I know this is a dangerous game to play, but what of the future?
I am intrigued by the idea of true optical computers,
perhaps the $10M super-computer will return?
GPUs have definitely taken over in some areas - even where
SIMD would not seem a good fit. My previous employer does motion
estimation of realtime video and has moved from custom electronics
and FPGAs to using off the shelf GPUs in PCs.
-Steve
Thread local storage and starting threads up is largely a rather
inconsequential implementation detail. When it comes down to actual
parallel programming, of which I have done more than a little, the big thing
is thread synchronization. It's rather hardware dependent. You can
pretty much entirely wipe out any parallism gains with a synchronization
call that results in a context switch or even a serious cache impact. On
one side you have machines like the Denelcor HEP where every memory word had
a pair of semaphores on it and the instructions could stall the process
while waiting for them and the hardware would schedule the other threads.
On the other hand you have your x86, which you can do a few clever things
with some atomic operations and inlined assembler but a lot of the
"standard" (boost, pthread, etc...) synchs will kill you.
All, I'm planning to come to the Usenix ATC next year on July 10-12
on the assumption that there will be some Unix 50th celebration there.
Does anybody know of other events in the date range June 28 to July 9,
as those are the dates I'll be able to get off work.
And/or, if I'm in the U.S on these dates, does anybody want to catch up?
Just trying to build an itinerary for this time next year.
Thanks, Warren
> But don't forget Clarke's Third Law!
Ooops. Read my Web search results wrong. (Should have taken the time to click
through, sigh.) Meant 'Clarke's First Law'.
Noel
> From: Larry McVoy
> This is a really poor place for a younger person to come in and make
> loud points, that is frowned upon. It's a fantastic place for a younger
> person to come in and learn.
But don't forget Clarke's Third Law! And maybe you can remember what it's like
when you're young... :-)
But Ted does have a point. 'Distributed' != 'parallel'.
Noel
The discussion of the last few days about the Colossus is getting
somewhat off-topic for Unix heritage and history, but perhaps this
list of titles (truncated to 80 characters) and locations may be of
interest to some TUHS list readers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Papers and book chapters about the Colossus at Bletchley Park
Journal- and subject specific Bibliography files are found at
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/NAME.bib
and author-specific ones under
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/N/
where N is the first letter of the bibliography filename.
The first line in each group contains the bibliography filename, and
the citation label of the cited publication. DOIs are supplied
whenever they are available. Paragraphs are sorted by filename.
adabooks.bib Randell:1976:C
The COLOSSUS
annhistcomput.bib Good:1979:EWC
Early Work on Computers at Bletchley
https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1979.10011
annhistcomput.bib deLeeuw:2007:HIS
Tunny and Colossus: breaking the Lorenz Schl{\"u}sselzusatz traffic
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978044451608450016X
babbage-charles.bib Randell:1976:C
The COLOSSUS
cacm2010.bib Anderson:2013:MNF
Max Newman: forgotten man of early British computing
https://doi.org/10.1145/2447976.2447986
computer1990.bib Anonymous:1996:UWI
Update: WW II Colossus computer is restored to operation
cryptography.bib Good:1979:EWC
Early Work on Computers at Bletchley
cryptography1990.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP
The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi
https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758
cryptography2000.bib Rojas:2000:FCH
The first computers: history and architectures
cryptography2010.bib Copeland:2010:CBG
Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His
cryptologia.bib Michie:2002:CBW
Colossus and the Breaking of the Wartime ``Fish'' Codes
debroglie-louis.bib Homberger:1970:CMN
The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969
dijkstra-edsger-w.bib Randell:1980:C
The COLOSSUS
dyson-freeman-j.bib Brockman:2015:WTA
What to think about machines that think: today's leading thinkers on the age of
fparith.bib Randell:1977:CGC
Colossus: Godfather of the Computer
ieeeannhistcomput.bib Anonymous:1997:CBP
The Colossus of Bletchley Park, IEEE Rev., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 55--59 [Book Revi
https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1997.560758
lncs1997b.bib Carter:1997:BLC
The Breaking of the Lorenz Cipher: An Introduction to the Theory behind the Oper
lncs2000.bib Sale:2000:CGL
Colossus and the German Lorenz Cipher --- Code Breaking in WW II
master.bib Randell:1977:CGC
Colossus: Godfather of the Computer
mathcw.bib Randell:1982:ODC
The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61812-3
rutherford-ernest.bib Homberger:1970:CMN
The Cambridge mind: ninety years of the booktitle Cambridge Review, 1879--1969
rutherfordj.bib Copeland:2010:CBG
Colossus: Breaking the German `Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated His
sigcse1990.bib Plimmer:1998:MIW
Machines invented for WW II code breaking
https://doi.org/10.1145/306286.306309
turing-alan-mathison.bib Randell:1976:C
The COLOSSUS
von-neumann-john.bib Randell:1982:ODC
The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu -
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2018-06-22 20:01, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
> One of the other BI people, who's name now escapes me, although I can see
> his face in my mind, maybe I'll think of it later), would go on to do the
> PCI for Alpha a couple of years later. As I said, DEC did manage to get
> that one public, after the BI was made private as Erik points out.
