Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Jerry Feldman]

On 10/08/2011 03:32 PM, MBR wrote:
Speaking of RT-11, my first job out of college was in the Small Systems 
Group at DEC from 1972 to 1977.  RT-11 was developed as a successor to 
OS-8.  The PDP-8 (12-bit word, 3-bit opcode, maximum memory 
32K-12-bit-words) was to the world of computers in the early 1970s what 
the Model T had been to the world of automobiles in the 1910s.  While it 
was severely limited compared to mainframes of the day, the PDP-8 
brought the price down to the $10,000 to $20,000 range, a price where 
every college psych lab could afford their own computer to monitor 
experiments and process data.


DEC's mainframe at the time was the PDP-10 (36-bit word, 9-bit opcode, 
maximum memory 4M-36-bit-words), which typically cost many hundreds of 
thousands of dollars.  TOPS-10, the PDP-10 operating system, 
time-shared among lots of terminals.  I don't remember what its limit 
was, but I think 50 users at a time was not unusual.


When I joined DEC's Small Systems Group, one member of the group was 
legendary -- Ritchie Lary.  PDP-8 development had to be done with a 
cross-assembler running on the PDP-10.  But the Small Systems Group 
didn't have enough PDP-8's for everyone to have one, so we each got a 
few hours a day on the real PDP-8 hardware.  It was extremely 
cumbersome to have to assemble your source code on the PDP-10, punch a 
paper tape of the binary, wait for your 2-4 hour time slot on the 
PDP-8 hardware, load the binary from paper tape, debug your code, and 
then have to go back to the PDP-10 and repeat the process if you 
needed to change anything in your code.  The story was that a year or 
two before I joined, Ritchie Lary realized that to do a standard edit, 
compile, and debug cycle all on the same machine, he'd need a 
single-user version of TOPS-10 running on the PDP-8.  So he went off 
and wrote it!  Other members of the group wrote the necessary 
utilities.  The editor (TECO) was translated, 
instruction-for-instruction, to the 8 instuction set.  Someone wrote a 
native PDP-8 assembler.  And thus was OS-8 born!  Lary's original name 
for it was the _*F*_ully _*U*_pward _*C*_ompatible _*KE*_yboard 
_*M*_onitor.  Of course, marketing couldn't call it FUCKEM, so they 
gave it a more respectable name.


I know that if someone had suggested to me at that time that an OS 
that ran in Mega-words of 36-bit word memory could be implemented as a 
single-user verison in 8 Kilo-words of 12-bit word memory, with only 
256 words resident, I'd have thought the idea was insane!  I've always 
felt that Lary's ability to see that such a thing could be done and go 
do it was true genius.


Around 1973 or 1974, DEC's hardware engineers gave us a brand new, and 
quite innovative architecture, the PDP-11.  Its instruction set was 
nicely orthogonal so it was easy to learn, but was also quite 
powerful.  Its native post-increment and pre-decrement addressing 
modes inspired C's ++ and --.


Our managers came to us and said that because OS-8 was doing so well, 
they need OS-8 reimplemented to run on the new PDP-11.  That's how 
RT-11 came into existence.


Gary Kildall's CP/M started out as his own reimplementation of RT-11 
for the Intel 8080.  A few years later, Tim Paterson of Seattle 
Computer Products (SCP) wrote his own implementation of CP/M called 
QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS).  Bill Gates didn't write MS-DOS.  He simply 
bought rights to QDOS from SCP for $50,000 while keeping secret from 
SCP the fact that Microsoft's customer was IBM!  And that's how the 
whole chain of cloning and incremental improvement came to make a 
fortune for Gates under the name MS-DOS.


For me, the lessons of this history are:

   *

 Good software usually involves someone with a brilliant insight
 followed by a series of incremental improvements done by
 individuals, either collaborating with one another or
 unintentionally collaborating by copying and improving each
 other's work.

   *

 Those who reap the rewards seldom have a significant hand in the
 creation.  Instead they tend to be skilled publicists who make
 dubious deals with naive programmers.

