List of Archived Posts
2007 Newsgroup Postings (06/22 - 08/11)
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- One OS for everybody
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- the Depression WWII
- John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- What if there were two Internets?
- nouns and adjectives
- John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
- The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
- Operating systems are old and busted
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- What if there were two Internets?
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- VM system kept NYSE running
- What if phone company had developed Internet?
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- Programmable TLB management?
- How would a relational operating system look like?
- IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
- What I miss in my OS
- What I miss in my OS
- IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
- IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
- How to flush data most efficiently from memory to disk when db checkpoint?
- FastTCP Commercialized Into An FTP Appliance
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- Windows: Monitor or CUSP?
- Windows: Monitor or CUSP?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- the Depression WWII
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- WindowsMonitor or CUSP?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- VLIW pre-history
- WindowsMonitor or CUSP?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP? [was ReJohn W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies]
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- Windows Monitor or CUSP? [was ReJohn W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies]
- Windows Monitor or CUSP?
- computerworld 40 yr articles
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- IBM System/360 DOS still going strong as Z/VSE
- Computer Clocks
- IBM System/360 DOS still going strong as Z/VSE
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- UK computer history gets new home
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- IBM System/360 DOS still going strong as Z/VSE
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- least structured statement in a computer language. And the winner
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- women as computer operators in the 1960s
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend
- instructions for computers
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- PSI MIPS
- PSI MIPS
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- PSI MIPS
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- sysprog demand
- mainframe developer = permanent position - Dublin Ireland
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- Poll: oldest computer thing you still use
- PCI Compliance - Encryption of all non-console administrative access
- The Unexpected Fact about the First Computer Programmer
- Why is not AIX ported to z/Series?
- VLIW pre-history
- VLIW pre-history
- VLIW pre-history
- Combining VM list threads
- vm 35th b'day at share in san diego next week
- How old are you?
- PCI Compliance - Encryption of all non-console administrative access
- The Unexpected Fact about the First Computer Programmer
- some questions about System z PR/SM
- Loads Weighing Heavily on Roads
- News report: Federal court rules that Novell still owns UNIX
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:03:05 -0600
Frank McCoy <mccoyf@millcomm.com> writes:
BULL.
There was far more software available on CP/M at the time than IBM ever
provided. OTHER companies soon started supplying, once the market was
there; but not when the PC came out.
No, the reason was corporate "standards" as explained above.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
and/or corporate marketing ... majority of the people in the period ...
didn't understand what personal computing and/or PC software actually
met ... marketing such abstractions would have little meaning
(sufficient understanding of how they might actually benefit). 3270
terminals to the mainframe did have some meaning ... and terminal
emulation, effectively same price, same footprint ... with the addition
of something more than 3270 terminal emulation ... even if the vast
majority of people had no idea what that actually added value really met
(but it wasn't a risk/justification issue ... the cost/justification was
covered by its play as added value 3270 terminal replacement).
it didn't have to be a "standard" as something officially proclaimed
... although it could be an implicit standard ... in that terminal
emulation was something that the vast majority of the people could
relate to and believe they could understand.
this previous post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
with this reference on personal computer market share,
1975-2004:
http://www.wowdailynews.com/pegasus/total_share.html
shows TRS-80 with the earliest annual volumes of few hundred thousand
... then later atari 400/800, and eventually the apple II in the
80s. the closest to the pc in volumes was the commodore 64 in 83/84 with
millions ... but they weren't selling into the terminal emulation market
... and that really shifted by 85/86 (commodore 64 stayed in there with
2.5m/annum in 84, 85, & 86 ... while the pc+clones continued to
significantly increase).
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:34:00 -0600
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
2.6 came out in 2005 after a 5-year wait, and delivered on promise.
Linux 2.6 was just such a painful redesign, and IBM has contributed
a lot to that code. There are still corners in the code that only
do SMP moderatly well, but they are mostly backwards-compatible areas.
and at least some of that is purported to have been stuff from sequent
(dynix and numa-q), i.e. after ibm bought sequent.
back before numa-q ... when sequent was running both dynix and nt on
their i86 (32-way) SMPs ... they had claimed that much of the smp
scaleup in NT had come from work they had done ... aka previous posts
with some number of wiki & other refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#13 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
random other recent posts mentioning sequent &/or numa-q
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#8 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#27 nouns and adjectives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#72 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
and for other topic drift, old posts mentioning that steve chen
shows up as sequent's CTO in the 90s (we had done a little
consulting for him at sequent)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#42 Looking for Software/Documentation for an Opus 32032 Card
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#57 Another light on the map going out
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#9 Is no one reading the article?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#38 Wanted: info on old Unisys boxen
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: One OS for everybody ....
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:56:55 -0600
jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) writes:
I just wish I knew about modular exponentiation back when I was a wee
lad and saw that movie for the first time. Who knows, it might have
inspired me to invent RSA before anyone else...
a few old emails on subject of crypto and/or public key from 70s & 80s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#crypto
and couple more recent posts about working on a really inexpensive,
really fancy crypto hardware (in the mid-80s)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#36 The very first text editor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#45 waiting for acknowledgements
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:57:23 -0600
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
I hold dimetrically opposite views of the 80s. That was when all the
dispersed efforts came together. *n*x came of age, took up a lot
of the practices from other fields, and became a workhorse. RISC
came out of the closet. RAID was invented. Networking came to it's
own. The Open Source movement got going. The monopoly power of the
vendors was crushed, and the customer came in charge. Software was
unbundled from hardware.
note that the 23jun69 unbundling announcement met that software was
charged separately from the hardware. prior to that the software had
been free.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#unbundle
this was result of various litigation. however, they did make the case
that kernel software was necessary for the hardware operation ... and
therefor should still be free. later, the rise of the processor clones
gave them reason to rethink the decision. I was getting ready to
(re)release the resource manager (after much of it having been dropped
in the morph from cp67 and vm370) ... and it was selected to be the
guinea pig for starting to charge for kernel software.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#wsclock
in effect, prior to the litigation and the unbundling announcement,
software was free and (much of it,) open source. an example was the
large share/waterloo (, univerisity of) software libraries for cp67,
vm370, cms, etc ... including source updates/enhancements (i.e. cp67,
vm370, cms, etc not only was shipped as source ... but the monthly
updates/fixes were also shipped as source). Standard procedure at many
customers was to build/generate system from the source.
first patent for disk array, san jose plant site, '78:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#4 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#29 cheaper low quality drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#47 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
later IBM "co-sponsored research at UCB" that led to the raid level
definitions in '87 ... but i believe that first deployed use was by
as/400.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: the Depression WWII
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 07:47:31 -0600
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
Ugh when you put it that way it's a wonder anything works given
that the bureaucracies full of middle managers seem to turn up in every
system.
or boyd's scenario about doing something or taking credit for doing
something ... from dedication of Boyd Hall at USAF weapons school:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#20 MS to world: Stop sending money, we have enough - was Re: Most ... can't run Vista
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#74 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#61 Lean and Mean: 150,000 U.S. layoffs for IBM?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#77 IBM Unionization
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#3 IBM Unionization
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#5 IBM Unionization
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 07:52:49 -0600
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
The defense against these is simple - ignore them and never connect
to a bank except via SSL to a known starting point - note that it is
important to start in SSL so that no transparent proxy can intervene.
recent thread/post you may find of interest:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#29 A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#30 A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol
on following subject
A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/22/25OPsecadvise_1.html
from above:
Implementing -- and requiring -- stronger authentication and
cryptography standards is the next step toward a new Internet
... snip ...
i.e. a new internet is required ... along with new authentication
and crypto standards
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:10:55 -0600
Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Also, log structured file systems, the jfs and contributions to efs3,
and huge improvements to the irq and dma routing; including some work
in processor affinities.
metadata logging is slightly different from log structured file systems.
one of the problems with log structured file systems is the periodic
"garbage collection" done to consolidate files, making their records
sequential and contiguous. for other drift ... during work
on HA/CMP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
we hired one of the people responsible for doing the BSD log structured
filesystem implementation to consult on doing a "geographically distributed
filesystem".
JFS was originally done by people working on 801/AIXV3. 801 early on had
definition/implementation for "database memory" ... i.e. hardware could
keep track of fine-grain changes (size on the order of cache-lines).
Just load up data into memory mapped infrastructure ... provide the
COMMIT boundaries ... and eliminate needing to sprinkle "log" calls
thruout the code. At commit, just run thru the changed memory
indications ... collecting data-lines needing logging.
