The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
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From: jmfbahciv on 30 Mar 2007 08:45 In article <20070329152047.7053da0c.steveo(a)eircom.net>, Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo(a)eircom.net> wrote: >On Thu, 29 Mar 07 12:30:28 GMT >jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > >> And some of that work was done by JMF, the other half of my >> username. It took those with TOPS-10 experience to cause VMS >> to evolve to be an OS that was useful. > > And it took Microsoft to perform the opposite of incremental >development on it to produce the useless POS it has evolved into. Consider the people who are doing this. /BAH
From: Andrew Swallow on 30 Mar 2007 08:59 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > In article <mL2dndkRKfoabpbbRVnyvQA(a)bt.com>, > Andrew Swallow <am.swallow(a)btopenworld.com> wrote: >> jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >>> In article <6meeue.322.ln(a)via.reistad.name>, >>> Morten Reistad <first(a)last.name> wrote: >> [snip] >>>> Lastest pc press blurbs. Vista only runs around 80 of 150 >>>> identified critical XP applications. >>> So can we make a reasonable assumption that the load tests >>> involved all games and not critical apps? >> Or the games were written in the last 2 years and developed on >> the beta version of Vista. > > Sigh! I don't know what I'm going to do with you. > I wasn't talking about new games. The gamers have been > furiously typing and installing their old games and haven't > complained. Now, either the gamers have become jaded and > don't play as they used to (I have almost eliminated this > case) or Vista can play all the old games consistently. Remember how long Vista was at Beta release. It comes down to are many games that are at least 4 years old still played by gamers who buy the latest OS? Andrew Swallow
From: jmfbahciv on 30 Mar 2007 08:54 In article <573rgkF2b2dcvU1(a)mid.individual.net>, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?= <jvorbrueggen(a)not-mediasec.de> wrote: >>>Yes, that's the issue where I see the -10/-20 crowd have a valid point: the >>>8650 took much too long to arrive. >> First they had to figure out how to erase the 4 extra bits. > >Say what? I've always heard, if you are referring to Jupiter, that that >project was running way behing schedule and way over budget and significantly >contributed to the PDP-10 cancellation. Or is that FUD and urban legend? > >Anyway, after the 780 which was at the lower end of reasonable, >performance-wise, [spluttering emoticon wiping oatmeal off TTY screen] That is such an understatement, it's already 3/4 of the way to China. /BAH
From: Andrew Reilly on 30 Mar 2007 09:08 On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:46:53 +0000, Nick Maclaren wrote: > > In article <pan.2007.03.30.00.09.47.351963(a)areilly.bpc-users.org>, > Andrew Reilly <andrew-newspost(a)areilly.bpc-users.org> writes: > |> > |> > Dunno. I wasn't talking at that level anyway. If DEC had taken > |> > the decision to produce a new micro-PDP-11, there would have been > |> > a LOT of such issues to resolve. > |> > |> I played with a nice LSI-11 box at Uni. It wasn't new then, but there > |> were plenty of 68000 and a few Z8000 systems around by that time too (both > |> of which could reasonably be called -11 clones). > > None of those could hold a candle to the PDP-11 for peripheral driving > of the sort I am referring to. My colleagues tried all of them, and > had major difficulties getting round their restrictions. That's an interesting assertion. How so? All three were close-to-unpipelined 16-bit processors with about eight general purpose registers (double-ish on the 68k), running at a few MHz, and similar sorts of OS support (not counting some instruction restart failure that turned out to be in the 68k), and a very simple, traditional vectored interrupt scheme. What makes the -11 better? DMA bus-mastering in the peripherals? Not in the LSI-11 box that I got to use. I can imagine heroic peripheral designs if you really wanted that sort of thing, but I reckon that one of the other micros would have done as well with the same setup. On the peripheral front, the Z8390 (?) USART was (with the exception of a short (3-byte) receive buffer) a really great device that lived on in Macs and Sun systems for years. (Some of an HDLC protocol stack in the thing, from memory, but I don't know how much use that got beyond Appletalk networking.) Cheers, -- Andrew
From: jmfbahciv on 30 Mar 2007 09:03
In article <460C8655.91D81170(a)yahoo.com>, CBFalconer <cbfalconer(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >> >.... snip ... >> >> Neither would matter. Look if you increase your "CPU speed" by >> twice, your system will then be constantly waiting on I/O becaues >> the CPU got its job done faster. YOur system software and usage >> had been tweaked over the years to accomodate the behaviour of a >> VAX with its peripherals (this includes memory). Now you replace >> the CENTRAL processing unit with something that goes twice as fast. > >And the system simply switches to another process while waiting for >i/o. No problem. > It is a problem because the monitor has run every job that was runnable and _all_ are now waiting on I/O to complete. Look. We saw this. It was part of our business cycle. Systems were I/O bound so we built a faster I/O. The same jobs were now CPU bound so we built a faster CPU. The same jobs were now I/O bound so we built a faster I/O..... You know about bottlenecks and roads. /BAH |