- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dan Cross

He announced it on Twitter. I'm sure we all wish him well and a speedy recovery. Note, his tweet says that he is recovering. https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?s=20

4 years, 1 month

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On the rise and fall of Gopher

by Michael Kjörling

The EFF just published an article on the rise and fall of Gopher on their Deeplinks blog. "Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperabil… I thought it might be of interest to people here. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

4 years, 1 month

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The Z3

by Dave Horsfall

A bit of history: on this day in 1941, Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin. Pity it got destroyed when the joint was bombed... -- Dave

4 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Genix / early 80's VM variants

by Tony Finch

[ COFF not TUHS ] Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 3:58 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > > > National couldn't get it together to produce bug free chips or maybe > > we'd all be running that, pretty nice architecture (in theory). > > I've always wondered if a Nat Semi NS32016 based system running in a PC/AT > form factor had appeared that was priced like a PC/AT if that might have > had a chance. Acorn Computers made an odd machine consisting of a BBC micro with a 32016 second processor in a box. (It didn't run a unix-like OS, I'm afraid.) The 32016 was one of the CPUs that inspired the ARM, because its performance was so terrible: it was not able to make good use of the available memory bandwidth. (There wasn't a 68000 second processor because its interrupt latency was too bad to drive the "tube" interface.) http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/ACW.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#New_RISC_architecture Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> https://dotat.at/ Malin, Southeast Hebrides: Cyclonic 4 to 6. Slight or moderate in southeast, moderate or rough in northwest. Showers. Good, occasionally poor.

4 years, 1 month

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DEC terminal line driver chips?

by Tom Ivar Helbekkmo

I've got a number of DEC terminals, ranging from the VT220 to the VT520 (sadly, I got rid of my VT100 and VT102 many years ago, before I started collecting DEC equipment instead of just using it), and some of them have one or more burned out serial ports. Before I start taking them apart to find out what chips were used, I figured I'd check if any of you folks happen to know. I'd like to order a stash of replacements, and it would be nice to have them handy before I clear the work bench to start dismantling terminals... Oh, and for the record: the Q-bus PDP-11/23 uses 9636ACP and 9637ACP for output and input, respectively, while the VAX-11/630 substitutes a 9639ATC optocoupler for the 9637ACP differential receiver. (I have a couple of spare CPU boards with damaged ports, as well, so these are all on my shopping list already.) -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay

4 years, 2 months

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Dilbert on Unix

by Dave Horsfall

https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-11-09/ Ageless... -- Dave

4 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] Happy birthday, the Internet!

by Rudi Blom

did you know ... capitalising internet means you have to hold the shift-key -- the more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

4 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] Happy birthday, the Internet!

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

Re: [COFF] Happy birthday, the Internet! > From: Jim Carpenter > But even that isn't really correct, as the Internet is a network of > networks and Arpanet was all alone. Correct: the ARPANET was merely an ancestor (albeit an important one) of the Internet. (The most important, in terms of technical influence, was CYCLADES, "the key intermediate technical step between the ARPANET and the Internet".) The ARPANET was later sort of subsumed into the Internet, as its original long-haul backbone ("sort of" because the ARPANET's main protocol was discarded, in doing so), but that's not too important. If you want to select _a_ birthday for the Internet, I'd pick the day they settled on the IPv4 packet format; we know when that was, it was the second day of the 15/16 June, 1978 meeting (see IEN-68). I'm not wedded to that date, if someone has a better suugestion (e.g. the firt PRNET to ARPNET test), I'm open to hearing why the alternative's preferable. Noel

4 years, 2 months

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Happy birthday, the Internet!

by Dave Horsfall

Born on this day in 1969 with the publication of RFC-1 "Host Software" by Steve Crocker, it basically specified the ARPAnet and the IMPs. Oh, and it really peeves me when the stupid media call it "the internet"; it's a proper noun, hence is capitalised. -- Dave

