From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM 360 Model 20 Questions Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2007 18:56:52 -0600 ArarghMail706NOSPAM writes: "R14 pointed to the return address"? Pointed to or contained? I thought contained. But its been 30 years. :-) was the return address and/or pointed to the return location my q&d translation of gcard ios3270 to html http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html os/360 call/save/return conventions http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/gcard.html#50 note that os/360 call/save/return conventions ... have been extended with the program call and program return instruction ... mentioned in previous post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#71 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions allowing the call/return to/from routines residing in different virtual address space 5.7 Access-Register Introduction http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/5.7?DT=20040504121320 10.34 Program Call http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/10.34?DT=20040504121320 10.35 Program Return http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/10.35?DT=20040504121320 10.36 Program Transfer http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/10.36?DT=20040504121320 10.37 Program Transfer With Instance http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/10.37?DT=20040504121320 ... in additon there has been hardware support added for a linkage-stack mode of operation: 5.10 Linkage-Stack Introduction http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/5.10?DT=20040504121320 5.11 Linkage-Stack Entry-Table Entries http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/5.11?DT=20040504121320 5.12 Linkage-Stack Operations. http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/5.12?DT=20040504121320 and old posts mentioning ios3270 (browse, fulist, and/or Theo) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#41 IBM 4361 CPU technology http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#60 Living legends http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#61 Living legends http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#108 IBM 9020 computers used by FAA (was Re: EPO stories (was: HELP IT'S HOT!!!!!)) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#50 VM (not VMS or Virtual Machine, the IBM sort) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#76 Is a VAX a mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#83 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#8 Theo Alkema http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#9 Theo Alkema http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#5 What goes into a 3090? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#79 Fw: HONE was .. Hercules and System/390 - do we need it? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#25 Early computer games http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#40 Linux paging http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#20 Alpha performance, why? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#32 Alpha performance, why? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003l.html#12 Why are there few viruses for UNIX/Linux systems? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004n.html#10 RISCs too close to hardware? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#63 creat http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#14 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#39 FULIST http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#43 FULIST http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#45 FULIST http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#47 What is written on the keys of an ICL Hand Card Punch? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#0 EREP , sense ... manual http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#15 S/360 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006b.html#2 Mount a tape http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#50 TSO and more was: PDP-1 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#51 other cp/cms history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#62 Large Computer Rescue http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#5 Track capacity? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#8 Track capacity? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#13 Track capacity? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#6 Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#8 Not Your Dad's Mainframe: Little Iron http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#19 Improving 360 Addressing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#21 The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#8 should program call stack grow upward or downwards? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#27 A Day For Surprises (Astounding Itanium Tricks) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#44 Was FORTRAN buggy? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#45 Was FORTRAN buggy? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#26 Why these original FORTRAN quirks? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#31 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#39 Why these original FORTRAN quirks? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#46 Why these original FORTRAN quirks? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#24 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#18 IBM sues maker of Intel-based Mainframe clones http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#25 What is "command reject" trying to tell me? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#45 SVCs http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#39 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#64 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#65 History - Early Green Card http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#78 What happened to the Teletype Corporation? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#5 Even worse than UNIX http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#25 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 05:42:22 -0600 Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes: CIX won out, and we got the commercial exchange-based Internet we have today. This model buried the NSFnet model from 1983. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#67 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#68 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#69 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#70 nouns and adjectives so internetworking & high-speed networking were disruptive technologies ... the commercial interests were promoting it in the 80s & 90s ... but were really grappling with how to make the transition ... since they had fixed costs & fairly high run rate ... that was supported with lots of useage based charges. they weren't going to see two-order magnitude increase in bit useage ... w/o compareable two-order magnitude drop in useage charges. transition to two-order magnitude increase in bandwidth useage required evolution of bandwidth hungry application ... which wouldn't happen in the high price per bit environment ... so controlled incubator environments were reasonable solution. however, if the best managed ... there were still going to be glitches during distributive technology transition. in parallel with that, while tcp/ip provided the technology basis for internetworking ... there were some formidable operational and business issues associated with internetworking. i've claimed that NSFNET provided incubator for gestation for bandwidth hungry applications ... but also represented testbed working on various operational issues with respect to internetworking. business issues related to internetworking is totally different domain. The "peering" agreements (different commerical/operational domains interacting thru internetworking) still represent significant issues ... which tend not to spill over into public view ... however even in the past couple yrs there have been incidents where commercial entities have not been able to resolve issue for renewing "peering" aggreements ... and there would be situations where bits would no longer be flowing between two specific domains for days or weeks while they resolved their (peering) issues. The other force going on in this period was whole COTS philosphy. In the 80s and 90s there were starting to be greater and greater push for using COTS ... as being more efficient and cost effective. NSFNET backbone was much more of a temporary technology incubator ... which then had to transition to COTS ... that once the major issues were worked out ... use of COTS facilities would be much more cost effective for gov. operations than custom, non-COTS operation. Thru the 80s and 90s, congress passed various legislation promoting COTS as well as pushing gov. originated technology into commercial envirornment (commercializing the technology to make the technology more efficient as well as accelerating commercial environments ability to be more competitive). Some of this came under the heading of "technology re-use" bills ... pushing gov. invented technology into the commercial arena. Some of the technology re-use bills also involved relazing some of the anti-trust provisions when there was to be cooperating commercial interests involving use of gov. invented technology. for slightly other drift, one of the other areas COTS was involved starting in the late 70s and early 80s was the (gov) update of SGML for documents ... recent x-over involving subject of SGML (markup languages) and self describing data http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#24 Why self describing data formats: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#25 Why self describing data formats: misc. past posts mentioning the whole gov. involvement/promotion of COTS, technology re-use, disruptive technologies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#40 Comparison Cluster vs SMP? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#44 Al Gore and the Internet (Part 2 of 2) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#32 How Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Systems make society vulnerable http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#38 How Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Systems make society vulnerable http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#80 Al Gore and the Internet http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#82 Al Gore and the Internet http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#15 Large Banking is the only chance for Mainframe http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002p.html#6 unix permissions http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#26 Good news for SPARC http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#51 Integer types for 128-bit addressing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005d.html#20 shared memory programming on distributed memory model? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#15 Device and channel http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#40 IBM 610 workstation computer http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#63 Microsoft to design its own CPUs - Next Xbox In Development http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#14 Year-end computer bug could ground Shuttle http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#35 Friday fun - Discovery on the pad and the software's not done http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#16 Newbie question on table design http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#57 How would a relational operating system look like?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:07:45 -0600 Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes: Sure but decent multi-tasking does not require multiple cores, none of my boxes have multiple cores and they all multi-task very nicely. but in the past ... there seemed to have been a progression of chips getting faster and faster ... so they could do more work ... or run the latest version of some application that turned out to significantly more complex and required significantly more processor resources. some of the issues now is that (at least with synchronous clocks and other issues) it is getting harder and harder to make single chips operate at higher & higher frequency (limits of elapsed time for signal to span physical distance from one side of chip to another ... also discontinuity between speed that chip operates at and latency to get data out of memory chips). so the current direction is to increase computing thruput by going to multiple (independent) cores on the same chip ... this can be used to emulate multiprocessor, multi-chip operation ... especially if there are multiple independent tasks to keep the different chips busy. however, in personal computers with increasingly complex applications ... the single application thruput will no longer see improved thruput. this is starting to increase pressure on complex applications to move to multi-thread/parallel execution ... to be able to obtained increased thruput from the multiple, independent cores. This is much more than the operating system dispatcher/scheduler being able to efficiently multitask independent applications (whether they are working in single processor/core or multiprocessor/multicore environment). recent post with mention of story where Intel's Pat Gelsinger had to explain this to Gates: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies recent post mentioning news item that future generations of windows will be redone for multi-core operation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? other recent posts about the "disruptive" parallel/multi-core technology http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#3 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#9 "The Elements of Programming Style" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#29 Just another example of mainframe costs http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#30 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#31 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#16 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#44 Why so little parallelism? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#57 "The Elements of Programming Style" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#21 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#24 "The Elements of Programming Style" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007c.html#42 Keep VM 24X7 365 days http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#13 Why so little parallelism? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#28 SVCs http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#39 old tapes http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#10 Beyond multicore http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#3 University rank of Computer Architecture http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#23 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#57 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#9 21st Century ISA goals? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#34 GA24-3639 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#40 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#52 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#20 Does anyone know of a documented case of VM being penetrated by hackers? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#36 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#66 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#67 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#30 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#84 VLIW pre-history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#95 VLIW pre-history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#96 VLIW pre-history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#97 VLIW pre-history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#6 VLIW pre-history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#16 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#23 Another "migration" from the mainframe http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#33 Even worse than UNIX http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#38 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#15 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#19 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#24 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#25 Computer tube production years http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#26 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#34 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#42 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#49 Drums: Memory or Peripheral? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#52 Drums: Memory or Peripheral? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:15:02 -0600 jmfbahciv writes: We were in the OS development group. We had to be able to know how our customers and their users used systems without ever experiencing ourselves. You may think that this is an impossible thing to do...well, it ain't. however, i've joked that possible the majority of the new applications came out of customers shops ... in some ways this was disruptive technology stuff ... and people w/o the direct need/requirement weren't likely to anticipate. this is where some of the current major application product offerings didn't actually come out of vendor development shops ... but (development) originated in some customer shop ... and was only later transferred to some vendor development group (and I would joke that development groups weren't actually responsible for the original development ... but were more like maintenance organizations that were responsible for possible +/- five percent change per annum). The explosion of personal computers in the 80s ... saw an explosion in the number of (customer/end-user) invented new applications. There was a similar period in the late 60s and early 70s ... associated with the (relative) explosion in the number of (360) computers being used by customers ... and corresponding increase in new/different applications.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Zork and Adventure Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:26:24 -0600 jmfbahciv writes: I remember HAUNT having that restriction, but not ADVENT. I cannot recall if there was a DUNGEON on our system. re: the copy of (CMS) ADVENT from tymshare (which had ported the fortran from pdp10 ... that they had gotten from a stanford machine ... and ported to vm370) ... had a restriction ... game was limited to 100 moves first shift ... unless you had the secret password. i started distributing ADVENT executable on the internal network ... and would offer anybody that finished (obtained 300pts) the source. a couple old emails mentioning getting advent copy http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email780405 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email780405b from this old post (with numerous other advent references) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#18 The History of Computer Role-Playing Games
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:33:18 -0600 jmfbahciv writes: I've always thought of "parallel" an aspect of the hardware architecture, and not the software. note x-over explanation/comment in this recent post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#2 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Zork and Adventure
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:02:50 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email780405
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#email780405b
from this old post (with numerous other advent references)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#18 The History of Computer Role-Playing Games
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#4 Zork and Adventure
random other refs ... from long ago and far away
To: wheeler
Date: 04/14/78 09:39:55
From: someplace in the UK
hi.
do you know how to work out the second key to be allowed onto
adventur as a wizard ?
the first key is grate
the second key seems to be based on a formaula something like
do i=1 to 5 by 1;
.. = mod(..,5)+1;
.. = mod(..,10)-abs(array(..)-array(mod(..+1,5)+1))*mod(..,10)
k = mod(..,26)+1;
pswd(j) = abet(k);
j = j + 1;
end;
that's as for as i got.
... snip ... top of post, old email index
To: wheeler
Date: 05/17/78 10:12:22
From: someplace on the east coast
Lynn --
I've picked up a version of the source to ADVENTUR.
This version appears to be slightly older than the module,
and was converted from FORTRAN to PL/I.
You will be getting 4 files:
RANDU FORTRAN
ITIME ASSEMBLE
CAVES FILE
ADVENT PLIOPT
The last 2 files are huffed with the garble option.
The encryption key used was 'afs' (note --- lower case!!).
Enjoy.
... snip ... top of post, old email index
and from an old CMS filelist (no longer actually have the actual file,
just reference to the file):
&1 &2 ADVENTUR MODULE D1()V 65535 5 40 4/11/78 19:59
... snip ...
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:53:51 -0600 Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes: internetworking is totally different domain. The "peering" agreements (different commerical/operational domains interacting thru internetworking) still represent significant issues ... which tend not to spill over into public view ... however even in the past couple yrs there have been incidents where commercial entities have not been able to resolve issue for renewing "peering" aggreements ... and there would be situations where bits would no longer be flowing between two specific domains for days or weeks while they resolved their (peering) issues. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#67 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#68 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#69 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#70 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#1 nouns and adjectives a couple past posts mentioning problems/issues cropping up with peering aggreements (raising possibility of internet partitioning) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#28 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#32 How does the internet really look like ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#4 Privacy issue - how to spoof/hide IP when accessing email / usenet servers ? and with respect to wild, wild west reference in one of the above posts ... recent reference to traffic controls: Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping http://slashdot.org/articles/07/06/10/0645232.shtml TIME WARNER ANNOUNCES INTRODUCTION OF PACKET SHAPING TECHNOLOGY NATIONWIDE http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18468495
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 11:47:13 -0600 Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes: cmd-1 & cmd-2 & cmd-3 & cmd-4 & cmd-5 & wait note that gnu make supports -j ... which will start as many parallel threads as possible (or you can give it a number to limit the max. number of parallel threads). i do somewhat the above with script that does wget for 40-some different URLs and then checks for differences between between the previous and the current. "new" URLs (that appear on the pages) are then fired off to be loaded in browser tabs (sometimes may be a couple hundred). cycling thru the tabs (locally) is lot faster than clicking and waiting for each to load, one at a time, sequentially. there is a little heuristics needed here since some sites look for too many gets coming too close together from the same ip-address. however, it is possible to spread these out between gets for other servers tabs that have already loaded (this does require some coordination since multiple different origin sites can have URLs pointing to the same destination site). ... the gets are also running in the background ... so can be looking at browser tabs in the foreground while other tabs are still loading in the background. i can delete the tabs/pages that aren't interesting and then do tab-all bookmark of the rest. then extract the bookmark URLs for other purposes ... somewhat alluded to in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#30 tab browsing next on wish list is browser that is really multi-threaded that can take advantage of multi-core aka different tabs are somewhat multi-threaded ... but managed within the browser task ... so only takes advantage of single processor ... things can get a little sluggish over hundred or so tabs especially while still loading ... which additional processors would help.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:22:12 -0600 Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> writes: The most obvious answer, I think, is that there is no minimum number of minutes during which one can assume that authenticated user is still the person typing on the keyboard. this is some of the stuff all around the naked transaction/payment metaphor ... http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments in the e-commerce specific scenario ... a couple recent references/posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#35 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#68 nouns and adjectives SSL is somewhat session oriented that is used to "hide" (encrypt) the sensitive information (credit card number, other transaction details), while being transmitted over the internet ... but otherwise leaves the transaction information (naked &) vulnerable thru the whole rest of the numerous business processes. the x9.59 financial standards process "armors" (authentication plus integrity) the actual transaction ... so that it (and the related information) is "protected" for the complete lifetime that the transaction (& related information) may continue to exist. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 15:40:07 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
note that gnu make supports -j ... which will start as many parallel
threads as possible (or you can give it a number to limit the max.
number of parallel threads).
