My Vintage Dream PC

[Walter Bushell]

John Larkin wrote:

No offense (well, not much) it's surprising that you seem to have no
idea how big the monitor might be. Core was a precious resource in
those days. [1]

John

[1] I remember when IBM made a big deal over getting the price of core
down to $50,000 per megabyte. PDP-11 core cost about a dollar per
word.

Things have changed, when I was like in first grade television was a
marvel. I was the first kid on the block to have it. My parent's TV was
still the same until like two years after I graduated college when I
bought them a color TV, giant 19" over $350 in 1968 dollars.

And IIRC that was a very good price at the time. Late enough to be
(not so?) new "square tube" type.

It was IIRC a lot more square than the 13" set, it replaced. Going from
13" B&W to 19" color is a big step. My father commented that he could
really follow the football games better in color.

In the department of lost skills, I replaced vacuum tubes at least twice
in that thing. Wippersnapers don't know anything about that, but every
drug store had a tube tester, but not every one knew that if there were
two tubes of the same kind one had to mark them so as to replace them in
there respective old sockets.

 

[Walter Bushell]

Hopefully, that was a trinitron tube, the one gave you good picture!
I really hated those color tubes because they charged so much
voltage inside compared to black-and-white tubes. And if you were
not careful enough, the jolt literally went through your finger,
leaving phisical traces.

Atsunori

No, I wasn't exactly going for the top of the line, like my father when
he bought the giant 12" screen B&W.

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

And you trust your entire code base to this?

Absolutely. Non-commercial VCSs do this, too.

 

[Patrick Scheible]

=20
JosephKK wrote:

=3D20
StickThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt wrote:


I did not say that it was required, i said the a working network
connection would solve the wrong time entry at IPL time real easy.
Besides, how do most of the users talk to the "big iron" other than
the net these days?

It depends on the "big iron's" job. Some are isolated on no network
or a LAN that is isolated from the internet on purpose as a security
measure.

The previous point was that sometimes that date and time are set
incorrectly and that fouls up CPU voting to determine which is
correct. While starting NTP automatically at boot reduces the chance
of that happening it doesn't prevent it altogether.

-- Patrick

 

[Patrick Scheible]

Sounds like VAX VMS. Doesn't mean that it is though.

Several systems did it that way. TOPS-20 did it before VMS, but I
wouldn't be surprised if other system did it before TOPS-20.

If the Unix filesystem kept several previous versions automatically
like VMS and TOPS-20, there would have been much less motivation to
develop version control systems.

-- Patrick

 

[Rich Grise]

The hairier ones are

Oh, there are code "bugs", but I'd call them blunders or just plain
negligence on the part of the code writer.

Windows is famous for unchecked buffer problems. That is, I think, a
"local" problem. Nobody should do a memcpy without knowing what is
going where and whether it will fit.

The operative word here, of course, being "should".

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Recursive insanity. No wonder we live in the Dark Ages of computing.

Just a matter of using the computer to do the things it does better than
people (ie, bookkeeping)

 

[Scott Lurndal]

Recursive insanity. No wonder we live in the Dark Ages of computing.

You do know that the C compiler is actually written in C, don't you?

Why shouldn't a version control system be used to manage itself,
once it is past the bootstrap stage?

I'd have no problem using CVS to host the CVS source base (although
many may prefer SVN instead).

I've code from the 80's still under RCS/CVS control and have no problem
accessing it twenty years later.

scott

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

It was IIRC a lot more square than the 13" set, it replaced. Going from
13" B&W to 19" color is a big step. My father commented that he could
really follow the football games better in color.

If you have ever seen a late sixties early seventies NFL football
highlight reel, you would declare "How did I ever even watch that crap?"
The video quality is so bad.

I still remember seeing my first OTA NFL game on HD broadcast on an
HDTV CRT. One could count the number of grams of grass stain was
embedded in a jersey. One was lucky to be able to count yard markers
back in the early days.

Folks these days have it made.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Recursive insanity. No wonder we live in the Dark Ages of computing.

John

I think it is you that is stuck in a recursive loop of not knowing how
things are done outside your little JohnnyWorld.

 

[Rich Grise]

Just a matter of using the computer to do the things it does better than
people (ie, bookkeeping)

If you can't do it on paper[1], you can't do it on a computer! ;-)

Cheers!
Rich
[1] given an arbitrary amount of time, of course.

 

[Rich Grise]

It's more like wanting a computer to automate things that the
programmers don't want to be bothered with (ie, discipline and
responsibility.)

"Discipline, comrades, iron discipline!"
-- George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

Or, "Who's responsible for this disaster?"
-- Almost Everybody

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Actually, there are newsgroups dedicated to repairing and restoring
tube based equipment. There are also chatrooms and private groups
around. is one of the oldest. A member
is in the process of restoring a set with the RCA CTC-11 chassis.

Things may well migrate to IRC chat rooms.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

It's more like wanting a computer to automate things that the
programmers don't want to be bothered with (ie, discipline and
responsibility.)


John

You should learn some of the things Einstein stated.

Don't clutter your mind, Johnny.

 

[Peter Flass]

[snip...] [snip...] [snip...]

At a PPOE, I had spent half a day making changes to a FORTRAN program
on a Harris 800 system. Then I accidentally deleted the source
file. (When you delete using a wildcard in the filename, you can
sometimes hurt yourself.) I could get the back-up from the previous
day, but then I would lose half-a-day's work.
How do you should yourself in foot in a Unix shell?
% rm * .o
rm: cannot remove `.o': No such file or directory

I'm *not* sure what you mean here. The Harris 800 system was running
the Vulcan operating system; quite different from a Unix shell.

If it had been 'rm *.o', it would have been "remove every file in the
directory ending in .o" -- in other words, all the object files. But
since it was 'rm * .o' (with a space between the * and the .o), it says
"remove every file in the directory, and the file named .o". The second
line is the system responding that there is no file named .o, which is
how you know you just shot yourself in the foot.

Now-a-says, I will do a "directory" command using the wild card to see
what files come up. Only then will I use the wild card filename to
delete files.

Subject to the same typo, unfortunately.

Yes, but at least you can up-arrow and just replace the "ls" by "rm".

I did this once on DOS, it even asked "are you sure?", but by the time I
realized what I was doing my fingers had already done it. I still cringe.

 

[Peter Flass]

Sounds like VAX VMS. Doesn't mean that it is though.

I thought that's what I replying to, but I may have misread.

 

[Peter Flass]

=20
JosephKK wrote:


It depends on the "big iron's" job. Some are isolated on no network
or a LAN that is isolated from the internet on purpose as a security
measure.

Usually a re-IPL would be the way to go.

 

[Peter Flass]

If the Unix filesystem kept several previous versions automatically
like VMS and TOPS-20, there would have been much less motivation to
develop version control systems.

There is no *the* unix filesystem. There's no reason why *a* unix
filesystem couldn't be written to do this. I'd certainly like to see it
done.

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

There is no *the* unix filesystem. There's no reason why *a* unix
filesystem couldn't be written to do this. I'd certainly like to see
it done.

I don't remember if I've mentioned before that I've got a student
working on a FUSE filesystem on top of SVN. Looks like it's going to be
*really* slick when he's got it done.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Show us some code that you've written.

Excel sheets don't count.

John

This is not about code segments, Johnny. It is about computing and
programming paradigms.