- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Rudi Blom

>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2020 07:04:43 +1100 (EST) >Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? >On Thu, 6 Feb 2020, Rudi Blom wrote: > >>Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might >>have had MODCOMPs > >Dunno about Tidbinbilla, but Parkes ("The Dish") has a roomful of Linux boxen; I didn't >have time to enquire further. >-- Dave The questions was "Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details." Maybe MODCOMP, but at THAT time for sure no Linux. Cheers

4 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

Re: [COFF] How much Fortran?

by Rudi Blom

Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might have had MODCOMPs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODCOMP Cheers, uncle rubl =========== From: Wesley Parish <wobblygong(a)gmail.com> To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> Cc: Bcc: Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2020 14:25:25 +1300 Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? My thoughts exactly. I was once lucky enough to visit the NASA's Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in the ACT just a few miles out of Canberra c. 1976 or 77, and they had some sizeable minicomputers in their computer room. (How many I don't know.) I imagine they would've been used to record the transmissions on tape and do some preliminary processing, before sending the tapes to NASA HQ in the States for storage and further analysis. I think what NASA did with their early probes would've made Real Programmers (TM) sit up and gasp. :) Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details. Wesley Parish

4 years, 10 months

2
1
0 0

How much Fortran?

by Arthur Krewat

So, given the membership here, I wonder, does anyone have the inside scoop? How much Fortran was used ? https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/01/31/1837209/nasa-is-trying-to-save-…

4 years, 10 months

10
11
0 0

The MOO problem and set-uid

by Dave Horsfall

I recall reading in an old manpage that the (patented) set-uid bit was to solved the MOO problem. I've searched around, but cannot find anything relevant. Anyone know? -- Dave

4 years, 10 months

3
4
0 0

Huffman - What did he do when he wasn't coding?

by John P. Linderman

I despair of getting an attachment through. Let's hope a link survives. https://www.dropbox.com/s/2lfmrkp34j9z68n/Huffman.jpg?dl=0 The NYC Math Museum (MoMath) had/has an origami exhibit. Seems David Huffman was interested in origami as well as compression.

4 years, 10 months

1
0
0 0

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Unix quix

by Peter Jeremy

=> coff since it's non-Unix On 2020-Jan-22 13:42:44 -0500, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: >Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no >stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. "no stack" was fairly standard amongst early computers. Note the the IBM S/360 doesn't have a stack.. The usual approach to subroutines was to use some boilerplate as part of the "call" or function prologue that stashed a return address in a known location (storing it in the word before the function entry or patching the "return" branch were common aproaches). Of course this made recursion "hard" (re-entrancy typically wasn't an issue) and Fortran and Cobol (at least of that vintage) normally don't support recursion for that reason. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 11 months

5
5
0 0

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Unix on Zilog Z8000?

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 12:53 PM Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote: > As I remember the Z8000 was going to be the great white hope that > would continue Zilog's success with the Z80 into modern times. > But, it obviously didn't happen. > > Why? > A really good question. I will offer my opinion as someone that lived through the times. The two contemporary chips of that time were the Intel 8086 and Z8000. Certainly, between those two, the Zilog chip was a better chip from a software standpoint. The funny part was that Moto had been pushing the 6809 against those two. The story of the IBM/PC and Moto is infamous. Remember the 68K is a skunkworks project and is not something they were talking about it. Why IBM picked 8086/8088 over Z8000 I do not know. I'm >>guessing<< total system cost and maybe vendor preference. The tea, that developed the PC had been using the 8085 for another project, so the jump of vendors to Zilog would have been more difficult (Moto and IBM corporate had been tight for years, MECL was designed by Moto for IBM for the System 360). I do know they picked Intel over the 6809, even though they had the X-series device in Yorktown (just like we had it at Tektronix) and had wanted to use what would become the 68000. In the end, other than Forest's scheme, none of them could do VM without a lot of help. If I had not known about the X-series chip (or had been given a couple of them), I think Roger and I would have used the Z8000 for Magnolia. But I know Roger and I liked it better; as did most of our peeps in Tek Labs at the time. IIRC Our thinking was that Z8000 has an "almost" good enough instruction set, but since many of the processors's addressing modes are missing on some/most of the instructions, it makes writing a compiler more difficult (Bill Wulf used to describe this as an 'irregular' instruction set). And even though the address space was large, you still had to contend with a non-linear segmented address scheme. So I think once the 68000 came on the scene for real, it had the advantage if the best instructions set (all instructions worked as expected, was symmetric) and looked pretty darned near a PDP-11. The large linear address was a huge win and even though it was built as a 16-bit chip internally (i.e. 16-bit barrel shifter and needing 2 ticks for all 32-bit ops), all the registers were defined as 32-bits wide. I think we saw it as becoming a full 32-bit device the soonest and with the least issues.

4 years, 11 months

2
1
0 0

The Third Ronnie's SDI's embedded systems

by Wesley Parish

Hi This isn't precisely Unix-related, but I'm wondering about the Third Ronnie's SDI's embedded systems. Is there anyone alive who knows just what they were? I'm also wondering, since the "Star Wars" program seemed to go off the boil at the end of the "Cold War", and the embedded systems were made with the US taxpayer's dollar, whether or not they are now public domain - since iirc, US federal law mandates that anything made with the taxpayer's dollar is owned by the taxpayer and is thus in the public domain. I'm wondering about starting a Freedom of Information request to find all of that out, but I don't quite know how to go about it. (FWVLIW, I'm a fan of outer space exploration (and commercial use) and a trove of realtime, embedded source code dealing with satellites would be a treasure indeed. It'd raise the bar and lower the cost of entry into that market.) Also, more Unixy, what status at the time were the POSIX realtime standards, and what precise relation did they have to Unix? Thanks Wesley Parish

4 years, 11 months

2
1
0 0

Book about the Sprint/Spartan ("Safeguard") hardware/software

by Arrigo Triulzi

Does anyone know if there is a book or in-depth article about the Sprint/Spartan system, named Safeguard, hardware and software? There is very little about it available online (see http://www.nuclearabms.info/Computers.html) but it was apparently an amazing programming effort running on UNIVAC. Arrigo

4 years, 11 months

1
1
0 0

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Apollo Domain/OS

by Clem Cole

moving to COFF On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 1:06 PM Pete Wright <pete(a)nomadlogic.org> wrote: > I also seem to remember him telling me about working on the patriot > missile system, although i am not certain if i am remembering correctly > that this was something he did at apollo or at another company in the > boston area. > The Patriot was/is Raytheon in Andover, MA not Apollo (Chelmsford - two towns west). Cannot speak for today, but when it was developed the source code was in Ada. I knew the Chief Scientist/PI for the original Patriot system (who died of a massive stroke a few years back -- my wife used to take care of his now 30-40 yo kids when they were small and she was a tad younger). During the first Gulf War, he basically did not sleep the whole first month. As I understand it, Raytheon normally took 3-6 months per SW release. During the war, they put out an update every couple of days and Willman once said they were working non-stop on the codebase, dealing with issues they have never seen or have been simulated. I gather it was quite exciting ... sigh. We got him to give a couple of talks at some local IEEE functions describing the SW engineering process they had used. Willman was one of the people that got me to respect Ada and the job his folks had to do. To once told me, that at some point, Raytheon had a contract supporting the Polaris System for the US Navy. The Navy had long ago lost the source. They had disassembled and were patching what they had. Yeech!!!! He also once made another comment to me ( in the late 1980s IIRC) that the DoD wanted Ada because they want the source to be part of the specifications and wanted a language that was more explicit that they could use for those specs. I have no idea how much that has proven to be true.

4 years, 11 months

2
1
0 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

COFF