There had been various kinds of conflict between the unix development
group in palo alto and the group in austin. The palo alto group took JFS
and ported it to non-801 platforms ... having to retrofit the logging
calls to the software (since they lacked database memory hardware). It
turns out that the version with explicit logging calls ran faster than
the original implementation (even on the same 801 hardware platform) ...
the commit time scanning of memory for changes tended to be higher
overhead than the explicit log calls.
Then the remaining justification for database memory is the
implementation simplification ... somewhat akin to some of the pushes
for parallel programming (except parallel programming is frequently
explicitly about performance; not trying to trade-off performance
against simplicity).
some of the database memory stuff can be found under the heading of
transactional memory ... some posts mentioning transactional memory:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#27 transactional memory question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005s.html#33 Power5 and Cell, new issue of IBM Journal of R&D
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#44 Why so little parallelism?
misc. past posts mentioning log structured filesystems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#28 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#29 Log Structured filesystems -- think twice
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#24 Hard disks, one year ago today
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#59 JFSes: are they really needed?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#20 index searching
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#36 Do any architectures use instruction count instead of timer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#69 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#22 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005l.html#41 25% Pageds utilization on 3390-09?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#36 Code density and performance?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#3 virtual memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006j.html#10 The Chant of the Trolloc Hordes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#30 V2X2 vs. Shark (SnapShot v. FlashCopy)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#27 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
some past posts mentioning database memory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#33 Does it support "Journaling"?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#34 Does it support "Journaling"?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003c.html#49 Filesystems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#54 Filesystems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#20 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#32 Why? (Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#26 Cache-Size vs Performance
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#36 Multiple mappings
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#27 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if there were two Internets?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.folklore.computers,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:19:57 -0600
"Dave Wade" <g8mqw@yahoo.com> writes:
Certainly in Europe we had two "internets" that reflect the above. We had
the public X.25 network including the JANET X.25 academic network, which
many thought of as the BETA version. After all it had end-to-end flow
control, guaranteed packet delivery, quality of service that was implemented
from day. On top of that we had software that conformed to formal standards,
and which was fully tested....
The big problem with it was that it was controlled by the PTTs whose
charging model was to wring every cent they could out of it. So there were
call costs to connect, plus a connection time on the "PAD", and on top of
that a charge per packet.
I know there wasn't any WEB but there was e-mail, file transfer, and job
transfer.
But its now long gone....
Pity there aren't copies of the standards on the BITSAVERS web sites.....
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#71 What if there were two Internets?
EARN was the european version of BITNET ... misc. past posts
about BITNET &/or EARN
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet
a couple old emails with the person charged with setting up EARN:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email850607
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: nouns and adjectives
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:37:32 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
Nobody seems to be getting this. Lynn sees a little bit of the problem
but not the work, bit and human flows all together...I think.
actually we've had to do the whole thing several times ... the issue is
actually getting them all addressed/implemented in an end-to-end
manner. the whole set of postings about "naked" transactions is somewhat
related to some of the end-to-end issues
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payment
and recent references to how SSL is now actually operating (from an
end-to-end human perspective) ... as opposed to how it was originally
designed to operation (again from human perspective).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#5 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#29 A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#30 A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol
changing existing infrastructure is hard. when we were doing our
(internal) backbone, we were not allowed to bid on nsfnet backbone
... even tho there was an nsf audit that said what we had already
running was at least five yrs ahead of all (nsfnet rfp) bids to build
something new ... now some of the stuff looks like it will show up in
"internet2" ... which makes it 20+ yrs ... not five.
another scenario is all the AADS work in the 90s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads
part of it includes reducing the cost of a widely deployed, high
integrity, hardware token authentication infrastructure by potentially
four orders of magnitude (two orders of magnitude in the per token cost
and possibly another two orders of magnitude in the number of such
tokens that would be required). even a single order of magnitude change
in costs is likely to face strong opposition by somebody. lots of
infrastructures become succesful because there is somebody with strong
financial motivation pushing them. an infrastructure that purely saves
everybody oodles of money may have lots of problems because it would
lack individuals with strong financial motivation to see it succeed, and
potentially also facing strong opposition from those that had interests
in maintaining the existing status quo.
another example, somewhat alluded to in recent threads ... is
translating NSFNET backbone infrastructure to commercial environment.
Lots of the telco community had strong interest in having the NSFNET
infrastructure succeed as a technology incubator (for new generation of
bandwidth hungry applications). However, at the same time, the
internetworking model applied to traditional, commercial telco business
would have severe disruption on their traditional revenue streams. this
would create enormous ambivalence in those businesses ... frequently,
strongly backing NSFNET as a "research only" incubator environment
... and at the same time, strongly opposing having the internetworking
model break-out into the commercial world).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#71 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#7 What if there were two Internets?
we've periodically have advised people (that have called us in to
consult), to be careful of what you ask for. in a case where we were
called in by one of the large airline res systems to look at the "ten
impossible things" they couldn't do. After a week or two study ... we
went away for two months and then came back with a complete replacement
implementation, that would do all of their "ten impossible things" (as
well as all the stuff they were currently doing). This was met with
quite a bit of dismay and anguish. One way of describing the core
problem was that they had something like 800 people involved in doing
various kinds of tasks .. and it would be necessary to automate all
those tasks in order to succesfully address the "ten impossible
things". Any elimination of 800 positions would propagate up the whole
organization chain ... impacting the "importance" (and presumably
compensation) of the upper level executives. Eventually, they would
pretend like the whole sequence had never occured.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:57:35 -0600
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
SSL is strong encryption and *very* hard to break.
From a FAQ:
Q: How secure is the encryption used by SSL?
A: It would take significantly longer than the age of the universe to
crack a 128-bit key.
Of course if someone finds a way to do it other than brute forcing
all 2^128 possible keys then things get a little sticky.
Equally of course if you put a large network (say every Windows
machine you can work into) onto the job it would be quicker, you might even
finish before the sun goes out.
SSL was supposed to be two things:
1) is the webserver that you think you are talking to, actually the
webserver that you are talking to (aka authentication)
2) encryption to hide transmitted information
...
previous reference, I point out that because of certain assumptions
about human behavior interacting with browsers ... which are no longer
valid assumptions (or at least rarely so) ... and therefor can be
leveraged by attackers:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#27 nouns and ajectives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#5 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
to defeat assumptions about whether the user is talking to the webserver
that they think they are talking to.
one of the major world-wide SSL uses for information "hiding" is in
electronic-commerce for hiding credit card numbers. the issue is that
information from previous/existing transactions can relatively trivially
used by crooks in fraudulent financial transactions (primarily because
of relatively weak authentication in other parts of the infrastructure).
the observation was that the majority of data-breach and security-breach
compromises in this area, hasn't been from evesdropping on internet
(even before ssl) but from all sorts of compromises at the end-points
... lots and lots of mechanisms used by crooks to harvest such
information
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#harvest
little, if any, addressed by SSL internet transmitted information
hiding.
we had been called in by small client/server startup that wanted to do
payment transactions (i.e. electronic commerce) on their servers, and
they had this technology they called SSL that they wanted to use.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
after doing that, we got involved in the x9a10 financial working group,
that in the mid-90s had been given the requirement to preserve the
integrity of the financial infrastructure for all retail payments.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959
this involved a detailed, end-to-end study of threats and
vulnerabilities ... including, but not limited to transmission of
payment transactions over the internet. the result was using digital
signatures to effectively armor every x9.59 transaction (strong
authencation as well as strong integrity) and a business rule that
information from x9.59 transactions could not be used in non-x9.59
transactions.
X9.59 financial standard eliminated evesdropping, havesting, skimming,
data breaches, and other kinds of exploits related to crooks using
gathered information for being able to generate fraudulent transactions
(not just limited to transactions transmitted over the internet). As a
result, X9.59 also eliminated the need for the prevailing use of SSL in
the world today (hiding information that would be useful to crooks).
this is also somewhat discussed in the naked payment/transaction
collection of posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#payments
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:28:09 -0600
John Ahlstrom <AhlstromJK@comcast.net> writes:
As a former boss always said:
Demo costs 1 unit
Usable by others 10 units
stand alone product 100 units
Integrated into a
system 1000 units
Course that was a long time ago.