I think some, but not all of this, applies to Steve Jobs too.  He was 
definitely quite skillful at promoting his company, their products, 
and himself.  He didn't invent the modern bitmapped graphics 
computer.  That work was done by people like Charles Thacker, Alan 
Kay, Douglas Engelbart, Robert Metcalfe, and others that most people 
have never heard of.  But I think Jobs had vision that allowed him to 
improve on their ideas while copying what they'd done, just as Kildall 
improved on what we'd done at DEC, and Paterson improved on what 
Kildall did.  In that regard, whatever other objections I may have had 
to how Jobs ran things, I have far more respect for him than for Gates.



One of my first jobs after graduate school was at Burger King Corp. At 
that time, BK's point of sale systems were 8K DEC PDP-8Ms (with no 
c

Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[MBR]

On 10/8/2011 11:42 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:

My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
MITS Altair

The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google).
Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer.
You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a
biorhythm chart generator.

Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the TRS-80
and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus
PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486.
That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
"frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane,
and transistor density has accelerated ever since.

By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters
usually run Linux.

-rich
Speaking of RT-11, my first job out of college was in the Small Systems 
Group at DEC from 1972 to 1977.  RT-11 was developed as a successor to 
OS-8.  The PDP-8 (12-bit word, 3-bit opcode, maximum memory 
32K-12-bit-words) was to the world of computers in the early 1970s what 
the Model T had been to the world of automobiles in the 1910s.  While it 
was severely limited compared to mainframes of the day, the PDP-8 
brought the price down to the $10,000 to $20,000 range, a price where 
every college psych lab could afford their own computer to monitor 
experiments and process data.


DEC's mainframe at the time was the PDP-10 (36-bit word, 9-bit opcode, 
maximum memory 4M-36-bit-words), which typically cost many hundreds of 
thousands of dollars.  TOPS-10, the PDP-10 operating system, time-shared 
among lots of terminals.  I don't remember what its limit was, but I 
think 50 users at a time was not unusual.


When I joined DEC's Small Systems Group, one member of the group was 
legendary -- Ritchie Lary.  PDP-8 development had to be done with a 
cross-assembler running on the PDP-10.  But the Small Systems Group 
didn't have enough PDP-8's for everyone to have one, so we each got a 
few hours a day on the real PDP-8 hardware.  It was extremely cumbersome 
to have to assemble your source code on the PDP-10, punch a paper tape 
of the binary, wait for your 2-4 hour time slot on the PDP-8 hardware, 
load the binary from paper tape, debug your code, and then have to go 
back to the PDP-10 and repeat the process if you needed to change 
anything in your code.  The story was that a year or two before I 
joined, Ritchie Lary realized that to do a standard edit, compile, and 
debug cycle all on the same machine, he'd need a single-user version of 
TOPS-10 running on the PDP-8.  So he went off and wrote it!  Other 
members of the group wrote the necessary utilities.  The editor (TECO) 
was translated, instruction-for-instruction, to the 8 instuction set.  
Someone wrote a native PDP-8 assembler.  And thus was OS-8 born!  Lary's 
original name for it was the _*F*_ully _*U*_pward _*C*_ompatible 
_*KE*_yboard _*M*_onitor.  Of course, marketing couldn't call it FUCKEM, 
so they gave it a more respectable name.


I know that if someone had suggested to me at that time that an OS that 
ran in Mega-words of 36-bit word memory could be implemented as a 
single-user verison in 8 Kilo-words of 12-bit word memory, with only 256 
words resident, I'd have thought the idea was insane!  I've always felt 
that Lary's ability to see that such a thing could be done and go do it 
was true genius.


Around 1973 or 1974, DEC's hardware engineers gave us a brand new, and 
quite innovative architecture, the PDP-11.  Its instruction set was 
nicely orthogonal so it was easy to learn, but was also quite powerful.  
Its native post-increment and pre-decrement addressing modes inspired 
C's ++ and --.


Our managers came to us and said that because OS-8 was doing so well, 
they need OS-8 reimplemented to run on the new PDP-11.  That's how RT-11 
came into existence.


Gary Kildall's CP/M started out as his own reimplementation of RT-11 for 
the Intel 8080.  A few years later, Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer 
Products (SCP) wrote his own implementation of CP/M called QDOS (Quick 
and Dirty OS).  Bill Gates didn't write MS-DOS.  He simply bought rights 
to QDOS from SCP for $50,000 while keeping secret from SCP the fact that 
Microsoft's customer was IBM!  And that's how the whole chain of cloning 
and incremental improvement came 

Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[edwardp]

First computer was a TRS-80, had Level II BASIC and 16KB of RAM (circa 
1980).  Programs loaded in via cassette tape.


