28 Aug
2006
28 Aug
'06
10:09 a.m.
Am 28 Aug 2006 9:38 meinte Chuck Guzis:
On 8/28/2006 at 12:01 PM Dave McGuire wrote:
> Either that or let's change it to the "twenty year rule" and revisit
>it in another few years.
Yeah, we should have done this 20 years ago - Microprocessors are just
off topic at all :))
Right now, we're looking at what appears to me to
be a mature technological
system--we've got nothing but a forest of Pentiums and Pentium look-alikes
with other minor CPUs occupying the role of embedded support functions.
You've seen one, you've seen them all. Short of a major upheaval, I'd
expect things to stay like this for a very long time. And it's boring.
To some extend. Then again, you just might have to have a closer
look. There have been plenty of differences between the CPUs and
it continues. Also, the extreme similarity is only if you look at
the desktop market. All arround there's still quite some neat stuff
to play with - and not long ago I rediscovered that it is fun to
play with the newest toys - SSE 1/2/3/4 offers quite some new ways
to use (and enhance) some old knowledge about streaming. I found
that knowing about how a /370 statezising works and how a CDC 6600
internaly handels the PP vs CPU workflow - and how vector processing
in general works gives a great advantage over the young ones :)
Agreed, you've seen one, you've seen all, but that would already
be true if one would have just learned the /360 and the PDP-11.
All thereafter was just variations - and it doesn't matter if
they are binary compatible or not - who realy cares about the
code reprensentation (Remembers me of an Israel based company
that did a one on one clone of some VAX, except that they swaped
high and low nibble of the opcodes :)
We could exclude certain CPUs, but that doesn't
address the issue that
anything that runs on an older CPU will probably run on a newer CPU of the
same family, so one might as well include the newer ones.
Not not realy. While it's true that a DOS based 8088-Programm
could probably work on an Athlon64, chachances are good that
it also might require some work ... like running a PET programm
on a C65.
I don't know what the answer is.
To me, whenever a certain Machine/Idea is either no longer of
_average_ daily use (for whatever reason) or old enough that
it will be viewe as 'good old thingy' it becomes an acceptable
topic for the list.
Beside that, I'll go with the old idea, that it needs two (or
more) for a working communication.
No Interest - No Response - No Communication
That simple, and noone needed to govern it.
H.
--
VCF Europa 8.0 am 28/29.April 2007 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/