I wonder what the relative figures are now.
we've used the number of 4-10 times to take a thuroughly checked-out
and debugged application and turn it into a "service".
in the case of the payment gateway ... for the stuff that has since
come to be called "electronic commerce" ... it was around 10 times
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
a lot of the effort isn't directly code ... but detailed understanding
of how things might fail ... and to be able to recover (and/or at
least diagnose) such failures. a somewhat related comment about ports
of UNIX to mainframe typically ran under virtual machine hypervisor
... since the effort to add 370 mainframe EREP support to unix was
several times larger than simply porting UNIX to the mainframe
(running in virtual machine hypervisor, UNIX could take advantage of
EREP provided by the hypervisor).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#69 Operating systems are old and busted
in the payment gateway scenario ... we defined a matrix of about 40
failure scenarios and 5-6 states that might happen involving the
webserver, the internet, and/or the payment gateway ... and had to
show for every possible case, the situation could be automatically
recovered from and/or failing component identified and diagnosed with
a few minutes.
some of this was philosophical. the basic internet payment process
takes the messages defined for (circuit-based) operation between
point-of-sale terminal and payment infrastructure. These messages
defined for circuit-based operation were then just retargted to a
internet, packet-based environment. Now, there are some number of
implicit operational consideratiions that are part of a circuit-based
infrastructure that are lost in migrating to packet-based operation.
So some part of what we had to do was basically compensating processes
to make up the difference between circuit-based operation and
packet-based operation ... including the writing of a problem
diagnosing manual. In the telco, circuit-based world, a call is made
to the telco provider and all sort of magic automatically happens
... especially when there is a service-level agreement in place
(something that has been slow coming to the internet world ... and
still won't really address full end-to-end operation ... especially
crossing several different service providers).
by comparison, in that time-frame there was a situation ... where a
(telco) central exchange mangled some 1-800 point-of-sale terminal
calls for a period of 18 minutes ... which was treated as an
enormously severe problem at the highest executive levels.
another related scenario ... were various things ... in addition to
use of PREPARE comand, automated operator (enabled with AUTOLOG
command), and automatic reboot/restart .... enabling "lights out",
unattended operation for off-shift timesharing use ... recent post
that also touched on this subject:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#68 Operating systems are old and busted
other posts about operating online, commercial timesharing service
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare
i've since claimed that a lot of the operation of a lot of the large
scale web-based services ... have a lot of the "human" free
requirements that old-style mainframe operations had to evolve. This
may be represented more of a philosophical challenge to many of the
commingly used platforms for web services. A lot of these platforms
evolved from an "interactive" environment ... where the operation of
the machine was tied to interactions with some person. Many of the
"batch" platforms evolved methodologies over periods of several
decades ... assuming that the person responsible for the application
wasn't present ... and therefor automated processes were needed for
nearly all contingencies. In that sense, frequently the person
responsible for a webserver operation may not be always available
during periods that the webserver is operating.
misc. past posts mentioning the 4-10 times rule-of-thumb:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#75 Test and Set (TS) vs Compare and Swap (CS)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#91 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#93 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#11 Wanted: the SOUNDS of classic computing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#62 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#15 A Dark Day
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#37 The BASIC Variations
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#8 Mars Rover Not Responding
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#48 Automating secure transactions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#20 Vintage computers are better than modern crap !
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#49 "Perfect" or "Provable" security both crypto and non-crypto?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#23 Systems software versus applications software definitions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004p.html#63 Systems software versus applications software definitions
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/2005i.html#42 Development as Configuration
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#26 Data communications over telegraph circuits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006n.html#20 The System/360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#37 Is computer history taught now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#51 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!!)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#78 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Operating systems are old and busted
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 18:49:43 -0600
another article on the same theme:
Leopard and Vista: Last Gasp of the Big OS?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/133276
from above:
Twenty years from now a new generation of computer users will look back
on the operating systems of today with the same bemused smile we look
back at the cars of the late 1950s and early 60s. They had huge fins,
were the size of a small yacht and burned up just about as much gas.
... snip ...
a few similar articles over the past yr:
Windows Vista: The last Of Microsoft's Supersized Operating Systems?
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/08/windows_vista_t.html
Windows Vista the last of its kind
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=6718
Vista: The Last Microsoft Operating System that will Matter
http://www.realtime-websecurity.com/articles_and_analysis/2007/01/vista_the_last_microsoft_opera.html
Vista is the last of the dinosaurs
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36155
other recent posts in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#64 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#66 Off Topic But Concept should be Known To All
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#67 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#68 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#69 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#73 Operating systems are old and busted
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 12:06:47 -0600
timcaffrey@aol.com (Tim McCaffrey) writes:
While I don't disagree about the Z-100 being a superior machine (still
have one and parts for another). It wasn't introduced until March
1982, and it is very difficult to get one. I got my Z-100H in
Dec. 83.
the issue wasn't whether or not the Z-100 was a superior machine
... especially for consumer market place; the issue was where was
critical market and what were customers basing their buying decision
on.
looking at purely (home) personal computing ... that would make Z-100
competing with trs-80 and commodore 64 ... which had the largest volumes
in the (home) personal computing market. ... i.e. previous posts
with reference to volumes by yr
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#0 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
big issue for ibm/pc was that its volumes selling into business market
... it wasn't heavily competing with volumes in the purely home personal
computing market.
the issue has been raised repeatedly that nobody got fired for buying
IBM (in the business market). the other view point is that a lot of
the people making buying decision (in the business market) wouldn't
have technical expertise to make a distinction between two different
"personal computers" ... aka at the time, the majority of the business
people (making buying decision) wouldn't be able differentiate between
the ibm/pc and say the Z-100 ... so buying decision is likely to be
heavily influenced by lots of other factors; (business) brand
recognition, whether they had seen sales pitch, etc (some of this is
analogous to whether people buy brand names or generic in grocery
stores), how exactly compatible they were (and any attempt to pitch
significant differentiating features would, in turn undermine the
compatibility theme).
the clone business ... dating back to mainframe clone controllers in
the 60s and mainframe clone processors in the 70s ... have tended to
be based on being essentially identical and selling on price
... mostly able to get some small percentage of the market based
purely on price. Big part of the issue in selling into the business
market, was that there were only very small percentage of the decision
makers that believe they had technical expertise that would enable
them to make evaluation based on features. as a result, majority of
clone marketing was based (effectively) on being identical and selling
on price alone (with other differentiating features having little
meaning to the majority of the buyers).
So there might be some markets where differentiating features in
something like Z-100 would have meaning to perspective buyers ... say
putting them in competition with commodore 64 sales. In the (business)
ibm mainframe terminal emulation market segment ... positioning would
primarily be as a clone ... identical and selling purely on price (the
brand name vis-a-vis generic scenario). Then a major issue is
compatibility ... and thru the ages, some number of clones failed
compatibility ... and was leveraged as marketing countermeasure
against clone purchases. To get past the small percentage of early
adopters ... specific clone vendors frequently had to somehow
establish critical mass install base ... effectively brand name of
their own (and as demonstration of true compatibility).
This sort of market penetration scenario was seen in the mid-70s with
clone (mainframe) processors ... and similar type progression could be
seen in the mid-80s with clone personal computers.
lots of pervious posts mentioning terminal emulation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
other posts in this specific thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#45 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#48 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#57 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#72 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 13:58:29 -0600
timcaffrey@aol.com (Tim McCaffrey) writes:
Lynn do you have any figures about how many PCs were sold into the
corporate market vs. the home market in the first 18 months? (pre XT, in
other words). I think most people don't appreciate how much leverage the
corporate world has over the PC market. Which, of course, explains why
certain things sucked on the PC for such a long time (graphics, sound,
plug-n-play upgrades, etc), and other things were available very quickly
(networking, printer sharing, hard disks, etc).
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#12 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
other than the overall numbers referenced in the previous posts:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#0 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
I haven't yet found quotable numbers for break out of commercial
vis-a-vis consumer. however, the previous references on overall market
also do talk about the total number of different vendors in the
(personal computing) market during the early 80s (couple hundred)
... and lots of confusion and compatibility issues ... especially with
software/application life-cycle ... which was also somewhat the replay
of driving factor behind 360 mainframes.
however, his is somewhat different perspective on what it took
to be a succesful clone in that time-frame:
http://www.cwhonors.org/search/his_4a_detail.asp?id=3875
the above comments, from compaq perspective was that they got their
foothold in the clone business by driving compatability
search engine use uncovers a series of posts here
which are extracts from articles in that time-frame
including discussion of some of the market forces:
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg.htm
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg24.htm
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg25.htm
past post mentioning testimony in (mainframe) anti-trust litigation
about industry awareness concerning market requirement for
compatibility
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#33 Big black helicopters
the above also makes reference to conversation with somebody that worked
with TJW-jr, saying all the litigation took all the interest out of
running the company since every (business) decision had to made from the
standpoint of how might the gov. react.
other past posts mentioning testimony in (mainframe) anti-trust
litigation about industry awareness concerning market requirement for
compatibility
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#44 bloat
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#20 1401 series emulation still running?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#231 Why couldn't others compete against IBM?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#0 Did Intel Bite Off More Than It Can Chew?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#26 looking for information on the IBM 7090 instruction set
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003o.html#43 Computer folklore - forecasting Sputnik's orbit with
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#22 System/360 40th Anniversary
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#18 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/2007m.html#34 IBM 8000 ???
