Tom,
it stands up very well, 1977 to 2023.
> On 5 Aug 2023, at 13:46, Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here's my summer activity report on my work porting V6 code to the Interdata, working closely under Steve and Dennis. I left before the nasty bug was discovered. (I think).
> https://akapugsblog.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/inter-unix_portability.pdf
--
So I've been studying the Interdata 32-bit machines a bit more closely lately and I'm wondering if someone who was there at the time has the scoop on what happened to them. The Wikipedia article gives some good info on their history but not really anything about, say, failed follow-ons that tanked their market, significant reasons for avoidance, or anything like that. I also find myself wondering why Bell didn't do anything with the Interdata work after springboarding further portability efforts while several other little streams, even those unreleased like the S/370 and 8086 ports seemed to stick around internally for longer. Were Interdata machines problematic in some sort of way, or was it merely fate, with more popular minis from DEC simply spacing them out of the market? Part of my interest too comes from what influence the legacy of Interdata may have had on Perkin-Elmer, as I've worked with Perkin-Elmer analytical equipment several times in the chemistry-side of my career and am curious if I was ever operating some vague descendent of Interdata designs in the embedded controllers in say one of my mass specs back when.
- Matt G.
P.S. Looking for more general history hence COFF, but towards a more UNIXy end, if there's any sort of missing scoop on the life and times of the Bell Interdata 8/32 port, for instance, whether it ever saw literally any production use in the System or was only ever on the machines being used for the portability work, I'm sure that could benefit from a CC to TUHS if that history winds up in this thread.
So as I was searching around for literature I came across someone selling a 2 volume set of Inferno manuals. I had never seen print manuals so decided to scoop them up, thinking they'd fit nicely with a 9front manual I just ordered too.
That said, I hate to just grab a book for it to sit on my shelf, so I want to explore Inferno once I've got literature in hand. Does anyone here know the best way of VMing Inferno these days, if I can just expect to find a copy of distribution media somewhere that'll work in VirtualBox or QEMU or if there's some particular "path of righteousness" I need to follow to successfully land in an Inferno environment.
Second, and I hope I don't spin up a debate with this, but is this something I'm investing good time in getting familiar with? I certainly don't hear as much about Inferno as I do about Plan9, but it does feel like it's one of the little puzzle pieces in this bigger picture of systems theory and development. Have there been any significant Inferno-adjacent developments or use cases in recent (past 10-15) years?
- Matt G.
I don't know if a thousand users ever logged in there at one time, but
they do tend to have a lot of simultaneous logins.
On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:16 PM Peter Pentchev <roam(a)ringlet.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > [bumping to COFF]
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking:
> [snip]
> > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues.
> > > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways?
> >
> > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior
> > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like,
> > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the
> > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to
> > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was
> > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one
> > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that.
> [snip]
> > For that matter, a
> > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With
> > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive.
>
> sdf.org (formerly sdf.lonestar.org) comes to mind...
>
> G'luck,
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Pentchev roam(a)ringlet.net roam(a)debian.org pp(a)storpool.com
> PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc
> Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
Howdy folks, I wanted to get some thoughts and experiences with regards to what sort of EOL handling of mainframe/mini hardware was typical. Part of this is to inform what and where to look for old hardware things.
So the details may differ with era, but what I'm curious about is back in the day, when a mainframe or mini was essentially decommissioned, what was more likely to be done with the central unit, and peripherals if they weren't forward compatible with that user's new system.
Were machines typically offloaded for money to smaller ops, or was it more common to simply dispose of/recycle components? As a more pointed example, if you worked in a shop that had IBM S/3x0, PDPs, larger 3B hardware, when those fell out of use, what was the protocol for getting rid of it? Were most machines "disposed of" in a complete way, or was it very typical to parts it out first, meaning most machines that reached EOL simply don't exist anymore, they weren't moved as a unit, rather, they're any number of independent parts floating around anywhere from individual collections to slowly decaying in a landfill somewhere.
My fear is that the latter was more common, as that's what I've seen in my lab days; old instrumentation wasn't just auctioned off or otherwise gotten rid of complete, we'd typically parts the things out resulting in a chassis and some of the paneling going in one waste stream, unsalvageable parts like burnt out boards going in another, and anything reusable like ribbon cables and controller boards being stashed to replace parts on their siblings in the lab. I dunno if this is apples to oranges though because the main instruments I'm thinking of, the HP/Agilent 5890, 6890, and 7890 series, had different lifespan expectations than computing systems had, and share a lot more of the under the hood components like solenoids and gas tubing systems, so that may not be a good comparison, just the closest one I have from my own personal experience.
Thoughts?
- Matt G.
