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Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

by Dan Cross

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

2 years

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Typical Fate of Older Hardware

by segaloco

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.

2 years

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Re: What Happened to Interdata?

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey > Interdata had instruction sets that were close to the IBM instruction > set, but my recollection was that they were different enough that IBM > software wouldn't run on them. Bitsavers doesn't have a wealth of Interdata documentation, but there is some: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/ Someone who's familiar with the 360 instruction set should be able to look at e.g.: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/8-32/8-32_Brochure_1977.pdf and see how compatible it is. Noel

2 years

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Wanted: 16-bit big-endian Unix-like environment and/or libc

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I'm looking for a 16-bit big-endian Unix-like development environment with a reasonably new C compiler and a symbolic debugger. And/or, a libc with source code suitable for a 16-bit big-endian environment. Rationale: I've designed and built a 6809 single board computer (SBC) with 8K ROM, 2K I/O space for a UART and block storage, and 56K RAM. It's a big-endian platform and the C compiler has 16-bit ints by default. I've been able to take the filesystem code from XV6 and get it to fit into the ROM with a hundred bytes spare. The available Unix-like system calls are: dup, read, write, close, fstat, link, unlink, open, mkdir, chdir, exit, spawn and the spawn is like exec(). There is no fork() and no multitasking. I've got many of the existing XV6 userland programs to run along with a small shell that can do basic redirection. Now I'm trying to bring up a libc on the platform. I'm currently trying the libc from FUZIX but I'm not wedded to it, so alternative libc recommendations are most welcome. There's no debugging environment on this SBC. I do have a simulator that matches the hardware, but I can only breakpoint at addresses and single-step instructions. It makes debugging pretty tedious! So I was thinking of using an existing Unix-like platform to bring up the libc. That way, if there are bugs, I can use an existing symbolic debugger on the platform. I could use 2.11BSD as the dev platform but it's little-endian; I'm worried that there might be endian issues that stop me finding bugs that will arise on the 16-bit 6809 platform. As for which libc: I looked at the 2.11BSD libc/include and there's so much stuff I don't need (networking etc.) that it's hard to winnow down to just what I need. The FUZIX libc looks good. I just came across Elks and that might be a possible alternative. Are there others to consider? Anyway, thanks in advance for your suggestions. Cheers, Warren References: XV6: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public FUXIZ: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX/tree/master/Library Elks: https://github.com/jbruchon/elks/tree/master/libc

2 years

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Seeking Some Books (Primarily Standards)

by segaloco

Good afternoon or whichever time of day you find yourself in. I come to you today in my search for some non-UNIX materials for a change. The following have been on my search list lately in no particular priority: - Standards: COBOL 68 C 89 C++ 98 Minimal BASIC 78 Full BASIC 87 SQL (any rev) IS0 9660 (CD FS, any rev) ISO 5807 (Flow Charts, any rev) - Manuals: PDP-11/20 Processor Handbook (EAE manual too if it's separate) WE32000 and family literature GE/Honeywell mainframe and G(E)COS documents The IBM 704 FORTRAN Manual (The -original- FORTRAN book) The Codasyl COBOL Report (The -original- COBOL book) Any Interdata 7 or 8/32 documentation (or other Interdata stuff really) The Ti TMS9918 manual The Philips "Red Book" CDDA standard If it's part of one, the Bell System Practices Issue containing, or separately otherwise, BSP 502-503-101 (2500 and 2554 reference) If any of these are burning a hole in your bookshelf and you'd like to sell them off, just let me know, I'll take em off your hands and make it worth your while. I'm not hurting for any of them, but rather, I see an opportunity to get things on my shelf that may facilitate expansion of some of my existing projects in new directions in the coming years. Also, I'm in full understanding of the rarity of some of these materials and would like to stress my interest in quality reference material. Of course, that's not to dismiss legitimate valuation, rather, simply to inform that I intend to turn no profit from these materials, and wherever they wind up after their (hopefully very long) tenure in my library will likely have happened via donation. - Matt G. P.S. On that last note, does anyone know if a CHM registration of an artifact[1] means they truly have a physical object in a physical archive somewhere? That's one of the sorts of things I intend to look into in however many decades fate gives me til I need to start thinking about it. [1] - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102721523

2 years

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Re: Seeking Some Books (Primarily Standards)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Matt G. > PDP-11/20 Processor Handbook > (EAE manual too if it's separate) Yes and no. There are separate manuals for the EAE (links here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/KE11-A_Extended_Arithmetic_Element https://gunkies.org/wiki/KE11-B_Extended_Arithmetic_Element the -B is the same to program as the -A; its implementation is just a single board, though) but the -11/20 processor handbook (the second version; the one dated 1972) does have a chapter (Chapter 8; Part I) on the EAE. (For no reason I can understand, neither the -11/05 nor the -11/04 processor handbook covers the EAE, even though neither one has the EIS, and if you need multiply/etc in hardware on either one, the EAE is your only choice). Noel

2 years

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Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'd like some thoughts ~> input on extended regular expressions used with grep, specifically GNU grep -e / egrep. What are the pros / cons to creating extended regular expressions like the following: ^\w{3} vs: ^(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) Or: [ :[:digit:]]{11} vs: ( 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|31) (0|1|2)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]] I'm currently eliding the 61st (60) second, the 32nd day, and dealing with February having fewer days for simplicity. For matching patterns like the following in log files? Mar 2 03:23:38 I'm working on organically training logcheck to match known good log entries. So I'm *DEEP* in the bowels of extended regular expressions (GNU egrep) that runs over all logs hourly. As such, I'm interested in making sure that my REs are both efficient and accurate or at least not WILDLY badly structured. The pedantic part of me wants to avoid wildcard type matches (\w), even if they are bounded (\w{3}), unless it truly is for unpredictable text. I'd appreciate any feedback and recommendations from people who have been using and / or optimizing (extended) regular expressions for longer than I have been using them. Thank you for your time and input. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