4 years, 2 months

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how was TCF different or similar to Mosix

by Clem Cole

On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 1:50 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: > Out of curiousity, how was TCF different or similar to Mosix? > Many similar ideas. TCF was basically the commercial implementation of the Locus, which Jerry and students built at UCLA (one 11/70s original). I want to say the Locus papers are in some early SOSPs. MOSIX was its own Unix-like OS, as was Locus [and some of this was in Sprite too BTW]. TCF was a huge number of rewrites to BSD and was UNIX. The local/remote restructuring was ad-hoc. By the time Roman and I lead TNF, we had created a formal VPROC layer as an analog to the VFS layer (more in a minute). TNC was to be the gut of Intel's Paragon using OSF/1 as base OS. The basic idea of all of them is that the cluster is looks like a single protection domain with nodes contributing resources. A Larry says a ps is cluster-wide. TCF had the idea of features that each node provides (ISA, floating-point unit, AP, *etc*..) so if a process needed specific resources, it would only run on a node that had those resources. But it also meant that processes could be migrated from a node that had the same resources. One of the coolest demos I ever saw was we took a new unconfigured PS/2 at a trade show and connected the ethernet to it on the trade show network, and put in a boot floppy. We dialed back into a system at an LCC, and filled in some security things, details like the IP address of the new system and soon it booted and joined the cluster. It immediately started to add services to the cluster, we walked away, and (overnight) the system had set up the hard disk and started caching locally things that were needed for speed. Later I was editing a file and from another screen migrated the process around the cluster while the editing was active. The problem with VPROC (like VFS) is it takes surgery all over the kernel. In fact, for Linux 2.x kernel the OpenSSI <https://sourceforge.net/projects/ssic-linux/> folks did all the kernel work to virtualize the concept of process, which sadly never got picked up as the kernel.org folks did not like it (a real shame IMO). BTW, one of the neat side effects of a layer like VPROC is things like checkpoint/restart are free -- you are just migrating a process to the storage instead of an active processor. Anyway, Mosix has a lot of the same types of ideas. I have much less experience with it directly.

4 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

by Theodore Ts'o

On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 09:11:47AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much > > less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 > > for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was > > mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great > > deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM > > called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you > > could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either > > ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously. > > It's really a shame that TCF didn't get more widespread usage/traction. > That's exactly what BitMover wanted to do, I wanted to scale small cheap > SMPs in a cluster with a TCF layer on it. I gave some talks about it, > it obviously went nowhere but might have if we had TCF as a starting > point. TCF was cool. (Moving this to COFF...) Out of curiousity, how was TCF different or similar to Mosix? - Ted

4 years, 3 months

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Was [TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab

by John P. Linderman

The tab/detab horse was still twitching, so I decided to beat it a little more. Doug's claim that tabs saving space was an urban legend didn't ring true, but betting again Doug is a good way to get poor quick. So I tossed together a perl script (version run through col -x is at the end of this note) to measure savings. A simpler script just counted tabs, distinguishing leading tabs, which I expected to be very common, from embedded tabs, which I expected to be rare. In retrospect, embedded tabs are common in (my) C code, separating structure types from the element names and trailing comments. As Norman pointed out, genuine tabs often preserve line to line alignment in the presence of small changes. So the fancier script distinguishes between leading tabs and embedded tabs for various possible tab stops. Small tab stops keep heavily indented code lines short, large tab stops can save more space when tabbing past leading blanks. My coding style uses "set-width" of 4, which vi turns into spaces or tabs, with "standard" tabs every 8 columns. My code therefore benefits most with tabstops every 4 columns. A lot of code is indented 4 spaces, which saves 3 bytes when replaced by a tab, but there is no saving with tabstops at 8. Here's the output when run on itself (before it was detabbed) and on a largish C program: /home/jpl/bin/tabsave.pl /home/jpl/bin/tabsave.pl rsort.c /home/jpl/bin/tabsave.pl, size 1876 2: Leading 202, Embedded 3, Total 205 4: Leading 303, Embedded 4, Total 307 8: Leading 238, Embedded 5, Total 243 rsort.c, size 209597 2: Leading 13186, Embedded 4219, Total 17405 4: Leading 19776, Embedded 5990, Total 25766 8: Leading 16506, Embedded 6800, Total 23306 The bytes saved by using tabs compared to the (detabbed) original size are not chump change, with 2, 4 or 8 column tabstops. On ordinary text, savings are totally unimpressive, usually 0. Your savings may vary. I think the horse is now officially deceased. -- jpl === #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my @Tab_stops = ( 2, 4, 8 ); sub check_stop { my ($line, $stop_at) = @_; my $pos = length($line); my ($leading, $embedded) = (0,0); while ($pos >= $stop_at) { $pos -= ($pos % $stop_at); # Get to previous tab stop my $blanks = 0; while ((--$pos >= 0) && (substr($line, $pos, 1) eq ' ')) { ++$blanks; } if ($blanks > 1) { my $full = int($blanks/$stop_at); my $partial = $blanks - $full * $stop_at; my $savings = (--$partial > 0) ? $partial : 0; $savings += $full * ($stop_at - 1); if ($pos < 0) { $leading += $savings; } else { $embedded += $savings; } } } return ($leading, $embedded); } sub dofile { my $file = shift; my $command = "col -x < $file"; my $notabsfh; unless (open($notabsfh, "-|", $command)) { printf STDERR ("Open failed on '$command': $!"); return; } my $size = 0; my ($leading, $embedded) = (0,0); my @savings; for (my $i = 0; $i < @Tab_stops; ++$i) { $savings[$i] = [0,0]; } while (my $line = <$notabsfh>) { my $n = length($line); $size += $n; $line =~ s/(\s*)$//; for (my $i = 0; $i < @Tab_stops; ++$i) { my @l_e = check_stop($line, $Tab_stops[$i]); for (my $j = 0; $j < @l_e; ++$j) { $savings[$i][$j] += $l_e[$j]; } } } print("$file, size $size\n"); for (my $i = 0; $i < @Tab_stops; ++$i) { print(" $Tab_stops[$i]: "); my $l = $savings[$i][0]; my $e = $savings[$i][1]; my $t = $l + $e; print("Leading $l, Embedded $e, Total $t\n"); } print("\n"); } sub main { for my $file (@ARGV) { dofile($file); } } main();

4 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Pondering the hosts file

by Bakul Shah

On Mar 11, 2021, at 10:08 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 10:40 AM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote: >> From https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hosts(5) >> For each host a single line should be present with the following information: >> Internet address >> official host name >> aliases >> HISTORY >> The hosts file format appeared in 4.2BSD. > > While this is true wrt the history of FreeBSD/Unix, I'm almost positive that BSD didn't invent it. I'm pretty sure it was picked up from the existing host file that was published by sri-nic.arpa before DNS. A different and more verbose format. See RFCs 810 & 952. Possibly because it had to serve more purposes? > Warner > >>> On Mar 11, 2021, at 9:14 AM, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location. >>> >>> I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's any historical documentation around it's format and what should and should not be entered in the file. >>> >>> I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines around entering data, and how it's supposed to function. >>> >>> A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines / entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following: >>> >>> 192.0.2.1 host.example.net host >>> 127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Grant. . . . >>> unix || die >> _______________________________________________ >> COFF mailing list >> COFF(a)minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

4 years, 3 months

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Pondering the hosts file

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'm not sure where this message best fits; TUHS, COFF, or Internet History, so please forgive me if this list is not the best location. I'm discussing the hosts file with someone and was wondering if there's any historical documentation around it's format and what should and should not be entered in the file. I've read the current man page on Gentoo Linux, but suspect that it's far from authoritative. I'm hoping that someone can point me to something more authoritative to the hosts file's format, guidelines around entering data, and how it's supposed to function. A couple of sticking points in the other discussion revolve around how many entries a host is supposed to have in the hosts file and any ramifications for having a host appear as an alias on multiple lines / entries. To whit, how correct / incorrect is the following: 192.0.2.1 host.example.net host 127.0.0.1 localhost host.example.net host -- Grant. . . . unix || die

4 years, 3 months

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Ancient Pi [Was: Re: [TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab]

by Nemo Nusquam

4 years, 3 months

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Quote from Wilkes

by Nemo Nusquam

I am currently reading "Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer" by Maurice Wilkes, MIT press. The following text from p. 145 may amuse readers. [p. 145] By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember then this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below [...]. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to spent in finding errors in my own programs. N.

