13 Sep
2007
13 Sep
'07
9:33 p.m.
On Wednesday 12 September 2007 07:43, Allison wrote:
Mine started when I needed to get stuff from the
various CP/M systems
that even when they had disks were incompatable hard sector to soft
or 8 and 5.25. I started with serial peer to peer as in pipmodem and
similar.
Pipmodem? That's a new one on me, though the name is pretty suggestive.
Later I did a two system resource sharing that grew to
allow up to a
potential 256 systems. In '82 the whole thing peaked with a multiprocessor
S100 crate with intercommunications via pooled memory.
How was that handled in the hardware, particularly with regard to contention
for access? I vaguely recall running across some multiport memory chips,
but their capacity wasn't anywhere near what was currently in use that didn't
have that feature.
All of the things I did and got to see and use colored
my perception
of what computers could do. Usually it was far greater than marketed
capability.
:-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin