[cctalk] Re: What's the going rate for 80286?
Dunno, what does a box of Cracker Jack cost these days...?
[cctalk] Re: A little off-topic but at least somewhat related: endianness
> From: Peter Ekstrom > > I am tinkering with some C-code where I am working on something that > can process some microcode. The microcode is from a DG MV/1 > machine and while working on it, I noticed it is in little-endian. > That's simple enough to work around but that had me wondering, why do > we have big and little endianness? What is the benefit of storing the > low-order byte first? Or is that simply just an arbitrary decision > made by some hardware manufacturers? Mostly because hardware support for dividing a word into smaller chunks (and addressing them individually) was something manufacturers added at different times, on their own initiative, and there was no agreed-upon way to do it. And since there are two obvious ways to turn a sequence of X Y-bit chunks into a word of X * Y bits and neither one is exactly "wrong," it ended up being a crapshoot as to whether manufacturers would do it the one way, or the other. (...or do something demented instead, like the PDP-11's "middle-endian" approach to 32-bit values...) And most of the debate probably came down to matters of taste; big- endian is how we write things on paper, so it seems "natural" to most people, while little-endian means that byte offset matches place value (i.e. byte 0's value is multiplied by (256 ^ 0) = 1, byte 1's value by (256 ^ 1) = 256, etc.,) so it seems "natural" to math types. That said - and I have no idea whether this actually influenced anyone's decision for any system anywhere ever - one hard advantage of little-endian representation is that, if your CPU does arithmetic in serial fashion, you don't have to "walk backwards" to do it in the correct sequence.
[cctalk] Re: MS-DOS
> From: Adrian Godwin > > i think it was strongly disliked by many non-technical users because > it was the first one where MS tried to lock down some admin > functions, forcing the users to confirm or enter an admin password to > continue. This isn't necessarily bad but it was rather hamfisted and > disliked. This, 100%. On top of the usual "chews up more memory for not that much more functionality" issue that's always the case, the initial release of UAC was *spectacularly* braindead, to the point where the simplest way to make Vista usable was to disable it entirely - and once that habit was ingrained in users, they persisted on down the line, even well into Win10's lifetime. Windows really did need improved security/ permissions features, but their rollout was such a bungle that we ended up with a world where millions of people ran *less* secure by choice, because it just wasn't worth the pain.
[cctalk] Re: Experience using an Altair 8800 ("Personal computer" from 70s)
On Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:08 -0500 cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote: > > It's like John Conway's "game of life," but more prone to cause > > uncontrollable fits of laughter. > > You owe me a new keyboard (and another glass of milk). Even in death, his power remains ;)
[cctalk] Re: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
From: ben To: cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: [cctalk] Re: terminology [was: First Personal Computer] > The third thing is a real OS. Nobody has one, as a personal computer. > CP/M and MSDOS does not handle IRQ's. Unix for the PDP-11 is real > operating system but not personal as it requires a admin,and a > swapping media. This an auld refrain among *nix partisans of the ESR type, but I've yet to hear someone offer up a real defense of it. Even putting aside what "handles IRQs" means here (yes, strictly speaking the IRQs on the IBM PC are handled by the BIOS and/or add-on drivers/utilties, but DOS most certainly makes use of the facilities provided,) why does that make it "not a real OS?" What does PDP-11 Unix provide which MS-DOS doesn't to make one "real" and the other not? Certainly, nothing about a single-tasking single-user text-based environment *requires* interrupt-based I/O, even if it may smooth out performance in some aspects. And there's little if any call for a security system that'd require an administrator account in such a model; if one user "owns" the machine, whatever they decide to do to it can be Considered Legitimate. Virtual-memory capability may certainly enable the user to do more than they'd otherwise be able to, but it's hard to make an argument for it as a *requirement;* even *nix can run without swap, and in point of fact DOS can be support virtual memory with a protected-mode extender. Or is it multi-tasking capability itself that makes the difference? Can't see why that should be the case; it's definitely convenient, but as one person can only be doing so much at any given time, it's also hard to see that as a *requirement.* So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and why?
[cctalk] Re: DOS p-System Pascal: (Was: Saga of CP/M)
On Fri, 10 May 2024 12:00:07 -0500 cctalk-requ...@classiccmp.org wrote: > The UCSD shell was atrocious. The compiler was slow. The editor was > terrible. The entire experience was reminiscent of working on a dumb > terminal connected to a mainframe, when it could've taken advantage of > the features of the personal computer. > > I hated it. > > I hate it. I've never had the pleasure, but a glance over the documentation is... enlightening. God only knows why so many people over the decades have gravitated to the "pick the thing you want to do from this list of the things which can be done" school of UI design...
[cctalk] DOS p-System Pascal: (Was: Saga of CP/M)
> Pascal never really made it on the microcomputer platform did it? > I can be convinced otherwise but it seems like microcomputing Pascal > was more of a staging environment for then upload into a production > mainframe/mini Pascal was the language of choice over at Apple in the original MacOS days, and as Mike has noted Turbo Pascal was popular enough on the PC; it was more, I think, that the UCSD-style language-environment-as-OS paradigm never caught on in the microcomputer world. Early consumer micros of course had ROM BASIC, but once you got past that to a reasonably full-featured operating system, there was no compelling reason for it to be tightly coupled to one particular language/compiler when it could just as easily treat compilers as Yet Another Program and support arbitrarily many.
Re: Sun 3/60 Up for Grabs
I'm moving and I need to clean out a few things. I have a Sun 3/60 with no keyboard/mount/monitor/hard drive - just the pizza box. It net booted NetBSD, but that was many years ago so YRMV. Free for pick-up only in Queen Creek, AZ. Is this still available? This is the kind of hardware I'd like to help preserve. Thanks, John Klos
OFFLIST Re: domains available (FTGH)
Sun Fire v254, an AMD Ryzen box (with ECC), a 1U Amiga 1200, and a 1U VAX. John Klos What OS do you run on the Amiga 1200 that is in a 1u case? That is pretty odd :-) - Ethan -- : Ethan O'Toole