4 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc.

by Peter Jeremy

=> COFF since it's left Unix history behind. On 2021-Feb-16 21:08:15 -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: >I like SQLite and Berkeley DB in that they don't require a full RDBMS >running. Instead, an application can load what it needs and access the >DB itself. I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it just runs inside the client instead of being a separate backend server. (BDB is a straight key:value store). >I don't remember how many files SQLite uses to store a DB. One file. I often ship SQLite DB files between systems for various reasons and agree that the "one file" is much easier that a typical RDBMS. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. (Grant Taylor)

by Rudi Blom

I've been maintaining a customer's application which uses C-ISAM as database interface on SCOUNIX, TRU64 and HP-UX. Simple and above all in 'C' ! As wiki says "IBM still recommends the use of the Informix Standard Engine for embedded applications" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix_C-ISAM Mind you, the page hasn't seen significant changes since 2006 :-) Of course not having C-ISAM as a shared library can make executables a bit big unless included in a custom made shared library which I never really tried on SCOUNIX, but did on the newer UNIXes. A diskette used on SCOUNIX for certain offline salvage actions just isn't 'spacious' enough. Cheers, uncle rubl . >From: Grant Taylor <gtaylor(a)tnetconsulting.net> >To: coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:23:35 -0700 >Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. >On 2/18/21 12:32 AM, Peter Jeremy via COFF wrote: >>I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it just runs inside the client >>instead of being a separate backend server. (BDB is a straight key:value store). > >Fair enough. > >I was referring to an external and independent daemon with it's own needs for care & >feeding. >. >>One file. I often ship SQLite DB files between systems for various reasons and agree >>that the "one file" is much easier that a typical RDBMS. > >*nod* > >-- >Grant. . . . >unix || die -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

4 years, 4 months

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Fwd: [TUHS] nothing to do with unix, everything to do with history

by Dan Cross

The COFF folks may have a bead on this if no one on TUHS does. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:33 AM Subject: [TUHS] nothing to do with unix, everything to do with history To: TUHS main list <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> There's so much experience here, I thought someone might know: "Our goal is to develop an emulator for the Burroughs B6700 system. We need help to find a complete release of MCP software for the Burroughs B6700. If you have old magnetic tapes (magtapes) in any format, or computer printer listings of software or micro-fiche, micro-film, punched-card decks for any Burroughs B6000 or Burroughs B7000 systems we would like to hear from you. Email nw(a)retroComputingTasmania.com"

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Typing tutors

by Michael Parson

<moving to coff, less unix heritage content here> On 2021-02-07 23:29, Doug McIntyre wrote: > On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 04:32:56PM -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote: >> My Sun UNIX layout keyboards (and mice) work quite well with my Macs. >> I share your sentiments. > > Most of the bespoke mechanical keyboard makers will offer a dipswitch > for what happens to the left of the A, and with an option to print the > right value there, my keyboards work quite well the right way. I've been using the CODE[0] keyboard with 'clear' switches for the past few years and have been very happy with it. Has the dipswitches for swapping around CTRL/CAPS and the meta/Alt, probably others as well. When I don't have hardware solutions to this, most modern OSes let you remap keys in software. Being a gnu screen user, CTRL & A being right next too each other makes life easier. I've used enough keyboards over the years that didn't even have an ESC key (Mac Plus, the Commodore 64, the keyboard on my Samsung tablet, probably a few others), that I got in the habit of using CTRL-[ to generate an ESC and still do that most of the time rather than reaching for the ESC up there in the corner. > I did use the Sun Type5 USB Unix layout for quite some years, but I > always found it a but mushy, and liked it better switching back to > mechanical keyboards with the proper layout. Before I got this keyboard, I used a Sun Type 7 keyboard (USB with the UNIX layout). It had the CTRL and ESC keys in the "right" places (as noted above, ESC location doesn't bother me as much), but yeah, they're mushy, and big. Much happier with the mechanical keyboard for my daily driver. I've been eyeballing the TEX Shinobi[1], a mechanical keyboard with the ThinkPad type TrackPoint, cut down on reasons for my fingers to leave the keyboard even more. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX [0] http://codekeyboards.com/ [1] https://tex.com.tw/products/shinobi?variant=16969884106842