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#8 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
trivial makefile ...
urls := $(shell cat urllist.txt)
.PHONY: RUP $(urls)
RUP: $(urls)
$(urls):
wgetlist.sh $@
...
invoke make with -j specifying the above make file; urllist.txt contains
a list of URLs ... with no parameter for -j ... it will fire off
wgetlist.sh for each of the URLs and waits for them all to
finish. something like "-j 10" will only keep a max of ten going
concurrently.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 22:40:55 -0600 Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes: The hypervisor only traps privileged instructions and does any fixup necessary to make the virtual machine believe the instruction was executed natively. All non-privileged instructions execute natively without causing any traps. Changes to the hypervisor may be required for new hardware, but it can also make the guest OS believe it is running on older x86 machines. New MS OSes and releases are typically tested now in virtual machines instead of real hardware because it's a lot more convenient for people to setup virtual machines than real machines. Virtual machines can also easily be migrated between real machines, once any pending I/O has been serviced. hypervisor can also trap invalid/unimplemented instructions. the emulation of the privileged and invalid instructions don't necessarily have to match the hardware being used. this was used to implement 370 virtual machines in cp67 (running on 360/67). 370 virtual memory hardware defintion didn't exactly match 360/67 ... and there were some new 370 instructions that didn't exist in 360. 370 virtual machine support was operational and running on regular basis a yr befor 370 hardware was operational. a few recent posts mentioning cp67 l, h, and i "level" updates http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#20 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#12 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#16 when was MMU virtualization first considered practical? that effort also involved some amount of distributed development between endicott (where the hardware was being built) and cambridge science center ... with network link for exchanging files ... misc. past posts mentioning internal network http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet the support for multiple level source update was also developed in that period ... supporting the different kernel source "levels". a few recent posts on cms multi-level source update http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#12 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#33 Even worse than UNIX
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Buying a used desktop PC? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 06:32:59 -0600 krw <krw@att.bizzzz> writes: Not necessarily. Some banks will ding the customer with significant late penalties and treble the interest rates on credit cards if the bill is one day late once. Any excuse. a couple recent items Fed Proposes Tighter Controls On Credit Card Rates; Congress Considers Bills to Curb Abusive Practices http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/05/fed_credit_cards.html Are Consumers Kicking the Credit Card Habit? http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/06/credit_hooked.html
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:21:06 -0600 krw <krw@att.bizzzz> writes: Complete nonsense. The NT variety of NT has been SMT capable since it came out. Linux is SMP capable. SMP is "in there". doing some consulting with sequent in the early/mid 90s ... they claimed nearly all the NT SMP kernel scaleup work had been done by them (fine-grain locks in kernel ... rather than spin-locks that blocked large portion of the kernel code, providing little or no incremental thruput above 2-4 processors). this was in-part because sequent had 16-way & 32-way intel smp platforms (supported by their dynix variety of unix). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems however, at the time they were working on 256-way numa implemention (NUMA-Q, with intel processors) done with SCI ... we had been involved in some of the SCI stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Coherent_Interconnect at the same time we were involved with some of the FCS ... and also working on ha/cmp scaleup ... old ha/cmp posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp and some old email about ha/medusa scaleup http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa in the same time frame we were dealing with sequent, we also spent some amount of time talking to convex which were doing SCI-based 128-way exemplar using pa/risc chip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_Computer somewhat as an aside, the wiki sequent article notes that after ibm bought sequent ... nearly all vestiges of sequent technology has disappeared, except for possibly some stuff contributed to linux. past posts mentioning smp, tightly-coupled, and/or compare&swap instruction http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp for other drift, ibm also bought informix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix when we were doing ha/cmp ... we spent some amount of time with ingres, sybase, informix ... as well as oracle ... old post reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#15 and informix had been doing quite a bit of working tuning informix on (multiprocessor) sequent platforms (somewhat referenced in wiki article) ... in fact, most of the informix people we dealt with were in their portland location (near sequent's beaverton location) for additional drift ... lots of posts about RDBMS and/or original relational/sql implementation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr past posts in this thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#24 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#26 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#34 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#5 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:16:36 -0600 jmfbahciv writes: This is getting really interesting. I'm beginning to understand why history has to repeat itself. People can't tolerate that the "new" thing isn't new. For some reason, they must think it will take away from their glory of "doing it first". This has got to be related to the psychological obsession about "the 10 best" of something. a lot of multiprocessing/tightly-coupled operations had been kernel programming ... effectively managing a lot of independent operations. multi-threading has tended to be associated w/application (or at least non-kernel) programming ... but most have tended to be relatively specialized implementions ... like DBMS ... not necessarily general applications (in the mainframe world, some of it was in subsystems that were doing their own multitasking implementations ... to compensate for the native operating system deficiencies ... from 60s ... stuff like CICS and apl\360). while charlie had invented compare&swap at the science center as part of cp67 multiprocessing fine-grain locking support ... justifying the instruction for 370 required coming up with uses other than kernel multiprocessing support. the result was the description for its use by application (or at least non-kernel) multi-threaded operation. Previously, multi-threaded applications tended to require kernel calls to safely serialize/coordinate the different application threads. Compare&swap instruction allowed some of that to now be implemented "in-line" and avoid the overhead of the kernel calls ... and worked the same, whether the application multi-threading was executing in a non-multiprocessor environment or in a multiprocessor/tightly-coupled environment. description was written up and appeared in the 370 principles of operation ... version in more recent principles of operation http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/A.6?DT=20040504121320 reference in early post in this thread http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? lots of past posts mentioning multiprocessing, tighly-coupled, and/or compare&swap instruction http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:04:54 -0600 oscarptyltd@ibm-main.lst (Clem Clarke) writes: It's a shame, but unless IBM does do a big rethink on this, and allows small developers some sort of inexpensive or free access to the mainframes, they will die. Allowing a "hobbyist" license for Z/OS, VM and VSE on Hercules would be one way, and what does IBM really have to lose? And the gain would be that they could have many people working at no cost on these systems developing tools and applications to make them better and better. some related thread drift from another n.g. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#3 nouns and adjectives that in the 60s and much of the 70s ... lots of the innovation came out of customer installations & datacenters ... since it was the customers that understood the need and requirement ... things like cics, ims, etc. later they were transferred to "development" organizations for product support. in many cases, this is misnomer ... since those "development" organizations are responsible for product maintenance ... not the products "development" (maybe doing plus/minus five percent changes per annum). I've periodically made facetious comments referencing the "term" inflation in using the word "development" applied to organizations that are primarily product "maintenance". something similar happened with the introduction of the ibm/pc ... large proportion of the "products" originated from end-users (that were faced with the actual problems and understood what kind of solution was needed). vendor product operations tend to have people like software engineers that understand issues about software maintenance ... but rarely have people with the necessary experience that they could see what solution was originally needed. even before ibm/pc came out ... there were some that had jump shipped from vm/cms (that had been providing mainframe-based personal computing environment) and were implementing some number of CMS applications on other early personal computers. These weren't ports of CMS applications (because the implementation details tended to be totally different), but frequently the look&feel and the solution they provided were the same. the "OCO-wars" were especially hard on the vm/cms community ... because not only was full source available ... but even maintenance, fixes, etc for customers were shipped as source updates ... based on CMS multi-level source maintenance facilities. Some studies from their period even claimed the number of system (source) updates done at customer datacenters (aka aggregate lines-of-code) was actually larger than the source lines-of-code in the base system. the high-end of the market is where the (quarterly) revenue/profit ... but all the innovation tends to originate at the low-end & mid-range ... in part innovation requires quite a bit of experimentation, trial&error, etc ... and the high-end is rarely made available for such experimentation. As a result, some of the other vendors found a need that could filled in the entry/low-end market segment (and long term ... it is frequently the entry/low-end that tends to feed the high-end with the applications that keep the high-end quarterly revenue sustained). the pre-occupation with quarterly results has been a sporadic topic for at least the last 40 yrs. during periods when there was significant general economic growth ... the generational issues appeared to almost take care of themselves ... allowing the perception that executives could solely concentrate on the quarterly issues. however, this approach somewhat came to roost. i've mentioned before about being at a talk at MIT in the early 70s where Amdahl was asked how he was able to convince the money people to support his new clone computer company. His reply was that there was already something like $200b that customers had invested in 360 applications ... that even if IBM were to totally walk away from 360/370 ... which might be considered a veiled reference to the future system project http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys ... (just) that (existing) software application base could keep him in business thru the end of the century. starting in the early 70s, i had been heavily involved with HONE deployment ... first its original objective to provied "hands-on" experience to branch office SEs with operating systems running in virtual machines ... and then the transition to being primarily an online, interactive environment deploying applications (mostly implemented in cms\apl) supporting sales & marketing worldwide. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone in the mid-70s, I got con'ed into helping with the virgil/tully microcode assists ... including spending time off & on over a period of a year running around the world with the product managers, meeting with business planning & forcasting groups positioning the processors in the market. One of the things that I saw was that the business positioning environment in world trade was somewhat the early stages of what was going to be happing in the domestic market a decade or so later (the HONE tools somewhat gave me perspective of what sales & marketing was doing world-wide ... from the mechanics bottom-up ... where-as all the virgil/tully forcasting was perspective of sales & marketing somewhat from top-down). lots of past posts talking about (both) 360 & 370 microcode: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#mcode
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Can individual TCP packets travel along different route or ... ? Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:11:08 -0600 "robertwessel2@yahoo.com" <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> writes: The abstraction that TCP provides to the applications at the endpoints is that of an undifferentiated stream of bytes. One application sends 1000 bytes, either with a single send() or 1000, and the other application receives those exact 1000 bytes, in the order sent, either with a single recv() or 1000, with no relationship between the sizes of the send()'s and recv()'s. Nor is any of the magic underneath visible or meaningful* to the application, hence the TCP stream looks like a virtual wire or circuit between the two endpoint applications. reference old rfc discussing difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols (including reference to discussion about the problem/difficiency for TCP) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#28 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#29 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols and http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#67 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#72 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#73 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#74 Difference between NCP and TCP/IP protocols some of the discussion found in rfc721 ... rfc721 summary from my RFC index http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcidx2.htm#721 as usual ... clicking on the ".txt=nnnn" field (in the rfc summary) retrieves the actual RFC.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:17:14 -0600 krw <krw@att.bizzzz> writes: I think the depression is responsible for far more of this than WWII. My mother went through the depression (she'll be 94 next month) and is *exactly* like this. Many friends' parents were a decade or so younger and didn't seem to be quite so, um..., "tight". My mother saved aluminum foil for several uses. My wife looked at me like I had I third eye when I put the aluminum foil away after cooking, at first. or like turning the block of wood on the outhouse door. the door had a spring on it ... but it had a wood block that was nailed to the outside frame ... and turned the block to keep the door from blowing open and help cut down on the flies. on one trip back with the family ... at one point was out in the outhouse ... and my daughter was waiting outside for me to leave ... she slipped in as i exited ... and automatically i turned the block of wood (locking her in) as the door shut ... w/o even thinking about it consciously. 30-40 mins later ... somebody asked where she was ... and found her inside banging and yelling (couldn't hear her from the house).
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:27:05 -0600 re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#17 Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography my (younger) brother recently sent me a scanned jpg of old photo when i was 8yrs old ... shows me in high rubber boots (younger cousin is next to me in picture) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lynnat8.jpgi had been out in the field moving irrigation sprinkler pipe ... 3in diameter aluminum ... each section something like 20ft long. the house was on bank of small river which would nearly dry up by late summer ... but earlier in the yr could get enough water to irrigate around 10acres of alfalfa. if the ground had just the right amount of moisture ... the mud would really clump ... getting possibly 10lbs on each boot ... at which time, i remember finding it easier to take off the boots and go barefoot. Farming in the 1950s & 60s http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/water_03.html from above: In June 1976, Scientific American magazine called center pivot irrigation systems "perhaps the most significant mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animals by the tractor." ... snip ... aka before that ... the irrigation pipes had to be manually moved and placed. hard to find old pictures of the sprinklers and pipe ... did find this pdf file with b&w picture on page 3 http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/mcm/uw21_06.pdf tracks back to original here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/WaterUse/Images/handline2.jpg
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:28:50 -0600 Greg Menke <gdmnews@toadmail.com> writes: Please define "master/slave thinking". lots of early 2-processor kernel (and sometimes even larger number) support only allowed the kernel running on a (specific) single processor ... with all the other processors purely being used for (usually independent) application workload. Sometimes referred to as as asymmetric multiprocessing. it is a simplification of the common implementation in the 60s & 70s (and frequently well thru the 80s) of a single kernel "spin-lock" ... where the first thing that happened on entry into the kernel was to "spin" on a single lock ... until it was obtained (serializing all kernel operations, effectively kernel almost operated as if there was only a single processor, avoided having to resolve many of the concurrency issues). for some vendors ... getting reasonably highly parallel operation and support was long difficult road ... and didn't come immediately and/or easily. if some of the highly experienced/skilled kernel developers could take decades to supporting highly parallel ... it might be understandable that it would take application developers a couple decades once they get around to it. i.e. old email discussion/announcement of VMS symmetric multiprocessing support in 1988 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email880324 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email880329 in this post: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#46 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? i.e. VMS symmetric multiprocessing support was nearly two decades after charlie originally invented compare&swap instruction for fine-grain cp67 multiprocessing locking ... and the whole stuff put together how application programs could use it for multi-threaded operation (independent of whether it was running in single processor environment or multiprocessor environment). past posts in this thread http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#24 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#26 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#34 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#5 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#13 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#14 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:45:05 -0600 R.Skorupka@ibm-main.lst (R.S.) writes: Key-based solutions exist on mianframe as well as on other systems. I think it is rather technical, not ethical or organisational issue: It is *easy* to have illegal software on PC, sometimes you are even unaware of it. I mean a lot of small but usefull tools like Windows Commander, archivizers, DVD-burning software etc. etc. Even if you have some "tools" for z/OS it is simply not so easy to install it on the host - usually several persons are involed, usually someone could ask - "Did we buy it ? How did you get it ?". From the other hand, people are interested in having some bells & whistles on *their* PC (even company owned), while mainframe is not *their*. It is not *personal*. It's "common". re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#15 Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules slightly related recent posts about looking at software piracy (DRM) in the mainframe and PC market space http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#59 Peter Gutmann Rips Windows Vista Content Protection http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#9 Enterprise Right Management vs. Traditional Encryption Tools old email about "new" apple lisa announcement and conjecture about the processor serial number being used for software licensing (and piracy countermeasure). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email830213 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email830213b in this recent post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#56 old lisa info part of the mainframe was being able to show in court that something out of the ordinary had to have been done to subvert the licensing provisions (value was worth taking to court). in the PC case, the value of individual copy makes it difficult to justify investigation and bringing to court every individual case. TPM is the one of the latest in piracy countermeasure (as well as suppose to be countermeasure to software compromises). misc. past posts mentioning giving an assurance talk in trusted computing track at intel developers conference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn1 Assurance, e-commerce, and some x9.59 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm21.htm#3 Is there any future for smartcards? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#56 UK Detects Chip-And-PIN Security Flaw http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#23 Use of TPM chip for RNG? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#52 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005g.html#36 Maximum RAM and ROM for smartcards http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005o.html#3 The Chinese MD5 attack http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#48 Device Authentication - The answer to attacks lauched using stolen passwords? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#37 What does a patent do that copyright does not? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#61 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#63 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#42 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:51:12 -0600 Peter Flass <Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com> writes: It's interesting, my parents were newlyweds and raised their kids (all but old boomer me) during the Depression, and I picked up a lot of cheap^Hfrugal habits from them. For example, I still put sugar instead of syrup on my french toast; I used to save bacon fat to fry my eggs until I was talked out of it a few years ago. i still make my own syrup ... sugar:water 2-to-1, cup of sugar in 1/2 cup boiling water ... then some "mapleine" flavoring old cresent/mapleine reference: http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2006 from above: Mapleine was the company's signature product for much of the twentieth century. Cash-strapped housewives used it as a substitute for maple syrup during the Depression of the 1930s, and it remained popular with cooks and bakers for decades. It was also used as a flavoring agent in commercial cigarette manufacturing. Crescent promoted Mapleine and other products by publishing small cookbooks, with titles such as Mapleine Dainties: How to Make Them, A Guide to Spices: How to Buy Them, Store Them, Use Them, and Pickles and Relishes. ... snip ... re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#17 Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#18 Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography slightly related previous thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#79 Working while young other drift here: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#51 Year-end computer bug could ground Shuttle
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:38:25 -0600 scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes: No. He in no way implied that one cpu had capabilities that the other did not (which defines master/slave). Typically this implies that I/O, for example, can only be done from one of the two CPU's (the master), or that a master schedules work on multiple slaves. master/slave can be an artifact of the (kernel) software implementation ... aka it is obvious that asymmetric hardware configuration. "attached processor" 370s in the mid-70s ... were additional processors w/o i/o capability, ... however, there have been some number of purely software master/slave implementations (that weren't dictated by non-symmetric hardware). as an aside, in the 370 attached processor scenario ... most of the kernel implementations was fully symmetrical kernel operation in all respects ... except when it came to actually initiating an operation ... and the kernel would check if the current processor had the specific attached channels ... and if necessary create a request item that was queued for the other processor. this was actually a special case of the 370 multiprocessor operation. standard 360 and 370 multiprocessors didn't actually have shared "channels" ... but it was simulated by having device controllers with multiple channel connections ... configured at identical channel addresses on all processors. however, it was possible to have some devices w/o multiple channel coinnection ... in which case only one processor in the configuration might be able to perform i/o operation to the device. in which case, all the standard multiprocessor kernel operation required testing if the specific processor was able to perform an i/o operation to a specific device ... or it needed to be handed off to some other processor (that was capable of performing the operation). The "attached" processor scenario then becomes the case where all device i/o operations might have to be handed off to another processor. 360/67 multiprocessor hardware was the exception ... where all processors were capable of accessing all possible channels. this machine also had virtual memory support and was the platform that cp67 implemented virtual machine support. this was also the platform that charlie was working on at the science center when he invented compare&swap instruction when he was working on fine-grain multiprocessing locking (the mnemonic compare&swap was chosen because CAS are charlie's initials). misc. past posts mentioning multiprocessor, tightly-coupled, and/or compare&swap instruction http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp other posts in this thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#24 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#26 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#34 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#5 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#13 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#14 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#19 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Bulkiest removable storage media? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch.storage Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:54:09 -0600 Walter Bushell <proto@oanix.com> writes: per byte it must be some kind of flopy. Just think of a gigabyte worth of floppies would look like. OTOH don't. Probably punched paper tape, though. maybe half gigabyte .... another of the experimental ideas ... from the person responsible for 801 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 ... in addition to the recent mention of the 16+2 track head (i.e. single head that simultaneously would read/write 16 data tracks while tracking two servo tracks) ... old email with 16+2 track/head reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#email871230 in this post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#30 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ? some technology, sort of combination from 2321 datacell and old time disks with single arm moving between platters. it had several hundred floppies all rotating on a single (horizontal) shaft. r/w head moved back&forth along the spindle ... and when the r/w head got into position at the correct floppy ... shot of compressed air (2321 sort of had something similar as part of inserting strip back into its bin) would separate the floppies so the head could be inserted (had sort of leading thin blade that entered first). there was a problem (i don't believe was ever resolved) with the floppy material streching because of the constant spinning (this effort was in the mid-to-late 70s ... after floppies had been invented in san jose ... but before seeing use in PCs). misc. past post mentioning this large number of floppies on single spinning spindle http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#48 Competitors to SABRE? old posts mentioning 2321 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#41 How to learn assembler language for OS/390 ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#51 Competitors to SABRE? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#78 HMC . . . does anyone out there like it ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#63 MVS History (all parts) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#16 index searching http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#22 index searching http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#84 Questions on IBM Model 1630 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#26 : Re: AS/400 and MVS - clarification please http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#40 Wanted: the SOUNDS of classic computing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#3 PLX http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#7 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#9 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003k.html#36 What is timesharing, anyway? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#39 DASD history http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#22 1960s images of IBM 360 mainframes http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#5 The BASIC Variations http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004.html#6 The BASIC Variations http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004e.html#41 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#18 FW: Looking for Disk Calc program/Exec http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#0 Relational vs network vs hierarchic databases http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005c.html#23 Volume Largest Free Space Problem... ??? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005h.html#32 Software for IBM 360/30 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#50 non ECC http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005v.html#6 DMV systems? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#46 Hercules 3.04 announcement http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#29 CRAM, DataCell, and 3850 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#30 CRAM, DataCell, and 3850 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#31 CRAM, DataCell, and 3850 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#31 50th Anniversary of invention of disk drives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#32 Why magnetic drums was/are worse than disks ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006v.html#31 MB to Cyl Conversion http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#35 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#19 How many 36-bit Unix ports in the old days? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#38 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#51 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#64 FBA rant http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#64 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#74 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#49 Drums: Memory or Peripheral?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Does socket represent an interface between ... ? Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:56:26 -0600 "Albert Manfredi" <albert.e.manfredi@nospam.com> writes: Just as an aside, I think the OP (original poster) was asking about typical UNIX sockets, and I think that the 7-layer ISO/OSI model is just as valid for IP as it was for ISO protocols. As a conceptual tool, it works well in both cases. We have been over this topic in this usenet group before. I think that while the names might be a little different, and while OSI is a 7-layer model vs a 4-layer model used in early RFCs, there really is no big disconnect there. ISO protocols might have been abandoned, but the 7-layer OSI model is as good as any conceptual model for digital comms, IMO. OSI model lacks any internetworking layer ... that was one of the problems with OSI ... aggravating the situation was that ISO had procedures that precluded working on any (networking) standards that failed to conform to OSI model ... which precluded anything that supported internetworking ... and for that matter for anything that supported LANs/MACs; aka LANs/MACs have an interface/api that sits somewhere in the middle of layer3/networking (above layer2/layer3 interface but below the layer3/layer4 interface) ... and the internetworking layer (ability to internetwork multiple networks) doesn't exist at all in OSI. part of arpanet and OSI evolving thru the 60s and 70s was support of a homogeneous network (i.e. network of networking nodes). so some number of the IETF RFCs reflect the homogeneous arpanet/OSI type of approach. However, within the IETF community in the 70s ... it was realized that networking wasn't going to be sufficient and work started on internetworking. about the time that ISO finally passed the initial OSI standards in the early 80s ... IETF was converting from homogeneous kind of arpanet networking to internetworking (the big 1jan83 conversion to tcp/ip) then thruout the 80s, OSI continued to hang on ... somewhat as the difference between networking and internetworking started to slowly permeate the conscience of wider community (even tho still in the 1990 time-frame there were still various gov. mandates to eliminate the internet and have it replaced with ISO/OSI). possibly, part of the issue of looking at TCP/IP compared to OSI at a purely protocol level ... is that the complexities of internetworking are as much at the operational and business levels ... as the technical/protocol level (altough the finer nuances of internetworking technical/protocol have to be in place to enable the operational and business caracteristics). misc. past posts mentioning OSI and/or attempt at high-speed protocol standardization effort in ISO ... which was precluded based on violating OSI model (aka support for both LAN/MAC as well as tcp/ip internetworking). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp a few recent posts discussing 1) tcp/ip being the technology basis for modern internet(working), 2) NSFNET backbone being the initial operational basis for modern internet(working) and 3) early CIX (commercial interchange) being the business basis for modern internet(working) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#43 Is computer history taugh now? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#38 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#69 How the Internet took over http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#70 Using rexx to send an email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#37 Friday musings on the future of 3270 applications http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#67 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#68 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#69 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#1 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#7 nouns and adjectives
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Does socket represent an interface between ... ?
