20 Feb
2020
20 Feb
'20
11:54 a.m.
Seen on one of our local "seminars" lists recently...
Emerging hardware, such as non-volatile main memory
(NVMM) [...]
changes the way system software should be designed and implemented,
because they are not just an enhanced version of existing devices,
but provide new qualitative features and software interfaces.
Core store, mutter, mutter.
We used to regularly restart machines which had been turned off for a
while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One PDP-8 was
happy to resume after several years of idleness.
Sorry, had to send that, mutter...
--
George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP
University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics,
Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9LE
Mail: gdmr(a)inf.ed.ac.uk Voice: 0131 650 5147
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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
20 Feb
20 Feb
1:31 p.m.
On Feb 20, 2020, at 3:54 AM, George Ross
<gdmr(a)inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
Core store, mutter, mutter.
We used to regularly restart machines which had been turned off for a
while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One PDP-8 was
happy to resume after several years of idleness.
Sorry, had to send that, mutter…
So a story about core memory.
I was working with a group and had just finished bring up of a new system. It was running
the diagnostics when someone in shipping turned off the hardware. No disk so no risk of
breaking something like that (ah those were the days). Anyway they pack the machine and
deliver it to the customer (name lost to the mists of time) who gets it set up and then
powered on.
It resumes the diagnostic. The customer was amazed that the machine would perform a
diagnostic on power up. Though that was the most wonderful idea.
David
8:39 p.m.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2020, George Ross wrote:
We used to regularly restart machines which had been
turned off for a
while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One PDP-8
was happy to resume after several years of idleness.
There was a story posted to Usenet yonks ago about a minicomputer (PDP-8?)
being used for nuclear testing. The last test involved the box inside a
truck, parked on top of the hole. Truck flies up into the air, but the
core memory survived intact, was retrieved, and plugged into another box
and all the data read out. Try doing *that* with solid-state memory :-)
-- Dave
11:14 p.m.
So at the old MIT Architecture Machine (predecessor of the Media lab) circa 1975/6 we had
Interdata 7/32
minicomputers running the home-grown Magic 6 OS.
These machines had core memory, and there was a microcode bug that under certain
circumstances (happily rare) you could get into an infinite loop taking interrupts or
faults of some sort.
Due to the core, this condition could not be cleared by the reset switch or even turning
off the power. IIRC the only way to clear it was to unplug the core memory board while
the power was on.
-Larry
On 2020, Feb 20, at 3:39 PM, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Feb 2020, George Ross wrote:
We used to regularly restart machines which had
been turned off for a while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One
PDP-8 was happy to resume after several years of idleness.
There was a story posted to Usenet yonks ago about a minicomputer (PDP-8?) being used for
nuclear testing. The last test involved the box inside a truck, parked on top of the
hole. Truck flies up into the air, but the core memory survived intact, was retrieved,
and plugged into another box and all the data read out. Try doing *that* with solid-state
memory :-)
-- Dave
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3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Dave Horsfall -
David Barto -
George Ross -
Lawrence Stewart