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode (Clem Cole)

by Rudi Blom

I have to agree with Clem here. Mind you I still mourn the demise of Alpha and even Itanium but then I never had to pay for those systems. I only make sure they run properly so the customer can enjoy their applications. My 32-1/2 cents (inflation adjusted). Take care and stay as healthy as some of my 25 year old servers :-) Cheers, uncle rubl >From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> >To: Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> >Cc: COFF <coff(a)minnie.tuhs.org> >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 09:36:20 -0500 >Subject: Re: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode <snip> >BTW: Once again we 100% agree on the architecture part of the discussion. And frankly >pre-386 days, I could not think how anyone would come up with it. As computer >architecture it is terrible, how did so many smart people come up with such? It defies >everything we are taught about 'good' computer architectural design. But .... after all of >the issues with the ISA's of Vax and the x86/INTEL*64 vs. Alpha --- is how I came to the >conclusion, architecture does not matter nearly as much as economics and we need to >get over it and stop whining. Or in Christensen's view, a new growing market is often >made from a product that has technically not as good as the one in the original >mainstream market but has some value to the new group of people. <snip> -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode

by Clem Cole

Moved to COFF - and I should prefix this note with a strongly worded -- these are my own views and do not necessarily follow my employers (and often have not, as some of you know that have worked with me in the past). On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:34 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: > The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get. Required > to know it, but so unpleasant. > BTW: Once again we 100% agree *on the architecture part of* *the discussion*. And frankly pre-386 days, I could not think how anyone would come up with it. As computer architecture it is terrible, how did so many smart people come up with such? It defies everything we are taught about 'good' computer architectural design. But .... after all of the issues with the ISA's of Vax and the x86/INTEL*64 *vs.* Alpha --- is how I came to the conclusion, *architecture does not matter nearly as much as economics and we need to get over it and stop whining. * Or in Christensen's view, a new growing market is often made from a product that has technically not as good as the one in the original mainstream market but has some value to the new group of people. x86 (and in particular once the 386 added linear 32 bit addressing), even though DOS/Windows sucked compared to SunOS (or whatever), the job (work) that the users needed to do was performed to the customer's satisfaction *and for a lot less.* The ISVs could run their codes there and >>they<< sell more copies of their code which is what they care about. The end-users, really just care about getting a job done. What was worse was at the time, it was the ISV's keep their own prices higher on the 'high-value platform' - which makes the cost of those platforms ever higher. During the Unix wars, this fact was a huge issue. The same piece of SW for a Masscomp would cause 5-10 more than a Sun -- why we were considered a minicomputer and Sun was a workstation. Same 10MHz 68000 inside (we had a better compiler so we ran 20% faster). This was because the ISV's classified Masscomp's competition was considered the Vax 8600; not Sun and Apollo -- sigh. In the end, the combination of x86 and MSFT did it to Sun. For example, my college roommates (who were trained on the first $100K architecture/drawing 3D systems developed at CMU on PDP-11/Unix and Triple Drip Graphic's Wonder) Wintel running a 'boxed' AutoCAD was way more economical than a Sun box with a custom architecture package -- economics won, even though the solution was technically not as good. Another form of the same issue did you ever try to write a technical >>publication<< with Word (not a letter or a memo) -- it sucks -- The pro's liked FrameMaker and other 'authoring tools' (hey I think even Latex and Troff are -- much ' better' for the author) -- but Frame costs way more and Word, so what do the publishers want -- ugh Word DOC format [ask Steinhart about this issue, he lived it a year ago]. In the case of the Arm, Intel #$%^'ed 101-15 yrs ago up when Jobs said he wanted a $20 processor for what would become the iPhone and our execs told him to take a hike (we were making too much money with high margin Window's) boxes. At the time, Arm was 'not as good' - but it had two properties Jobs cared about (better power - although at the time Arm was actually not much better than the laptop x86s, but Apple got Samsung to make/sell parts at less than $20 -- i.e. economics). Again, I'm not a college professor. I'm an engineer that builds real computer systems that sometimes people (even ones like the folks that read this list) want to/have wanted buy. As much as I like to use sold architecture principle to guide things, the difference is I know be careful. Economics is really the higher bit. What the VAX engineers at DEC or the current INTEL*64 folks (like myself) was/is not what some of the same engineers did with Alpha -- today, we have to try to figure out how to make the current product continue to be economically attractive [hence the bazillion new instructions that folks like Paul W in the compiler team figure out how to exploit, so the ISV's codes run better and can sell more copies and we sell more chips to our customers to sell to end users]. But like Jobs's, DEC management got caught up in the high margin game, and ignored the low end (I left Compaq after I managed to build the $1K Alpha which management blew off -- it could be sold at 45% margins like the Alpha TurboLaser or 4x00 series). Funny, one of the last things I had proposed at Masscomp in the early 80s before I went to Stellar, was a low-end system (also < $1K) and Masscomp management wanted to part of it -- it would have meant competing with Sun and eventually the PC. FWIW: Intel >>does<< know how to make a $20 SOC, but the margins will suck. The question is what will management want to? I really don't know. So far, we have liked the server chip margins (don't forget Intel made more $s last year than it ever has - even in the pandemic). I feel a little like Dr Seuss' 'Onceler' in the Lorax story ... if Arm can go upscale from the phone platform who knows what will happen - Bell's Law predicts Arm displaces INTEL*64: “Approximately every decade a new computer class forms as a new “minimal” computer either through using fewer components or use of a small fractional part of the state-of-the-art chips.” FWIW: Bell basically has claimed a technical point, based on Christenson's observation; the 'lessor' technology will displace the 'better one.' Or as I say it, sophisticated architecture always losses to better economics.