Clem, I think I saw you say something similar in an earlier post.
To me it sounds as if you are saying that DEC did/designed PCI.
Are you sure about that? As far as I know, PCI was designed and created
by Intel, and the first users were just plain PC machines.
Alpha did eventually also get PCI, but it was not where it started, and
DEC had no control at all about PCI being public.
Might you have been thinking of Turbobus, Futurebus, or some other thing
that DEC did? Or do you have some more information about DEC being the
creator of PCI?
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Semi-Unix History....
Dave's "this date in history stuff" has reminded me of a great Masscomp
story that really needs to be written down and not lost to Unix history.
I'm hoping Warren can forgive me a little as the Unix history is the
Masscomp part and people involved; but I think it is fun and should be more
widely known.
Some of you may know who Jack Burness is (and even be part of his humor
mailing list - which is one of the most amazing who-is-who of the
industry). Jack is probably most infamous for his being the author of RT-11
Moonlander <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)>.
Some of his stunts over his career are legends, as our old friend and
colleague Mike Leibensperger once said, I want to be like Jack, when he
grows up (at ~70, I can assure you that he still has not).
After Jack left DEC, he became the original one man Masscomp Graphics
group. While the year really does not matter, at some point, Jack had been
given a tear off desk calendar as a Christmas present from his girfriend
called the 'Sex Fact of the Day Calendar.' Like Dave's daily reminders to
us on TUHS, every morning he typed in the one line factiod and passed it on
to the Masscomp Engineering Mailing List. This is important because the
VCs had just given us a straight laced ex-IBM guy as a president named Gus
Klein (aka Mr. Potatohead), who did not read email, and of course did not
read the engineering mailing list. He wants to workspace to be
'professional' and look like his idea of an 'office' and his 'memos' were
amazing as you can imagine.
The other important note to the story is that the late Roger Gourd, our
direct boss, had just created Masscomp's new Custom Product Engineering
(CPE) group; to be the analog to DEC's CSS. When Roger had left DEC for
Gould he had of course, moved to south Florida where they were based and
become quite a fisherman and protector of natural resources. When he was
recruited to come move back to New England to take on the reins in
development at Masscomp be brought some of south Florida back with him.
Well from Jack we had learn two important facts and from those facts
realized that mediterranean fisherman were liars: at some time in March it
was reported that fisherman in the med that caught a female manatee in
their nets and brought it into their boat considered it bad luck unless they
sodomized them because the manatee were thought to be mermaids; and some
time in May we learned that the Roman Catholic Church would excommunicate
any fisherman if it was discovered that said fisherman had caught a manatee
and that manatee had been used as a sex toy.
Upon learning this interesting catch-22, Gourd immediately sponsors the
"Save the Manatee Society in South Florida" and makes it the Group Mascot
for CPE. Well, manatees start popping up all over engineering. Mr.
Potatohead is clueless of the significance of course. At his memorial I
gave Roger's widow a stuffed manatee I still had from my desk from those
days, she knew and laughed and laughed knowing that Roger would have
approved.
BTW: I do however, still keep 'Darth Tater, on my desk at Intel'.
> From: Clem Cole
> I may have the the original Rand MH release somewhere.
There's this:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC/mh
Not sure how modified from the formal release this is, it may be pretty much
the original (it's certainly quite old - pre-TCP/IP).
Noel
> On 06/23/2018 04:38 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Others like DNS are pretty perfect and scale fantastic.
It's perhaps worth noting that today's DNS is somewhat different from the
original; some fairly substantial changes were made early on (although maybe
it was just in the security, I don't quite recall).
(The details escape me at this point, but at one point I did a detailed study
of DNS, and DNS security, for writing the security architecture document for
the resolution system in LISP - the networking one, not the language.)
Noel
Paul Winalski:
That was the VAXstation-11/RC.
===
Yep, that's the name.
My first batch of discarded MicroVAX IIs were the original
backbone routers for a large university campus, installed
ca. 1990. That backbone ran over serial-line connections,
at 56Kbps, which was quite impressive for the day given the
physical distances involved.
Either they had a bunch of Qbus backplanes lying around, or
someone computed that the cost of an 11/RC plus a backplane
was appreciably less than a system with an unobstructed
backplane. In any case, they swapped most of the backplanes
themselves. The one I got that still had the glue in was an
anomaly; maybe it was a spare chassis.
The MicroVAX routers ran Ultrix, and some of them had uptimes
of five years when they were finally shut down to be discarded.
All the hardware I rescued tested out fine, and some of it is
still running happily in my basement. I've had a few disk
failures over the years, and I think lost one power supply
back around Y2K and maybe had a DZV11 fail, but that's it.
We don't make hardware like that any more.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Paul Winalski:
Rather than design a new
CPU, they just put NOPs in the Skipjack microcode to slow it down.
The official code name for this machine was Flounder, but within DEC
engineering we called it "Wimpjack". Customers could buy a field
upgrade for Flounder microcode that restored it to Skipjack
performance levels.
====
As I remember it, once it came out that the upgrade
merely removed gratuitous nops, customers raised sufficient
fuss that the denopped microcode was made available for
free (perhaps only to those with service contracts) and
Flounder (VAX 8500) was no longer sold.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Ron Minnich:
Jon Hall used to love telling the story of the VAX backplane with the glue
in the board slots, which clever customers managed to damage and have
repaired with a non-glued-up backplane.
=====
It wasn't exactly a VAX backplane; it was a QBus backplane,
though I don't know whether this marketing-induced castration
was performed on anywhere but on the backplaces of certain
MicroVAX models.
I think one of my saved-from-the-dumpster BA23s had one
of those backplanes. I just declared it to be a source
of spare parts, other than backplanes.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Grant Taylor:
Why do you have to give up one tool to start using a different tool?
====
I hereby declare this part of the conversation very much
on-topic for TUHS.
The question of what tools should exist, what should do what,
whether to make a new tool or add something to an existing
one, is a continuing thread in the history of UNIX and its
use and abuse.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Over the last few years I’ve photographed many of the people listed on the wiki.
You can see the photos here:
http://facesofopensource.com
-P-
--
Peter Adams
http://www.peteradamsphoto.com
> On Jun 22, 2018, at 7:32 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> All, I've had a fair bit of positive feedback for my TUHS work. In reality
> I'm just the facilitator, collecting the stuff that you send me and keeping
> the mailing list going.
>
> I think we've captured nearly all we can of the 1970s Unix in terms of
> software. After that it becomes commercial, but I am building up the
> "Hidden Unix" archive to hold that. Just wish I could open that up ...
>
> What we haven't done a good job yet is to collect other things: photos,
> stories, anecdotes, scanned ephemera.
>
> Photos & scanned things: I'm very happy to collect these, but does anybody
> know of an existing place that accepts (and makes available online) photos
> and scanned ephemera? They are a bit out of scope for bitsavers as far as
> I can tell, but I'm happy to be corrected. Al? Other comments here?
>
> Stories & anecdotes: definitely type them in & e-mail them in and/or e-mail
> them to me if you want me just to preserve them. There is the Unix wiki I
> started here: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=start, but maybe there is
> already a better place. Gunkies?
>
> Interviews: Sometimes it's easier to glean stories & knowledge with interviews.
> I've never tried this but perhaps it's time. Who is up to have an audio
> interview? I'll worry about the technical details eventually, but is there
> interest?
>
> All of the above would slot in with the upcoming 50th anniversary. If you
> do have photos, bits of paper, stories to tell etc., then let's try to
> preserve them so that they are not lost.
