>> Such innovation, but it ended up in vain efforts just cloning
>> IBM mainframes
>> and the like. Sound like a company you know? (Minus the vain).
>
>Several companies: RCA Spectra, XDS Sigma, Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi ...
> Jack "I love MS, MS loves me" Peacock
You're right. I actually have nothing against MS, just it's current
product line and a few of it's business practices. A good company shouldn't
need to um... err.... ahh... lobby (that's it!) anyone.
Tim "Who Care's About MS, except when you need to" Hotze
> Such innovation, but it ended up in vain efforts just cloning
> IBM mainframes
> and the like. Sound like a company you know? (Minus the vain).
Several companies: RCA Spectra, XDS Sigma, Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi ...
Jack "I love MS, MS loves me" Peacock
>Yes it is possible, if you play with the meaning of "PC". If you define
>it to mean a small computer used by a single person, then a low end mini
>computer becomes a PC. In which case we have to go all the way back to
Yes, but it would have to fit in a space that people can have.. say... at
home.
>machines like the Bendix G-15 (late 50s ?). The USSR did not have
>microprocessors before the US.
And the US was not developing an atomic bomb during WWII.
>That's easy to prove, because soviet
>micros all used US designed instruction sets. How could they produce an
>8080 compatible IC before it was released by Intel?
A better question: How could Intel make a 8080 compatible machine before it
was produced by the Soviets? ;-)
Honestly, I think that Soviet computers are, on the whole, a sad story.
Such innovation, but it ended up in vain efforts just cloning IBM mainframes
and the like. Sound like a company you know? (Minus the vain).
Tim D. Hotze
> OK... I was talking to a Ukranian programmer, who told me
> that in 1968 the
> PC was invented, not far from where he worked in Ukrane.
> Now, that's 4
> years before the microprocessor, but is it possible?
Yes it is possible, if you play with the meaning of "PC". If you define
it to mean a small computer used by a single person, then a low end mini
computer becomes a PC. In which case we have to go all the way back to
machines like the Bendix G-15 (late 50s ?). The USSR did not have
microprocessors before the US. That's easy to prove, because soviet
micros all used US designed instruction sets. How could they produce an
8080 compatible IC before it was released by Intel?
Jack Peacock
>It's easy to blame novice users and get rich quick spammers, but I can't
>agree with you. I look on the 'Net as evolution in action. Right now
>we have the feeding frenzy of spammers drowning us in unwanted email.
>The easy, and wrong, solution is to force them to stop. The right way
>is to make it uneconomical for them to send spam. How? I don't really
>know, I just ignore it, sort of like background static noise on a
>shortwave radio.
In general, it is ignored. I know someone, who recently got online. They
own a small company, and were offered 15,000 eMail addresses at .01 per
person. That sounded like such a great deal! So, they sent the e-mail, and
got 200 eMails that bounced, then in 3 months, had recieved 6 orderes for $5
and over 500 eMails about the bad business practices of spamming. They knew
no better, but still...
>But consider, what kind of response rate do spammers get? Now junk
>snail mailers have to actually pay per piece, although at a reduced
>rate. They have to make the junk mail attractive to readers so they can
>get a high enough response rate to justify the mailing. Maybe we need
>the same mechanism for mass commercial postings. In other words, the
>ISP specifies in the terms of service that mass commercial mailings (aka
>spam) are charged at the same mailing rates as the local post office,
>something around 20 cents per item. Now you have a legal means to get
>back if the ISP catches a spammer, because they are liable for the
>contracted costs.
Spam should be illegal. The commercialization of the Internet's what we
needed for a long time: a worldwide information resource. Allowing people
to profit by it (by ads, etc.) gives you more information available, and a
wider user base. Even sci-fi writers didn't envision a global information
resource like ours for another ten to twenty years. Let's face it: Until we
go past the money-stage, for many things to become popular, they seemingly
MUST be commercial.
<> S-100s started out with an Intel 8080, then Zilog Z80. That was
<> pretty much the end of the 8-bit version, although there were
<
<Hmmm...this is sort of like the Creationist version of where S-100 came
<from. Actually, a guy named Ed Roberts at a company called MITS that
<built a computer called the Altair 8800 invented the S-100 bus.
It's the of the form... In the beginning Ed created MITS and intel created
the 8080 and it was ok,... :-)
<> The response time compared quite favorably to contemporary low
<> end DEC PDP-11s, and for a fraction of the cost.
Actually the Alpha MicroSystems was a s100 box in the 1979-80 time frame
that used the WD13 chipset (same as the LSI-11/pdp-11) with slightly
different microcode and it did run with the same or slightly better
performance than the LSI-11/03 it's contemporary.
<> Another problem was the unregulated power supply. Unregulated
<> +8 and +/-16VDC was run over the bus itself, right next to
<> signal lines. Every board required it's own regulation, which
<> could take 20% or more of the board space, as well as being a
<> nightmare to keep cool. If you see early pictures of loaded
<> IMSAIs, the cover was always off. This was a necessity, the
<> heat was too much with the cover on. I had to use a 16" fan to
<> keep mine running with 64KB of 2102 based static RAM (not 21L02s
<> BTW, they cost more than the fan did).
Typical of the earlier boxen. Their cooling path was poorly thought out
at best and looking at them it's was obvious. Usually some fish paper
in the right places did the trick.
<> >As for laissez-faire, I never have believed in it. It makes society
<> >too concerned about money. This is proven when complete crap hardware
<> >is released now, and people don't care because it's good _financially
An aside to this... some of the S100/SS50/trs80/apple... items from the
various third parties were quite the garbage. Some fo the suppliers were
patently ripoff artists where money was taken and nothing shipped.
Reality check. PCs today can be purchased to do real work and expected
to perform. Computers of the late '70s and into the early 80s were often
useless as shipped if they worked and required a fair amount of acumen to
configure, expand and *required* programming skills. The latter due to
add hardware and even create applications to make them useful.
For example to add a hard disk in 1980 (10mb DISCUS system was $3995.00)
and that was the drive and a s100 card. The user would have to set the
jumpers on the card for the correct IO ports to not conflict with their
system. The system BIOS would have to be rewritten to add the hard disk
and the system tracks on the floppies and the hard disks would have to be
rewritten onto the media. This assumes you had the BIOS for your system
and it was CP/M or similar... all others the bet was off. So to add a
hard disk you needed a system that was up and running, sources, could
read the sources supplied...
I often had the problem of the NS* using hard sectored 5.25 and the
supplied media was 8"!!!
Also you had an assembler, editor, debugger and knew 8080/z80 assembler.
When I went from a teltek controller to a different one... do it all over
again as the new one was totally incompatable. Far cry from an IDE disk
and setting the CMOS.
Allison
>I am completely unfamiliar with S-100 systems, so could you
please
>explain... were S-100 technologically superior to PCs (i.e. IBM
>PC 5150), or just aesthetically? As far as I know, they used an
>older processor...
S-100s started out with an Intel 8080, then Zilog Z80. That was
pretty much the end of the 8-bit version, although there were
several other variants (8085, NSC 800, Hitachi 64180, Signetics
2650, etc.). Hmm, I never recall seeing a 6502 or 6800 CPU
board. Once the S-100 was standardized around the IEEE-696
specifications the good 16 bit systems started appearing. One
of the earliest was the 8086 by Seattle Computer Labs (IIRC).
Famous because it came with the ancestor of MS-DOS, which
Microsoft later bought for their IBM PC deal. You might say all
the PC software now in existence owes its existence to the
S-100....
Anyway, there were quite a few 16-bit systems. Many 80286
variants, including a nice one by Macrotech, a dual Z80H/80286
CPU. There were several 68000s, TI 9900, National 32000, Zilog
Z8000, and a variant on the Western Digital LSI-11 bit slice
chipset called Alpha Micro. The AM ran its own multi-user
operating system, very reminicent of RT-11 (there was a strong
DEC influence there).
Was the S-100 technically superior? Well, if you go by the
IEEE-696 specifications then compared to either the XT or AT it
was quite a bit better. Maximum memory was 16MB (24 bit
address, 8 or 16 bit data path), 8 interrupt levels (open
collector! which meant multiple boards could use the same IRQ),
16 DMA levels (still better than the 7 DMA levels on the current
PC). Most 286 based systems ran up to 8Mhz reliably, some made
it to 10 or 12 Mhz (compared to the original AT at 6Mhz). Even
better, it was common practice to use static RAM memory on the
better business systems. If that term doesn't sound familiar,
cache memory on modern PCs is static RAM. The significance is
that there were no wait states or lost cycles to refresh. Think
of how fast your Pentium would run today if all 64MB of RAM was
cache, not DRAM.
S-100s were also very expandable. Motherboards usually had
between 18 and 22 slots for full sized machines. You could put
a lot of RAM, serial, and disk controllers in that many card
slots. I built custom 286 based multi-user systems that
supported 10 or more users running production business work.
The response time compared quite favorably to contemporary low
end DEC PDP-11s, and for a fraction of the cost.
S-100s were also early adopters for much of the current crop of
PC peripherals. Networking, using ARCnet at 2.5Mbps over coax.
Digital Research supported network access to disk drives using
CP/NET on top of MP/M II. No, it wasn't TCP/IP, but it still
compares quite well to a basic Netware system. Disk drives,
both the 5.25" floppy and the 5.25" hard drive showed up on
S-100s before PCs. S-100s using MP/M II could support disk
drives up to 512MB, long before MS fixed the 32MB barrier in the
XT and AT.
The S-100 did have some drawbacks, mostly from the weird control
signals the CPU had to generate (anyone remember how difficult
it was to simulate a PSYNC on a non-8080 processor?). It
suffered terribly from early failures to standardize the bus.
Many of the 8-bit systems had unsolvable compatibilty problems.
(on the other hand, it did make for some extra pocket change for
struggling college students who knew how to tune an S-100 to
make everything work :) )
Another problem was the unregulated power supply. Unregulated
+8 and +/-16VDC was run over the bus itself, right next to
signal lines. Every board required it's own regulation, which
could take 20% or more of the board space, as well as being a
nightmare to keep cool. If you see early pictures of loaded
IMSAIs, the cover was always off. This was a necessity, the
heat was too much with the cover on. I had to use a 16" fan to
keep mine running with 64KB of 2102 based static RAM (not 21L02s
BTW, they cost more than the fan did).
The single worst problem was the absolute lack of any hardware
standardization beyond the 696 specs. There were no I/O
addresses for anything. One manufacturer might use a WD 1791
floppy controller at port 7xH, another would use the NEC 765
floppy controller at address 9xH. There were no standardized
BIOS ROMs either. Systems came with some basic boot ROM for one
particular disk controller/serial interface, and that was it,
everything else was supported by drivers in the machine specific
version of the OS. A boot disk for an Altos wouldn't run on a
North Star, not even close. For those who think it an evil that
the world has standardized on the Wintel architecture for PCs,
trust me, the other choice is far worse.
>Was it just an issue of being used to them?
Sure, but then if you wanted a good hardware oriented micro with
lots of support from 3rd parties, in the mid 70s the S-100 was
the only choice. You could get a board to do just about
anything, tho you had to program it yourself. Nearly all boards
came with schematics, if you didn't like the design or it wasn't
quite compatible, you could cut traces and rewire to your own
choosing. My own IMSAI is far from a standard out of the box
model.
>As for laissez-faire, I never have believed in it. It makes
society
>too concerned about money. This is proven when complete crap
hardware
>is released now, and people don't care because it's good
_financially_
You don't like the profit motive? *gasp* That's, well, that's
just plain un-american (understandable and excusable if you
happen to be european tho).
Jack "show me the money" Peacock
<ISTR an article on alt.folklore.computers a year or so back, giving the n
<the lawyer who sent the first officially-recorded unsolicited email spam.
<he lost his account. I can't remember the details, so it might be hard t
<(and I'm not sure of the details, but 5-6 years ago sounds about right).
The landmark was right around the time I left DEC (1993).
I'd been on the 'net via their gateways since before '87. I was greatly
sadend when I the words went out the internet would permit commercial
ops.
Allison
> From: Wirehead Prime [mailto:wirehead@retrocomputing.com]
> Not all of us ISPs are evil and unconcerned with the
> Internet. I run a
> good, solid business with a 95% customer retention rate
> calculated over 4
> years. I don't do business with spammers or pornographers and have
> written my contracts so that I can immediately terminate any customer
> that violates Netiquette. I've been yelled at about that...that I'm
> ...
> Some of us who started in the early days of commercialization
> wanted the
> Internet to be like we were used to it being when we used it
> from college
> or businesses in the late 80s and early 90s. You can thank
> CompuServe,
> AOL, and hordes of know-nothing little ISPs with wads of cash to
> substitute for business sense for the current situation.
It's easy to blame novice users and get rich quick spammers, but I can't
agree with you. I look on the 'Net as evolution in action. Right now
we have the feeding frenzy of spammers drowning us in unwanted email.
The easy, and wrong, solution is to force them to stop. The right way
is to make it uneconomical for them to send spam. How? I don't really
know, I just ignore it, sort of like background static noise on a
shortwave radio.
But consider, what kind of response rate do spammers get? Now junk
snail mailers have to actually pay per piece, although at a reduced
rate. They have to make the junk mail attractive to readers so they can
get a high enough response rate to justify the mailing. Maybe we need
the same mechanism for mass commercial postings. In other words, the
ISP specifies in the terms of service that mass commercial mailings (aka
spam) are charged at the same mailing rates as the local post office,
something around 20 cents per item. Now you have a legal means to get
back if the ISP catches a spammer, because they are liable for the
contracted costs.
And just to bring it back on topic...when consumer PCs came out (IBM,
PET, Atari, Apple, etc.) those of us who built and used "real" micros
(S-100s of course) lamented that fact that the microcomputer market was
being overrun by large corporations bent on destroying the laissez-faire
market of the mid 70s. Sound familiar?
Jack "I use an IMSAI, not those toy computers" Peacock
On Apr 14, 1:36, Tony Duell wrote:
> Pete Turnbull wrote:
> > Isn't a DX11 an IBM channel interface? Originally a big cabinet with a lot
> > of flip chips and lamps? I've seen two, working.
>
> That's right.
> Where on earth did you see one of those?
A few summers ago, Leeds University were getting rid of an Amdahl mainframe and
supporting equipment, which included several PDP-11s and two DX11s. I managed
to invite myself along with a couple of friends, one of whom acquired a
complete working DX11 and one in bits, plus cables. I think there was a doc
set as well. I got an 11/73 with a much smaller 3rd party Qbus version, which
I've since passed on, as the same friend actually has a 360 which he's hoping
to get going again.
> I really must cable one of mine up again, re-read the printset, and
> figure out what on earth to use it for...
First find a System/360 :-)
Then find a lot of space with a strong floor. Jim put his in a room which he'd
prepared with a false floor. Unfortunately the materials supplier had provided
the wrong grade of board, and apparently the main unit rolled in OK, but when
it came to its proper position, there was a crunching sound, and the 360
settled a few inches as several of the castors punched through the floor
panels. Jim wasn't too pleased (he did get it fixed, though).
BTW, the little DX11-alike in the 11/73 was accompanied by a "Camtech Ethernet
QBus Interface". It's a quad-high Q-bus board, with a 68000 and a 68450 (PGA
types), a 68230, 68564, some memory, and the usual AMD ethernet chip set.
There's a 20-pin header for the ether i/f, and two 26-pin ribbon cable
connectors near a pile of 26LS30s and MC3486's, so I assume this is some sort
of terminal concentrator or PAD (there's also a 2.4576MHz xtal, which implies
standard 300/600/1200... baud rates). I was told the firmware didn't support
TCP/IP, but some other protocol. Anybody know what that would be? Is it any
use for anything? Can it be changed to use TCP/IP?
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
