7 Apr
2021
7 Apr
'21
4:31 a.m.
Serial port performance did not scale well on early pcs, so an industry was
grown with smart serial cards. There were a few serial cards, but most
didn't have the smarts, just shared interrupts. Best performing, in my
usage, was the Stallion brand, an Australian company. These cards had their
own processor, uarts and ram. Had used 4-32 ports. I am guessing they did
high speed transfers via the high speed bus on the PC, relieving the main
CPU from getting interrupts, doing queuing, caching etc. These cards were
supported by SCO products like Xenix and Unix, some others and ran on a PC.
Flying aircraft could be efficient for some visits that didn't have direct
city pairs served by airlines, especially the US. Plus a lot of fun, if you
do it yourself.
I used to push statistical and financial data around Australia in the 80s
via dial up using automated scripting with Zmodem, Sun hosts, PC remotes.
Was very reliable.
IBM NDAs and legals can feel overwhelming in meetings....
Serge
On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 11:59, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 06:49:31PM -0700, Jon
Steinhart wrote:
Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
Yeah, I went and looked, it was a small $5M/year (not that small)
business and for some reason he was delivering software with his
small plane.
Another hypothesis I had ties in with this: both he and Bill Gates
were speakers at Euromicro 1980 in London, from 16 to 18 September.
Bill Gates was a no-show. Would that fit in with Gary's "gone
flying"?
Greg
According to Tom, no, he was visiting a somewhat local customer, I
think in the bay area, which is why he was flying his plane. This
wasn't the modern times when CEOs owned fancy jets.