>
> Cheers all, Warren
>
All, I've had a fair bit of positive feedback for my TUHS work. In reality
I'm just the facilitator, collecting the stuff that you send me and keeping
the mailing list going.
I think we've captured nearly all we can of the 1970s Unix in terms of
software. After that it becomes commercial, but I am building up the
"Hidden Unix" archive to hold that. Just wish I could open that up ...
What we haven't done a good job yet is to collect other things: photos,
stories, anecdotes, scanned ephemera.
Photos & scanned things: I'm very happy to collect these, but does anybody
know of an existing place that accepts (and makes available online) photos
and scanned ephemera? They are a bit out of scope for bitsavers as far as
I can tell, but I'm happy to be corrected. Al? Other comments here?
Stories & anecdotes: definitely type them in & e-mail them in and/or e-mail
them to me if you want me just to preserve them. There is the Unix wiki I
started here: https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=start, but maybe there is
already a better place. Gunkies?
Interviews: Sometimes it's easier to glean stories & knowledge with interviews.
I've never tried this but perhaps it's time. Who is up to have an audio
interview? I'll worry about the technical details eventually, but is there
interest?
All of the above would slot in with the upcoming 50th anniversary. If you
do have photos, bits of paper, stories to tell etc., then let's try to
preserve them so that they are not lost.
Cheers all, Warren
> From: "John P. Linderman"
> 4 bucks a bit!
When IBM went to license the core patent(s?) from MIT, they offered MIT a
choice of a large lump sump (the number US$20M sticks in my mind), or US$.01 a
bit.
The negotiators from MIT took the lump sum.
When I first heard this story, I thought it was corrupt folklore, but I later
found it in one of the IBM histories.
This story repets itself over and over again, though: one of the Watson's
saying there was a probably market for <single-digit> of computers; Ken Olsen
saying people wouldn't want computers in their homes; etc, etc.
Noel
[ A few list members asked me to re-post this out of the existing
thread, so that it is more prominent. ]
All, based on the comments we've had in the past day or so, it seems that
you are mostly happy to stick with one list, and to tolerate a bit of
off-topic material.
I'm also aware that this list is approaching its own quarter-century
anniversary and it has become an important historical record.
So feel free to drift away from Unix now and then. But please self-regulate:
if you (as an individual) think the S/N ratio is dropping, please ask the
list to improve it.
As always, I'll insert my own nudges and requests based on my own eclectic
set of rules :-)
Cheers all, Warren
Because some "off-topic" discussions wander into estoterica that's beyond
me, I superficially thought an off-topic siding would be a good thing for
some trains of thought. But then I wondered, if I ignore the siding how
will I hear of new hear about new topics that get initiated there? I could
miss good stuff. So I'm quite happy with the current arrangement where
occasionally ever-patient Warren gives a nudge. (I'm a digest reader. If
every posting came as a distinct message, I might feel otherwise.)
Doug
> From: "Erik E. Fair"
> ordered a VAX-8810 to replace two 11/780s on the promise from DEC that
> all our UniBus and MASSbus peripherals would still work ... which we
> knew (from others on the Internet who'd and tried reported their
> experiences) to be a lie.
Just out of curiousity, why'd you all order something you knew wouldn't work?
So you could get a better deal out of DEC for whatever you ordered instead,
later, as they tried to make it up to you all for trying to sell you something
broken?
Noel
> From: Warren Toomey
> Computing history is maybe too generic.
There already is a "computer-history" list, hosted at the Postel Institute:
http://www.postel.org/computer-history/
Unlike its sibling "Internet-history" list, it didn't catch on, though. (No
traffic for some years now.)
Noel
> From: Tim Bradshaw
> There is a paper, by Flowers, in the Annals of the History of Computing
> which discusses a lot of this. I am not sure if it's available online
Yes:
http://www.ivorcatt.com/47c.htm
(It's also available behind the IEEE pay-wall.) That issue of the Annals (5/3)
has a couple of articles about Colossus; the Coombs one on the design is
available here:
http://www.ivorcatt.com/47d.htm
but doesn't have much on the reliability issues; the Chandler one on
maintenance has more, but alas is only available behind the paywall:
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/1983/03/man1983030260-abs.html
Brian Randell did a couple of Colossus articles (in "History of Computing in
the 20th Century" and "Origin of Digital Computers") for which he interviewed
Flowers and others, there may be details there too.
Noel