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:57:37 -0600
"Albert Manfredi" <albert.e.manfredi@nospam.com> writes:
You actually made that same comment last time around, IIRC, but it's
not so. The OSI Network Layer, Layer 3, *is* what early RFCs such as
RFCs 791 and 793 Figure 1 in both cases, call Internet Protocol
layer. Also RFC 1112, Section 5. In each case, this Network Protocol
ties together different local area networks, of any type.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#24 Does socket represent an interface between ... ?
Old email from long ago and far away. x3s3.3 was ANSI chartered ISO
standards group responsible for "OSI" level 3&4 standards work.
From: wheeler
Date: 27 Mar 89 21:41:07
Quicky note on ansi x3s3.3 and hsp meetings last week. More
information coming as time allows.
A "high speed networking & transport protocol" proposal was
submitted at the x3s3.3 meeting. After various discussions it was
decided to submit a "study proposal for high speed protocols" to the
x3 committee ... the work product of which will be some number of
protocol proposals.
Problems with the original protocol proposal were numerous. Many
people objected to it violating the OSI reference model (and in fact
it is not possible to submit a protocol proposal to X3 that violates
the reference model ... although it is possible to approve an ANSI
standard that does violate the reference model ... but that takes some
fine work ... case in point are the LAN protocols ... especially with
LAN/MAC coming up thru level 1 and 2 well into level 3).
... snip ... top of post, old email index
i.e. it has been possible for ANSI (and/or IEEE) to pass a standard
(like the 802 stuff) that violate OSI (just that they couldn't do work
on such standardization violating OSI within ISO chartered group...
it wasn't possible to have a standard work item accepted for
standards work; interesting distinction). x3s3.3 had to object to the
hsp work item on grounds that it violated OSI ... 1) supporting
internetwork protocol, 2) going directly from transport to LAN/MAC,
bypassing level 3/4 interface, and 3) supporting LAN/MAC interface.
other posts on the subject:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp
and for past light hearted post (by somebody else) in this n.g. also
long ago and far away ... but should also be in one of the online
archives
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.protocols.iso
Date: 1 Apr 88 00:00:01 GMT
Posted: Fri Apr 1 00:00:01 1988
WASHINGTON -- In a simultaneous announcement that took the
computer industry by surprise, OSI leaders today said that they were
abandoning their effort to promote the OSI Protocol Suite in favor of
the existing US Department of Defense (DoD) ARPANET Protocol Suite.
The official reason cited for the decison was a new report from
the Office of Technology Assessment stating that the manpower required
to fully implement and test even the few OSI protocols that are now
defined would consume the entire output of American university
computer science programs for the rest of the century, and that
printing and distributing the necessary protocol specifications would
consume the entire American and Canadian paper supplies for the next
five years.
However, one high-placed source speaking on condition of anonymity
said, ``The whole OSI thing was a practical joke one of the guys
cooked up a few years ago. Nobody ever expected anybody to take it
seriously. I mean, who would believe an organization supposedly
dedicated to tearing down barriers to free and open communications
between computers when it's run by a former director of the National
Security Agency? I guess computer people are a lot more gullible than
we thought. We kept dropping hints, making the whole thing more and
more ridiculous. We hoped that people would eventually catch on, but
it didn't work. Finally, our consciences got to us.''
In related news, officials at the Mitre Corporation in Bedford,
Massachussetts reported that one of their employees, as yet publicly
unidentified, froze ``as solid as stone'' when he heard the
announcement. Medical experts have as yet been unable to communicate
with the victim or get him to relax his facial muscles, which are
reportedly locked into what was described as an ``enormous grin''.
... snip ...
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:45:12 -0600 scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes: The scheduler will very briefly acquire spinlocks on certain resources (typically the ready-to-run list) to ensure atomicity with respect to other processors executing the same instruction stream. actually some of these won't use traditional "spinlocks" at all ... but typically the compare&swap instruction ... a purpose for which it was originally invented. when i did smp kernel support ... including the work on my (mainframe) resource manager (which included the scheduler and dispatcher) several decades ago ... i used compare&swap. misc. past posts mentioning smp, tightly-coupled, and/or compare&swap instruction http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#smp here is post from last yr referencing a (mainframe) redbook (category of technical oriented publications) on effective "scaleup" for some typical workload enivronments as number of processors go from 1 to 64. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#41 One or two CPUs - the pros & cons other posts in the same thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#30 One or two CPUs - the pros & cons http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#43 One or two CPUs - the pros & cons http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#47 One or two CPUs - the pros & cons other posts in this thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#24 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#26 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#34 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#63 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#5 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#13 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#14 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#19 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#22 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:09:02 -0600 scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes: For even stricter authentication the bank host can request that the browser also produce a signed certificate (called client auth) as a credential and will drop the connection of the client certificate cannot be succesfully validated or is not signed by a party that the bank host trusts. With this type of authentication, username and passwords are not necessary to access the bank host, the certificate (which will be protected by a password on the client system) is sufficient to authenticate the user. It's not done today for on-line banking because generating, signing and distributing certificates is not particularly easy nor straightforward. recent posts effectively about credentials/certificates getting the issues related to identity, authentication, and authorization confused http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#22 A crazy thought? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#23 Identity resurges as a debate topic http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#24 Why self describing data formats: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#26 A crazy thought? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#27 A crazy thought? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#32 SSL Security http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#79 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#8 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#9 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#64 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#70 nouns and adjectives i.e. i was recently contacted by some of the identity players about beefing up our merged security taxonomy & glossary with a lot more related to identity. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote so when we were called in to consult with this small client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions ... they had this technology called SSL ... but it was server to client authentication. For the thing called "payment gateway" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway ... that actually handled the transactions between the commerce server and the financial infrastructure payment infrastructure ... we had mandated "mutual" authentication (something that hadn't been implemented at the time). this required both parties to present digital certificates. it was in this exercise that we realized that the digital certificates were actually obsolete, redundant and superfluous ... because both parties already had recorded information about the other party ... including the other party's public key. the resulting use of the (redundant and superfluous) digital certificates was purely an artifact of leveraging the already existing SSL software libraries ... which had implicit, builtin need for digital certificates. misc. past posts about SSL and SSL digital certificates: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts later we did some work in the x9a10 financial standard working group which had been given the requirement in the mid-90s to preserve the integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments. the result was the x9.59 financial standard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959 we had realized from the earlier work on payment transaction support with the small client/server startup that had this SSL technology ... that the relying party had all the necessary information and records about the clients ... and therefor digital certificates were redundant and superfluous ... and so promoted a certificate-less public key authentication infrastructure http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#certless something similar was done for the Kerberos pk-init draft standard ... just specify that a public key is recorded in lieu of a password ... which is sufficient to perform (certificate-less) digital signature authentication. It was later that heavy lobbying was done to have the pk-init draft include a certificate mode of operation (although one of the prime instigators responsible has subsequently contacted us and apologized for how wrong he was). http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#kerberos something similar has been done for (certificate-less, public key) RADIUS (the other major internet authentication protocol in use across the world today) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#radius part of the x9.59 standardization process ... also recognized that the payment transaction has in use by dozens of processes spanning numerous different business entities ... a purely "session" oriented protocol protecting transmission of data across the internet wasn't going to be sufficient ... since the transaction was exposed as a large number of different points. So the other aspect of x9.59 fianncial standard transaction, was the actual transaction was "armored" on an end-to-end basis (from origin all thru way thru the multitude of different business processes and entities that might touch the transaction). This eliminated the possible vulnerabilities that occur in purely session oriented operation. Lots of discussion about the difference in threats, exploits, and vulnerabilities between a session oriented paradigm and an armored transaction paradigm http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments the other part of the x9.59 financial standards work was the observation that a certificate-based transaction implementation added enormous payload and processing bloat to an existing payment transaction ... increasing the payload size and the processing overhead (for just the certificate part) by a factor of 100 times http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#bloat as part of the x9.59 work in the 90s ... there was also work on the AADS chip strawman. Some other hardware token oriented work going on in the period were making claims that truely secure hardware tokens were too expensive ... and so they had to compromise with other kinds of chips. This led to implementations like the "yes card" http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard we somewhat facetiously claimed that we were going to take a $500 mil-spec part and aggressively cost-reduce it by 2-3 orders of magnitude ... so the incremental cost of adding such a chip to an existing magstripe card distribution was significantly less than the fully loaded cost of personalizing and distributing magstripe cards. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads the key pair for the chip was generated in the fab as part of the standard power-on/testing done before the wafer was even sliced & diced. The result was that the institution that shipped the card registered the (card/chip) public key in the standard account record ... along with the other administrative information done as part of card personalization and ship (i.e. date the mailer went out and other gorp that goes on as part of the standard card distribution infrastructure). As a result, there was the possibility of an extremely high integrity, fully functional public key authentication infrastructure at very close to zero incremental cost ... and the whole enormous complexity and cost of a PKI, digital certificate oriented operation is totally avoided. One of the other issues that was done as part of x9.59 and AADS was looking at the issues from transitioning from an institution-centric hardware token infrastructure ... to a person-centric hardware token infrastructure ... i.e. that the same identical AADS hardware token would support public key oriented authentication for x9.59, radius, kerberos and a large variety other possible infrastructures ... w/o any special considerations and/or requirement to load different software and/or provide additional initialization for the token. misc. recent postings mentioning the work on person-centric paradigm considerations: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#12 Special characters in passwords was Re: RACF - Password rules http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#13 special characters in passwords http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#12 One Time Identification, a request for comments/testing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#8 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#9 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#43 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based for additional topic drift, even with a public key hardware token at the highest integrity level ... there are other kinds of vulnerabilities and exploits that might occur in the environment where a digital signature originates. The EU has done the FINREAD (financial reader) standard for home/personal use that has countermeasures for some of these other kinds of vulnerabilities and countermeasures. Lots of past posts related to FINREAD standard and possible vulnerabilities and exploits http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#finread
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: OSI abandoned! Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:24:22 -0600 Albert Manfredi <bert22306@hotmail.com> writes: That was an April Fools joke, but I remember when it actually happened. IIRC, it was 1996. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#24 Does socket represent an interface between ... ? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#25 Does socket represent an interface between ... ? i pulled the copy out of my email archive ... ... as i mentioned in the previous post, should be able to find it in one of the online usenet archives. here is version ... posted Mar 31 1988, 7:00 pm http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.tcp-ip/browse_thread/thread/42eb18a6c94f6541/123b59f7f112234b?lnk=st&q=&rnum=3#123b59f7f112234b so are you referring to a warmed over version of the above nearly a decade later? ... or when some specific party/organization ... taking nearly another decade to actually accept it. for other topic drift ... various old email mentioning NSFNET backbone activity thru the 80s http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:09:18 -0600 Intel readies massive multicore processors http://news.com.com/Intel+readies+massive+multicore+processors/2100-1008_3-6190856.html from above: Researchers at Intel are working on ways to mask the intricate functionality of massive multicore chips to make it easier for computer makers and software developers to adapt to them, said Jerry Bautista, co-director of Intel's Tera-scale Computing Research Program. ... snip ..
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Bulkiest removable storage media? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch.storage Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:14:20 -0600 Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes: I never heard of an IBM peripheral like that, but I know somebody made a multi-floppy pack with something similar for the early microcomputer world. It didn't stay very popular, but it was out there for a little while. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#23 Bulkiest removable storage media? well before the start of steep decline in hard disk prices (and well before cdroms) '80 Mbytes of storage for under $12k!' and other ad favorites through the years http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9023960
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:15:18 -0600 Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes: we somewhat facetiously claimed that we were going to take a $500 mil-spec part and aggressively cost-reduce it by 2-3 orders of magnitude ... so the incremental cost of adding such a chip to an existing magstripe card distribution was significantly less than the fully loaded cost of personalizing and distributing magstripe cards. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#27 nouns and adjectives part of the aggressive cost reduction was eliminating chip features (that didn't affect performance or integrity) as means of reducing chip area. manufacturing costs are basically per wafer (so as the number of chips per wafer goes up, the per chip cost comes down) and post manufacturing per chip processing (with person-centric operation and key generation export as part of existing power-on test, large number of post/per-chip manufacturing steps are eliminated). one of the limiting factors here with super small chips (like aads chip strawman or some of the RFID chips) is when they become smaller than the size of the saw cut (used to slice and dice the wafers) ... loosing most of the wafer area to the saw. so there has been work on developing other techniques for slicing and dicing wafers. recent news item: Dicing tool http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/300270/Dicing+tool.htm and somewhat related paper Laser dicing of chip scale and silicon wafer scale packages http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/8681/27505/01225869.pdf other recent references: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm24.htm#49 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#1 Crypto to defend chip IP: snake oil or good idea? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#12 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#13 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:23:31 -0600 bblack@ibm-main.lst (Bruce Black) writes: ASM2 was eventually acquired by CA and become CA-DISK, then Brightstore CA-DISK, and now CA Disk Backup and Restore. I think there was an intermediate acquisition that I have forgotten about. for other folklore ... a couple people that worked on AIX system management left and formed a company called tivoli. eventually tivoli was bought up ... and when adstar was sold off ... some of the adstar software packages (as well as other software products) were moved over to tivoli ... for instance ADSM (adstar storage management) became TSM (tivoli storage management). i had done the original backup/archive implementation in the late 70s which was deployed at some number of internal datacenters ... and went thru a number of versions with various other people helping with the work. one of the people involved left ... and worked on a number of backup/archive implementations for other companies ... some of these other implementations may currently be sold by sterling(?). my original backup/archive internal implementation first saw product release as workstation datasave facility which then morphed into ADSM (before being renamed TSM). some old email on the subject http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#cmsback and numerous posts mentioning backup/archive http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#backup
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:27:27 -0600 Online Bank Security Worsens http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070614/tc_pcworld/132935 from above: This year's Annual Security Report from NTA Monitor, a security testing firm, found that 20 percent more security vulnerabilities turned up in the infrastructures of banks, ... snip ... misc. past posts in this thread (some totally unrelated): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#67 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#68 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#69 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#70 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#1 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#3 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#7 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#27 nouns and adjectives http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#31 nouns and adjectives
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: IBM 8000 ??? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:55:39 -0600 hancock4 writes: Yes, it's true. As the other poster mentioned, it's in the IBM history series books (Bashe, Pugh, et al). Around 1960, IBM had to make an extremely difficult decision about compatibiltiy between its various computers. Up to that point IBM offered four families: . Small business computers . Large business computers . Small science/eng computers Large science/eng computers Small machines had a small address space. In a time when core memory ["RAM" to you kids] was still expensive, wasting bits on unneeded memory address space was very wasteful. Business machines were character oriented for ease of moving data around, science/eng machines were word oriented for high speed binary arithmetic. None of the families were compatible, that is, programming for one family couldn't be used in another. This meant IBM had to support four separate lines of peripherals, system software, applications, utilities, etc. It was getting to be quite expensive. Customers faced a massive upgrade if they wanted to grow from a small machine to a big one. IBM had a special committee go out and work up a future plan. The report, "SPREAD", served as the basis for System/360 architecture, a universal machine for all sizes and business and science. (Today that is known as the "Z" series and is the same basic archiecture.) At the time, this was seen as a huge gamble. Within IBM, the machine families had powerful supporters. For example, those building the 1401 (small business machine, 6 bit character) felt their machine was great and wanted to continue it using newer components. The other problem IBM faced was that the computer industry was rapidly growing at that time and IBM faced tough competition. A few years after introduction, IBM's principal machines, the 1401 and 7090 faced tough competition. this is along the lines of what was related to me about testimony by one of the "bunch" at the anti-trust trial ... i.e. in the late 50s, all the computer vendors knew that the single most important requirement to succeed in the business was to have compatible line ... i.e. the economy and use of computers was undergoing dramatic growth. "one shot" computer install was enormous cost, having to repeat it everytime, the requirements and business changed was enormous market inhibitor. addressing the issue of cost to business of long term change ... was more significant than any single specific (short term) cumputer technology issue. the comment in the testimony was that IBM was the only vendor that had strong enuf top executive direction to enforce the implementation strategy (i.e. trading-off various short-term tactical advantages again long term strategic objectives). misc. past posts referencing the testimony at anti-trust trial http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#44 bloat http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#231 Why couldn't others compete against IBM? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#33 Big black helicopters http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#71 Card Columns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005k.html#0 IBM/Watson autobiography--thoughts on? this theme is also related to Amdahl's comment in his talk at MIT (in the early 70s) when asked what justification did he use with the VC money people started his business ... aka that companies had already invested something like $200B in application software ... and even if IBM were to totally walk away from 360/370 ... possibly a veiled reference to future system project http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys ... that installed software base would keep him in business thru the end of the centry. the other view would be that businesses were more likely to sink that sort of investment into software development ... if they thot the investment had long term benefit to the company i.e. would be re-useable over many generations of the same machine line as well as different machine lines, as the business's computing requirements exploded (protecting the customer's "investment" has been a frequent re-occuring theme). In later generations, there were other avenues attempting to address the software investment ... things like portable software technologies as well as attempting to significantly reduce software costs (including COTS, commericial off the shelf ... instead of RYO, roll-your-own). past posts referencing Amdahl's talk at MIT: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#23 OT - Internet Explorer V6.0 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#20 MVS on Power (was Re: McKinley Cometh...) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003.html#36 mainframe http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#13 unix http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#15 unix http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#32 IBM system 370 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#3 A Dark Day http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#30 Not A Survey Question http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#22 System/360 40th Anniversary http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004h.html#20 Vintage computers are better than modern crap ! http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#51 Specifying all biz rules in relational data http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004m.html#53 4GHz is the glass ceiling? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004o.html#66 Integer types for 128-bit addressing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#47 The mid-seventies SHARE survey http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#35 Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#49 MVCIN instruction http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#7 EREP , sense ... manual http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006c.html#18 Change in computers as a hobbiest http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#61 Is computer history taught now? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#77 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#57 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#46 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#15 Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Boyd, Metcalfe, and Amdahl all in one article Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:56:58 -0600 Boyd, Metcalfe, and Amdahl - Modelling Networked Warfighting Systems: http://www.ausairpower.net/IWC5-Kopp-2004-Slides.pdf from above: Conclusions • Amdahl's Law provides a valuable abstraction for modelling the impact of the Decision-Action phases of the OODA-loop on system capability gains. • Amdahl's Law complements Metcalfe's Law by providing for a complete abstraction to model OODA-loop behaviour. • Amdahl's Law presents a model which relates achievable numbers of engagements to time. • Metcalfe's Law, conversely, presents capability gains indirectly, as it measures utility in terms of connectivity. • Fusion of Boyd, Metcalfe and Amdahl provides an intellectual framework for understanding capability gains in networked warfighting systems. ... snip ... lots of past posts mentioning Boyd http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd and various URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd and/or OODA-loops http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Subject: Re: Future of System/360 architecture? Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:21:11 -0600 hancock4 writes: Likewise, I sense that major applications written in the 1970s and 1980s are getting old and it appears companies are retiring them in favor of newer technologies. Is this true? there was a cycle of that, which went on in the 90s ... the problem was that some of the software projects that ran on the order of a billion had disastrous failures. somewhat the issue was that the new kids with the new technologies ... had never actually encountered the business critical requirements and scaleup that were required. for instance, we had a one week "JAD" with taligent in the mid-90s that came to the conclusion that about 1/3rd (very specific) new code was needed and something like 1/3rd of the existing code had to be rewritten ... just to address the business critical requirements ... that doesn't get to the scaleup issues. misc. past posts: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#46 Where are they now : Taligent and Pink http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#93 Buffer overflow http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#64 Systems software versus applications software definitions http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005b.html#40 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#38 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005i.html#42 Development as Configuration two buzz words from these projects in the 90s, were overnight batch window and straight-through processing. some of the monstrous software development disasters of the 90s were around major transaction operations (payments, trading, settlement, etc). these are operations that had "online" front-ends built during the 70s & 80s ... but final processing actually finished up in the overnight batch windows. as business grew ... the batch window was stressed ... and globalization further increased the workload stress on the batch window ... and also cut the amount of time for the window (since it wasn't necessarily "overnight" all around the world). the "new" technology in the 90s was to re-engineer the infrastructure and do "real-time", straight-through processing ... i.e. each transaction went straight-through to final completion ... instead of final completion being queued for the overnight batch window (attempting to totally eliminate the overnight batch window) the issue was that the new technology and "real-time" processing was less efficient than batch ... so, in theory, this would be made up with lots of parallelized COTS processing. the problem was that much of this new generation of software engineers didn't appear to know how to do back-of-the-envelope speeds&feeds calculations. This is something that was somewhat specialized at the science center http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech in the 60s & 70s ... performance tuning, workload profiling, and laying the whole ground work for stuff like capacity planning http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#benchmark so it frequently turned out that these great, new effort's "less efficiency" was on the order of two orders of magnitude (100 times). this is where quantitative really becomes qualitative ... and the project eventually goes down in flames possibly after several tens, hundreds, or thousands of million. we were even called into the middle of one of these massive projects (before the realization that it couldn't succeed had started to permeate the organization) ... and the first thing we did was the back-of-the-envelope speeds&feeds calculations. there was a recent article mentioning that nothing succeeds like failure ... it is possible that some of the large system integrators acquired a substantial appetite for failing projects in this period ... since if they were to succeed, then there wouldn't be the next (big, expensive) follow-on effort. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#59 On cleaning up the security mess: escaping the self-perpetuating trap of Fraud? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#8 Leadership, the very definition of fraud, and the court of security ideas http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#29 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#62 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#29 sizeof() was: The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#48 Securing financial transactions a high priority for 2007 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#55 ANN: Microsoft goes Open Source http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#46 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based a lot of what is happening now ... isn't so much the re-engineering of the core (backroom, batch) applications ... but "webizing" the online parts. say a customer call center (trouble center, catalogue order, etc) ... that has a lot of screens/menus to walk the person answering the phone thru what ever the customer has called about. Lay in a bunch of authentication, identification, authorization, etc in the middle ... and let the end-user directly walk thru the call-center screens (via web/browser) ... eliminating a lot of the 1-800 calls (aka "self-service"). we had done a lot of work in ha/cmp http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp for both commercial and numerical intensive scale-up http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa with both loosely-coupled (cluster) and tightly-coupled scaleup. Much of that got side-tracked into numerical intensive for national labs and high-energy physics. some of th