someone smarter than Dave Cutler
in [Device Drivers]
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From: Scott Lurndal on 30 Mar 2010 18:48 Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >> Mark Crispin wrote: >>> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >>>> Anyone that takes the time to leaf through some >>>> Datamation magazines of that era would be lucky >>>> to find any reference to PDP-10's. >>> Using Datamation as an historical reference is like using the National >>> Enquirier. >> A circular religious argument not unexpected from >> someone that believed that PDP-10's dominated the >> era. > >So enlighten us about the IBM S/360 systems used to build the Internet. >Tell us how such tools as document processing and email were invented on Ever heard of SNA? BNA? TCP/IP may have originated on DEC equipment, but it sure as hell wasn't a DEC idea (n.b. DECnet). Document processing: CMS Script on CP-67/TSO (followed by UW script on MVS) troff for the CAT typesetter on Unix V7 and the Documenters Workbench (PDP-11). ADSINP on Burroughs medium systems (circa 1970). Email: Plato NOTES (CDC Cyber systems) >S/360. Tell us about how the world's timesharing was on TSS/360, Call-OS, There was certainly a lot of timesharing on CP67/TSO, TSS/360, CICS and burroughs CANDE. >Oh, and tell us how S/360 launched the computer game industry with such >programs as adventure and zork. See again, PLATO on Cyber. An IBM salescritter mailed me a fortran listing of Star Trek in 1975. I played Hammurabi on a B-5500 (UW Eau Claire) in 1973. >Apparently, in the world of Jim Stewart, everybody used S/360 until they >switched to Windows. Mark, The bulk of the computer industry never used a PDP-10 during the 70's or 80's. Everything you've mentioned was first done on a IBM, Burroughs or CDC machine in the 50's or 60's (networking as opposed to the 'internet' which is just vendor neutral networking). scott
From: Jim Stewart on 30 Mar 2010 19:02 Mark Crispin wrote: > On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >> Mark Crispin wrote: >>> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >>>> Anyone that takes the time to leaf through some >>>> Datamation magazines of that era would be lucky >>>> to find any reference to PDP-10's. >>> Using Datamation as an historical reference is like using the >>> National Enquirier. >> A circular religious argument not unexpected from >> someone that believed that PDP-10's dominated the >> era. > > So enlighten us about the IBM S/360 systems used to build the Internet. > Tell us how such tools as document processing and email were invented on > S/360. Tell us about how the world's timesharing was on TSS/360, > Call-OS, and APL\360. Tell us about the seminal work on symbolic > algebraric manipulation and artificial intelligence done on S/360. > > Oh, and tell us how S/360 launched the computer game industry with such > programs as adventure and zork. > > Apparently, in the world of Jim Stewart, everybody used S/360 until they > switched to Windows. As long as you consider "dominated the era" to really mean "technically superior" and I consider it to mean "market share", we'll never agree. Setting that aside, and it's a big set-aside, I question how much the PDP-10 was responsible for building the internet. My understanding is that PDP-11's, Vaxen and IMP's built the early internet. Granted, the PDP-10's made major contributions to time-sharing and AI, and they were beautiful machines, but that doesn't mean they dominated the era. Budweiser dominates the beer market but I prefer Spatan Optimator.
From: Pat Farrell on 30 Mar 2010 22:02 Jim Stewart wrote: > Setting that aside, and it's a big set-aside, I question > how much the PDP-10 was responsible for building the > internet. My understanding is that PDP-11's, Vaxen and > IMP's built the early internet. Vaxen were much later. Many of the early nodes on the Arparnet/Dapranet were aimed at connecting PDP-10 and Tenex systems. The IMPs were minicomputers, or in IBM speak, IO controllers. The very first IMPs were specialized, then PDP-8s, and later PDP-11. -- Pat Farrell http://www.pfarrell.com/
From: Pat Farrell on 30 Mar 2010 22:06 Peter Flass wrote: > No one knew ho big NT was going to be, > and no one knew what the effect of paging kernel code would be. Once > there was a running system people could play with it and try out things > like that. I don't buy this argument. NT was OS/3, and designed squarely to take on Novel Netware. At that point, it was all about departmental servers, all of which were multi-user. The Tops-10 and Tops-20/Tenex systems were in common production with 1 MW or 1.5MW of memory, roughly 4MB to 8 MB depending on how you count bytes in a 36 bit word. They clearly knew how to use, and knew why you used paged/swappable kernel code to support users in a multi-user, multi-tasking world with limited memory. -- Pat Farrell http://www.pfarrell.com/
From: Mark Crispin on 31 Mar 2010 01:14
On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Pat Farrell posted: > Jim Stewart wrote: >> Setting that aside, and it's a big set-aside, I question >> how much the PDP-10 was responsible for building the >> internet. My understanding is that PDP-11's, Vaxen and >> IMP's built the early internet. When it comes to Internet history, Jim Stewart is blowing farts out his anus and claiming that they are facts. I was there in the 1970s. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpnet-map-march-1977.png PDP-10 dominates the picture (note variants, such as "DEC-1080", "DEC-2050", "MAXC", etc.), especially of systems offering services. There were many fewer PDP-11 systems systems than PDP-10 systems on the ARPAnet. Most were client only systems ("users"). Only a handful of very large PDP-11 systems (mostly running nascent UNIX) offered any services. The same is true for many of the other machines listed. I recall only one IBM S/360 with services, and that was accomplished via a micro acting as a front end. The NIC's maps and host tables were, of course, always horribly inaccurate. They showed long-defunct machines (e.g., PDP-1) and omitted new PDP-10 systems which continually popped up. We never bothered making our own maps, but we did make our own host tables. > Vaxen were much later. VAX/VMS had a negligible presence on the Internet. Almost all Internet VAXen ran BSD UNIX. Their advent wasn't until 1979-1980. By that time, ARPAnet had been in operation for a decade. Most VAXen did not get onto the network until the TCP/IP transition on January 1, 1983. Prior to that time, if they had connectivity to the network, it was often over a local area network to a PDP-10 system on which they could log in and then access ARPAnet. This was the day and age of "small-i" internet where SMTP relaying was essential as messages hopped from VAX to PDP-10 to PDP-10 to VAX. Even after the TCP/IP transition, VAXen remained second class citizens for some time due to the miserable PDP-11 based routers. It wasn't until microprocessor routers, later in the 1980s, that it was reasonable to be on a non-ARPAnet network and not resort to small-i internet. Even then, it wasn't until NSFnet in the late 1980s that the ARPAnet finally began to wither away. > Many of the early nodes on the Arparnet/Dapranet were aimed at > connecting PDP-10 and Tenex systems. The IMPs were minicomputers, or in > IBM speak, IO controllers. IMPs were Honeywell 316 and 516 16-bit computers, and served two purposes; one as a packet switch to route packets on the ARPANet (over point-to-point links to other IMPs), and the other being to connect other computers to the ARPAnet. From the point of view of a computer on the ARPAnet, the IMP was no more than a hub (although it was very much more internally). ISTR that BBN made a processor that was used as an IMP in the waning years of the ARPAnet. > The very first IMPs were specialized, then PDP-8s, and later PDP-11. No. PDP-8s were never used as IMPs; nor to my knowledge was a PDP-8 ever connected to the ARPAnet. PDP-11s were (briefly) used as Internet routers before being replaced by microcomputer based devices (e.g., early cisco routers). They were never IMPs. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. |