Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread G Mann via Mercedes
There is nothing wrong with Microsoft that a massive EMP strike could not fix in .0008 nano seconds. Perhaps, then it could be replaced with something that actually worked well and was not designed on bloated code that is based on work stolen, and then claimed as "new and better", but in

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Peter Frederick via Mercedes
Actually, what Gates bought was a technical reference clone of CPM (by Digital Research) modified to run on a 16 bit 8080 chip. Seattle Computing? Dont' remember the company, and I believe the guy who did the (illegal) clone is now dead. Flat-out copyright infringement that the Reagan

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Jim Cathey via Mercedes
> The problem was that traditionally spending a bunch of time optimizing code > was wasted time because you could just wait for the hardware to get faster... They always said that, but you don't have to spend much time optimizing to get the 10x benefits. It's getting that last 10% out that

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Jim Cathey via Mercedes
MS was notorious for rather poor code, on the whole. Excel was their first best-in-class product, if I recall. It came along rather late. MS specialized in 'good enough', but quickly, and high priced. Get there first, don't (quite) get thrown out the door due to shoddy workmanship, and

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Jim Cathey via Mercedes
> As I recall the story, a bastard-child division of IBM decided to produce > the PC using CPM for the disk operating system. But the folks that owned > CPM saw all those Big Blue dollar signs and got greedy. The story is well-known. Gary Kildall (only owner of CP/M) thought the day was too

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Scott Ritchey via Mercedes
As I recall the story, a bastard-child division of IBM decided to produce the PC using CPM for the disk operating system. But the folks that owned CPM saw all those Big Blue dollar signs and got greedy. In the meantime, Bill Gates had observed a demonstration of a disk operating system (forgot

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Peter Frederick via Mercedes
If you looked at the actual machine code all those many years ago when I was doing some piddly programming in C+, until it was optimized it was full of dead space filled with no-op opcodes (do nothing, skip to the next opcode) since the programming language set aside large amounts of data space

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Rick Knoble via Mercedes
>systems originally written for 8 bit processors (thank you Microsoft) >, if you remember the Millenium Bug scare (another product of Microsoft, by >the way, the issue was known in 1970 by the mainframe people and fixed), If nothing else, you now understand why I am sceptical of ANYTHING Bill

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Peter Frederick via Mercedes
Silicon reached it's speed limit more than a decade ago, and multi-core processors are limited by the overhead of managing tasks -- at some point the time needed to distribute and collect the processing threads is more than running them consecutively. I have also come to the conclusion that

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Peter Frederick via Mercedes
More to the point, it's too complicated to write much of anything in machine code anymore, due to the graphical interface, touch screen environment (plus all the bloatware). Software is orders of magnitude more complicated and difficult than hardware, and we are stuck for the foreseeable

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Allan Streib via Mercedes
Mostly BS by a guy trying to sell something. He's right about a few things, many modern systems are more complicated and bloated than they need to be -- precicsely because people buy into the sort of fad architectures that he himself is selling. Read "No Silver Bullet" essay by Fred Brooks.

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Curt Raymond via Mercedes
I listen to the "Retro Computing Roundtable", some time ago in one of their discussions they referenced the idea that optimizing code would improve the speed of an application some ridiculous amount, like 10x or more. The problem was that traditionally spending a bunch of time optimizing code

Re: [MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Jim Cathey via Mercedes
Silicon computing has reached a plateau. They can continue to multi-core things, but software cannot be multi-cored easily, or very thoroughly. The current performance limit IS software efficiency. Current high-end desktop hardware would be able to serve thousands of users simultaneously, IF

[MBZ] OT The next IT revolution: System Oriented Programming?

2021-02-24 Thread Meade Dillon via Mercedes
Dan and others in the IT field, Is this a thing? https://www.softwarebusinessgrowth.com/doc/end-of-silicon-era-is-at-hand-software-about-to-change-in-big-way-0001 By Jay Valentine, ContingencySales.com Moore’s Law means hardware gets about twice as fast every 24 months as chips can have smaller