test-drb May 2002

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

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"Toy" computers http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules

by dquebbeman＠acm.org

> Raymond > > Your Mother Runs TSO ! Your Daddy runs BTAM! ;)

21 years, 12 months

"Toy" computers http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules

by dquebbeman＠acm.org

> > I didn't mean to say it wasn't. Just that you made it sound like > > one could completely replace a 390 with a peesee. > > A 360 you could. a 370 soon, and thats doing emulation > on the bare metal a PC is faster than the total run of > 360's ever built combined many times over, and that > includes the I/O. What, even a 360/91 (I guess there weren't too many, in fact, did anyone besides Columbia get one)? -dq

21 years, 12 months

PDP11 M8190 console + DIP switches / FPA

by jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de

Hi. I am looking for the console bulkhead pinout and the DIP switch description of the M8190 / KDJ11-B PDP11 QBus CPU module. I had a look at the micronotes and googled around, but found nothing. Also: The board seams to be revision C1 (stamped on the handle). Does this mean I can not add a FPA? I am a bit confused because there is only "KDJ11-B" written on the board and micronote 39 lists the "KDJ11-BC" as FPA incompatible. field-guide.txt contains no "KDJ11-BC" and lists only the "KDJ11-B 11/84 CPU" UniBus CPU as FPA incompatible. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

21 years, 12 months

PDP11 M8190 console + DIP switches / FPA

by Antonio.Carlini＠riverstonenet.com

>I am looking for the console bulkhead pinout and the DIP switch > description of the M8190 / KDJ11-B PDP11 QBus CPU module. I had a look > at the micronotes and googled around, but found nothing. You can find a manual over at http://scandocs.trailing-edge.com/micropdp11/volume1_system_cpus/EK-247AA-M… and you can find the related KDJ11-A info at: http://www.spies.com/~aek/pdf/dec/pdp11/ (I believe that the KDJ11-A and KDJ11-B are similar but not identical). Antonio

21 years, 12 months

"Toy" computers http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules

by csmith＠amdocs.com

> -----Original Message----- > From: Raymond Moyers [mailto:rmoyers@nop.org] > Well the newer ones are getting better, the new fridge sized > boxes require a fraction of the cooling the old ones did I know, but power is somewhat expensive for me anyway ;) > getting small, a IBM 3864 modem was a hefty 30 pounds or so. Seen the "I put the nut on a rock, and I hit it with the modem" text file? > So what i said was correct, the herc emu is emulating the majority I didn't mean to say it wasn't. Just that you made it sound like one could completely replace a 390 with a peesee. If that's the case, you (rather, the people who own the 390 in question) should have never used a 390 in the first place. > of all that stuff, dasd,, tapes,, card deck with an emulated > "reader" the 3174's and the terminals, that campus full of stuff > running virtualized on your PC. One day I'll actually get around to trying it. > at the time when the press would talk about NT everywhere when > it was knowwhere, i guess doing their part to create the illusion > of "everyone else, why not you?" You mean NT finally got somewhere? :) > > I don't know exact numbers, but honestly, the CPU in a modern peesee > > isn't the weak spot at all. Generally there's some kind of > bottleneck > > (or five) that needs repaired in the design. > Well a decent modern board is no slouch there either really The boards aren't, but the disk I/O on most "consumer" systems is pretty bad, for instance. It should be possible to get better I/O out of them, especially if there are (as I hear) AMD boards with 64-bit PCI. > You cant really trash PC I/O anymore, its right up there > with everything else and surpasses all the old workstations, Might be a dangerous statement. There have been some pretty impressive workstations. Add that to the fact that some people consider a one-year-old machine "old." I won't argue that peesee hardware hasn't advanced. it's literally mind-blowing what they've done with it, given the origins of the thing. I just wish they'd started with a nicer architecture to begin with. > current PC I/O dont compete with a current mainframe, > but what ever did ? Well, other current mainframes, of course, possibly -- as you mentioned -- supercomputers, too. > There has been really large R&D sums spent on pushing PC > performance. and its starting to show bigtime. I'm sure. Just imagine what they could have done by pouring all of that cash into Alpha. > In a way, comparing a mainframe to a PC is like a coal train to a > dodge viper, sure the viper is faster, but lets see how well it > does hooked to 80 hopper cars full of coal eh ? I'll go along with that. > > a supercomputer at all. When is "yesterday" in this context? :) > Well litteraly yesterday, dreamworks, pixar etc is going all linux > for their stuff and the supercomputers people talk about these > days on the www.top500.org list are linux clusters. All? I haven't checked top500 recently, but there were certainly a few non-clusters in the top 20 last time I looked. My trouble with clusters is that they're not "tightly coupled" enough to make them very interesting to me, generally. Sure, they'll solve problems, but again, I/O is the bottleneck. > Another example, look at www.ltsp.org, they are netbooting old > retired PC's used a diskless xterminals and hanging up to 200 > of them off a modern machine that the apps run on. I've considered doing something like that just for fun, and it's interesting, but as far as being a "cluster," I'm not sure it would qualify in my book. :) Or did you mean it as an example of something else? > It saves them bucks, and a machine not bloated down > to a 486 with winblows can hump a good load these days. Windows is up to 486 performance now? You wouldn't know it to use windows 2k on the pentium 5xx at work. > > Your comment about mainframes having "stayed small" is > oddly amusing, > Stay small they did, sure the linux kernel tree has grown with the They've certainly "gotten small," in hardware. I can't argue that the software isn't efficient, either. > in-tree driver count and branches for all the different hardware, > the same tree builds for a sun alpha or s390. It's not so much the size of the tree that bothers me in general with Linux, but the size of the finished kernel. I do still use it occasionally on <on topic> hardware, and it really annoyed me when I had to start using the bzImage target for make ;) I don't think it's in the drivers, either, but in the kernel somewhere, that it's gotten larger. There could be a good reason for it, but I'd like to see some of the stuff optionally removed so that my kernels can go back to being a few hundred kbytes uncompressed. Admittedly, loadable modules help. > but the resultant built kernel has not grown much over the years, > same for the mainframe, sure it has lots of services hanging around > it but its core also has stayed very trim. In relation to the memory capacity of the hardware on which it runs, you're absolutely right. I'd still like to see it trimmed some. > One important object of kernel development is for the code to > get smaller and faster consistent with the other goals. > Linux, the BSD's and IBM's top line operating systems have > done well here. I can't name any non-microsoft product that hasn't done ok. > My firewall DNS mail www and other sundres is still running on an > old 486 EISA machine, and its just as happy running the same > kernel and userspace as the 1000mhz linux box with the > nvidia 3D card, runs fast on slow machines, runs all the faster > on fast machines. I hope you re-compiled specifically for the CPUs. There are some optimizations that the compiler could make differently for 486 vs. Pentium (I assume it's 100Mhz Pentium) that could make a difference in performance. > The agenda for mickysoft dumbf**kware n co, however, seems > to be ""cover up any hardware performance gains ( and existing > hardware) with bloat, forcing the market to buy new boxes > and end up with no gain at all."" Agenda? I don't know about that. I honestly don't care what microshaft is thinking. The result, though, is as you say. > My main beaf with x86 is register starvation, at least AMD is doing > something about it. Ok, this is floating off-topic again, but do you mean in their 64-bit core, or in some 32 bit chip? > c++ for example, eats a register for "this" and on a register > starved cpu it hurts far more than others that have more > registers, this type of thing is perhaps why some fare well > by compare despite slower clock speeds. There's always "virtual registers." > Its hard to ignore raw speed however, what the x86 lacks > archtectually its seems to be making it up with brute force. That's true. I won't argue that it's not effective, but it's the wrong way to do it ;) Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '

21 years, 12 months

APPLEVISION Monitor

by mythtech＠mac.com

>What's the "right" way to add networking to the MAC? Just add the card >I'm not inclined to buy >into standard Ethernet, since I've got 100Mbps and am looking to move to the >bleeding edge for educational purposes. Is there any >10Gbps stuff one can >add? How about just the 100 Mbps? There are 10, 100, and 1000 cards available, but the 1000s are only for the newer PCI based Macs. That isn't to say you can't lay your hands on the Mac cheap (a 7200 can be had for nearly free)... but the giga card is likely to cost you far more than the Mac did. You can get 100 cards for NuBus... Farallon made one... but they are a little tough to come by. If you are looking to get a Mac and not use the 630, then get a PCI based Mac... 10/100 cards can be bought for those easy (and some of your off the shelf brands support the Mac... like SMC sells one of their cards and offers Mac drivers on their web site). I don't know of anything faster than a 10Mb for the LC slot in your 630... at that point, you are better off getting a cheap 10/100 switch and just use the 10Mb card. >I'm also looking for a recommendation for a decent but not too rare or >expensive 56K dialup modem that's also fax-capable. Just about any external modem will work with a Mac. Take your pick... all the major brands work fine. >I've noticed that there's software out there for doing >long-distance jibberjabber between computers on the internet. If I equip one >of these babies with that and send it to my S.O's sister in Portland, they >can >yack without running up the long distance bills. That's easily going to pay >for an older MAC in a week or so. Find a cheap Power PC mac (these can be had almost for free these days for low end ones). Make sure it is a PCI one (check apple.com's hardware specs to see which ones) -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>

21 years, 12 months

MacEthernet (Was: RE: APPLEVISION Monitor)

by dquebbeman＠acm.org

Dick said: > One thing that I've wondered is how one gets an old MAC to talk on the > Ethernet when it's a mixed environment with Netware and Windows NT servers. I > know Netware has a provision for MAC namespace, but I've only seen one > ethernet-capable MAC, which leaves me wondering how folks who use MACs install > an ethernet interface. Nuvolink made a box, SCSI interfaced Ethernet, 10-base-2 and AUI. The Quadra 700 was a slight modification to the Mac IIci. The IIci didn't have Ethernet; the Q700 did. The IIci was a 1990 machine. Q700 was probably late '91 or early '92. Not sure therefore what you mean by "old". May have been e-net boards that clamped down on the 68k chip like the hard drive upgrades and the 1st Radius FP display, but once SCSI was in place, you had that. But shortly thereafter you have e-nat on (almost) every Mac. -dq

21 years, 12 months

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test-drb May 2002