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] AT&T 3B1 - Emulation available

by Peter Jeremy

On 2021-Feb-03 09:58:37 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >but the original released (distributed - MC68000) part was binned at 8 and >10 There was also a 4MHz version. I had one in my MEX68KECB but I'm not sure if they were ever sold separately. ISTR I got the impression that it was a different (early) mask or microcode variant because some of the interface timings weren't consistent with the 8/10 MHz versions (something like one of the bus timings was a clock-cycle slower). >as were the later versions with the updated paging microcode called the >MC68010 a year later. When the 68020 was released Moto got the speeds up >to 16Mhz and later 20. By the '040 I think they were running at 50MHz I also really liked the M68k architecture. Unfortunately, as with the M6800, Motorola lost out to Intel's inferior excuse for an architecture. Moving more off-topic, M68k got RISC-ified as the ColdFire MCF5206. That seemed (to me) to combine the feel of the M68k with the clock/power gains from RISC. Unfortunately, it didn't take off. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode

by Peter Jeremy

On 2021-Feb-03 17:33:56 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: >The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get. Required >to know it, but so unpleasant. Warts upon warts upon warts. The complete opposite of orthogonal. >I have to admit that I haven't looked at ARM assembler, the M1 is making >me rethink that. Anyone have an opinion on where ARM lies in the pleasant >to unpleasant scale? I haven't spent enough time with ARM assembler to form an opinion but there are a number of interesting interviews with the designers on YT: * A set of videos by Sophie Wilson (original designer) starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhwwrSaHdh8 * A history of ARM by Dave Jaggar (redesigner) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6sh097Dk5k If you don't want to pony up for a M1, there are a wide range of ARM SBCs that you could experiment with. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode

by Larry McVoy

On Fri, Feb 05, 2021 at 01:16:08PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > [ Directing to COFF, where it likely belongs ] > > On Thu, 4 Feb 2021, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > >>-- Dave, wondering whether anyone has ever used every VAX instruction > > > >Or every VMS call, for that matter. ;) > > Urk... I stayed away from VMS as much as possible (I had a network of > PDP-11s to play with), although I did do a device driver course; dunno why. Me too, though I did use Eunice, it was a lonely place, it did not let me see who was on VMS. I was the only one. A far cry from BSD where wall went to everyone and talk got you a screen where you talked.

4 years, 4 months

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