Favourite computer history books?
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From: Wes Groleau on 22 May 2010 13:14 On 05-22-2010 01:39, DMcCunney wrote: > fundamentals. Look at his early work, for example, and you discover > that Picasso could *draw*. I once watched a TV biography of Picasso, which included lots of views of his work. I remember noticing that the realistic works mostly were done when he had a girlfriend, and the cubist when he did not. I will not go any deeper into amateur psychology. :-) -- Wes Groleau I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS. -- Larry DeLuca
From: Wes Groleau on 22 May 2010 13:16 On 05-22-2010 13:14, Wes Groleau wrote: > I will not go any deeper into amateur psychology. :-) On second thought, I will. Now that I've lost my wife, I can definitely understand such a phenomenon. NOW I'll retire from the field. -- Wes Groleau "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as could possibly be imagined." -- David Hume, age 37 "There's no such thing of that, 'cause I never heard of it." -- Becky Groleau, age 4
From: DMcCunney on 22 May 2010 13:35 * Geoffrey S. Mendelson: > > Over the years, several satellites have been "reparked", or moved. An old friend of mine worked for a Boeing unit in Seattle that did such things. She became part of a group called the Seattle 7, because a competitor was interested in them, and they told Boeing "Exceed their offer, or we leave." Boeing needed them badly enough to do the unthinkable and give them substantial out of band increases to keep them. My friend had clients who specifically asked that *she* handle their moves because they trusted her abilities. Boeing decided not to find out the hard way whether they would follow her if she moved to a competitor. > Geoff. ______ Dennis
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 22 May 2010 16:18 DMcCunney <plugh(a)xyzzy.com> writes: > An old friend of mine worked for a Boeing unit in Seattle that did such > things. She became part of a group called the Seattle 7, because a > competitor was interested in them, and they told Boeing "Exceed their > offer, or we leave." Boeing needed them badly enough to do the > unthinkable and give them substantial out of band increases to keep > them. My friend had clients who specifically asked that *she* handle > their moves because they trusted her abilities. Boeing decided not to > find out the hard way whether they would follow her if she moved to a > competitor. when they folded sbs ... most of the people went to mci (the old mci before getting absorbed by worldcom) and satellites were eventually picked up by hughes ... now known today as boeing satellite systems: http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bss/factsheets/601/dbs/dbs.html all the uplink control and positioning that I remember was in castle rock ... mentioned at the bottom of the above web page. part of the issue was the challenger disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster I was at the launch for sbs-4 on 41-d http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-41D.html and newer satellites were designed for larger capacity of shuttle bay and had to wait for larger ariane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_4 sbs-6 ... went up 1990 (after sbs was dissolved and satellites taken over by hughes) http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bss/factsheets/376/sbs_6/sbs_6.html and mentioned here (12oct90) http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/business/ariane_milestones.html SBS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Business_Systems above mentions first commercial use of shuttle was flying sbs3. supposedly one of the use of satellites was higher speed computer communication ... but a lot of people came over from the SNA organization ... which was very bad at handling (geo-sync) satellite propogation delay ... and the standard 3705/3725 offering didn't handle more than 56kbit. as a result ... their foreys into (sna) computer communication didn't go well ... and it then seemed SBS sort-of drifted into voice communication (which geo-sync delay was not also suited for). my HSDT effort with T1 and higher-speed links ... got me pulled into also driving satellite links (and handling propogation delay ... in addition to terrestrial links) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt I've used anecdote from the mid-80s about the large chasm between SNA (mostly dumb terminal driver) paradigm and high-speed computer communication. One friday, somebody from the communication division sent out on announcement on the internal network http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internal for a new discussion forum about computer communication that included the following definition: low-speed <9.6kbits medium-speed 19.2kbits high-speed 56kbits very high-speed 1.5mbits that weekend, I left on business trip to the other side of the pacific .... and monday morning on the wall of conference room low-speed <20mbits medium-speed 100mbits high-speed 200-300mbits very high-speed >600mbits about the same time, the communication group published an internal report claiming that mainframe users didn't need more than 56kbit links (i.e. could be considered justifying that 3705/3725 controllers didn't support more than 56kbit links) ... which projected that it wouldn't be until 1992 before mainframe customers would have requirement for T1 support. Their analysis was based on study on "fat pipes" support by 3725 controller ... where two or more (separate) 56kbit links were treated as single logical link. They showed the number of customers with two, three, four, five, and six 56kbit links in single "fat pipes" ... where above five ... the number was dropping to zero. what they didn't document was that (at the time) typical telco rates for T1 was about the same as five or six 56kbit links ... so when customer required more than about 256kbit ... they moved to T1 and supported it by some other vendors hardware. At the time of the "fat pipes" study .... it was trivial possible to find 200 mainframe customers with T1s installed (using other vendors products to support the links). -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 22 May 2010 19:07
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn(a)garlic.com> writes: > SBS > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Business_Systems re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#69 Favourite computer history books? the sbs wiki page claims that the sbs earth station and been produced from highly modified 8100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_8100 when my wife was asked to review 8100 ... she turned thumbs down and it was killed. past reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#75 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#53 MVS History http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#27 IBM 3705 and UC.5 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#46 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#55 Is computer history taught now? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008h.html#40 3277 terminals and emulators http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010.html#6 Larrabee delayed: anyone know what's happening? for other drift ... past posts with old email from jul79 telling story about MIT LISP machine people asking for 801s ... and being offered 8100s instead: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#65 801 (was Re: Reviving Multics http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#3 Architectural support for programming languages http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#45 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006t.html#9 32 or even 64 registers for x86-64? we did "custom" designed earth station for hsdt ... earlier reference (in this thread) to one of the companies that built a set ... was approached by a large telco asking if the company would build the telco a duplicate set to the same spec (aka form of industrial espionage): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#27 Favourite computer history books? -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 |