We gained computer pioneer John Mauchly on this day in 1907; he was best known
as the co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the world's first computers.
-- Dave
We gained Marvin Minsky on this day in 1927; he was an AI researcher,
computer scientist, invented neural networks etc, and is now thought to be
cryogenically preserved.
-- Dave
Dedicated on this day in 1944, it was conceived by Dr. Howard Aiken; the
Wikipedia entry for it has a fascinating history, and it's a wonder that
it worked at all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I
-- Dave
We lost computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra in 2002; he gave us ALGOL,
structured programming, semaphores, and ranted against the GOTO statement
(much to the distress of the Fortranites and their spaghetti coding). Oh,
and a certain Prof. Goto used to complain that everybody wanted to
eliminate him :-)
However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he
could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet (but note
that he edited most of the RFCs, not authored them, but deserves credit
all the same).
-- Dave
We lost him in 2007; he was known for working with monitors and concurrent
programming etc, and authored "Operating System Principles" and "The
Architecture of Concurrent Programs".
-- Dave
A computer pioneer, he is credited with the invention of core memory;
fascinating stuff, when you realise that a "read" involves a couple of
write cycles :-) Sense windings, etc...
And 386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz
started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and
corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just
about everything).
-- Dave
Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano (11 November 1917 – 13 July 2016) was an
Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical
engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fano
Robert Fano, computing pioneer and founder of CSAIL, dies at 98
Professor emeritus helped launch field of information theory and
developed early time-sharing computers.
http://news.mit.edu/2016/robert-fano-obituary-0715
Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando
Corbató has passed away at 93.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html
Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where
we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m
running Multics!).
This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from.
- Dan C.
A combination of both an extended back-hoe fade and me accidentally
blocking Minnie :-(
(This is also a test to see if I'm still on COFF, as it's a fairly quiet
list.)
-- Dave
Greetings,
I'm looking for a list of all hard disk drives that DEC supported prior to
~1970 or so as part of some research I'm doing for my talk this fall in
Lillehammer. so far, I've only found one listed in a pdp-9 brochure (the
RB09 listed in the PDP-9 handbook). Are there others? I've seen a reference
to an RA01, but have seen no details on it. It appears that Rx## is the
pattern to look for in that era.
Alternatively, if someone can articulate the XX## naming scheme of the
time, that would be great. I've seen Dx## for different communications
modules, for example, but don't know if I can generalize.
Warner
We really should take this off-list if you want to continue the discussion
as it has little to do with simh and more history (so I'm CCing the TUHS
COFF list. I'll include simh for now, but if you reply please kill the
simh part).
An Eagle or Eagle-II was a whole lot lighter (and physically smaller) than
an RP06 or RP07 (or an RM series drive for that matter). It is interesting
to hear you had problems with the Eagles. They were generally considered
the best/most reliable of the day. The SI controller on the Vax was less
so, although many of us in the UNIX community used them.
FWIW: I was accused of jinxing the 19" SMD Ampex drive by Masscomp's field
service team. The story is we could never make the Ampex drives work
reliably at UCB (they were cheaper in bytes/$ than the Eagles at the
time). When I was being recruited to Masscomp as I was leaving UCB, they
were trying to use Ampex as their high-end SMD drive with the Xylogic 440
controller, but had not (yet) had a failure. [Xylogic, like Masscomp, was
ex-DEC folks]. Anyway, I had mentioned @ UCB we had given up on the Ampex
drive on our Vaxen, and within 2 weeks of my starting to work darned near
all of them that Masscomp owned had failed.
PC (Paul Cantrell), tjt and I did eventually make them work but only after
we got Xylogic to redesign the 440 to be the 450 controllers and PC spend
hours with the microcode team on the error recovery logic. Funny, the
450/Eagle combination (and later Xylogic 472 tape) became the de rigor in
the UNIX community.
BTW: if Mark and the simh team is to ever to create a solid
Sun/Masscomp/Apollo simulator, they will need to emulate the Xylogic
controller family. One more thing for the forever growing list of things
I'd like to do when I retire, but I think I still have the engineering
specs for them and PC and tjt are still to be found ;-)
On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 9:19 AM Tim Wilkinson <tjw(a)twsoft.co.uk> wrote:
> Back in 85 have had applications to purchase a 785 – 780-750-730 then 725
> rejected, we were fortunately given a 750 by a sister company who were
> upgrading to a 785, but they took their disks. So we had to buy for
> ourselves.
>
>
>
> To keep the bean counter happy we went for a System Industries controller
> and 4 super Eagles.
>
>
>
> But back then there was a problem with the eagles and all 4 had to be
> swapped out 4 times.
>
>
>
> Carrying them up stairs to the computer room was not fun. The platter size
> may have been reduced. But the weight!!!
>
>
>
> Tim
>
> *From:* Simh [mailto:simh-bounces@trailing-edge.com] *On Behalf Of *Clem
> Cole
> *Sent:* 01 July 2019 14:08
> *To:* Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org>
> *Cc:* SIMH <simh(a)trailing-edge.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [Simh] Which PDP-11 to choose
>
>
>
> I can not say why it followed that naming convention, but it did. The
> drives of that day were referred to as 19" technology since that's how they
> mounted. FWIW: Most manufacturers at the time used the same platter
> size as the original IBM 1311 (which as you pointed out was 14"), but not
> everyone, for instance, the Fujitsu Eagle used 10.5-inch platter. FWIW:
> I answered a bunch of this in:
> https://www.quora.com/How-do-hard-drives-get-smaller-and-smaller-in-size-bi…
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 8:52 AM Patrick Finnegan <pat(a)computer-refuge.org>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 7:32 AM Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
>
> 19” form factor for the disks drive fir the space in the 19” relay rack.
> You’re right the platters themselves were smaller. The disks were referred
> too by the mechanical FF. 19, 8, 5.25 etc.
>
>
>
> But, 8" hard drives have 8" platters, and 5.25" hard drives have 5.25"
> platters. The casing on a the 5.25" drive in front of me is almost 6" wide.
>
>
>
> Pat
>
>
>
> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…> Virus-free.
> www.avast.com
> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campai…>
> <#m_1729574511750107707_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>
(More of a test to see if I'm still subscribed; a long story - see TUHS
for more details.)
Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng was born on this day in 1913; he was involved
with EDSAC, microprogramming, etc.
Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone
post-only for me (as TUHS has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm
no longer subscribed then it should bounce with an URL...
-- Dave
>Now, if I'm still subscribed then this will appear; if it has gone post-only for me (as TUHS >has) then it won't come back to me, and if I'm no longer subscribed then it should bounce >with an URL...
Maybe its a matter of electronic delay. Like with old tube
televisions, a good bang on top and all works again ... mostly :-)
Cheers,
uncle rubl
I just finished reading "Life under the Sun" by David Yen, a 296-page
collection of anecdotes in historical order covering his 20y at Sun. An
amusing, and sometimes sad, read.
Here are two: (1) During the Serengeti project, Sunsoft lost the only
person who knew FORTH and they waited two months to find someone to
modify the OBF. (2) Google's purchasing dep't rejected their engineers'
purchase requisitions for T1 machines because they were single-sourced,
despite running their search s/w six times faster than comparably priced
Intel boxes.
N.
No details left, so not sure it was this particular virus, but a
customer running SCO UNIX on a DEC box left a DOS diskette in the
floppy drive and after the CRON scheduled nightly reboot (to clean up
application logs) the server found the diskette and started booting
from it. Staff arriving in the morning were wondering why their PCs
couldn't connect to the server.
Seems someone had forgotten to disable in the BIOS the booting from floppy.
Server was re-installed, booting from floppy disabled, about 200
servers spread over the country checked 'on site'!
Fast forward to the 'here and now' we still see regular warnings
posted about "don't stick a unknown USB memory stick in your PC or
notebook"
Nothing changes?
Commemorating Michelangelo's birthday in 1457, this was the scourge of
DOS-box users everywhere in 1992 (I was still using CP/M at the time
before upgrading to Unix).
-- Dave
Dick Hustvedt was born on this day in 1946; an architect of RSX-11 and VMS, he
also had a weird sense of humour which he demonstrated by enshrining the
"microfortnight" into VMS in order to make admins RTFM.
Sadly, we lost him in a car accident in 2008.
-- Dave
Almost forgot...
Born on this day in 1934, he pretty much invented ALGOL (and algorithmic
languages in general; the running joke was that you could call him by
name or by value)... From Clem Cole: "The actual joke was Europeans
called him by name ("ni-klaus vurt") and Americans by value ("nickel-less
worth").
-- Dave
On Thu, 14 Feb 2019, Thomas Kellar wrote:
> I am learning from the discussion. I disagree with the binary
> argument. Women and men both have personalities and brains that range
> over a huge spectrum of differences. It is society that tries to force
> them into particular molds.
Hi Thomas.
FWIW, the mainstream on both sides of this argument agree that men and
women overlap in characteristics. The question is what causes the
differences.
Many human characteristics are bimodal with most people clustering around
one of two points, and those points correlating with biological gender.
Opponents of inate gender differences argue that the observed differences
are socialised. They point out that neuroplasticity means that even
differences in brain structure between genders *could* be socialised.
This is why I find studies on infants so interesting. There are plenty of
examples but I've linked a study below that monitored the behaviour of
infants that are around 24 hours old. Statistically significant
differences in behaviour were observed between boys and girls. This is
far too early for any socialisation to have occured.
https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
When I was a young man I believed that gender differences (beyond obvious
morphological differences) were socialised. But the evidence grew, and
has continued to grow, that to a large degree this isn't so.
A really fascinating area is "greater male variability" (GMV) which really
explains a lot about the world. I wrote an article on that for a well
known blog a few years ago. While researching the article I discovered
that men vary more than women in personality. That is to say that on
average women are more similar to each other in personality than men are.
I admit that one really surprised me.
Some people claim GMV has been discredited. It hasn't. People claiming
GMV has been discredited usually cite a handful of counter examples as
evidence of this. GMV was never claimed to be univerally true, only true
for most characteristics.. I suspect there is at least one case where
females, not males, exhibit greater variability but this still doesn't
discredit GMV.
Getting back to employment, there have been many studies on employment
patterns and gender by researchers and governments. They consistently
show that men and women make a myriad of different choices in employment.
In particular they show that men will tend to prioritise earning potential
over many other characteristics of employment while women tend to do the
reverse. The largest study on this topic anywhere is probably the
CONSAD Report, commissioned by the US Dept of Labor. The CONSAD Report is
actually on the gender earnings gap but it's still relevant to a
discussion on different choices men and women make in employment.
Here's a tiny URL to the CONSAD Report:
https://tinyurl.com/y6vvzm4v
Cheers,
Rob
<SNIP>
Is this thread really a good place for TUHS discussion? Maybe COFF would
be better suited for it.
And maybe the explanation why there are more men in IT is simpler than some
folks who forcefully try to create elaborate sociological theories think.
In nature males are just wired differently from females. And that is why
they ARE different, like 1 and 0. Otherwise they would be just one sex.
And as we know nothing can come from just one number...
--Andy