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if there were two Internets?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.folklore.computers,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:30:17 -0600
Greg Goss <gossg@gossg.org> writes:
*High Speed - terminology changes over the years That blindingly fast
connection was 0.0096 megabit.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#71 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#7 What if there were two Internets?
misc past posts with references to mid-80s "high-speed" ... during period we
were doing some stuff somewhat related to nsfnet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#33b High Speed Data Transport (HSDT)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#69 oddly portable machines
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#45 IBM's Workplace OS (Was: .. Pink)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003m.html#59 SR 15,15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004g.html#12 network history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#58 Q ALLOC PAGE vs. CP Q ALLOC vs ESAMAP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005j.html#59 Q ALLOC PAGE vs. CP Q ALLOC vs ESAMAP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005n.html#25 Data communications over telegraph circuits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005r.html#9 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005u.html#57 IPCS Standard Print Service
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#36 The Pankian Metaphor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006i.html#17 blast from the past on reliable communication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#4 Google Architecture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#42 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#50 Ranking of non-IBM mainframe builders?
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:22:03 -0600
mailbox writes:
Restating my earlier query and
adjusting the newsgoups line so as not
to get sidetracked on the technical
aspects: What if the phone company
had developed the Internet? What
would we be paying for access? Would
e-mail be metered? Would there be
spam? Would there be Google?..etc.
the folklore is that the national PTTs were substantially behind OSI
ISO/ITU-T standards ... basically very traditional copper link/circuit
oriented.
http://www.itu.int/net/home/index.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU-T
at various points there were even national edicts that internetworking
would be eliminated and replaced it with OSI.
also take a look at ISDN, X.25, VAN (value added networks), EDI, X.400,
X.500, etc standards. Various VAN/EDI offerings, in fact, offerred
metered email. However, most all of this were targeted at commercial
entities (in part because the pricing structure) and saw little or no
use in consumer market segment. internetworking has nearly supplanted
nearly all of the (commerical) VANs that had grown up in the 70s & 80s.
In that sense ... they DID develop their own online offerings ... which
eventually gave way to the internet ... i.e. it wasn't "IF" ... they DID
... but of course, they weren't going to look like THE INTERNET. In that
sense the telco "developed" internets lost out to THE INTERNET.
While ISO wasn't limited to PTTs, one major differentiation between IETF
(and the internetworking standards) and ISO ... was that IETF requires
demonstration of multiple interoperable implementations as standard
progression ... while ISO can pass a standard w/o ever demonstrating
that it was practical and/or even possible.
some past posts mentioning some of the issues/activities going on around
OSI and ISO
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp
Even after (NSFNET backbone) broke out into commercial with CIX,
peering-aggreements, etc ... various telcos continued to be involved in
various parts of internetworking activity.
we had been called in to consult with a small client/server startup that
wanted to do payments on their server ... and they had this technology
called SSL (the result is frequently now referred to as electronic
commerce).
Part of the effort was something called a payment gateway ... misc. past
posts referencing payment gateway
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
they had this project called a "commerce server" ... which happened to
be run by two people we had worked with in previous life ... a couple
refs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#15
the implementation started off being a "mall" paradigm ... designed to
be hosted by service provider ... with merchants "leasing"
space/services in the "mall". there were lots of effort equated various
implementation pieces with the physical mall paradirm.
there is some possibility that this whole initial effort was
underwritten by one of the telcos.
this fairly quickly gave way to another implementation where each
merchant could field their own electronic commerce webesrver.
part of the issue is the mall construct fundamentally provides a
physical/time solution for customers (large number of merchants in a
physical compact space, simplifying access for customers). one of the
attributes frequently ascribed to the internet is that it eliminates
physical distances (all by itself) ... aka customers can visit a large
number of different merchants at distinct different webservers. the
online mall possibly would have greater appeal if customers actually had
to make unique circuit connections (different phone calls) to specific
sites (i.e. vestiges of circuit-based orientation in contrast to packet
oriented internetworking).
with world-wide internetworking "anarchy" ... there is no service
provider that is responsible for establishing directory for everything
available online. this free-for-all anarchy eventually allowed huge
explosion in online content (which would have been extremely difficult
in a more structured PTT environment) ... and gave rise to the
requirements for "search engines" ... aka "what is there" and "where can
it be found".
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:43:00 -0600
"William Black" <william.black@hotmail.co.uk> writes:
The Internet started as a means of passing military communications. The
message was there before the medium
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#15 What if phone company had developed Internet?
the arpanet started as packet-switched network that could possibly be
routed via a number of different paths. however, the implementation was
still a single network with homogeneous interface provided by IMPs.
it didn't support internetworking.
somewhere along the way ... there was the realization that large complex
environments were going to require "internetworking" ... implicit
assumption was to provide internetworking between multiple, independent
networks.
i've frequently claimed that the internal network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
was larger than the arpanet/internet (from just about the beginning
until sometime mid-85) because it early on provided for a layered,
gateway kind of function (which the internet finally got in the
switchover from arpanet to internetworking).
the great switchover from arpanet to internetworking occured on 1jan83
... eliminating many of the growth inhibitors that were present in the
homogeneous arpanet/imp paradigm ... contributing to it be able to
exceed the internal network in size.
the relative interconnect anarchy provided by the internetworking
functionality was something alien to telco/PTT way of doing business
... since they had been used to directly providing all communication
capability (explicit point-to-point operation for every communication).
posts in the previous thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#71 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#7 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#14 What if there were two Internets?
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:58:13 -0600
BernardZ <bernardZ@BluesystemNospam.com> writes:
Actually phones using bulletin boards were popular with computer nerds
in the early 1990s.
a large part of csnet in the late 70s/early 80s used "phonenet" ... reference
to "phonenet" connection ... old email describing csnet connection
options (including "phonenet"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#email821022
in this post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0
this was even before arpanet moved off their IMP implementation and
supported internetworking.
usenet in the late 70s started with "phonenet" store&forward.
some number of the bulletin boards in the early 90s were also usenet
servers (using phone calls). In the early 90s, I had a ms/dos platfrom
running waffle ... but I had also done a satellite modem driver for
company offering usenet feed via satellite (so they provided me with
free dish and modem). dish was slightly larger than the current
generation of satellite TV dishes. I also co-authored article on the
driver and service for boardwatch magazine (included picture of me
standing next to the dish in backyard).
should make some distinction between using phone calls for computer
networking ... and using phone calls for terminal dial-in to computer
(whether originating real terminal or a PC emulated terminal with
something like kermit). terminal dial-in operation to computer has
been around since at least 50s&60s (teletype terminals with 110
baud modems). i had gotten a home terminal with dial-in access in
march of 1970 ... and had it until upgrading to PC ... with terminal
emulation dialin.
some number of commercial timesharing services started cropping up in
the 60s ... offering terminal dialin ... lots of collected past posts
about some of the commercial timesharing services
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare
an example would be vm370-based TYMSHARE ... started in the early 70s.
They also developed their own private operated value-added-network
that they called TYMNET. The installed POPs (point-of-presence) phone
numbers in large number of cities for terminal dial-up access ... and
used TYMNET to communicate between the POPs and their TYMSHARE
service. They also started offering TYMNET to corporations that were
looking providing remote terminal access to in-house corporate
computer service. When M/D bought up TYMSHARE in the 80s, TYMNET was
spun off to british telecom (moving into the states).
Something similar was emulated yrs later ... with service providers
offering dial-up access into online and/or internet access (some
number of service providers actually subcontract "local" modem dial-up
POPs to other operations).
One of the early hardware vendors into this market was Livingston
which had a combo "terminal" concentrator ... that evolved from
terminal (or terminal emulation) into acomputer service, then SLIP
support and then finally PPP ... with internet routing out the
back-end (I had done some work helping configure Livingston boxes in
the early/mid 90s). Part of what Livingston developed was an
authentication protocol called RADIUS. Livingston was eventually
bought up and went thru a number of transition that unlikely any
vestiges survive. However RADIUS was "donated" to the IETF for
internet standard and continues to survive today as the dominate form
of authentication used to connect into ISP (even when it doesn't
actual involve a dial-in connection).
from my internet standards index:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
click on Term (term->RFC#) (in RFCs listed by section), then click
on "RADIUS" in the Acronym fastpath:
remote authentication dial in user service (RADIUS )
see also authentication , network access server , network services
4849 4818 4679 4675 4673 4672 4671 4670 4669 4668 4590 4372 4014 3580
3579 3576 3575 3162 2882 2869 2868 2867 2866 2865 2809 2621 2620 2619
2618 2548 2139 2138 2059 2058
clicking on any RFC number brings up the RFC summary in the lower frame,
clicking on the ".txt=nnn" field in a summary, retrieves the actual RFC.
other collected posts mentioning RADIUS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#radius
for other topic drift, past posts mentioning boardwatch
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#38 Vanishing Posts...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#39 I'll Be! Al Gore DID Invent the Internet After All ! NOT
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#66 UUCP email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005l.html#16 Newsgroups (Was Another OS/390 to z/OS 1.4 migration
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006m.html#11 An Out-of-the-Main Activity
Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:22:24 -0600
lists@ibm-main.lst (Phil Smith III) writes:
Re VAX vs. IBM:
I was a central, low level member of the 4300 series. I also led the
engineering side of the fight against the VAX. We never approached
the installed base of the VAX machines. Never.
approach the size of the install base in number of customers or number
of machines or competitive marketing approaching the customers that
bought vaxes?
past post giving decade of vax install numbers sliced and diced by
model, yr, domestic, non-domestic, etc:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction
both 43xx and vaxes saw huge uptake in the early 80s with the growth
of the department market ... which was starting to move into
workstations and PCs by the mid-80s. as above, the big volumes for
VAXes in the mid-80s were from micro-vax ... not traditional 780
machines.
lots of vaxes were customer orders for one or a very few. vaxes had an
advantage here since their installation and support required a lot
less effort (something that 43xx was constantly fighting ... there
were even some SHARE reports highlighting the resource requirement
differences in competitive environment).
however, there were some number of large customers that ordered 43xx
boxes in large lots (sometimes hundreds, even large hundreds). the
resource support requirement competitive advantage (in small shops)
was mitigated when amortized across a large number of boxes.
old email about specific customer ordering in hundreds (customer
initially thot 20, but order was finally for 210):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#email790404
in this post also discussing other "departmental computing" issues from
the period
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental server
lots of old email discussing various aspects of 43xx ... use for
clustering and/or distributed, departmental computing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:42:32 -0600
lists@ibm-main.lst (Phil Smith III) writes:
Re RISC vs. 68K:
Anyone who thinks the RISC chips killed the 68K is off base. They
just need to check the dates. Intel killed the 68K. Motorola allied
with IBM on RISC only after Intel had destroyed Motorola's market for
the 68K.
801 was originally targeted (very) low-end ... ROMP chip was targeted
to be used in a displaywriter follow-in ... when that project was
killed, the group looked around for something to save the effort
... and hit on the unix workstation market (with the displaywriter
follow-on morphing into unix workstation). lots of unix workstation
market place is very numerical and power hungry ... somewhat as a
result ... the followon to ROMP for that market was large,
power-hungry RIOS chipset (i.e. POWER, announced in RS/6000).
Paperweight on my desk (from original) has six chips, and says 150
million OPS, 60 million FLOPS, and 7 million transistors.
somerset was combined ibm, motorola, apple project to do a single
chip, 801 PC-level implementation ... the executive we reported to
when we were doing ha/cmp
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
went over to head up somerset. part of somerset including infusing
power/pc with some of motorola's 88k (risc) technology. ROMP and RIOS
were single processer implementations with no provision for
multi-processor cache consistency. power/pc was going to be able to
support cache consistency and multiprocessor operation.
lots of past 801 posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801
68k was still hanging in there in 89/90 time-frame ... a couple posts
with some old references from the period (raw chip volumes, business
analysis, etc)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#35 Intel strickes back with a parallel x86 design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#44 Intel strickes back with a parallel x86 design
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:42:00 -0600
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#18 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
the place that 43xx had the most difficult competition against vax/vms
was in the single (at a time) departmental servers (as some of the
SHARE studies highlighted). cost of mid-range computers had dropped
below a threshold that made them very cost-effective in departmental
settings ... however scarce people skills and costs then started to
dominate as market inhibitor.
43xx did do very well in large number of departmental server orders
(especially with distributed, networked operation) ... where people
support skill/costs could be amortized across large number of
machines.
clusters of 43xx also started to impact 3033. at one point
(traditional internal politics), the head of pok, manipulated east
fishkill to cut the allocation in half of a critical component needed
for 43xx manufacturing. later the same person gave a talk to a large
public audience and made some statement that something like 11,000
vax/vms orders should have been 43xx ... also referenced in this old
post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#15 departmental servers
and old email mentioning various 43xx issues ... including moving
workload off 3033 boxes onto 4341 clusters ... and large distributed
departmental server operations.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:27:44 -0600
eugene@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) writes:
No, the most difficult competition was and is against the IBM PC.
If it did so well, we'd see more evidence of it being around.
They are not even museum pieces.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#20 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
you didn't read the zillion previous posts mentioning that mid-range
market for both vax/vms and 43xx volumes in departmental server market
started to move to workstations and larger PCs in the mid-80s. above
reference post ... mentions the previous post in the thread ... which
made the same point one more time (and then later the workstations
started to also loose out to PCs).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#18 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
for instance, the 4361/4381 which were expecting similar large volume
sales as seen for 4331/4341 ... never happened. similar numbers can be
seen for vax/vms numbers ... where vax did do some volumes in the
mid-80s with micro-vax ... also readily seen in the repeated
references to decade of vax/vms numbers, sliced & diced by model,
yr, domestic, world-wide, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction
... the 4331s/4341s and other mid-market players in the departmental
servers had very little PCs to compete with (late 70s and early 80s)
... it wasn't until you get to the followon machines; 4361s/4381s (and
later vax) that you start to see the workstation/PC effect in the
departmental server market.
one of the contributions to the PCs in the departmental server market
was a project called DataHub which was being done by the san jose disk
division. Part of the software implementation was being done under
work-for-hire subcontract by a group in Provo (one of the people from
San Jose commuted to Provo nearly every week). At some point, the
company decided to kill the DataHub project and allowed the Provo
group to retain rights to everything that they had done under the
work-for-hire contract. Not too long later, there was a company out
of Provo with a PC server offering.
misc. past posts mentioning DataHub project:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#40 No more innovation? Get serious
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#19 When will IBM buy Sun?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#79 Coulda, Woulda, Shoudda moments?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#33 Over-the-shoulder effect
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#26 MP cost effectiveness
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#13 Alpha performance, why?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004f.html#16 Infiniband - practicalities for small clusters
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005p.html#23 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#9 What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005q.html#36 Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006l.html#39 Token-ring vs Ethernet - 10 years later
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006y.html#31 "The Elements of Programming Style"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#17 Is computer history taught now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#49 How difficult would it be for a SYSPROG ?
in the mean time, the communication division had seen a huge install
base of communication controllers grow based on terminal emulation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
which was started to break away into various kinds of client/server ...
they came up with SAA ... somewhat positioned at helping preserve their
communication controller market (and countermeasure to client/server).
A problem we had in this period was that we were making some number of
customer executive presentations on 3-tier (network) architecture ...
and taking flames & barbs from the SAA factions
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier
other recent posts in this same thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#45 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#48 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#57 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#72 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#0 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#12 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#13 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#19 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:27:10 -0600
Bob Ward <bobward@email.com> writes:
You missed out on the first ten years of BBS's? I was running the
ASCII Attic in San Bernardino, CA in the early 80's...
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#15 What if phone company had developed Internet?
using csnet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0
doing high-speed backbone
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt
on the internal network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
internal network announcement of 1000th node ... not too long after
the great arpanet-to-internet conversion (which was somewhere between
100 nodes and 255 nodes ... depending on how you count)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#22
other references to locations that added one or more internal network
nodes during 1983 (over 100 different locations, including most major
cities around the world)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#8 Arpa address
also working with the people trying to put in place nsfnet backbone
.... various old email references
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
and posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet
at one point, the internal high-speed backbone ... providing austin
access to LSM (high-speed vlsi chip logic simulator) in los gatos was
credited with helping bring in the RIOS chipset (aka power, rs/6000) a
year early. ... recent post/ref
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#61 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
one of the issues with internal network links were that everything
leaving a corporate facility had to be encrypted. this wasn't too bad
for slower-speed links ... but got a lot harder for some of our
higher-speed stuff and also for links that cross national boundaries
(even if it was between sites for the same corporation). comment in
the mid-80s that the internal network had over half of all the link
encryptors in the world. misc. old email mentioning different kinds of
crypto
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#crypto
other posts in these threads:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#71 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#7 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#14 What if there were two Internets?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#16 What if phone company had developed Internet?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#17 What if phone company had developed Internet?
Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:38:13 -0600
Bob Ward <bobward@email.com> writes:
You missed out on the first ten years of BBS's? I was running the
ASCII Attic in San Bernardino, CA in the early 80's...
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#15 What if phone company had developed Internet?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#22 What if phone company had developed Internet?
oh ... and i got to do a lot of the stuff for online machine at the
science center ... write a lot of the kernel software, do a lot of the
production operational support ... when I got my home terminal in mar
1970 ... it was where I would dial-in to to get online access.
the science center, 4th flr, 545 tech sq was also where virtual machines
originated (with cp40 in the mid-60s),
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
the internal network started
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
GML was invented ... precusor to SGML, HTML, XML, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#sgml
a recent post tracing some of the evoluation ... with a little
RDBMS archeology also thrown in
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#24 Newbie question on table design
Both CERN and SLAC ("sister" high energy physic installations) were large
vm370/cms shops (virtual machine cp67 system which morphed into virtual
machine vm370 system in the 70s); reference to to CERN HTML evolving out
of CMS/GML
http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/
and first webserver outside europe was on slac's vm370 system
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml
some amount of online, commercial timesharing in the late 60s and 70s
was based on the virtual machine technology (cp67 and later vm370) from
the science center
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 04:57:53 -0600
Bob Ward <bobward@email.com> writes:
As I said, all this claimed experience, but no knowledge of the BBS
world before the early 1990's?
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#22 What if phone company had developed Internet
my earlier reference was operating my own bbs platform on ms/dos
platfrom using waffle and supporting satellite usenet feed (in the
early 90s)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#17 What if phone company had developed Internet
i thot your previous comment appeared to imply what i supported/used
in the 70s & 80s ... as opposed knowledge of.
however, from long ago and far away ... old usenet reference from
early 80s:
To: wheeler
Date: 10/27/83 17:10:13
The following comes to me from a non-IBM friend, who found it on the
Usenet (Unix Network) Bulletin Board System...
"There are a few chip designers and sellers at Intel (the rumor goes)
who would like to shoot Bill Gates right now. It seems the Microsoft
folks can't read, and as a result Intel has a large pile of 80188s it
can't ship. And Intel is redesigning the 80188 chip. Again."
"It's like this: the 8088 spec sheet reserves two of the 256 jump
vector addresses for future Intel use. Microsoft went ahead anyway
and used them in the MS-DOS operating system anyway. The large pile
of 80188s that Intel can't ship use those two reserved vectors for a
hardware purpose... Unfortunately, there are about 12,000 application
programs sitting on computer retailer's shelves all over the country
which call those vectors... Since Intel's documentation scrupulously
documented that those two vectors are reserved, they are (the rumor
goes) refusing to take back the 80188s (already) sold, unless (the
rumor continues) the customer uses a blue logo with three alphabetic
characters."
And now you know why Peanut hasn't been shipped yet, and what CPU
Peanut uses. We wonder how long it will take Intel to change the mask
-- again -- and get the chip back into production -- again?
... snip ... top of post, old email index
lots of csnet used phonenet ... and gatewayed "bang" addresses that
would propagate thru the csnet interface ... i.e.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#0
other, not necessarily related old email back to early 70s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html
test email thru the csnet gateway:
Date: 13 Jan 1983 16:42:28PST
From: xxxx@xxxxx.UUCP at UDel-Relay
Return-Path: <xxxx@xxxxx.UUCP>
Date: 12-Jan-83 03:57:58-PST (Wed)
From: xxxx@xxxx.UUCP.Berkeley.ARPA
Subject: hi there
Received: by UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA (3.293 [1/9/83])
id AA10567; 12-Jan-83 03:57:58-PST (Wed)
Received: from UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA by udel-relay.ARPA (3.284 [1/5/83])
id AA07867; 13-Jan-83 16:42:08-EST (Thu)
Message-Id: <8300121157.10567@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.ARPA>
To: ucbvax!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!wheeler.IBM-SJ@Udel-Relay.ARP
does this work?
... snip ... top of post, old email index
same person shortly later forwarded:
From ucsfcgl!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!harpo!npois!jak Fri May 21 13:55:19 1982
Subject: all 7 old decwars articles
Newsgroups: net.sources
Subject: DEC WARS
Have you ever wondered what happened to all those characters eaten by
arpavax? Well, we found most of them loitering around on our system,
taking up disk space. So we're putting them back out on the net where
they belong. Any resemblence to events real or imagined is purely
intentional.
A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax).....
XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX * X X XX XXXXX XXXX X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X XXXXX X X X X X X X XXXX X
X X X X X XX X XXXXXX XXXXX X X
X X X X X XX XX X X X X X X
XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX X X X X X X XXXX X
... snip ...
the actual file is much longer
however, quick check with search engine and slightly later version can
be found here:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/cowtext/100/dec~1war.htm
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
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, 26 Jun 2007 08:26:07 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
a couple recent items:
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#60 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
another:
Maryland Professor Creates Desktop Supercomputer Prototype
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/531072/?sc=rsbn
from above:
But no advancements in clock speed have been achieved since 2004. From
an early stage, Vishkin foresaw that Moore's Law would ultimately fail
to help improve clock speed due to physical limitations. This has guided
his perseverance over his professional career in seeking to improve
computer productivity by distributing the load among multiple
processors, accomplishing computer tasks in parallel.
... snip ...
Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: VM system kept NYSE running
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:08:13 -0600
here is reference to some mainframe history including NYSE MDS-II,
originally on a pair of specially duplexed 360/50s, which was upgraded
to run in vm/4341 virtual machine
lifetime)
http://www.raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html
or wayback machine
http://web.archive.org/web/20060220161415/http://raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html
Minor typo in the above ... mentions MVS-Release 11 ... but obviously
should be MFT-Release 11 (MVT came with Release 12 or 13).
One of the description is about author processing information from other
users ... using a process that originated in the 60s on cp67 and
remained relatively unchanged through the addition of networking and
whether it involved exchange between two users on the same machine or
different machines.
old post with copy of one of my versions that provided similar
functionality to the what was mentioned in the above:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004b.html#56 Oldest running code
the example exec takes advantage of the fact that in CMS, (initially)
all kernel system APIs, command line input, and exec (command script)
processing are done by a common routine. With minimal hack it is
possible to take something that is an assembler program kernel API and
use it directly in in an exec (command script). My exec (included in the
referenced post) includes what is nominal an assembler kernel API call
to WAIT on (ready) interrupt from reader (indicating new arrival). The
trailing garbage characters on the "WAIT RDR1RDR1" line are supposed to
be 8 bytes of binary zeros, which is a standard way to terminate CMS
kernel API parameter list.
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What if phone company had developed Internet?
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if,alt.history.what-if,alt.fan.cecil-adams
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:59:22 -0600
ncwaite writes:
Phone companies used to supply some content. The Speaking Clock is
probably the best example, but in the old days of the British GPO, you
had Directory Enquiries, Weather Reports and even the Recipe of the
Day. I read once that in the very early days of the telephone (before
regular radio broadcasts started), it was proposed that people could
listen in to concerts via the telephone. You could describe this as a
Victorian version of media streaming.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#15 What if phone company had developed Internet?
one of the telcos that provided a lot of the services for NSFNET
backbone, misc. old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet
(aka tcp/ip is technology basis for modern internetworking, nsfnet
backbone was the operational basis for modern internetworking, and cix
& peering aggreements was the business/commercial basis for modern
internetworking)
.... appeared to also underwrite the cost of developing the electronic
commerce "mall metaphor" webserver (anticipating that they would be
the major service provider for that capability). this didn't appear to
really take off ... and then a "stripped" down electronic commerce
webserver version was then done for individual merchants ... we had
been called in to consult with this small client/server startup that
wanted to do payment transactions on this thing that they were calling
commerce server (and had this new technology they were calling SSL).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
businesses that now do (individual) webhosting have since come into
play ... but these tend to be individual web servers (as opposed to
the mall metaphor webserver).
for other drift, one of the new buzzwords is "server consolidation"
... i.e. frequently involving combinations of (floor/space saving)
"blades" and "virtualization" (leveraging virtualization to compensate
for most webservers tending to have very low, sporadic and/or bursty
utilization patterns).
and of course, virtual machines are the 40yr old, new thing
... courtesy of the science center, 4th flr, 545 tech. sq
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech
where gml was also invented ... precursor to sgml, html, xml, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#sgml
as well as the internal network
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
aka, previous post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#23 What if phone company had developed Internet?
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
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, 27 Jun 2007 19:37:47 -0600
HP fires up Multi-Core Aid effort
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/27/hp_multicore_mop/
from above ...
HP has located a few friends, including Intel and AMD, to help it deal
with the multi-core processor morass.
The hardware vendor has invited chums to join its new Multi-Core
Optimization Program (MOP), which will support work that makes software
run better across chips with numerous processor cores.
... snip ...
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Programmable TLB management?
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 05:26:44 -0600
John Mashey <old_systems_guy@yahoo.com> writes:
This bug, of course, confirmed the argument of the OS people who'd
fought with bugs for years in complex hardware MMUs, and had bigged
the chip designers for the most minimalist MMU we could get ... and
even that had a bug. It was unsurprising that early 1980s micros
often had MMU bugs, and OS programmers hated them.
360/67 had a bug in the associative array (i.e. used by 360/67 for
TLB) that charlie (aka compare&swap, CAS, charlie) found circa
1970 (nearly 40yrs ago).
on page fault interrupt, the 360/67 cleared all the associative array
entries to zeros w/o setting the invalid bits (bug). this hadn't been
uncovered since the kernel would eventually do LCTL of CR0 (the
segment table pointer) which would reset the associative array, and
all entries would have invalid flag turned on (i.e. associative array
only handled single address space, and any reload of the virtual
address space table pointer would reset all the entries, even if it
was for the same virtual address).
so charlie was attempting to eek a couple extra cycles (in kernel
interrupt handling) by eliminating unnecessary LCTLs, resetting the
associative array. The hardware bug was that now all entries in the
associative array were set to map virtual page zero to real page zero
... and if the page fault handling could be done w/o switching to
different address space (like if the page invalid bit was on, but
virtual page still in real storage and could be "reclaimed"), then there
was some chance the virtual address space execution and/or the system
might have some explained anomolous behavior. Kernel software work
around was to make sure that LCTL was always done.
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: How would a relational operating system look like?
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:13:32 -0600
Cimode <cimode@hotmail.com> writes:
Hi,
Lately, I came to put a version of Microsoft Vista on my desktop. As
I am accustomed to with Microsoft OS's, I am bracing for the impact of
how much extra RAM will be consumed when adopting a new generation of
OS to make it function prperly. For Vista, I found out it is a
nightmare! To make the usual applications I use (mainly
administration tools), no less than 4Gb of RAM are required to avoid
the screen *hanging on*/reeze effect one gets when openning several
applications simultaneously. As a result I went back to XP Pro more
and more despaired by the utter unefficiency of current OS and
Environments. Convinced that a perfect OS is nothing else than a
relational OS, I kept dreaming about building one someday.
do a little cleaning of boxes in the basement, found
Notes On Data Base Operating Systems, RJ1288, 2/23/78, 111pgs, James
Gray.
ABSTRACT: This paper is a compendium of data base management operating
systems folklore. It is an early paper and is still in draft form. It
is intended as a set of course notes for a class on data base operating
systems. After a brief overview of what a data management system is, it
focuses on particular issues unique to the transaction management
component especially locking and recovery.
misc. other posts mentioning system/r
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#systemr
the bibliography from a System R web site:
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/bib.html
also mentions that the above paper appeared in "Operating Systems: An
Advanced Course", Springer-Verlag, 1978, p. 393.
The document is standard CMS script (gml) document format (reproduced
from copy printed on 1403/3211 with TN chain). Virtualized CMS was
standard internal personal computing environment ... first with cp67
which later morphed into vm370. The system/r implementation was done as
virtualized operation under vm370.
This is 40yr old new thing, now starting to take on renewed life.
For a little topic drift in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#64 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#65 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#67 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#68 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#69 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#73 Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#11 Operating systems are old and busted
with some references:
Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/20/usenix_07_opening_keynote/
Operating systems are old and busted
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/20/usenix_07_opening_keynote/
Leopard and Vista: Last Gasp of the Big OS?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/133276
Leopard and Vista: Last Gasp of the Big OS?
http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/63b28a3a0a01040801e9093a3cb7de53/pg0.htm
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:13:05 -0600
rfochtman@ibm-main.lst (Rick Fochtman) writes:
If the business needs are being satisfied, with reasonable economy,
who cares whether the box is "the lastest and greatest"? Future
business needs may or may not dictate upgrades. YMMV
a little search engine mainframe surfing for vm/4341 turned up this
story about a vm/4341 keeping the nyse running well thru the 80s
... apparently with an old mvt system that had been moved from 360/50s
http://www.raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html
that i mentioned in this recent post:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#26 VM system kept NYSE running
a quick check just this moment, turns up some problem with the URL
... but (as always) the wayback machine knows
http://web.archive.org/web/20060220161415/http://raylsaunders.com/asmwork.html
for other topic drift ... we spent some amount of time in the early
90s talking to SIAC about using ha/cmp for much of the work that the
tandems were doing (see mainframe MDS-II being replaced with tandem
MDS-IIIs in the above reference) ... lots of ha/cmp references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp
this was in the period that we were also working on ha/cmp scaleup and
trying to cram as much computing into dense footprint, old email
references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa
I had actually attempted to do something similar nearly a decade
earlier with trying to cram as many 370 chipsets (each had about 168-3
thruput) as possible into racks.
the old 8-10 yr cycle for mainframe generations (and obsolescence)
really showed up when the early 70s FS project was killed
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys
since FS was going to be something completely different, much of the
work on 370 related stuff pretty much went away. after FS was killed,
there was a scramble to get stuff back into the 370 product pipeline.
370-xa/3081 was going to take eight yrs (early 80s) ... so they had to
find something else that could be done in possibly half that time.
the resulting 303x was quite a bit of warmed over 370. they took the
intergrated channel microcode from 158 and made it stand-alone box
called channel director. Then 158 paired with a channel director
became 3031 (with integrated channel microcode running on different
processor). 168 became 3032 repackaged to work with channel
director. 3033 started out as 168 wiring diagram implemented with
faster chip technology. straight-forward mapping would have just been
20percent faster than 168 ... other tweaks done during development got
3033 up to 1.5times 168.
part of the issue was that up to the 80s, lots of technology was on
7-10yr cycle ... where in the 80s, the rate of change started to
accelerate; for a time, leaving some mainframe technology in the dust.
note that it wasn't just mainframes. circa 1990, the US automobile
(C4) task force looked at being able to accelerate (cut in half) US
automobile product cycle from 7-8yrs (in attempt to get on level
playing field with some of the imports). it was interesting to watch
what the mainframe people were saying in the meetings (since, at the
time, they were effectively in the same boat).
one of the things that the automobile industry had been doing would
run parallel new product projects offset by four yrs (so it appeared
that something new was coming out every four yrs). the analogy for
mainframes ... was as soon as 3033 was out the door, they started on
3090 (overlap with 3081 with 4yr offset). in fairly stable industry
this worked since consumer tastes weren't signicantly
changing. However the 8yr lag could become significant if there was
any significant change in what the market place was looking for
(giving vendors that had much shorter product cycle a competitive
edge).
some recent references to C4 effort circa 1990 ... attempting to
improve competitive footing vis-a-vis several imports:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#50 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#29 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#34 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#52 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#13 U.S. Cedes Top Spot in Global IT Competitiveness
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#33 IBM Unionization
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What I miss in my OS
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:54:20 -0600
Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> writes:
Thus, if somehow I am transported back to BAH's circa-1980 workflow
and a developer hands me a bunch of edits on paper, I can make each
one and save the file, and get the benefits of BAH's no-backups
approach. The existence of automatically saved backup files should be
no hindrance to using a workflow that's been outdated for the past 20
years.
cp67/cms supported a single "update" file to a particular source file
... and you had to "edit" the update file ... along with all the control
stuff. very early 70s, this was augmented with an iterative process that
would cycle thru a number of cascading "updates" (part of multi-level
update project to support unanounced 370 architecture features under
cp67). later in the 70s, some of the 3270 fullscreen editors got
enhancements to save source file changes as "updates" (the original
source file left unchanged ... and an "update" file was saved with
control statements to modify the original source to what had been
performed in the edit session).
for random drift ... recent post mentioning some connection between the
cms multi-level update work and internet domain name system
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#33 Even worse than UNIX
misc. other recent posts mentioning cms source update processes
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#12 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#11 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#15 Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#3 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
misc. recent posts about supporting unannounced 370 features
under cp67:
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?
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: What I miss in my OS
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:39:28 -0600
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#32 What I miss in my OS
for a slightly different take ... post in thread that ran
in comp.databases.theory
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#30 How would a relational operating system look like?
now this post touches on log structured filesystems
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#6 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
... but mentions that typically it refers to database type transaction
logging of filesystem control information ... as opposed to always
writting new/changed data to a new (physical) disk location (frequently
also preserving unmodified records ... which then periodically requires
"garbage collection" ... file reorganzations for things like
contiguous/sequential).
so one of the "post-relational" databases that did something similar was
Illustra ... where changed/updated records always went to new disk
location and allowed arbitrary older versions/views (various
combinations of original records and some selected set of
changed/modified records). Ilustra was bought up by Informix ... which
was subsequently bought by IBM.
Surviving web references seem to be mostly about Illustra
object/relational paradigm ... and very little about the versioning
methodology (which required periodic processes for "garbage collection"
and deletion of unwanted versions)
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/illustra-tips.html
from above:
Archiving
One of Illustra's coolest sounding features is archiving. You get to
query the system to find out what your data looked like, say, 6 months
ago. I relied on this feature in a classified ad system. I would DELETE
the ads from the table but still have them around when I wanted to
calculate statistics on, say, how many users had successfully sold their
goods because of the service.
... snip ...
so if you leave/preserve the older versions ... then you also get
archiving
Refed: **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:09:50 -0600
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
in fairly stable industry this worked since consumer tastes weren't
signicantly changing. However the 8yr lag could become significant if
there was any significant change in what the market place was looking
for (giving vendors that had much shorter product cycle a competitive
edge).
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#31 IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
of course, this could be considered another plug for cycling Boyd's
OODA-loops faster. misc. 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
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
To: <ibm-main@bama.ua.edu>
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 10:46:45 -0600
chrismason@BELGACOM.NET (Chris Mason) writes:
One of the presentations was someone from a big UK bank who defended
IBM having made the 155 and 165 available and relatively shortly
afterwards having announced the 158 and 168 - together with the
relatively expensive DAT box extension to the 155 and 165. I hope I'm
remembering the details about right.
I heard about this only second-hand but I believe the argument was
that IBM was right to offer the enhanced performance of the 155 and
165 as soon as it could in spite of the fact that it knew that the
virtual storage models were well advanced in development. I guess
there was a shadow of the "it's illegal to preannounce" principle
hanging over this.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#31 IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#34 IBM obsoleting mainframe hardware
370/165 ... announce jun70
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3165.html
370/168 ... announce aug72
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3168.html
for virtual memory ... hacking virtual memory support into MVT (for
VS2/SVS) was needed in addition to the virtual memory hardware
retrofitted to 165s (there were significant software as well as hardware
schedules).
this is similar to previous comments about crash program to try
and get out 370-xa (after FS project was killed) and POK in 1976,
convincing the corporation to shutdown vm370 product and transfer all
the developers to POK as part of being able to make mvs/xa (software)
schedule (although Endicott was eventually able to save part of the
vm370 product mission).
i've mentioned before about (370 virtual memory) prototype work that
went on in pok, using 360/67s and hacking "single address space"
virtual memory into the side of MVT ... as well as cobbling in cp67's
(ccw translation) CCWTRAN into MVT ... i.e. cp67 had started out
having to build "shadow" channel programs with real addresses ... for
the virtual machine's channel programs; (in SVS) all the (MVT) channel
programs passed via EXCP ... would be equivalent "virtual address"
channel programs ... requiring similar translation (and misc. other
things like page locking/pinning)
recent posts about using CP67's CCWTRANS as part of turning MVT into
os2/svs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#6 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#33 Historical curiosity question
The other part ... was that there was a lot of work to retrofit
virtual memory to 165 ... so much so that they ran into schedule
problems. In order to buy back six months in the 165 virtual memory
schedule, there was an escalation dropping several features from the
original 370 virtual memory architecture. Once the 165 engineers had
won that battle, then all the other processors (that had already
completed their virtual memory implementations) ... had to go back and
remove the dropped features.
recent posts mentioning 165-ii schedule issues and impact on dropping
features from original 370 virtual memory architecture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#7 IBM S/360 series operating systems history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#16 more shared segment archeology
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#43 z/VM usability
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#28 IBM 360 Model 20 Questions
Refed: **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: How to flush data most efficiently from memory to disk when db checkpoint?
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.databases.theory
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:18:02 -0600
Sune <sune_ahlgren@hotmail.com> writes:
I'm looking into designing an in-memory DB and I wonder:
How to flush data most efficiently when I checkpoint?
Say I have a page size of 8K and 1K of those have been updated in
random places, that is, the changes may be contiguous but most likely
they are not.
Will it always be more efficient to flush the whole page instead of
keeping track of each element and write them to disk one by one?
Obviously, if I did this I would flush them from page offset 0 to the
end of the page, in that order.
Sorry to bother you with such elementary questions but I want to get
things right from the beginning, and other people's experiences are
usually very helpful.
some of this can be related to transactional memory ... there have
been various past threads in comp.arch about both software &
hardware transaction memory.
early 801/risc (late 70s, early 80s) had support for hardware
transactional memory ... it was used for journaled filesystem (JFS) in
aixv3 on RIOS (i.e. power, rs/6000) ... basically all the (unix)
filesystem metadata was laid out in memory area defined for
transactional memory. wiki reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_file_system
there are granualarity trade-offs regarding having explicit log API
... and having explicit references to all changes or having to scan
for all the actual changes. when palo alto started looking at porting
jfs to platforms w/o transaction memory ... they found that they
actually had better performance with the explicit log calls ... even
compared to retrofitting to aixv3 running on rs/6000 (and not
using the hardware transactional memory)
references to software transactional memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
part of the transactional memory tends to also get tied up with
parallelism and concurrency models
a comp.arch thread (from google groups)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/browse_thread/thread/5b0cb88a6d36b309/f5ad4a01cbed0a79?lnk=st&q=&rnum=12#f5ad4a01cbed0a79
intel article related to large number of cores
http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing/tera-scale-0606.htm
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: FastTCP Commercialized Into An FTP Appliance
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 14:10:52 -0600
FastTCP Commercialized Into An FTP Appliance
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/07/01/1718221.shtml
Startup FastSoft Prepares App Accelerator
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2152807,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
older threads on this subject:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#1 FAST - Shame On You Caltech!!!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#46 Fast TCP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#8 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#9 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#12 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#13 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#16 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#17 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#18 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004k.html#19 FAST TCP makes dialup faster than broadband?
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:15:21 -0600
greymaus writes:
Now being supplented by `minidigger', tracked vehicle with just the
digging arm, and without the loading bucket in front/back.. AFAIK, the
U.S. version of the JCB is a bit more limited than the U.K. version.
how 'bout ditch-witch,
http://www.ditchwitch.com/
some history
http://www.ditchwitch.com/dwcom/AboutUs/index.jsp
they have trenchers that are about half the size of small car (they
actually come in a variety of sizes). they are commingly used for
underground utilities, propane gas lines, etc (i.e. bldg. codes
typically have 500gal propane tanks quite a distance from nearest
structure).
one of the relatives had acquired one, there was big business installing
500gal propane tanks leading up to y2k.
Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:06:43 -0600
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#38 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
the ditch-witch, a relative got, was tracked vehicle about the half the
size of small automobile ... there was no place for the operator to
ride, the operator walked along side the machine ... ditch-witch family
company originated 1902
http://www.ditchwitch.com/
all the JCB stuff appears to be more traditional construction and
agricultural equipment ... JCB family company originated 1945
http://www.jcb.com/
they all appear to have some sort of platform for the operator to
ride.
more like the small caterpillar stuff
i.e. select "compact equipment" at:
http://www.cat.com/
the stuff i grew up with was more traditional farm equipment,
international harvestor (last tractor was 1985) and massey-furgeson
http://www.masseyferguson.com/
i really learned to drive at eight ... old yellow chevy 2.5ton flat-bed
truck .... starter was pedel on the floor and there was no syncromesh
... all gear shifts required double clutch (or come to stop) and you had
to acquire an ear for the correct engine speed ... slightly related
topic drift
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#18 Scholars needed to build a computer history bibliography
before that i was just allowed to do some steering on small farm
tractor.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Windows Monitor or CUSP?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:32:11 -0600
jmfbahciv writes:
All banking going on-line is inevitable. Which OS is going to
be the default is still to be determined. At the moment, there
are one and one-half choices of OS software for the regular
user. The "one" is whatever MS shite is automatically installed
on all systems. The one-half is a Unix-flavor and it takes an
effort or the help of a friendly geek to get that software system
installed for regular use.
a little x-over ... recent thread in crypto m