At 01:42 PM 5/1/2009, you wrote: >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.
Well, if you come work for the Gummint here, you can still program in Ada... I have to do it on occasion to port some software from VMS to *nix type architecture. That's not very pleasant by the way. As portable as Ada was supposed to be, DEC put system hooks in so that you could "optimize" your code for the system you were running on. DEC/HP/Compaq ruined VMS by letting marketing decide which direction they were going to take the OS. Instead of capitalizing on their stature in the "Big Iron" industry, they figured they would take over the desktop world. That worked well... Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
