My Vintage Dream PC

[jmfbahciv]

You've never actually worked with actual core, have you, Grasshopper?

Actually, he doesn't know what a zero bit is.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Are you certain about that?

Nope but I was thinking about all the scanning that gets done
for security.

Today we have possibility to add millions
of gates just to protect the chips from unexpected events, radiation
for example. Altough the chips contain more and more transistors, the
FIT rates have not exploded. This has been achieved by designing
redundancy to the chips and also by fine-tuning the silicon process,
and better materials control (less alpha radiation).

The only catastrophic event from cosmic radiation is a latchup in the
cells, but that is very rare event, or nonexistent depending on the
process, wafer type and chip design.

And of course you could run two kernels in parallel, and switch from
active to passive if the active one notices problems in its environment.
This has been done for decades in telecoms equipment. Often it is
easier to notice the problem early enough to recover from it by doing
active/passive switchover than to fix the problem in HW for the active
kernel.

Will this gear survive a vacuum running near it?

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

G > Either approach can work if properly executed.

G > Wouldn't it already be difficult to find a new
G > PC that isn't a dual or quad processor?
G > The genie's already out of the bottle.

jmfbahciv > I played with one on a retail shelf. Managed
jmfbahciv > to kill it within 3 minutes.

Could you please be more specific?
Are you talking about one of those tiny
$300 notebook PC's running an Atom processor?

Gosh, I don't remember the hardware specs. It was
probably a year ago in BJ's. I don't remember seeing
the term Atom. And the price was maybe $600..perhaps
a tad more.

If you want to crash this stuff, play dumb and try to
find the hardware configurations. I'm a complete
dufus w.r.t. using GUI shit. So I try clicking here
and there just to get a listing of the hardware the
system has. Crashes every time I try to do this.
I still have no idea how I crash it (which bugs
me...I was paid to notice how to reproduce crashes).

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

You are more discussing a single system, i was discussing a
heterogeneous mixture of systems.

And we provided systems which anybody could use to do anything.

It included PCs, Unix based
engineering workstations, an IBM 3090 600J, dedicated text processors
based on i never knew what hardware, and making it all work together
around 1990 or so.

JMF's first job at DEC was to do a similar thing. That was 1970.
Most of the computing work to develop all of this was done on the
-10.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Yes you have. I basically come from the nuxi model.

It is kernel space in the *nix world.

In olden unix' world. I'm beginning to have some doubts based
on what's been written here. It looks like a lot of things
get put into the kernel which shouldn't be there (if I believe
everything I've been told).

Terminology is failing here.
It's not a confusion of terminology. It's more a confusion of
the software level a piece of code is executing. I run into
this confusion all the time. I think it's caused by people
assuming that Windows is the monitor. It never was.

MSwin never was much of a proper OS. Just remember that there are
more things claiming to be an OS besides Multics, RSTS, TOPS-10, VMS,
MVS, VM-CMS, Unix(es), and MSwin.

MS got Cutler's flavor of VMS and called NT. They started out with
a somewhat [emoticon's bias alert here] proper monitor but spoiled
it when Windows' developers had to have direct access to the
nether parts of the monitor.

/BAH

Yep, just like the ruined win 3.1 by insisting on embedding the 32-bit
mode within the GUI, and insisting on internals access.
More yet of the tiny basic mentality.

Nah. It got started a long time ago, when the founders of MS discovered
a listing of DAEMON.MAC (of TOPS-10) in a dumpster and believed they
had a listing of the TOPS-10 monitor when they read the comment
"Swappable part of TOPS-10 monitor". It was a user mode program
that ran with privs.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Please, i am still trying to work my way through the references you
have already provided. And i still have a day job.

Yea, I know.

/BAH

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

On Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:00:14 -0500,

Should have said:
And SEMICONDUCTOR memory may well come up in a random state.


RAM is just a bit generic.

Since you submitted a timely correction, we'll also overlook that "RAM
memory" is a parallel construction to "PIN number", "TCP protocol" or "LED
diode".

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

G > Either approach can work if properly executed.

G > Wouldn't it already be difficult to find a new
G > PC that isn't a dual or quad processor?
G > The genie's already out of the bottle.

jmfbahciv > I played with one on a retail shelf. Managed
jmfbahciv > to kill it within 3 minutes.

Could you please be more specific?
Are you talking about one of those tiny
$300 notebook PC's running an Atom processor?

Even that is hyperthreaded, is it not? -- so that the processor appears to
the operating system as two processors even though it has a single physical
core.

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

Nope. The extra pluses are to fool you into thinking it's faster...
than molasses in January in the Northern Hemisphere.

ObNewEnglandFolklore:

Ah, that would explain the similarity between C++ and the Great Molasses
Flood.


--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[jmfbahciv]

I suspect you and i are talking past each other. Expand some more on
the distribution thing. Especially, clarify how it is different from
the marketeering thing. I sure do not follow you yet.

If I'm doing OS development and I need a UUO which gives me access to
the nether regions of all customer systems so I can distribute a file
FOO.EXE, my proposal would be turned down by TOPS-10 but accepted by NT.
Assume that FOO.EXE is an executable that is required to run on
all systems.

