Machine reliability - was: Sources for 8b TTL keyboards (Keytronics)

Message: 22 Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2008 23:04:12 +0100 From: Angel Martin Alganza <ama at ugr.es> Subject: Re: Sources for 8b TTL keyboards (Keytronics) To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <20081207220412.GJ31191 at darwin.ugr.es> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 05:27:51PM -0200, Alexandre Souza wrote: I thought I would chime in at this point. In the Mid 80's, my College had a perfectly functional PDP11 system. It used provided support for RSTS-E, was well appreciated, reliable, and the workhorse for all of the computing programs throughout the school. The machine was in the computer room, its front panel was out in the open, and nobody did anything bad to it. the most malicious piece of software that was run was a program that I wrote that output human readable character patterns sideways on paper tape. In about 1988 (or so), the powers that be decided to replace it with a Prime computer. All of a sudden, the student body was not very happy about the replacement. The Unix like operating system didn't look like RSTS-E, the terminals were HORRIBLE (They took away our beloved VT52's), the editor EMACS, was not very friendly at all. All of our code was GONE! Agreed that the machine was Bigger (tm), Faster (tm), More Functional (tm), than the PDP we had, but the user experience was woeful. Needles to say, that the student body decided that they had to find ways to break the thing. Malicious software was created, the machine was regularly halted from the front panel, and reliability went through the floor. Eventually, they made a physical cage for the machine to reside in that even the longest broom handle couldn't manipulate the front panel switches !! At least the reboots stopped. What am I trying to say here... You can get faster hardware, but if it is operated in a HOSTILE environment, then you will have a bad time. To a point, I agree with the snapshot concept of not installing arbitrary software, and leaving an environment in a working state. If you are patient, you *can* get a windows machine to operate reliably. But the *last* thing you do is to install yet another random upgrade for yet another piece of software without careful testing. The windows concept simply does not translate to the classic computer environment. There is no way that I can impact the operating system of my CP/M system by simply running a terminal program (unless I specifically perform a download). Likewise, there is no concept of downloading a device driver that hasn't been tested on any of my PDP11 machines. The machine base was simply too small and too well controlled. The modern environment is radically different, there are hundreds of manufacturers of cards and motherboards, and other hardware, and millions of equipment combinations possible. And, there is the dreaded concept of BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY. Woe is me, as a manufacturer, I have to support arcane cards in systems where they simply may not work.... (Could somebody please explain why having an ISA bus slot in a PCI system was a good idea!) In summary - you can have a 'powerful beast' and have it work. you just have to adopt a 'professional' attitude to running it, and not download arbitrary software willy nilly. How do you do that when the modern browsers are designed to download and execute arbitrary code??? By not doing that! Just my 0.02 worth. Doug