small C ver 1.00 source?

[Tomasz Rola via cctalk]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 02:30:37PM -0400, Phil Budne via cctalk wrote:
> I can't make ANY assertions about version or pedigree of the files
> (which came to me in 1981 when I was using a PDP-10), but they APPEAR
> to be from Ron Cain himself, from SRI-KL (TOPS-20):
> 
> ftp://ftp.ultimate.com/pdp10/c80.tar.gz
> 
> Which contains runtime files from November 1979, and compiler files
> dated June 1981.

By pure coincidence I have found the page with many versions of Small
C. Just in case someone needs them:

http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c.html

And this one is claimed to be "SMALL C converted to the 8088 by Byte
magazine":

http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c/smc88dos.zip

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **