At 08:03 AM 6/15/04 -0400, Teo Zenios wrote: Well Said! Too many members of this list simply collect old computers and don't bother with the related docs, manuals or application programs. I have an old original 64k IBM PC and it's been very intersting collecting original software and peripherals for it. Things like DOS 1.0, CPM-86, uSCD Pascal, Professional Fortran, PolyForth, IBM GPIB software, early versions of MS Word and MultiPlan, EasyWriter (written by none other than Capt'n Crunch!), etc etc. And that's just the software, it doesn't include all the various Tech Refs and all the fasinating 3rd party cards and peripherals. I don't like the current over-bloated version-of-the-day MicroSoft products either but it doesn't mean that the early PCs are uninteresting and not worth collecting. Joe

Hey, I resemble that remark :-)! Vince

Maybe the list simply needs to take a firm non-Windows stance, or else specifically OK non-Windows HW that would otherwise be blocked by the 10 year (or whatever it might get expanded to) rule. I for one don't care to see any posts about Windows, but wouldn't object to posts about say the Amiga OS 4.0 beta or an SGI Tezro. Zane

On Tuesday 15 June 2004 21:52, William Donzelli wrote: While I mostly agree, we might want to make an exception for discussing emulators of classic systems on such OSes (like running simh under linux or Winderz). But as a general "Don't ask Windows questions here" rule I'd tend to agree. I think that's better than extending the 'oldness' limit, as there are some machines (like DEC Alphas, IBM RS/6000s, Sun or SGI workstations, etc) that I'd consider as valid for this list (within the age constraint) as compared to, say, a Commodore 64 or Amiga 1000. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCS --- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You are so weird. (but then so am I ;) -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com -- Actually, we can overcome gravity (just not the paperwork involved). -------

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Zane H. Healy wrote: I think that's a bit absolute. In 6 years, when Windows 3.0 will be 20 years old, if someone wishes to set up a Windows 3.0 box for a historical exhibit, it should be perfectly acceptable to discuss that here. (I told you exceptions will apply ;') -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 20:43:30 -0700 (PDT) Vintage Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> wrote: That, and there are perfectly acceptable and technically interesting reasons to discuss some obscure variants and machines that run Windows 3. Example: I have one of the original HP Omibook 300 machines. It was made by HP's Corvalis Division, the same group that made the classic HP Calculators. It has the same design heritage and quality as other Corvalis projects (it's significantly different that the crap HP later sold with the 'Omnibook' brandname). It's a 386sx machine with only 2 MB of memory, 4 PCMCIA slots and it runs Windows 3.1, Word 5 and Excel 4 out of ROM memory. In fact, Windows 3.1 and the Office components are directly embedded in a PCMCIA ROM card that plugs in as one of the Drives. The 'run directly out of ROM' design of the Omnibook 300 was a radical and expensive project at HP Corvalis, and while it's a dead-end architecture it's a really, really cool piece of work. The 'applications' and Windows itself run right out of ROM, not being loaded into RAM to run- something nobody tried before and nobody has ever tried since. So the machine can load up pretty hefty Excel spreadsheets and Word without impacting the tiny 2MB memory built into the machine. It's interesting enough that the Omnibook 300 is a unique machine, and technically significant. And it's a natural addition, along with the HP95lx and HP100 palmtop machines, to anybody collecting HP calculators. (It's also a cool machine because it runs on four ordinary AA batteries for practically forever.) Yep. It's an on-topic machine, by the ten-year rule.

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Jay West wrote: Yeah, when was Windows 3.0 (i.e. the beginning of the end)? 1990 right? I think (any prior) makes a good general rule. Nice and easy to remember. Exceptions apply. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Mike Kenzie wrote: There is a later version of BOB that runs on Windoze95! But BOB is such a CLASSIC example of offensive user interface design, that it (and Clippy) will remain topics of conversation for many decades.

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Roger Merchberger wrote: Thank Gawd for that. Sounds intriguing. CoCo3's SUCK! (Just kidding :) Yeah, I guess we'll be able to discuss the list itself in another 3 years ;) I wonder that myself from time to time. The last I remember his van, in which he stored part of his collection, was broken into, and, based on the amount of blood Bill found in the cab, the thief had found the razor blades Bill had mounted underneath his dash (ouch!) Still need to get that hotel room block going... -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Jay West wrote: You mean individually, each as examples in their own right, or collectively? In the former case, I agree (to a certain extent). But in the latter case, PC clones definitely have their place in history. They represent the commoditization of the computer industry. I don't think it's a simple answer. But really, I don't think this will ever become a forum for discussing PCs and Windows. For one, not many people on the list would tolerate this happening. For another, there are so many better machines to discuss. It's not like PC or Windows discussions, if they are allowed to take place, would become the norm and supplant the discussions we currently find topical. If an occasional thread pops up then I don't see a problem with that. If it's a stupid question that can be answered by searching Google and newsgroups then we can mercilessly flame the offending poster. But there definitely will be, at some point, very topical discussions about Windows and PCs of the 1990s. For example, see any Vesa Local Bus motherboards or interface cards around anymore? I say, don't worry about it. It won't happen for a while yet, and in the meantime we can continue to enjoy the 10 Year Rule. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

There is another issue here. Many of the machines that we currently consider to be classices -- The 8 bit micros, PDP11s, PPD8s, HP9100s, etc -- are repairable. Scheamtics exist, they were built from mostly standard parts that are still easy to get. If I need a chip for the I/O interface card in my HP9830 then most likely I can still get one. This, alas, doesn't apply to commodity PCs. Custom chips abound, schematics don't exist (and probably wouldn't be a lot of use if the did). I suspect that such machines will never really be repairable. A few years ago I gave a talk to HPCC on the internals of the HP9100. This was shortly after the HP49G had been announced. And I ended my talk by saying 'In 30 years time the HP49G will probably be unrepairable, but people will still be able to fix their 9100s using the information I've given here'. -tony

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Quite a few actually... I have a fair number of VLB and EISA based systems still running, and at least a couple boxes of assorted VLB boards in storage. (I'm still looking for certain types of boards for software testing though...) -Toth

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: Most of my cards came from "computer graveyard" type shops that I used to hunt though in years past. I don't remember any video VLB video capture cards, but the ISA type were common, and were usually just connected to the VLB video card in a VLB system (though the Diamond Viper VLB has no expansion connector... supposedly just an oversight during the design phase.) There were some VLB sound cards, but I doubt they really made any use of the VLB bus. I do have some VLB NE2000 based network cards. I've never done any sort of benchmarking on them though, so I have no idea if they are any faster than an ISA NE2000 card. I suspect that they might actually be a little slower, since the drivers are not as well tested. The boards I'm really after are things like the Promise caching EIDE controllers, S3 based and/or Diamond brand video cards (any bus type), some SCSI controllers (I don't think I need any more Adaptec 1740/1742 cards though!), and probably other boards I can't think of right now. I have my fair share of junk ISA cards too (and if anyone needs a particular model of ISA IDE/IO card, I might just have it...) While on the subject of EISA stuff...I finally got my hands on a nice EISA testbed platform not too long ago, but it doesn't have any hard drive mounting sleds. The system is a Dell Poweredge SP5100-2, and it came with 4 Adaptec AHA-2742 in some of the slots. Those are a dual channel bus mastering fast SCSI controller, and are great for my stacks of cdrom changers and such. I added two more AHA-2742 cards, so it technically now has 13 fast SCSI channels (12 add-on, 1 built-in). Anyhow, if anyone has hard drive sleds or the brackets for mounting drives in the bays of that system laying about, contact me off-list. -Toth

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 01:39:12AM -0500, Tothwolf wrote: I, too, have some VLB hardware that I use when I'm home - my old Win3.1 box is still running Win3.1. Mostly, I use it for cutting 5.25" disks. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Jun-2004 07:20 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -51.5 F (-46.4 C) Windchill -80.40 F (-62.5 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 9 kts Grid 060 Barometer 685.8 mb (10408. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

:-) Agreed. I am primarily a hardware person, but I guess much of the below applies to classic software too but I am not qualified to comment on that. I am somewhat unusual (I won't say unique because I know there's at least one other person here who does this) in that I pull classic computers apart (non-destructively !). Really apart, and then investigate what I can see. If there are no schematics, well I produce a set 99% of the time. And much of the time, when I'm working on a classic, I discover something which I consider beautiful, or at least interesting for the time. Some optimisation, either to increase performance with the technology then available (e.g. in the PDP11/45), or to reduce component count (e.g. the fact that the HP9810 uses half as many RAM chips as you might expect) or.... I _don't_ get this feeling when I look inside a PC. Any PC. Please don't forget Acorn (and I suppose I'd better mention Sinclair and Amstrad, although their machines are not in the same class as Acorn...) One of the oldest computer preservation groups in the world (18 years old now), although founded by a hardware hacker, has the aim of 'preserving old computers, software and operating practices as far as possible'. Yes, there's a lot more that needs to be preserved other than boards of chips (or trasnsistors, or valves, or...) Actually I started because I realised that unless _somebody_ started preserving these old machines then 30 years of history was going to get lost. And rather than simply say that, I started grabbing all I could find. Particularly minicomputers. -tony

This is a separate issue, but it worries me too. Just about everyone these days hasn't a clue as to how anything actually works :-(. -tony

That has _nothing_ to do with it. Somebody has to design those chips!. It is possible to understand how they work. This may partially explain the lethal driving I see around here :-(... It propably won't suprise you that although I don't drive, I have no problem repairing cars (old or modern). They're not that complicated. Heck, I'll have a go at repairing _anything_... It's the absolute, not relative number that bothers me. What I mean is that <n> years ago (for large n) there were A clueful users and B clueless ones (with B being fairly small). Now there are C clueful users and D cluelss ones. I think everyone agrees that D is larger than B (the number of non-knowledgeable users has certainly gone up). But IMHO C is less than A -- the number of clueful users has actually gone down in absolute terms. There is of course the other issue that anyone who uses something without properly understanding it is liable to make a right fool of themselves or worse.... -tony

Though I agree with most of your points, I think it is only self-evident that someone *once* understood how any one of those chips works. It is possible (and likely, once a couple of years have passed), that the information about how it was done then has vanished, even from the hands of those who once knew. Vince

If it is a real chip design, and not just a big PLD. I don't think the IP is reliably transferred once the team is disbanded, let alone through a chapter 11. Often only the legal "rights" persist in a useable form. Manufacturing data may not include enough data to reconstruct "how it works". The lifetimes of new designs (say, for a piece of consumer electronics), are generally quite short. Vince

A lot of people don't understand _wire_ properly ;-). Of course that is one of the most complex parts of your circuit in general. I once had a row with an idiot who decided that the 100 off 100nF decoupling capacitors I'd shown across the supply lines (this was a large board...) could be replaced by a single 10uF electrolytic mear the power connector. This was on a board of ECL clocking at 100+ MHz..... Most people with EE degrees over here can find and solve the equations a lot better than I can, but have no idea what they mean, or why they're applicable, or what the components actually are. Somebody once asked me for a 362.8 ohm (or something like that) resistor to use as an LED current limiter because that's what the formula had told him to use... -tony

A fellow technician once asked me : " If I wire 2 x 9v batteries in parallel , will I get 4.5v or 18v ? " My reply - a resigned " Oh , f*** off " didn't answer his question but everyone else in the room was laughing anyway. We also had an ex- RAF guy who used to ask for a 250v fuse - not a 12v one , a 250v one !? It took a long time to put him straight. Both could be classed as "board jockeys " as opposed to their earlier counterparts " valve jockeys". I am also told of production workers on a TV assy. line who complained that their remote controls didn't work. Of course , they tested fine....etc. It turned out ( this was in the early days of remote controls ) that they had "lifted " the remotes to use at home on their old "non-rc" tv's. Who was it said that ,to earlier civilisations, high technology would appear to be magic ? Not that much earlier , it would appear. Geoff. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt; To: &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2004 4:14 AM Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & a read a I

Regarding the two 9V batteries in a parallel... A better question is what happens if you put them at right angles.... you get 13.85V!!!!! [This is the square root of the some of the squares for those who are slightly innumerate] If a "sufficiently advanced technogoloy is indistinguishable from magic" and many people that magic once existed on earth, is it not possible that the older civilizations were actually more advanced than ours?????

----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe R." &lt;rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 10:37 PM Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ;-)) a I People get too specialized these days. If you ever worked for a process equipment manufacturer of any type you will have been bombarded with calls somebody without a finished degree would know. The school I went to would not pass an EE is he didn't know the resister color codes in his head, but that was in the late 80's early 90's. To be honest most EE's today only know a resister by the icon used in SPICE type programs, very few actually touch the things anymore since that's all done by technicians. The best engineers actually go on the floor sometimes and get their hands dirty. Small companies allow a designer to be involved in every facet of design, production, QC, and customer returns while in a larger company your insulated from all of that unless there is a huge fuckup that somehow comes back to you in the paper trail. Every generation of engineer graduating school has less overall knowledge then the ones before them since they have more layers of equipment and software between them and the process they are working on. Too much time is spent on teaching how to use a complex tool then what's going on inside of the process itself. When I was in college studying chemical engineering I had to crawl around real heat exchangers, learn how to play with live steam, work on a real 2 story distillation column, run material through industrial dryers, read stripcharts, weigh chemicals precisely before chucking them into a reactor, worry about thermocouple placement (and what type to use), etc. People that graduate now sit in front of a PC and play with ChemCAD and type in numbers. What you have now is allot of people who know allot about their small chunk in a device and nothing about what happens before or after their section. Nobody knows how the whole completed device really works in detail.

----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" &lt;aw288(a)osfn.org&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 11:47 PM Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ; -)) but know touch have are chunk section. Tools are great, I use them myself. But you have to have some knowledge of what's going on to know when the answer the tool gives you is wrong (maybe you didn't feed the tool enough information, forgot something, or there is a bug in the program, etc). Lots of solutions that look good on a computer end up not working great in the field because of many things that are not modeled in your tool. Bridges fall, roofs cave in, microchips short out, etc not because the tools were wrong, but because when things get too big or too small other forces that normally don't matter come into play. The only thing that really changes in engineering is we have new materials, controls, and better detailed models to play with, the basics you learned in school don't change much if at all. Without the basics the tools are just a good quick way to make a mess of things. Somebody who knows what's going on can jump in trouble. The most important things I learned in college is how to deal with people you might not like but have to work with, the basics of the field I was in (that you DO use believe it or not for the rest of your life), and how to solve problems you never seen before in a logical way. The fringe classes I took in college might not have been directly used by me in my job, but they were useful in giving me a perspective of what the other disciplines needed to know from me to get their part of the job done. Specialization is ok if you like doing just one thing and don't mind being out of a profession when your specialty is obsolete (especially in any programming or electronics field). A few people do know what the chip in a video cards does step by step, if they didn't they could not design the part to begin with. Just because there are a million gates in the part doesn't mean each one is doing something totally different. Tools just do the time consuming calculations, you still have to tell them step by step what to do so I would not say they do all the thinking. Then you have the fun of taking your model and figuring out a way to build, control, repair, and package it which is a whole job in itself.

This is *so* true. When I and my now-ex first arranged our mortgage, at one point we asked the loan officer how much we'd pay in interest over the entire amortization period, given certain parameters. We knew the number would be somewhere between two and three times the principal amount. The fellow punched at his calculator and came up with a number that was _way_ too low - later, our own calculations led us to suspect he gave us the total over just the term, not the full amortization period. When we pointed out that it was unreasonably low, he steadfastly stood by the number his calculator had churned out, not even realizing that it couldn't be anywhere near the answer to the question we wanted answered. I've always thought that was an excellent example of using a tool with grossly insufficient understanding. He not only didn't sanity-check the number himself, he didn't even acknowledge how unreasonable it was upon being called on it! I also was unable to ever get the bank to tell me exactly how interest was calculated - I had to juggle possibilities myself until I came up with one that tracked the bank's numbers exactly. (Today, I likely would not sign until they coughed up such information, and most certainly would be more insistent about it.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, der Mouse wrote: In my C class, one of my assignments calls for displaying some information, then skipping EXACTLY TWO lines, and then displaying some more. Invariably, I get some students who have skipped ONE line. When I point out that the gap is visibly obviously NOT two lines, they insist that it MUST BE 2 lines, in spite of what they see, because they had \n\n in the printf. (part of the exercise was to make them notice what happens when an output ends in mid line.) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

I couldn't say without knowing what mortgage.bas did. I do suspect, though, that it would be designed for US mortgages and thus at least somewhat inapplicable to mine, which was Canadian. (In case anyone cares: they de-compounded the quoted rate to a daily rate, with different rates in leap and non-leap years, and then charged interest at that daily rate, with payments wherever they fell.) Certainly when I asked on mortgage-ca, nobody seemed to know. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

How about the 12C versus the 17B, if I may ask? John A.

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: I think the question boils down: Are we losing any knowledge as each generation passes? My instinct would say "no", since the world is still working. People still understand electronics, mechanics, physics, etc. People are still being taught the fundamentals. One learns more in classrooms today than they did 100 years ago. Much of the subject matter has changed, but the basics remain the same. For example, we no longer learn how tubes/valves work, because we don't design with them anymore. However, the functional basics are the same as with transistors. We don't learn in detail how tubes or transistors work because we aren't going to be designing and building new ones. Now we learn how FPGAs and the like work because that's what we design with. In 100 years, FPGAs will be quaint, just like vacuum tubes are today. But as long as the basics are still being taught, the world will keep working. Exactly. But you don't need to go to school to learn this. A job as a waiter in a restaurant will teach these skills quite nicely. That's what most people don't realize school is all about. It's not about learning a subject matter, it's learning how to THINK properly (a skill many people lack today, partially as evidenced by the mess the world is currently in). -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

generation passes? I would have to answer this with a resounding YES! There are many skills (engineering related or not) that are lost regularly. You mentioned tube technology. My father was one of the most respected engineering wiremen of the 1960's. He was highly sought after for making harnesses by many companies. The art of hand lacing a harness is basically lost. Harnesses of any significant size are rarely used anymore, and when they are, they are almost invariably "tie wrapped". I am sure nearly every list member could give a similar example. An alternative question of course is... "Does it matter if knowledge is lost as each generation passes?" This gets much more complicated......