NT has to make the tradeoff decision because their business is to
distribute FOO.EXE while TOPS-10's is to provide general timesharing to
users without allowing disasters to happen. Allowing someone outside
the customer site to copy any file at any time to any place was
considered a security risk.

/BAH

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

Actually, he doesn't know what a zero bit is.

Yes, that as well.

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

i've been blamed for computer conferencing on the internal network in
the late 70s and early 80s ...

the internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just
about the beginning until possibly late '85 or early '86 ... misc. past
posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

some old pictures including online at home between 77 & mid-80s (still
haven't found any pictures of online at home from early 70s):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#oldpicts

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#30 My Vintage Dream PC


Tech is the UK's industry of the future
http://www.itpro.co.uk/611188/tech-is-the-uk-s-industry-of-the-future

and computer conferencing is the new, new thing ...

Noel Quinn, head of commercial banking in the UK for HSBC, said:
“Industry, skills and technology such as social media and social
networking, created during economic hardship, are destined to become the
tools of the trade for many of tomorrow’s businesses.â€

.... snip ...

other related posts in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#31 My Vintage Dream PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#32 My Vintage Dream PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#34 My Vintage Dream PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#71 My Vintage Dream PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009h.html#74 My Vintage Dream PC

somewhat result of getting blamed for computering conferencing on the
internal network ... a researcher was paid to sit in the back of my
office and take notes on how I communicated; they also got copies of all
my incoming & outgoing email as well as logs of all my instant messages.
besides a corporate research report, it was also used for a stanford phd
thesis (joint between language and computer ai), as well as some number
of papers and books. misc. post posts related to computer mediated
communication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc

 

[Kim Enkovaara]

Nope but I was thinking about all the scanning that gets done
for security.

What scanning are you thinking about, virus scanning, memory
protections, memory scrubbing of what.

Will this gear survive a vacuum running near it?

That is more a question of how the equipment casing works and
how good the power supply is. To fullfill the EMC requirements
the equipment must not leak out radio frequency emissions and
that means that those don't leak in either.


--Kim

 

[Kim Enkovaara]

My observation is that the computing biz has cycles. What
I'm seeing now is what we saw in the 70s. The hardware
is too slow for customer needs so the software has to
compensate. Since hardware speeds were increased over

The hardware is faster than ever, the speed just comes in
different form. The machines are fast enough for most of the
users. How many users are actually complaining about the
computer speed anymore, maybe gamers and there the GPU is
more critical.

nobody had to write software well. Now that the hardware
is hitting a silicon ceiling, the focus is slowly, IMO,
going back to using software solutions to squeeze out
the extra performance.

The direction just shifts to parallelism, which is not that
familiar area for the software people. And there is still steam
left in the silicon area.

--Kim

 

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

Since you submitted a timely correction, we'll also overlook that "RAM
memory" is a parallel construction to "PIN number", "TCP protocol" or
"LED diode".

OTOH transistor transistor logic actually makes sense, not all
repetition is is wrong.

 

[Scott Lurndal]

As did OS/2 years ago. I think the file systems run in ring 2.

VMS ran the kernel in ring 0(K), the file systems in ring 1(E), the command
interpreter in ring 2(S) and user tasks in ring 3(U), IIRC.

scott

 

[Walter Bushell]

True, I've only done RTOSs and embedded systems. But timesharing is
dead.

Google among others are trying to revive it under the name of web
applications. Congratulations, you've just moved your business
processing and data off your computer and on to someone else's. Lot of
people used online services to back up their data and lost it. Your
working copy another copy on another disk on your computer, a backup on
a disk not normally connected and a copy in a safe deposit box, should
be enough for the average small business. Perhaps critical data could be
backed up on line in real time.

 

[Patrick Scheible]

Nope. The extra pluses are to fool you into thinking it's faster...
than molasses in January in the Northern Hemisphere.

Much like racing stripes on a 1980s Pontiac?

Actually, I don't think even C++'s proponents say it's faster to
compile or run. They hope it's faster or easier to write.

-- Patrick

 

[Patrick Scheible]

I will assume you're not enchanted with the present gear. So what do
you think OS architectures will be like ten or 20 years from now, when
multi-core is the norm?

I'm not sure more than 4 cores or so will really catch on. The
benefits seem so marginal, for ordinary use. For some games, maybe.
To achieve reliability for a 24x7 application, yes. For certain
applications that parallelize well, yes. But ordinary work isn't
waiting on CPU power much anyway, and typically doesn't parallelize
well anyway. Maybe you have a couple of large applications each
sitting on a core, another one for the OS and GUI, but after that I'm
not sure what there is for them to do.

-- Patrick

 

[Bill Pechter]

On Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:45:50 -0700, Archimedes' Lever

One instruction? - Pull Power Cord.

ALL ZEROS.

I win.

Nope.
True CORE memory holds its state across power failures.
And RAM memory may well come up in a random state.
--
ArarghMail905 at [drop the 'http://www.' from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html

To reply by email, remove the extra stuff from the reply address.

And most hardware initializes the ram to a known state (and on some it
does it to start out with good ECC).

Some to all one's... some to all zeros, some to the address of the ram written
to the ram as data.

bill