Computers have indeed come a LONG way since then.

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Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Jerry Feldman]

On 10/08/2011 12:37 PM, Matt Shields wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Rich Braun  wrote:
>
>> Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:
>>> My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
>>> then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
>>> At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
>>> MITS Altair
>> The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
>> Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google).
>> Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
>> cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer.
>> You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program
>> and a
>> biorhythm chart generator.
>>
>> Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
>> thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the
>> TRS-80
>> and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
>> factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC
>> surplus
>> PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
>> mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486.
>> That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
>> "frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a
>> backplane,
>> and transistor density has accelerated ever since.
>>
>> By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing
>> clusters
>> usually run Linux.
> Mine was a Commodore Pet.  Dad bought one for his business and one for home.
>
>
The first computer I ever use/programmed on was an IBM 7044 that used
card input in 1965. I learned FORTRAN 2, and subsequently BASIC for a
feed into GE Time Sharing as an undergraduate. In graduate school we had
a DEC PDP-8 with a hard drive. I recall a DEC service guy coming in to
clean the drive. We did not have mag tape, so input was from PPT, TTY,
or punched cards. One project I did was to replace the printer driver
for the Potter Printer. I would spend hours in the lab.

-- 
Jerry Feldman 
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90

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Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Matt Shields]

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Rich Braun  wrote:

> Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:
> > My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
> > then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
> > At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
> > MITS Altair
>
> The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
> Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google).
> Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
> cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer.
> You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program
> and a
> biorhythm chart generator.
>
> Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
> thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the
> TRS-80
> and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
> factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC
> surplus
> PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
> mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486.
> That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
> "frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a
> backplane,
> and transistor density has accelerated ever since.
>
> By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing
> clusters
> usually run Linux.
>
> -rich
>
>
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Mine was a Commodore Pet.  Dad bought one for his business and one for home.

Matthew Shields
Owner
BeanTown Host - Web Hosting, Domain Names, Dedicated Servers, Colocation,
Managed Services
www.beantownhost.com
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Re: [Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

On 10/8/2011 11:42 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:

My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
MITS Altair


The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google).
Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer.
You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a
biorhythm chart generator.

Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the TRS-80
and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus
PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486.
That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
"frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane,
and transistor density has accelerated ever since.

By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters
usually run Linux.

-rich


The first computer I had any personal experience with was an IBM 1620. 
20K of BCD digits, and the peak instruction rate was about 6,000 per 
second. (The memory cycle was 20 microseconds and the shortest 
instructions took eight cycles.) Oh, and a hard disk that stored 2M of 
BCD digits.


After a year my school replaced it with an IBM 1130, which was hardly a 
powerhouse either: 8K bytes of RAM and a peak execution rate of perhaps 
80,000 instructions/second (5.85 microsecond cycle time and most 
instructions took multiple cycles). Oh yes, another hard disk; this one 
stored one megabyte and used stepper motors that made a loud saw-like 
noise during seeks. Although it was a hard disk it was no faster than a 
floppy drive.


I did have some exposure to more powerful systems at the nearby state 
university. They had a midrange 370 system (370/155 if memory serves) 
that was used in batch mode (submit deck of cards, come back later for 
printouts) and a PDP-10 timesharing system with ASR-35 terminals.


Once home computers had floppy drives they were already exceeding the 
performance of the 1620 and 1130 (though the early floppies didn't have 
as much capacity as the hard disks did) so they were never toys to me. 
It was a while before I could scrape up the cash to buy one of my own (I 
had an SWTPC 6800 kit that I never quite got to work properly, and later 
an Atari 800XL) but I certainly wanted a home computer right away!


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[Discuss] Old computers Re: (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Rich Braun]

Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer:
> My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back
> then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people.
> At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a
> MITS Altair

The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in
Arlington, VA in 1977:  an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google). 
Anyone else remember those?  It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a
cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer. 
You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a
biorhythm chart generator.

Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never
thought of these micro things as anything other than toys.  So when the TRS-80
and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first
factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus
PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11.  The first "real" home computer, that rivaled
mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later:  the Intel 486. 
That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the
"frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane,
and transistor density has accelerated ever since.

By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters
usually run Linux.

-rich


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