someone smarter than Dave Cutler
in [Device Drivers]
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From: Morten Reistad on 31 Mar 2010 09:23 In article <hova6m51ivj(a)news3.newsguy.com>, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: >Jim Stewart wrote: >> Scott Lurndal wrote: >>> Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >>> >> >> 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. > >Snobbery will get you nowhere. PDP-10s were not designed >for huge data processing tasks. Datamation focused on that >which was IBM-centric. The IBM 360/370 series were mainly corporate workhorses that churned relatively simple transactions, and more complex batch jobs for banks, accounting, insurance, airlines, shipping companies, retail chains etc. They started with a very inward-looking scope; and gradually openened up. Lots of homegrown protocols grew up around them to handle credit cards, atms, airline reservations, cash registers etc. SNA only did a little part of it. They were always computing islands, until the PC's built some rickety bridges. The Internet built the interstates and the autobahns of computing from the very start. The PDP10s ruled that kingdom. It was small in the beginning, but look at the relative sizes now. We had a scramble after may 17th, but that setback was temporary. -- mrr Who worked for the company that said no to world wide exclusive rights for the entire world wide web.
From: Mark Crispin on 31 Mar 2010 11:29 On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, jmfbahciv posted: > PDP-8s were the first CPU when a user would use to get at the PDP-10. > Think about dial-ups and TTYs which were "far away" from the DC-10s. > Users didn't see the 8s but those systems were used to answer the > phones. Yes, indeed; particularly on the KA10. IIRC, the most notable of these PDP-8 based front ends was called X680/I using a PDP-8/i. However, this was never how any system was connected to the ARPAnet. Although I have little doubt that the same hackers who implemented Kermit on the PDP-8 could figure out how to do an NCP, AFAIK nobody ever did. An ARPAnet connection also required a special hardware interface (described in BBN Report 1822, hence an "1822 interface") but once again AFAIK nobody ever did that for a PDP-8. -- 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.
From: Don Burn on 31 Mar 2010 11:39 AFAIK the first Arpanet connection that was not a mainframe was a PDP-11 at University of Illinois. This was the remote node to program ILLIAC IV when the decision was made to build it in California. Don Burn (MVP, Windows DKD) Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr > -----Original Message----- > From: Mark Crispin [mailto:mrc(a)panda.com] > Posted At: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 11:30 AM > Posted To: microsoft.public.development.device.drivers > Conversation: someone smarter than Dave Cutler > Subject: Re: someone smarter than Dave Cutler > > On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, jmfbahciv posted: > > PDP-8s were the first CPU when a user would use to get at the PDP-10. > > Think about dial-ups and TTYs which were "far away" from the DC-10s. > > Users didn't see the 8s but those systems were used to answer the > > phones. > > Yes, indeed; particularly on the KA10. IIRC, the most notable of these > PDP-8 based front ends was called X680/I using a PDP-8/i. > > However, this was never how any system was connected to the ARPAnet. > Although I have little doubt that the same hackers who implemented Kermit on > the PDP-8 could figure out how to do an NCP, AFAIK nobody ever did. An > ARPAnet connection also required a special hardware interface (described in > BBN Report 1822, hence an "1822 interface") but once again AFAIK nobody ever > did that for a PDP-8. > > -- 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. > > > __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature > database 4988 (20100331) __________ > > The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. > > http://www.eset.com >