2 years, 1 month

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Butler Lampson's 1973 Xerox PARC memo "Why Alto?"

by steve jenkin

What struck me reading this is the estimated price (~$10K) to build an Alto, elsewhere I’ve seen $12K and 80 built in the first run. [ a note elsewhere says $4,000 on 128KB of RAM. 4k-bit or 16-kbit chips? unsure ] I believe the first "PDP-11” bought by 127 at Bell Labs was ~$65k fully configured (Doug M could confirm or not), although the disk drive took some time to come. Later, that model was called PDP-11/20. Why the price difference? PARC was doing DIY - it’s parts only, not a commercial production run with wages, space, tooling & R+D costs and marketing/sales to be amortised, with a 80%+ Gross Margin required, as per DEC. Why didn’t Bell Labs build their own “Personal Computer” like PARC? They had the need, the vision, the knowledge & expertise. I’d suggest three reasons: - The Consent Decree. AT&T couldn’t get into the Computer Market, only able to build computers for internal use. They didn’t need GUI PC’s to run telephone exchanges. - Bell Labs management: they’d been burned by MULTICS and, rightly, refused the CSRC a PDP-10 in 1969. - Nobody ’needed’ to save money building another DIY low-performance device. A home-grown supercomputer maybe :) It’s an accident of history that PARC could’ve, but didn’t, port Unix to the Alto in 1974. By V7 in 1978, my guess it was too late because both sides had locked in ‘commercial’ positions and for PARC to rewrite code wasn’t justified: “If it ain’t Broke”… Porting Unix before 1974 was possible: PARC are sure to have had close contact with UC Berkeley and the hardware/software groups there. Then 10 years later both Apple and Microsoft re-invent Graphical computing using commodity VLSI cpu’s. Which was exactly the technology innovation path planned by Alan Kay in 1970: build today what’ll be cheap hardware in 10 years and figure out how to use it. Ironic that in 1994 there was the big Apple v Microsoft lawsuit over GUI’s & who owned what I.P. Xerox woke up up midway through and filed their own infringement suit, and lost. [ dismissed because approx they'd waited too long ] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp.> ============== PDF: <http://bwl-website.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/38a-WhyAlto/Acrobat.p…> Other formats: <http://bwl-website.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/38a-WhyAlto/Abstract.…> ============== -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

2 years, 1 month

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Re: Butler Lampson's 1973 Xerox PARC memo "Why Alto?"

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: steve jenkin > What struck me reading this is the estimated price (~$10K) to build an > .. [ a note elsewhere says $4,000 on 128KB of RAM. 4k-bit or 16-kbit > chips? unsure ] 16K (4116) - at least, in the Alto II I have images of. Maxc used 1103's (1K), but they were a few years before the Alto. > I believe the first "PDP-11" bought by 127 at Bell Labs was ~$65k fully > configured I got out my August 1971 -11/20 price sheet, and that sounds about right. The machine had "24K bytes of core memory .. and a disk with 1K blocks (512K bytes ... a single .5 MB disk .. every few hours' work by the typists meant pushing out more information onto DECtape, because of the very small disk." ("The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"): 11,450 Basic machine CPU + 8KB memory 6,000 16KB memory (maybe 7,000, if MM11-F) 4,000 TC11 DECtape controller 4,700 TU56 DECtape transport 5,000 RF11 controller 9,000 RS11 drive 3,900 PC11 paper tape ------- 44,050 (Although Bell probably got a discount?) The machine later had an RK03: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/u0.s but that wasn't there initially (they are 2.4MB, larger than the stated disk); it cost 5,900 (RK11 controller) + 9,000 (RK03 drive). Also, no signs of the KE11-A in the V1 code (1,900 when it eventually appeared). The machine had extra serial lines (on DC11's), but they weren't much; 750 per line. > Why the price difference? Memory was part of it. The -11/20 used core; $9,000 for the memory alone. Also, the machine was a generation older, the first DEC machine built out of IC's - all SSI. (It wasn't micro-coded; rather, a state machine. Cheap PROM and SRAM didn't exist yet.) Noel

2 years, 1 month

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Bell System and the Video Game Industry?

by segaloco

So this evening I've been tinkering with a WECo 2500 I've been using for playing with telecom stuff, admiring the quality of the DTMF module, and it got me thinking, gee, this same craftsmanship would make for some very nice arcade buttons, which then further had me pondering on the breadth of the Bell System's capabilities and the unique needs of the video game industry in the early 80s. In many respects, the combination of Western Electric and Bell Laboratories could've been a hotbed of video game console and software development, what with WECo's capability to produce hardware such as coin slots, buttons, wiring harnesses for all sorts of equipment, etc. and then of course the software prowess of the Labs. Was there to anyone here's knowledge any serious consideration of this market by Bell? The famous story of UNIX's origins includes Space Travel, and from the very first manual, games of various kinds have accompanied UNIX wherever it goes. It seems that out of most companies, the Bell System would've been very well poised, what with their own CPU architecture and other fab operations, manufacturing and distribution chains, and so on. There's a looooot of R&D that companies such as Atari and Nintendo had to engage in that the Bell System had years if not decades of expertise in. Would anti-trust stuff have come into play in that regard? Bell couldn't compete in the computer market, and I suppose it would depend on the legal definitions applicable to video game hardware and software at the time. In any case, undercurrent here is the 2500 is a fine telephone, if the same minds behind some of this WECo hardware had gone into video gaming, I wonder how different things would've turned out. - Matt G.

2 years, 1 month

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