18 Apr
2002
18 Apr
'02
7:22 p.m.
On April 18, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
*shakes head*
Pathetic.
Pathetic indeed. The pdp-11/34a that I had when I was in high
school...I think I babbled about that machine at one point. I had a
DH11-AD mux in there (16 lines, modem control, DMA...a 9-slot
backplane full of boards), it had my terminal and another terminal in
the house, both running at 9600 baud, and a 1200 baud modem for
dialin...It would keep up with me and two friends using kermit to move
stuff back & forth, or hacking code (yay Swedish Pascal and DECUS C!)
with no problems at all...three sessions, two at 9600 baud and one at
1200 baud...simultaneously. Without even feeling the bump.
Why do people use PeeCees, again? Pathetic, indeed.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire "Mmmm. Big."
St. Petersburg, FL -Den
Except that a real PDP-11 will probably be a good deal
more stable than a
PC. And how are PC's running windows at things like realtime data
acquisition?
My computer ( 600 Mhz ?? ) states not to use the seriel port faster than
9600 because the internal modem uses the irq line. sigh! 
19 Apr
19 Apr
4:57 a.m.
Why do people use PeeCees, again? Pathetic, indeed.
I encoded some family geneology into set of frame HTML
pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
took over 30 Minutes to write!
Pathetique!
John A.
6:17 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, John Allain wrote:
I encoded some family geneology into set of frame
HTML
pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
took over 30 Minutes to write!
OK. This is completely off topic, but it has bugged me for years.
You guys are more likely to know, and care, than any other forum I hang
in. I use a Linux PC as my daily workstation, file server, DNS, MOP
server, etc. Given hardware limitations, it's stable enough.
I can start a lowlevel format on a floppy, go and surf the net, read
my email, compile software, or play a game while (45-75 secs) that
happens.
Do that in Win<anyversion> on the same hardware, and I might as well
go make coffee. Same comparison applies to printing large documents.
WHAT is M$ doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
Doc
6:34 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
And thusly Doc spake:
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, John Allain wrote:
It's a Windows things... For some reason they just can't multitask
properly while doing a floppy disk format. Maybe they are still using DOS
type format routines.
With OS/2, you can also do a full format of a floppy and do anything else with
no slowdown.
Cheers,
Bryan
I encoded some family geneology into set of frame
HTML
pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
took over 30 Minutes to write!
OK. This is completely off topic, but it has bugged me for years.
You guys are more likely to know, and care, than any other forum I hang
in. I use a Linux PC as my daily workstation, file server, DNS, MOP
server, etc. Given hardware limitations, it's stable enough.
I can start a lowlevel format on a floppy, go and surf the net, read
my email, compile software, or play a game while (45-75 secs) that
happens.
Do that in Win<anyversion> on the same hardware, and I might as well
go make coffee. Same comparison applies to printing large documents.
WHAT is M$ doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
8:36 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Doc wrote:
That was one of the things IBM bragged about in the OS/2 2.0 ads. That
you could continue with your word processor while you formatted a floppy.
Windows could not even come close at the time.
Peace... Sridhar
I encoded some
family geneology into set of frame HTML
pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
took over 30 Minutes to write!
OK. This is completely off topic, but it has bugged me for years.
You guys are more likely to know, and care, than any other forum I hang
in. I use a Linux PC as my daily workstation, file server, DNS, MOP
server, etc. Given hardware limitations, it's stable enough.
I can start a lowlevel format on a floppy, go and surf the net, read
my email, compile software, or play a game while (45-75 secs) that
happens.
Do that in Win<anyversion> on the same hardware, and I might as well
go make coffee. Same comparison applies to printing large documents.
WHAT is M$ doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
9:13 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
That was one of the things IBM bragged about in the
OS/2 2.0 ads.
That you could continue with your word processor while you formatted
a floppy. Windows could not even come close at the time.
Why bother saying 'at the time'? My win is 2 years old and still
no better.
John A.
Yeah and the next version will have it fixed.
9:32 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
That was one of the things IBM bragged about in the
OS/2 2.0 ads. That
you could continue with your word processor while you formatted a floppy.
Windows could not even come close at the time.
Peace... Sridhar
I'd not realized they had any adds about this. I ran OS/2 from V1.3 to
V3.0, and one thing I always loved was how I could be formatting both 3.5"
and 5.25" floppies while I was editing a document and dialed into a BBS.
Taking Doc's complaint from a Macintosh angle, why is it that a 68k based
Mac can work with floppies nice and fast, while a PPC based Mac is dog
slow? When I moved from my PowerMac 8500/180 to my G4/450 I needed to
image all my floppy based software so I'd be able to install it on the G4
(I'm not one of those people that objects to Apple doing away with the
floppies, it makes sense). However, I ended up imaging them on my
Powerbook 540c and copying them via Appletalk to the 8500 to put them on
CD. For floppy based stuff basically any 68k Mac will run circles around
any PPC based Mac! I'm not talking slightly faster, I'm talking reading
several in the time it takes to read one on a PPC!
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | 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/ |
2:11 p.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
I already knew that every other OS that runs on PC does it right. I'd
like to know how M$ got it so horribly wrong....
Doc
WHAT is M$
doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
That was one of the things IBM bragged about in the OS/2 2.0 ads. That
you could continue with your word processor while you formatted a floppy.
Windows could not even come close at the time. 
11:18 a.m.
New subject: OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look
On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 10:17:46AM -0500, Doc wrote:
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, John Allain wrote:
I remember this behaviour from Windows 3.1 - format a floppy and you
might as well go grab a book. Enter OS/2: start formatting a floppy and
do something else on the machine until it is done (which didn't take
long). I suppose that:
- since Windows 3.1 couldn't do real (preemptive) multitasking (only
cooperative), it basically stopped everything else,
- this code was carried through to whatever flavour of Windows is sold
currently (hell, I had system error boxes with the Windows 3.1 widget
set pop up at me on some lusers Win9X machines),
Fortunately for me, I first switched from Windows 3.1 to OS/2 (Warp 3 at
the time, still have the red box around somewhere) and from that to Linux,
currently using only $UNIX (of several flavors) for my own needs and
touching Windows only when paid to do so and absolutely unavoidable.
I regularly marvel at some of more the boneheaded things Windows does - if
one were to write a dedicated sabotage program, one couldn't do better.
Regards,
Alex.
--
We're gonna be body guards for teen rock-stars. Wouldn't the cause of freedom
be better served if we killed them instead?
-- Schlock from the ''Schlock Mercenary'' comic
strip
I encoded some family geneology into set of frame
HTML
pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
took over 30 Minutes to write!
OK. This is completely off topic, but it has bugged me for years.
You guys are more likely to know, and care, than any other forum I hang
in. I use a Linux PC as my daily workstation, file server, DNS, MOP
server, etc. Given hardware limitations, it's stable enough.
I can start a lowlevel format on a floppy, go and surf the net, read
my email, compile software, or play a game while (45-75 secs) that
happens.
Do that in Win<anyversion> on the same hardware, and I might as well
go make coffee. Same comparison applies to printing large documents.
WHAT is M$ doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
8126
days inactive
8127
days old
8 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
allain＠panix.com -
als＠thangorodrim.de -
bpope＠wordstock.com -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
vance＠ikickass.org