When I studied Chem Engineering I had the chance to work/play on KL/KI 10's using TOPS 10 and what I learned there regarding spooling, OS, MultiTasking, Realtime... and so on... leaves the impression that everything simply went downhill from there. That machine had no specific CPU cycle. It kinda ran event driven. THAT was fast considering the discrete way that behemoth was build. Multi Ported Ferrit Memory... Awesome and I'm happy I saw all that running before it went onto the scrap yard replaced by the 'Wax Machine'. Downside at the time was that the 'adventure cave' could only be loaded after hours as it ate to many system resources 8))))). 'R GAM ADVENT' haha.. Good times... I am still missing the majority of functions available there. I loved the entire DEC line and the DEC Manuals are still by far the BEST organized documents with the clearest structure and language around.
I still do not fully understand why all that good stuff went to manure. One would expect that in the spirit of continuous evolution and human progress the better products are pushed ahead. But CPU and OS design are HORRIBLE today. I bought a color laser lately just to figure out that it took me about an hour to fight with Vista and drivers and the 1980's error messages regarding 'not being able to print'... WTF it's friggin 2009... an OS should 'smell' a printer and provide the functions for it. Well.. Apple does it nicely.. Just looking at the RT problems we are having in the light of several GHz in the background is totally unacceptable. One can be more precise with a 4.77MHz Z80 than I am with my 2.8GHz P4 and HyperThreading. When I learned about the SMI and the fact that this 'fudged functionality' is above the NMI.... it explained a lot and made me nearly cough up my morning coffee. All which is necessary for looser technology to develop is a few smart people doing nothing. And Bill Gates... and all the other Carnies along that line... HA... Happy Weekend fellow penguins Rainer PS:What to real programmer program in today? I guess Fortran is out and the Pascal programming quiche eaters moved on to VB haha. On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Jon Elson <el...@pico-systems.com> wrote: > Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote: >> I sysadmin'd a bunch of those behemoth Alpha 8400's. They really >> were a joy to administer. DEC did those ones right - we hardly ever >> had any hardware maintenance to worry about. Clustering was a >> wunnerful thing for system(s) uptime, especially on critical >> production machines. Too bad they let that all slip away. >> >> You are talking about CISC, right? ;-) >> >> > VAX was CISC, but done with a clean sheet, and following and expanding > on the general PDP-11 layout. > > Alpha was a very clean RISC design. > > I'm not sure X86 can even be called CISC, more like cobbled > abomination. Have you ever heard of Virtual DMA Services on the X86? > Doing some digging many years ago, I discovered there is a virtual IBM > PC (original 8088, 4 MHz clock, interrupt controller chip, DMA > controller chip, etc) implemented in all 386, 486 and Pentium chips. > This allows those games that were loaded from DOS but then took over the > whole system to be played on Windows 3.1 and later. Yucchhh! So, all > the I/o ports and auxilliary chip registers are implemented to > virtualize a game's playing with the DMA controller. > > Jon > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations > Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of > expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry > leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf > and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- _________________________________ Rainer M. Schmidt Complex Consulting LLC b...@complexllc.com VoIP (646)-233-1002 FAX (646)-435-9216 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