From: Mark Crispin on 31 Mar 2010 11:39 On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Morten Reistad posted: > Also, remember that the PDP10's and some '11s succeeded on > the nascent Internet very much despite DEC. They ran non-dec > software more often than not. Tenex, unix, ITS were popular. Yup. > 1979 > saw a transition from Tops10 to Tops20, More accurately, 1979 saw a transition from Tenex to TOPS-20. There were never more than a handful of TOPS-10 systems on the network. IIRC only one (Rutgers) switched from TOPS-10 to TOPS-20. CMU added a TOPS-20 system to their farm and it stayed online for a while after the demise of the TOPS-10 systems. Most ARPAnet TOPS-10 systems went offline after the TCP/IP transition on January 1, 1983. Sometime later, a few reappeared after a crash project to implement TCP/IP for TOPS-10, but others stayed gone for good. All TOPS-10 systems vanished by 1990; and the plug was pulled on WAITS and ITS at about that time. TOPS-20 has never totally vanished from the Internet, but it's an oddball today. > and unix came in use. Yes. Unix was very much an oddball prior to that. > Some odd machines like cybers, primes, etc were also on the > net after the tcp/ip transition. I don't recall any Cybers or Primes offering services, although there may have been one or two oddballs. IIRC, there was a Cyber that you could access by connecting to a Tenex system on the ARPAnet that had RJE capability to the Cyber. > We saw better performance from a 3-head QNX (with arcnet) 80x86 machine > than from a VAX 785 with unix. Running usenet, conferencing systems, > ftp archines, telnet logins etc. This was early 1984. I am not the slightest bit surprised. VAX's goose was cooked even as the PDP-10 was killed, but the PHBs at Digital didn't realize that. > Sun's also had a brief career as routers, using VME boards for > E1 and T1 lines, and their built-in ethernet cards. I still have > some of those VME boards somewhere. Talking about the earliest routers as SUN vs. cisco is rather misleading, as they have a common ancestor. There's a long long story about this, which others have already told many times and is too long for this email. -- 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.
From: alberto on 31 Mar 2010 13:46
Before TCP/IP ever was, starting in the early 60's, IBM/360 systems ran all the airline reservations in the western world, together with Univac 1100 and 494 systems, and Univac 418 machines ran the SITA network on which worldwide computer communication was based: the Panam Sabre system, SAS, Lufthansa, British European Airways, Iberia, Sabena, KLM, and others. Even before TCP/IP became fashionable, during the seventies, people were working on the communications architectures of the times: SNA, DCA, BNA, and so on, which evolved into X25 and X21. Time Sharing dates from the sixties, if I'm not mistaken CTSS was already a reality at MIT back in 1963 when I graduated from college - on IBM 7094 systems, which predated the IBM/360 line and which I had the privilege to work with when I was a young man: the IBM 7044, in fact, was my first ever computer, I programmed it in Fortran under the IBSYS monitor. Artificial intelligence dates from the late 50's and I believe that McCarthy's LISP paper was published in 1960 - again, running on 7090 series computers that predated even the IBM/360. And then came Multics! If you're interested, there's a neat interview by Professor Corbato' at http://www.cio.com.au/article/325323/cio_blast_from_past_40_years_multics_1969-2009 where he talks about the evolution of Time Sharing and of that very serious candidate to be the greatest Operating System ever written. And Corbato's scheduling algorithm, or some variation thereof, is still the choice scheduler for many contemporary operating systems. I still remember, when I was a young man and I told my boss that I wanted to learn operating systems internals, he handled me a copy of Corbato's original paper! Modern PC-like environment and applications were probably originated at the Xerox PARC. I was working in Europe back in 1980 or so and we got a prototype of the Xerox Star, which had a mouse, a graphics display, pulldown menus, and the whole nine yards. This was even before the IBM PC was launched, and before the Apple Lisa saw the light of day. I lived through those times, I was a young professional back in the sixties. The "wow" machine in those days wasn't the PDP-10 but the Burroughs 5500 - vintage 1964, if I remember - and the Burroughs 6500 which came a few years after it, with its Algol based architecture and its fabulous MCS Operating System. And the GE 600 Series, of course. Looking at it today from where I stand, well, le plus ca change le plus c'est la meme chose. I don't see that much OS technology that wasn't already available back then. But hey, I may be wrong! Alberto. On Mar 30, 6:09 pm, Mark Crispin <m...(a)panda.com> 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. > > -- 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. |