Never having seen one of these machines, what does it do if the power-OK signal is not asserted. I could believe (based on experiences with other machines) that all LEDs are on at power-up, and one of the first things the CPU does is change that pattern. So if the power-OK signal is deasserted, the CPU never starts, all the LEDs remain on. -tony

On Tue, July 25, 2006 8:24 am, Zane H. Healy said: Bummer :o| We can still get XP1000 mainboards at work but you're talking $$$ for one because someone has already parted out a working system, but I guess you knew that already :) Resellers in the UK want $$$ for the Powerstorm card too so it's not all bad. -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

On Tue, July 25, 2006 8:24 am, Zane H. Healy said: Bummer :o| We can still get XP1000 mainboards at work but you're talking $$$ for one because someone has already parted out a working system, but I guess you knew that already :) Resellers in the UK want $$$ for the Powerstorm card too so it's not all bad. -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

Zane H. Healy wrote: The codename is Miata not Miyata, but I don't think that will help since Miata is an older system. The XP1000 is Monet (iirc). All the XP1000 docs I have are already on Manx (they all all Install/Setup guides). Antonio

Not wanting to deal with a PDF at the moment, does this include info on the Apple II OS's? Zane

On 7/25/06, Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote: There's also some nice stuff on NeXTStep/OpenSTEP, Mach, A/UX, a bit about their UNIX heritage, and a quick history of RISC. Great stuff.

This is very common, and is based on an assumption of 'k' meaning 1000 (decimal), not 1024 - 16 bit bus - 65535 bytes (65 thousand). I've seen it in data sheets and other reasonably technically accurate material - I guess it depends on your point of view (and how low-level your experience is :-) Hard drive manufacturers have been doing the same thing with "meg" for years - specing in decimal 1,000,000 makes the drive sound bigger than specing in 2**20 sized blocks. Cheers, Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

Of course I actually intended to type 65536, but my fingers automatically rounded this down to valid 16-bit number :-) In a way it makes sense ... The general public understands "thousand" better than "k", so giving them the number of bytes in thousands will give them a better idea of the actual number than a true "k" value would - we computer geeks just think differently than everyone else I find myself counting non-computer related things in hex all the time (If you are doing it out loud, people nearby look at you strangely and move slightly further away) Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

And thusly were the wise words spake by Fred Cisin That could take awhile.. :) Now do you do it by saying the single numbers or the decimal representaion of the number? Cheers, Bryan

I wonder why. :-) A fellow sysadmin and I play pool approximately every two weeks, and for the last two or three sessions we have developed a system of calling most shots[%] entirely by hand, no voice. This is relevant here because it is binary-based, with the four fingers of one hand being the four bits necessary to identify a ball number 1-15. [%] We play that all shots must be called in detail - though if there is a really obvious choice of shot and you line up for it without saying anything, the call is taken to be "the shot I'm obviously lining up for". /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Dave Dunfield wrote: No we don't. We've just taken the trouble to learn something about the tools that we use. At some point it has to be accepted that people need a little education to use a computer - so I don't see why a rudimentary understanding of how computers operate shouldn't be one of them. Heck, it's not even as difficult as that - I expect the average user who just does a bit of email, surfing and word processing doesn't even need to know - providing they know the *rough* relationships between the units that's enough. But it's no excuse for the people bringing the computers to those people to go around trying to redefine fundamental principles of how they work in order to somehow make them more warm and fuzzy. -- (\__/) (='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your (")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.

Segin wrote: I suspect it won't happen as long as people exist :-) Companies do it to make more profit based on the assumption that most people are just too darn lazy to bother learning anything about their surroundings. If a company produces a product that makes it possible for a consumer to somehow muddle through in 80% of cases without any basic knowledge then they'll sell more of that product. Never mind that the consumer is tearing their hair out for the other 20% of the time - it's their own fault, after all. Problem then lies in that those of us who *want* to use the product to its maximum potential are left with something compromised because it's been dumbed down for mass appeal. Microsoft are certainly one of the worst culprits, if not the worst. But there are plenty of others who are equally guilty. Luckily there are still a few companies around who take pride in what they offer and do produce goods that need a few braincells to operate but result longer-term in higher efficiency or greater savings. Unfortunately they're becoming increasingly rare :-( Hmm OK, rant over :)

On Thursday 27 July 2006 07:12 pm, Jules Richardson wrote: Yeah we do, or a lot of this stuff wouldn't come so naturally... OTOH there seem to be an awful lot of people out there who will quite willingly accept somebody's idea of how it *should* work and take that as being the only way it *does* work which leads to all sorts of awful stuff. Like HTML email for example... -- 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

And thusly were the wise words spake by Fred Cisin Until you format the drive... :) Mebi that is why they make 320Gb drives - they format down to 'bout 300 Gibi ... <duck> <run> <hide> Cheers, Bryan

Allison wrote: We now have mebibytes, kibibytes, and other associated crap instead of proper terminology. If you read much open-source literature or docs, that spec is becoming disturbingly common. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html Can you tell I'm not thrilled? Doc

On 7/27/2006 at 11:58 AM Roy J. Tellason wrote: Yech! Maybe someone's not addressing the right problem. One of the problems with verbalizing scientific notation is the clumsiness of saying "itimes 10 to the". or "times 2 to the". I hereby propose a new pair of words, "tep" and "bip" for "times 10 to the" and "times 2 to the". So instead of saying "sixty-five k", you can now say "sixty-five tep three" with absolutely no abiguity. If you want the base-2 version, you could say "sixty-four bip ten". Just kidding, Chuck

Yeah. "Mebibytes" has always felt like "maybe-bytes" to me, and "kibibytes" smacks more of James Parry than anything else. But...whatevah. After what happened to ISO networking stacks you'd think standards bodies would know better than to try to impose standards from on high, but I guess not. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

And thusly were the wise words spake by Patrick Finnegan Yes but 300MB is usually attached to something and then you know what it means... "Context" :) Cheers, Bryan

If you load the whole thing? 300MB. Plus whatever overhead the OS imposes (eg, page table entries to map the space). Assuming it's not sparse? 300MB. Plus whatever overhead the filesystem imposes (eg, inode and indirect blocks). Time to send it over a 100Mbit line? 25.165824 seconds, plus comm overhead - probably more like 30 seconds. (This is where metric measurement for line speeds versus binary measurement for aggregate data storage needs care. Perhaps fortunately, you rarely get raw data rate out of real protocols; my rule of thumb is to expect 1MB/sec out of a nominally 10Mbit/sec line.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I've been juggling numbers and I can't see where you got 12.5%. 1MB is 16.666...% less than 1.2MB, regardless of whether your MB is metric or binary, as long as it's the same MB for both figures. If the 10Mb is metric and the 1MB is binary (which is how I'd measure it), 1MB is 16.11392% less than 10Mb. Using binary 10Mb and metric 1MB gives 23.706+%. I've been unable to find a combination that gets below 16%. Those are measuring the difference as a percentage of the larger value (which seems appropriate for saying "A is X% less than B"). Measuring as percentage of the smaller value gives even larger percentages (20%, 19.2+%, 31+%, respectively). Could you elucidate? But yes, what I am saying is that, in practice, at least in my experience, the various levels of overhead eat up approximately 16% of the raw bandwidth. This is not a carefully measured figure; the uncertainty is high enough that it's more scientifically accurate to say "between 10% and 20%". And, of course, this is best-case. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Doc Shipley wrote: The SI prefixes (k) kilo and (M) mega have always meant 10**3 and 10**6. The computer industry decided that K should mean 1024 (which is fine if somewhat confusing) but trying to bend mega into something that it should never have been was just lazy ... Antonio

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Jules Richardson wrote: Late 1970's, early 1980's. Or BEFORE. There were a few marketing types bragging that their microcomputers had 65.536K of memory (v the competition at only 64K?)

On Thursday 27 July 2006 07:08 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote: I just bumped into that one in an email conversation with somebody, who said that an LSI-11 would only handle 56K of ram. And my recollection (?) is that this referred to 56K _words_ as opposed to bytes. -- 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

On Friday 28 July 2006 09:22 pm, Patrick Finnegan wrote: It may be that I'm mis-remembering, this _was_ thirty years ago or so I was last messing with that machine. Wasn't there a line on that bus to indicate one or the other byte, though? -- 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

Not *always*. For example, 10Mbit Ethernet is 10000000 bits/sec, not 10485760 bits/sec. 9600 baud is 9.6 kilobaud, not 9.375 kilobaud. But communications speeds are the only computer context I can think of where the decimal meanings are standard (aside of course from storage makers trying to make their storage sound bigger than it is). /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

That, at least, *is* standardized. (While far too many people don't seem to know it, that's nothing new.) (Even a "2400 baud" modem really is 2400 baud if you measure it at the correct place, namely, the serial line interfacing it to the host. This is what you more or less have to do to make higher-speed modem speeds make any sense anyway.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

No, the line - the DTE data line, that is - is potentially changing state 2400 times a second; ergo, 2400 baud. 20% of those bit times convey almost no information when viewed at a higher level, but that is irrelevant. ("Almost" because they do convey a little information, namely, where character boundaries fall in the data stream - though even that they convey imperfectly if characters are sent back-to-back.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Not quite. The time it takes up is important for allowing small differences in oscillator frequency between sender and receiver to be tolerated. And having a spacing time there at all is important to guarantee at least two edges per character. Perhaps theoretically. In practice, if it's not spacing, you'll get framing errors. I've not tried it either, but I think most UARTs try to sample in the middle of a bit, so using half a stop bit would risk framing errors if the receiver is using a slightly slower clock than the sender - or if the receiver's sampling of the line state takes a significant fraction of the bit time (which seems not implausible at higher speeds). You might be able to get away with 2/3 of a stop bit. I wouldn't want to try it; it seems an awfully small gain (maybe 3% more speed) for a good deal of complexity and nonstandardization. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 7/28/2006 at 9:55 AM Don Y wrote: Well, consider that the probable reason for the "stop bit" was to allow the printing mechanism in a TTY to complete its cycle. If I remember my old Model 14 innards right, a start bit caused a clutch to engage and, as a rotor made its cycle, receipt of a mark pulse would cause one of several selector bars to move. At the terminus of the revolution, only a single typewriter-style typebar would be selected by the bars and it would print. The clutch then disengaged and the unit wated for the next start pulse. If you think about it, TTY-style async was a strange thing to keep around when the main application of the protocol was in more-or-less permanently connected setups. NRZ data would have made more sense in this situation--and one could have at least done away with stop bits--they're not really necessary for today's crystal-controlled bit rate clocks. But gosh darn it, we're still playing like we're moving those old selector bars when we have our equipment speak async. Cheers, Chuck .

On 7/28/2006 at 9:16 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote: In a nutshell, sync is great for pushing large blocks of data at nearly the maximum speed of a comm link. Messages are very formalized and there are no start, stop or parity bits. The clock is recovered from the data stream by the modem, not the USART, so when a transmitter has the line it's always transmitting (the SYN 1/6 character is the "filler" character). When it works, it's great. Cheers, Chuck

Jules Richardson wrote: My recollection is that that was well after the formatted vs unformatted capacity stuff :-) At least that seems to have died a death. Antonio

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Patrick Finnegan wrote: IBM does not use 2**20, NOR 10**6 for meg of disk space! For a meg of memory, they use 1048576, Mebi, 2**20, but for a meg of disk space, they use 1024000, 1000Kibi, 2**10 * 10**3

Allison wrote: Most of the confugion is by idiot's that don't know what the fuck S.I. means. -- The real problem with C++ for kernel modules is: the language just sucks. -- Linus Torvalds

huh? Why on earth would someone cc a message from cctech to cctalk or vice versa? They are the same list! J

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Allison wrote: That would have to be one one thousandth of a byte (or 1/125th of a bit) It would probably require special circuitry to access it. There once was a Bureau of Standards attempt (too little too late) to deal with the problem, that led to the development of: Kibibyte (binary K) 1024 Mebibyte (pronounce "maybe byte", binary meg) 1048576 Gibibyte (binary gig) 1073741824 If it were to have been done BEFORE "computer science" standardized on Kilobyte being 1024, it could have prevented the confusion. But then again, not everybody agrees on the number of bits in a byte, and many use their computer's word size, not 8, for "byte". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Also possible is that it could just be an honest typo; 4 and 5 are next to one another on most keyboards, after all. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 7/27/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: It's an expergated chapter from a book, I'd imagine it hasn't been gone through with a fine tooth comb editing-wise. Also, it's meant to be an overview for background of the current MacOS X operating system, not a comprehensive history (that's what the technical manuals are for, though those are sometimes wrong, too.) I still think it's an interesting read especially, since, when the earlier OSes were popular, I was using them to learn how to read :)

At 6:36 AM -0400 7/26/06, Doc Shipley wrote: Yep, that was one of the first things I checked. After having read up more on the XP1000, it shows that if the fan is out (at least the CPU fan), it will power off after 1 second. MONK has been an XP1000 for about 10 hours. I must say that it has been interesting how many Layered products seem to put the disk name in their startup procedures (DKA0 vs. DKC0 I'm now using). I setup logicals to handle this for my own stuff years ago, but didn't have all the layered products installed that I now use. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |