< What do you mean it was done with 386s?
There were boards to put 386s in XT machines. I have one, an Intel
inboard386pc. It replaces the 8088 (the 8088 has to be removed). There
were others made.
Allison
October 17, 1998
I REMEMBER IANA
Vint Cerf
A long time ago, in a network, far far away, a great adventure took place
Out of the chaos of new ideas for communication, the experiments, the
tentative designs, and crucible of testing, there emerged a cornucopia of
networks. Beginning with the ARPANET, an endless stream of networks
evolved, and ultimately were interlinked to become the Internet. Someone
had to keep track of all the protocols, the identifiers, networks and
addresses and ultimately the names of all the things in the networked
universe. And someone had to keep track of all the information that erupted
with volcanic force from the intensity of the debates and discussions and
endless invention that has continued unabated for 30 years. That someone
was Jonathan B. Postel, our Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, friend,
engineer, confidant, leader, icon, and now, first of the giants to depart
>from our midst.
Jon, our beloved IANA, is gone. Even as I write these words I cannot quite
grasp this stark fact. We had almost lost him once before in 1991. Surely
we knew he was at risk as are we all. But he had been our rock, the
foundation on which our every web search and email was built, always there
to mediate the random dispute, to remind us when our documentation did not
do justice to its subject, to make difficult decisions with apparent ease,
and to consult when careful consideration was needed. We will survive our
loss and we will remember. He has left a monumental legacy for all
Internauts to contemplate. Steadfast service for decades, moving when
others seemed paralyzed, always finding the right course in a complex
minefield of technical and sometimes political obstacles.
Jon and I went to the same high school, Van Nuys High, in the San Fernando
Valley north of Los Angeles. But we were in different classes and I really
didn?t know him then. Our real meeting came at UCLA when we became a part
of a group of graduate students working for Prof. Leonard Kleinrock on the
ARPANET project. Steve Crocker was another of the Van Nuys crowd who was
part of the team and led the development of the first host-host protocols
for the ARPANET. When Steve invented the idea of the Request for Comments
series, Jon became the instant editor. When we needed to keep track of all
the hosts and protocol identifiers, Jon volunteered to be the Numbers Czar
and later the IANA once the Internet was in place.
Jon was a founding member of the Internet Architecture Board and served
continuously from its founding to the present. He was the FIRST individual
member of the Internet Society I know, because he and Steve Wolff raced to
see who could fill out the application forms and make payment first and Jon
won. He served as a trustee of the Internet Society. He was the custodian
of the .US domain, a founder of the Los Nettos Internet service, and, by
the way, managed the networking research division of USC Information
Sciences Institute.
Jon loved the outdoors. I know he used to enjoy backpacking in the high
Sierras around Yosemite. Bearded and sandaled, Jon was our resident
hippie-patriarch at UCLA. He was a private person but fully capable of
engaging photon torpedoes and going to battle stations in a good
engineering argument. And he could be stubborn beyond all expectation. He
could have outwaited the Sphinx in a staring contest, I think.
Jon inspired loyalty and steadfast devotion among his friends and his
colleagues. For me, he personified the words ?selfless service.? For nearly
30 years, Jon has served us all, taken little in return, indeed sometimes
receiving abuse when he should have received our deepest appreciation. It
was particularly gratifying at the last Internet Society meeting in Geneva
to see Jon receive the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications
Union. It is an award generally reserved for Heads of State but I can think
of no one more deserving of global recognition for his contributions.
While it seems almost impossible to avoid feeling an enormous sense of
loss, as if a yawning gap in our networked universe had opened up and
swallowed our friend, I must tell you that I am comforted as I contemplate
what Jon has wrought. He leaves a legacy of edited documents that tell our
collective Internet story, including not only the technical but also the
poetic and whimsical as well. He completed the incorporation of a successor
to his service as IANA and leaves a lasting legacy of service to the
community in that role. His memory is rich and vibrant and will not fade
>from our collective consciousness. ?What would Jon have done?? we will
think, as we wrestle in the days ahead with the problems Jon kept so well
tamed for so many years.
There will almost surely be many memorials to Jon?s monumental service to
the Internet Community. As current chairman of the Internet Society, I
pledge to establish an award in Jon?s name to recognize long-standing
service to the community, the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award, which is
awarded to Jon posthumously as its first recipient.
If Jon were here, I am sure he would urge us not to mourn his passing but
to celebrate his life and his contributions. He would remind us that there
is still much work to be done and that we now have the responsibility and
the opportunity to do our part. I doubt that anyone could possibly
duplicate his record, but it stands as a measure of one man?s astonishing
contribution to a community he knew and loved.
--
Warbaby
The WebSite. The Domain. The Empire.
http://www.warbaby.com
The MonkeyPool
WebSite Content Development
http://www.monkeypool.com
Once you get the nose on, the rest is just makeup.
Re: Tim Shoppa's last message.
When I had this machine running, it would attempt to boot from the
Floppy (when asked to do so from ODT). The problem at the time
(which still exists) was I had no bootable media in said floppy
drive, thereby eliciting continued head loads, at about the tempo of
a dirge. Clic, read, 'nothing here...' clic, read, 'nothing
here...' clic, read....
Had I known Then what I know Now (grateful thanks to Tim and
Megan and Allison) I could have made a bootable disk on one of the
other machines, and gotten it going.
Aaron's problem is classic Catch 22... and I have just now freed
up some weekend time to perhaps assist him in that regard.
Note to Aaron: the Docs you gave me are In Process, and will be
returned to you when complete.
Cheers
John
< So don't underestimate the power of a micoprocessor. We
< just bring them unde a yoke, no 'real' processor ever
< har to carry.
Oh, I don't. I've said Z80s are not as shabby as some of the latterday
retrorevisionists would think. I've never seen a i286
running anything (OS) that really used all the raw power in any
useful way other than in embedded tasks. That view come from mostly
ISA bus PC implementations while interesting are really not best
possible performance.
At the other end of the line there were some monster transistor based
systems that offered stellar performance at a price. Some of the SSI
(small scale integration) IC machines of the late 60s bumped up those
numbers or shrank/lowered their cost.
Allison
>> Maybe you mean MHz? :-). Sorry, ads where sellers claim
>> spectacular milliHertz performance are one of my pet peeves. (Along
>> with specs calling for compatibility with the ASC-2 character set
>> and construction plans calling for DB-9 connectors!) Though it would
>> be an interesting exercise to construct a Pentium II-type computer
>> based on relays just so that it does top out around 300 milliHertz!
>
>No thanks... I don't have a dozen spare telephone exchanges for parts
;-)
If one were to estimate the number of transistors in a penitum II
at 100 million (?), then if an exchange has ~three relays per number,
you would get 300,000 relays in an exchange, which means 334
exchanges with a few spare parts left over!
>> example, everybody around the world uses the term "metric ton" when
>> the perfectly acceptable (and SI-preferred) term "megagram" is
>> exactly equivalent (and to my ears sounds better!) And why say
The reason is that using scientific notation/unit prefixes requires
more calculation if one is not well practiced. While 90 decibels
versus 900 decibels shows the relationship clearly (for those that
know what a log is), 90 decibels vs. 90 bels is not quite as simple for
some.
>90 decibels (what's wrong with 9 bels?)
>1000 millibars (= 1 bar. I was told by an idiot teacher at school that
>the 'bar' as a unit of pressure did not exist. A lot of books claim it
>does, though).
Has anyone read the book "Innumeracy"? It mostly deals with debunking
the concept of probability, but it is interesting in other respects,
too. BTW, would you say 'kilobyte' is a misnomer? THe number it
signifies isn't 10^3, it's 2^10. For a feeble attempt to get back on
topic: was kilobyte always accepted as 1024 bytes?
>-tony
>
>
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
It's a large MFM device, makes interesting noises, known good, but
one of the little animals (students) thought it would be k00l-rad to nuke
the CMOS. Anyone got numbers for this thing?
-------
> [TOPS on a PDP-10 is a *MINUS*?]
> What? You're kidding, right? What is wrong with PDP-10s?
Correction: PDP is a minus not TOPS :)
Maybe I'm just not _the_ big fan of the PDPs.
Maybe I'm just to /370ish :)
Gruss
H.
P.S.: Unix also runs on PDPs - for better or worse
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
How many of us (I don't) pronounce "giga" with a soft initial 'g'
as is correct..? [Back to the Future used to drive me crazy until I
found that the writers were right...]
I have a 2.5 Farad @ 450VDC capacitor bank... takes an hour to
charge, but delivers many Joules into a low-impedance load.
Sometimes quite spectacularly! If the load is a solenoid, many Tesla
are produced as well.
I used to know the speed of light in Furlongs per Fortnight.
If you wish to piss off the counter help at your local parts
shop... ask for a 'Light-Emitting Resistor'. Hardware stores and
markets have them too.
I maintain several movie theaters in connection with my Work..
when asked (by newbies usually) how much power the sound system is
in the largest one... and I am in one of those Moods... I will
sometimes answer "About 11 RMS Horsepower..."
And speaking as an audio geek... if a Pentium-class processor
were made out of relay logic... imagine the *sound* it would make!
I have many recordings of old telephone switchrooms.. especialy
interesting are the large urban Crossbar offices... nothing yet I
have heard makes that kind of sound.
Finally, I have heard that a 'Millihelen' is the amount of
beauty required to launch just *one* ship.
Cheers
John
On Oct 17, 18:22, Tony Duell wrote:
> Subject: Re: RX50's on a PC?
> >
> > Has anyone tried wiring an 8" RX52 floppy straight to a modern PC
> > controller? I did the best I know how, and I *appear* to have a
>
> What on earth is an 8" RX52? There are 8" RX01s and RX02s and 5.25" RX50s
> that I know about. Never heard of an 8" RX5x drive.
I wondered if the reference was to something like the General Robotics
double-sided RX02-compatible, but ISTR that's called an RX03. The drive is
a standard SA800-compatible, and the controller emulates an RXV12, except
that it has a firmware formatting routine.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
> ----------
> From: William Donzelli[SMTP:william@ans.net]
> Reply To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
> Sent: Monday, October 19, 1998 11:05 AM
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
> Subject: Re: discrete transistors
>
> > What about 386s? Did Intel outrun the mainframes with the 386, or were
> > there discrete transistor machines with better performance than that?
>
> If one looks at the Linpack benchmark, the CDC 6600 was almost twice as
> fast as a Sun 386i/250 (info lifted from
> <http://lithos.gat.com/docview/linpack.bb>).
>
> > BTW, what did the Cray I use?
>
> The Cray-1s used simple ECL chips - I think there were only four types in
> the whole machine.
>
> William Donzelli
> william(a)ans.net
>