There was an idea some time back that if we ever get to the moon that we could be using "open-air" valves (tubes) in the vacuum there for high powered devices - with the benefit that goes with the better radiation resistance that goes with valve technology.It would be quite cool to watch a tv picture on an open CRT methinks.But don't walk between the plates. Keep those old Mullard/Thorn/EMI books - GE in the states? Geoff.

der> Is the "open-air" vacuum on the Moon a hard enough vacuum for der> vacuum-tube technology? Does it depend on whether it's day or der> night (and therefore whether there is solar wind pouring in)? I der> know that _some_ vacuum-tube technology - notably CRTs - depends der> on electrons having a mean free path well over the tube size, der> and that needs a pretty hard vacuum. That's true for all vacuum tubes. If that condition isn't met, you have a "gas filled tube" -- something you occasionally want, but not very often. I think even solar wind is a pretty hard vacuum. der> Is it valves that give you rad-hardening, or size? A transistor der> the size of a valve would, I suspect, be inherently pretty der> rad-hardened. (Certainly the largest transistors I've seen are der> far smaller than the smallest valve I've seen. Probably by der> about an order of magnitude, once you strip each one down to the der> operating portion.) Take a look at power transistors sometime. Some come in "hockey puck" packages, which describes not just the shape but also the size. And I think a fair fraction of that package is die... paul

Geoffrey Thomas wrote: I think you would have problems with cross-talk between the open tubes, unless you limited your design to a single tube, or had large spaces between the tubes. The glass does more than just hold the vacuum, it is also an insulator.

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Kevin Handy wrote: sigh.... I ain't gonna get into a rant about modern electronics / science "education" nowadays... but could perhaps I offer a small logical trail, in response to the above assertion? If your tubes, envelopless, are already in an ambient vacuum - interplanetary space, the surface of the moon, etc - pray tell me what there is to 'insulate' against? What precisely, would be the mechanism of the 'cross-talk'? Now, granted, any electromagnetic, or even mechanical, disturbances could still be propagated between these envelopless tubes, but this holds true whether or not the glass is there. To pick nits, there would be added element structure suppport issues, as many tubes use the inside of the envelope to support the micas, or other parts, but that is a mechanical design problem, and does not bear on the actual operational characteristics of the said envelopeless, designed-to-operate-in-an-ambient-vacuum thermionic emission active device. I have participated in the design of more than one 'tube', which we built on the base of a bell-jar, then pumped down to check the operation, then re-admitted atmosphere to make adjustments - as in fact most tube design work is done (at the physical prototype level). Nothing changes electronically, physically there are plate heat radiation differences, some exposed element effects... but I can tell you that a quad of 6L6GCs, having had their glass envelopes carefully removed, operate as per spec when relocated to a bell jar (and thus in a vacuum of calibratable 'hardness' , hint hint hint...) Okay, my contribution to off-topicness is done now. Cheers John

On 22 Jun 2004, at 09:03, der Mouse wrote: This issue must have been addressed in double-triodes and double-pentodes that I remember reading about. Does anyone know how "cross talk" was avoided in these valves (aka tubes). I'm off to dinner at my parents and I'll ask Dad about it given that he did lots of work in this area just after the war - enough to be offered a senior position at Ferranti but turned it down to stay in academia. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

There are plenty of multi-section valves around, with several electrode systems in the same envelope. Double triodes are really common, so are multiple diodes + a triode (like the EABC80 or UABC80 triple diode + triode (used in AM/FM radio sets for the AM detector, FM discriminator and 1st audio amplifier). And triode pentodes (either signal pentodes or output pentodes). In general the only coupling between the secions is due to stray capacitance. Actually, it's not uncommon for it to be coated with a conduction film for electrical screening purposes. -tony

Me too. Who nowadays can knap a stone knife? hunt and kill game with no weapon but a spear? make a bow, and arrows to go with it? make a fire with a wood drill, or even flint and steel? Or if you want skills less thoroughly lost, who can harness a yoke of oxen for plowing? forge a plow? forge a sword? Or even less so, who can ride a horse? do arithmetic on an abacus? use the English subjunctive correctly? ...design vacuum-tube circuits? John W. Campbell put it well in _Forgetfulness_. Does it matter? It better not, because knowledge _will_ be lost. Perhaps ask instead "Which knowledge can we afford to lose?".... /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Who the hell needs to know this stuff on a daily basisanyway? If you need to know how to do this stuff, ask someone that knows, or go to the library. The knowledge isn't lost, people, it is archived just where it ought to be. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

I am sure you can find hundreds of books and thousands of papers and thesis all about ancient tool making. At the library. Pick a obsolete area of electronics - one where the information is "lost" - then do a little searching for it. You may be suprised at what you find. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

Good to hear there are others who have/do hand lace. Just a few questions out of curiosity... Were these true harnesses or were they cable assemblies. The difference being that a true harness is completely assembled prior to installation [usually on a board] where a cabble assembly is the use of lacing (or other methods) to "dress" simple cables [Simple in the respect that they are usually point to point [2 connectors] or have few branches]? Did you use spot stitch, running stitches, or locking stitches? I can still do a decent spot or running stitch, but struggle with getting a decent [even spacing, high tension, low torsion] stitch. If these were board build harnsesses were they "rigid"? I remember being young [a kid actually] and being amazed when a harness [made with 22 or 24 gauge stranded teflon wire] could be lifed off the board, held vertical [often well over 6 feet long] from the bottom and completely retain its shape without any droop in the extended side branches.... David

Rumor has it a nice Imsai system will be sitting on a vendor table at VCF East. David V. Corbin wrote:

It would not suprise me if you can order a copy of the military standard pertaining to lacing. It will tell all. There are also a few older Air Corps technical orders dealing with lacing and harnesses (and all of the odd connectors nobody uses anymore) floating around. The easiest (but somewhat simple) reference I know to get a hold of is an old ARRL handbook. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

I would think anything pre-1970 would do. 1949 would certainly have it. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

I did a LOT of cable stiching when I was in high school. I worked for a company that installed central office equipment for the phone companies. Since I was young, agile, skinny (and not very smart) I got the job of running all the cables on the overhead racks and stiching them down. I'd spent WEEKS up there. I wasn't unusual to install 60 or so 52 pair cables at one time. We used all three types of stiches. I never did build harness on a board but I saw plenty of them being build when I was at Martin Marietta. They used to built them as more or less rigid harnesses but all the newer stuff seems to be nothing more than wires in sleeve with tie wraps at the junctions and ends to hold everything together. They're a far cry from the older stiched harnesses. We used lacing cord when I worked for the phone companies but at MMC they only used lacing tape however I rarely see either one anymore. Joe

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt; To: &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2004 5:08 PM Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ; about It all depends on your school and the background of the teachers there. The local university I went to had a good teacher to student ratio and most of the teachers were from industry. You could ask them anything on the spot and they would either direct you on how to solve the problem, or solve it for you with chalk and the blackboard off the top of their head. One teacher that did not have industry experience would just puke up exactly what the book he was using said on the subject over and over, not very informative (hell I learned how to read a long time ago thanks). These teachers encouraged us to ask questions and to do undergraduate thesis because it would break us up into teams just like in a real world environment. My team ended up giving a presentation at Purdue university on our subject competing with the big name schools from across the country. While I was at Purdue I visited the classrooms, dorms, and labs there (we were given a tour). The things I remember were that the students living on campus tended to have quite a few BMW's in the parkinglot, the latest and greatest lab equipment was used by the tenured professors only (and their support staff), the classes were taught by undergrads or there was a videotape, and we had 20+ people in a room and they had 100+. I always wonder who got the better education for their money (I am sure they got better jobs because of the school name and having connections). TZ

THis may vary by examination board, but at the HPCC meeting last week, one of the members brought alogn a Sharp calculator 'recomended for A-level' The thing was, it didn't have any logarithm or e^X keys (it did have y^x). And teachers at the club meeting confirmed that, yes, logarithms were not longer required to be taught. -tony

In message <011d01c4575c$6691dea0$5b01a8c0@athlon> "Antonio Carlini" &lt;arcarlini(a)iee.org&gt; wrote: I've got two fairly recent LCD calculators - a Casio fx-82SX "FRACTION" and a Sharp EL-531VH "Advanced DAL". My Casio has most of those, except x ROOT y. The Sharp does everything you mentioned, but the display contrast is abysmal. Look at it straight-on and you can barely see anything; look at the display from a 35-degree angle and you can actually see what it's up to. I've got a Commodore MM3MW LED calculator - made in the late 70s FWICT. It's a shame no-one seems to make LED calculators anymore - I could live with the short time between recharges, but I guess most other people couldn't be bothered (the Commodore has gone a fair few weeks on a single set of 750mAh NiMH cells). Heck, my mobile phone needs recharging every few days, charging a calculator at the same time wouldn't be a big deal. Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... BNFL : Buy No Fish Locally

It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated: I recently came across a good site that describes how to use one: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/gd86/slides.htm and I've been having fun using the one slide ruler I have, getting a feel for how to use it. -spc (it's neat how they work ... )

I remember reading the HP41 user manaul for about 1 hour some 20-odd years ago, and thinking 'This is obvious and beautiful'. I never went back :-) Several books on slide rules have recently been reprinted. I really must learn to use one quickly (I understand _how_ they work, and therefore how to use one, but I don't know all the tricks). -tony

----- Original Message ----- From: "David V. Corbin" &lt;dvcorbin(a)optonline.net&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 8:56 PM Subject: VCF Update!! together. I hope you guys are going to post some pictures for those who didn't go.

It was written... I had my digital cam with me, but was running around too much to get any pictures. If someone got some pictures of the show, I'd love a URL to them! Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

Megan, Could you send me the photos of my exhibit (vintage handhelds)? I would really appreciate having it. Thanks, Evan --- Megan &lt;mbg(a)theworld.com&gt; wrote:

It was written... together. I have a 41C that I use daily. Once you go RPN, you never go back. Someday I'd like to find a card reader and some cards for it... plus I need the quad memory expansion. On occasion I've found these at dealers but they want way too much moolah for them. Jay West --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, David V. Corbin wrote: Are we really "doomed" to re-invent the vacuum tube? ;) Again, I'm thinking in terms of vacuum tubes, and I can't see how losing the knowledge of how they worked is going to affect the future, or even the present for that matter. We're so beyond them technologically that they are irrelevant today. If we knew we were going to be plunged into another Dark Age (becoming likelier every day at the rate things are going) and somehow all knowledge subsequent to when vacuum tubes were state of the art is going to be lost then sure, I can see how teaching vacuum tube theory would be useful. But, as pessimistic as I am about humanity right now (or at least the future of the US) I don't think it's very realistic to assume this will happen. We still have historical records of how they were made. We still have (with some glaring holes) historical records of how all manner of technology for the past 5000 years has been accomplished, and we can re-learn and resconstruct old technology as we wish (mainly for hobby, but there are examples of utility, though rare). It would be neat to know how the Egyptians built the pyramids, but we have cranes and stuff for that today, so even if we knew their methods, is it really practical to teach them in engineering school? So one question might be: do we really need to overload EE students with theory about vacuum tubes when they'll probably never use them, much less come across them in the real world today? Or is it sufficient to have historical records on file for posterity? It's called "progress". Me niether, but I think I have a good idea as to what it is :) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

You might joke, but a few years ago (and I don't mean 50 years ago :-)), I was reading about a new device that was consisted essentially of field-emitting (rather than thermionic emitting) valves etched into a silicon chip. The principles, other than the cathode, of course, were identical to those of the valve. The advantage of such devices is that they were much more radiation-hard than conventional transsitor-based chips. A few years before that I read about a new sort of memory, based on quantized magnetic flux through a superconduction loop. The principle of reading and writing were identical to core memory. I remember laughing as they descrived provlems and possible solutions that were totally obvious to anyone who'd ever worked on said ferrite core memory.... -tony

How many will ever need to? William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

Yes, but writing compilers is a specialty. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

I ask then - how much code today is being written in machine language? One percent? A tenth of a percent? C may be a pain in the neck, but it is used in all sorts of places* where machine language was king. In any case, if we are talking about less than a percent, I think that would be a "specialty". *yes, I know about code that has to be very efficient. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

It is not just Microsoft. Most software these days is bloated. Yes, I think it is extreme, and I really have to wonder just what these programmers are doing with all of that code. The truth of the matter is that they are not being paid to write compact, efficient code. They are being paid to write nice looking programs in a short amount of time, with the knowledge that the hardware resources will just get bigger and better, week after week. Nice looking programs make money, not code efficient ones. Programs that ship on time (or nearly) make money, not ones still "in the lab" being optimized like crazy. This is what the industry wants, so this is what the schools teach. Probably - in fact I would hope so. I am not against learning assembly. It would be great if all CS and CE kids did, however I can see it falling On a side note, about your students - it could be simply because they are just more experienced. My C improved greatly after taking a Graphics class. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated: How much time do you have? From my experience (not in teaching, but in sitting in several Assembly classes from college) that not many students "get" it. Perhaps part of that is due to the insturctor (in my case, spending almost a month covering DEBUG along with simple 8088 instructions) and perhaps part of that is the strangeness of the language (compared to higher level languages). Several of your suggestions could be lumped into a single heading: calling other APIs. File handling? Calling Windows APIs? Similar stuff really, just sticking the data in the appropriate place, and transfering control to the appropriate routine (CALL, INT, SYSCALL, etc). On making a real Windows application, most of the code will be: push 0 push SOMECRYPTICVALUE lea eax,[ebp + localvar] push eax lea eax,[ebx + structoffset] push eax push SOMEVALUE push YETANOTHERVALUE push ebx mov eax,[ebp + localvar] mov eax,[eax + structoffset] push eax call _Win32DoSomeThingMystic Just to make a single API call. DOS would be eaiser to program, but really, how much modern DOS development is being done nowadays? Interrupt handling is interesting, but again, how much time do you have? -spc (I might suggest writing code for a virtual VAX ... )

Fred Cisin wrote: I'm not sure. I hate proprietary microsoft stuff, therefore my guess whould be no. That should be covered in another class: computer architecture. I think it would suffice if you only discussed intel, since that allows students to experiment with what they learned. Assembly languages are all so much related that if you learned one, you easily learn any other. At least that is my experience. Interrupt handling is very important, but you can't do that in ring 3 on Windows. I feel you should discuss interrupt handling and point out stuff like interrupt nesting and what to do if there's no space available on the stack at the time the interrupt occurs. I have no idea what that has to do with assembly programming, but that might be my ignorance. *Very* important: - passing parameters by C calling convention and Pascal calling convention - linking stuff, different output sections and stuff like that Also *very* important, perhaps even more important than the previous one as most people will probably never write assembly programs, but almost anyone debugging C programs gains a lot knowing how to debug C programs on assembly level. Other stuff, that also might belong to the computer architecture class: - paging, virtual memory - supervisor mode vs user mode (ring 0 vs ring 3) Okay, what are the options: * DOS - obsolete in the viewpoint of many (not mine) - 16 bit - no possibility to demonstrate "advanced" concepts as supervisor mode vs user mode and paging + allows demonstration of interrupt handling * Windows - Perhaps doable if you discuss device driver writing (might not be a bad idea at all) * Linux - I'm not sure at what level these student are, but they might also use Linux at home as lots of students do these days - Allows easy device driver writing - Free tools available, no royalties included (as opposed to MS stuff, but you might be able to work out a deal) But being a student at the VU in Amsterdam I might suggest using Minix, as that is primarly intended for teaching. It is mostly written in C, but (of course) portions are in assembly and those are IMHO the hardest parts to understand (task context switching for example). Is there practical work included in this course? I think that is *very* important, as I think it's very hard to memorize all the details if you've "worked" on it. Someone wise said something like "Tell it, and it will be memorized for a month; Show it, and it will be memorized for a year; Experience it and it will be memorized for a lifetime." Regards, Bert

Andy Holt wrote: That does not imply that the reverse is true also. You can still learn assembly language without knowing anything about CISC or RISC. I think I know very skilled people who really understand assembly programming, but have no idea what CISC or RISC means. The way I experienced it was that RISC suddenly appeared and only by then CISC processors where called that way. Regards, Bert

I would agree. I don't see how you can understand how a processor operates, or what different architectures mean, without a knowledge of the concepts of machine code and assembly language. And I discovered years ago (while trying to understand how telephone exchanges work) that it's a lot easier to understand a real example (in this case a real assembly language for a real processor) than some 'simplified' ficticious thing that could never actually work because important details are missing. -tony

I have been following this with great interest, and trying to hold back on commenting until I see where it went. As a little background I have been programming since 1972. Started on a PDP-8 writing everything in PAL-8 off of teletypes with paper tape. I also developed many military systems using embedded processors with 4-8K ROM and 256B-2KB RAM. These days I own and operate a company which primarily programs Windows and Linux applications although we do some embedded systems work. 1) Reliability and Maintainability are more important than Memory/CPU Cycles these days. 2) Good Code or Bad code can be written in ANY environment. 3) Compilers are better than humans at doing things consistantly. The end result is that it is not necessary to spend the hours/days/weeks [many fondly remembered] to make a program a few bytes smaller or a few cycles quicker. I do not believe however that this justifies the writing of bad or horribly inefficient code. Most of what is written today is crap, but my statement is not based on size or speed, but rather the number of patches/updates that are required. Having a basic understanding of machine architecture and "what goes on under the hood" is critical to writing good code. Knowing the details [e.g. specific directives for implementing a macro] is not. I recently finished a job using a major microsprocessor [PIC] that DOES NOT HAVE A [accessable] STACK. There is NO concept of push arguments on the stack and call the sub-routine. The "C" compiler is actually a sub-set of the full language since recursion will not work [nor is it flagged as an error]. Parameters are stored in fixed locations allocated by the compiler linker. The potential call tree is walked during the compilation process to see what routines can share temporary storage locations. I would estimate that 90% of the progrmmers out there today, who are "qualified C programmers" could not easily understand this, or adapt their coding style to it [the advantage of parameters over global variables is minimized in this environment]. As far as teaching assembler, I would recommend a slightly different approach to the "tradiitional" one. Instead of focusing on writing code from scratch, focus on what the code means. This might include some of the following: 1) Provide a library of source "building blocks". Focus on usage and impact. Remove the emphasis from knowing the complete instruction set and all of the assembler directives. 2) If "C" is a pre-requisite, write/purchase/acquire a small x86 emulator written in "C". It should be small [and probably not need to support the full x86]. I have seen "the light go on" in a number of "apprentice" programmers who understand "C" [or at least belive they do] but are confused by machine language. Seeing the register set as a "struct", seeing instruction dispatch as a "switch", etc often provides a good mental link. 3) Work heavily with compiler generated assembler. Most of the students will not ever code by hand, but seeing the output from compilers for high level source [different methods, different compilers, different source languages, maybe even a brief MSIL] is something they should be able to look at and at least determine if it is "heavy" or "light", and do minor trace/debug operations 4) Be goal oritented. Have a target that is a fairly significant project [heck even a game!]. You could present the target at the beginning of the course ["By the end of the term we will...."], or keep it as a surprise for near the end ["...Now that we have learned the basics, lets put it all together]. I have used both methods. Where the learner is an unknown [as in a classroom prior to the start of the semester] I prefer the former. If I know the learner [typical when doing training with some of my long term clients] then I like the "surprise" element, if I believe the person will "stick through the boring parts" at the beginning. The goal is to show that you really can do useful stuff and it is NOT just an acedemic exercise. These are just a few of my ideas and experiences, and by no means complete or definitive. Feel free to contact me directly david(a)dynamicconcepts.us if you would like to discuss this in greater detail off-list. I fully realize that setting up a class in this fashion takes significantly more work. It does not map directly to any existing "TextBook". Going through a sememster of "OPCODE 0x32 is the MOV instruction which will....; OPCODE 0x33 is the CLR instruction which will...." is certainly easier on the educational institution [which explains why this seems to be hown many classes are taught, based on what I see recent graduates knowing (if anything)], but does not [IMHO] provide the student with any useful knowledge to apply in the real world. David V. Corbin President / Chief Software Architect Dynamic Concepts Development Corp Sayville, NY 11782 631-244-8487

Paul, Thank for your comments. First you left out my intentional use of the word "consistantly" when discussing performance. I was not discussing raw performance. If you ask a given programmer of any experience level (except novice) to code the EXACT same algorithm once a week for a year, I strongly doubt that you will get 52 identical binaries. If nothing else a different register will be used somewhere, etc. When I have been in a marathon coding session [fortunately not as common, the body will not really take it any more], I am much more likely to code a register over-write or forget that a given instruction effects some conditional flag [or code an unnecessary "update the conditionals" type instruction] than the compiler is when compiling a piece of C/C++/C#/VB/Cobol/Fortram code. Turning the discusion to performance [raw]. On simpler microprocessors [PIC, 6809, 6502, etc] I will concede that an excellent assembler level program can beat the compiler in many cases. From a business standpoint, it may very well not be worth the additional cost however. On a multi-processor pentium class machine with L1 and L2 cache, working in a virtual memory environment, etc, my experience has shown that most senior programmers with years of experience can not even come close to matching the compiler! In fact I have only worked with one individual who really had the "feel" to be able to create code that ran noticably faster than the code I produced in C++ [after MUCH study of the code generation, benchmarking different constructs, etc]. Since none of the other [8] team members could code in anything other than C/C++, his code was "untouchable" if he and I were both unavailable. However ANY of the team members could easily read my code and make changes. The result was that he concentrated on the one area of the code that DID require his skills [the DSP/PC data exchange] while the rest of the team developed the remainder of the project [Otari's first 100% digital audio mixing console...Advanta!]. btw: I did not mean to imply that a non-stack oriented architecture implied that "C" [or other languages] could not be implemented. Simply that the *vendor name deleted* compiler (which is available as a free download....) did not. Since the program was fairly trivial, and of low performance requirements, this was perfectly acceptable and met a nice cost / programming time match for the specific project. David.

Frankly, I don't think too many applications are ever tested for speed other than "is it fast enough not to be a pain?". Sure, some applications need speed at the forefront, but let's face it, most don't. There are probably ten times the number of people writing programs that balance checkbooks or are just dressed up interfaces for some other mundane programs, to the one guy that is writing some speed needing game. When it comes to testing these mundane programs for speed, typically the requirement is "just don't make it slow". Yes, but how useful? I don't think the industry thinks it is worth it. As a side (and to give the hornet's nest another whack), shouldn't good programming discipline be formed using Pascal? That is why it was invented. You break the rules, it yells at you. Of course, Pascal is falling from grace as well... William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

I remember looking at Delphi, and I liked it. Still, Pascal (in whatever form) is a mostly shrinking market. I remember when Turbo Pascal 5.5 was a serious contender in the programming world. I loved it - really cool and well done (especially with some 3rd party company's libraries that I have since forgotten). William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:45:37PM -0700, Cameron Kaiser wrote: The only time I ever did any Pascal programming was under TSX-11/RT-11 on an 11/73. The system existed before I was hired - I just had to tweak an existing (and mostly bug-free, fortunately) program to double the scan rates on an automated ultrasonic inspection tank (filled with industrial diamonds!) and display the higher-resolution results. My experiences were less than pleasant due to limitations in the language (like being forced to open of a file of record type X... we now had two "types" of files, one with 768 nybbles per record, one with 1536 nybbles per record). It made the code ugly, plus the compiler wasn't smart enough to know that I would never open up both types at once, so it wouldn't overlap the record buffers (i.e., in C, I could have allocated one buffer and used all of it or half of it, but Pascal allocates it behind the scenes where you can't get to it). It's one of the reasons I prefer compiled languages where I/O is not embedded into the language structure (C, asm...) But I'm sure lots of us could go on a Pascal rant if prompted... -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 23-Jun-2004 03:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -76.5 F (-60.3 C) Windchill -116.4 F (-82.40 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 12.2 kts Grid 066 Barometer 682.4 mb (10536 ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

Indeed. I used to write everything in Turbo Pascal... and I never ran into something I needed C (or another language...) for. I learned Pascal using Oregon Software Pascal II. You had to write your own string libraries... which is a good learning experience if nothing else... ----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" &lt;aw288(a)osfn.org&gt; To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 4:51 AM Subject: Re: "Nobody benchmarks anymore" "But Schindler is bueno! Senior Burns is El Diablo!" -------------------------------------------------------------- Website - http://www.retrobbs.org Tradewars - telnet tradewars.retrobbs.org BBS - http://bbs.retrobbs.org:8000 IRC - irc.retrobbs.org #main WIKI - http://www.tpoh.org/cgi-bin/tpoh-wiki

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 01:55:33PM -0400, William Donzelli wrote: There are speed issues in programs where one usually doesn't expect them, like in MUAs (Mail User Agents). A while ago I was looking for a suitable graphic MUA under UNIX for my SWMBO (myself being a loyal mutt user, I don't know any usable graphics one offhand). Turns out that most programmers these days seem to be in urgent need of a basic CS education, elementary things like estimating the complexity of algorithms (Big O notation) obviously being not known to them: all the graphical MUAs performed reasonably well when facing small mailboxes (less than 50 small, mostly plain text, mails) but most failed miserably when being set to work with serious amounts of data. One of my mailboxes, filled from a mailinglist, contains some 40000 mails and is around 250 MB in size. Good old mutt copes nicely with this, needing about a minute to read it, with the limiting factor being IO (NFS). And this was with full threading ... Most graphical MUAs I killed after they showed no progress after half an hour of trying to load this mailbox. Net result: all the micro-optimizing of inner loops won't help you if your algorithm is some O(n^2) crap, the nasty thing with those being that they tend to work well with the small datasets used by most during development, while failing spectacularly when used with serious amounts of data. Learning the ropes of programming with Pascal (or even better Ada), i.e. in what is usually called a "discipline and bondage" programming language is _good_. It teaches one right from the start that sloppy cobbling together of code is not acceptable. Having formed good habits, one might be allowed to proceed to more dangerous programming languages like C. Delphi and Kylix seem to have quite a cloud of users ... Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

That's what the company I work for need to do if we expect to stay in business. In our case it is more like being skilled in understanding exactly how the whole system hangs together. Most of the code (99.99%) needs to be correct rather than fast (noone cares too much how fast the web GUI is). The remaining (pretty small) percentage gets pored over by multiple people, looking for a hint of a performance gain. Even that code is almost all in a HLL. In our case that may be because the trick is to do as little as possible in s/w and get the vlsi to do it instead. I'm not sure that's true. A poor assembly programmer can probably pick a lousy algorithm in an HLL too :-) If they are restricted to implementing a specific algorithm, then I agree, these days a compiler for a modern RISC processor should be able to whip the pants off a poor or even average programmer all the time, and even a good programmer much of the time. The trouble is that all programmers (good AND bad) think they can predict where it is worth directing their effort. For real world programs, all the evidence I've seen suggests that they are both about equal in their predictive abilities: i.e. almost always wrong! The presence of numbers suggests you cheated by doing the unthinkable and actually measuring the performance both before fiddling (to see where you should play) and afterwards (to see what you'd done). Do you realise how much trouble you could get into with such an unconventional approach :-) Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

Bert> Fred Cisin wrote: Bert> I'm not sure. I hate proprietary microsoft stuff, therefore my Bert> guess whould be no. Bert> That should be covered in another class: computer Bert> architecture. I think it would suffice if you only discussed Bert> intel, since that allows students to experiment with what they Bert> learned. Assembly languages are all so much related that if you Bert> learned one, you easily learn any other. At least that is my Bert> experience. If at all possible, teach assembly language on ANY machine OTHER than Intel. There's nothing within an order of magnitude as ugly, baroque, or bizarre as the x86 instruction set architecture; not even the IBM/360 comes close. Not only are RISC machines easy to implement, they are also easy to understand at an assembly language level. MIPS has just one crock (delay slots); Alpha is even better. Making any of them fly is another matter -- you can't do that with ANY contemporary machine until and unless you really understand how it schedules instructions. And for modern machines that takes quite a lot of study (for RISC as well as x86). But to get started on writing just *correct* assembler code, RISC is a breeze. Run Unix, it has a much simpler ABI. Or use a bare machine -- serial line output is trivial, certainly once you've initialized the UART. Interrupts? Sure, at some point. Not necessarily day 1. For one thing, embedded systems don't necessarily use interrupts. paul

Or use an 8-bit microcontroller-based board with a simple monitor program in ROM. Designing something like that is not a difficult project, and even a novice assembly language programmershould be able to understand 'To print a character on the screen, load the ASCII code into the accumulator and call this address'. I think most of use agree that the important thing is to understand the concepts of machine language. Once you understand one processor it doesn't take that long to understand another. And there's little reason to specifically teach the 80x86 and LuseDoze API, since very little code for those machines is written in assembly language anyway. -tony

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: I'm going to teach them how to make programs that run on the machines that are there. But I intend to also show them a little bit about other processors, including the lack of symmetry of the 80x86, what kinds of differences to expect, different mnemonics, different architectures, quirks, etc. My goal for the semester is that they will be able to create simple working programs, be able to start on larger projects, and have a clue how to deal with other different situations. Teaching them how to learn assembly language is far more important than the mastery of a given one. Surely somebody will be offended by that approach. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

Presumably for stage two you have them explain why the POLYx instructions (which are in microcode in the early VAXen) were subsetted out later on. If I get some time to build that SBC6120 I may have to have a go at learning some PDP-8 assembler. (I know I could use a simulator, but I'd prefer to use this as an incentive to build something!) Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

If you have access to the appropriate printset, that might be an option. I don't have it on paper - I know that some of the 780 stuff is up at bitsavers, but I don't know whether any of the available prints have microcode listings. In all seriousness, you might want to start with something that is a tad simpler than an 11/780 though! I went to a DECUS session many moons ago where the guy was talking about the latest MIPs chips. He mentioned that while he was at DEC he would while away the time between whatever bits of stuff he was actually supposed to be doing, by studying the VAX-11/780 design. Obviously must have paid off! Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Tony Duell wrote: I think that we are getting more than a little past what I can realistically teach beginners in one semester. Ten or twenty years ago, we could add followup, more advanced classes into the schedule. Now I'm in a [losing] fight for survival, trying to keep programming classes alive. If they ask me to teach Microsoft Weird again, I might not survive.

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Jules Richardson wrote: While too much for the first semester intro to asm class, many of these proposals would make a GREAT textbook! My teaching is at the community college, which is a two year school that grants Associate of Arts (AA) degrees, provides the first two years and prepares students to transfer as third year students into 4 year schools, provides skill enhancement, adult enrichment for students who WANT to learn (why I joined), employable skills, and some remedial computer literacy, etc. Ten or twenty years ago, I could also recruit! I got Miriam Liskin to teach our dBase course, Charles Stevenson (Micropro) to do a semester of the data structures and algorithms class, etc. Now enrollment is lower, and they are cancelling (and deleting from future offerings!) any course with low enrollment. (which is damn near everything except required courses and remedial ones.) There is a tradition in the USA that, within the classroom, a professor is in absolute control. But now they want much more detail in course outlines, with people who know nothing about the subject matter having veto power over content, administrators who firmly believe that no course is appropriate in the college that goes into more detail of the subject than they personally know, an administrator who [incorrectly] insists that it is "ILLEGAL" for us to offer ANY course that is taught as "upper division" (third or fourth year) in any of the 4 year schools (including two courses that one of the state 4 year schools COPIED from us), a vice president who wanted to be a high school principal instead, etc. Retirement is starting to be interesting. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Kevin Handy wrote: That would be GREAT for a second semester. The semester is 16 - 18 weeks long, with 3 hours of lecture per week. They have NO prior assembly language, and some won't really have the prerequisite od "any other programming language". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Unlike the good old days, I no longer have ANY control over what is in the lab! Even FREE, they won't let us have anything in the lab, except for the HPaq machines that THEY chose and provide! A few years ago, they dumpstered most of Monte's collection two weeks BEFORE the deadline that they had given him to remove it. I had to get my VT100 back from their dumpster. I was able to negotiate keeping a single 4 foot wide shelf of artifacts. But they threatened Monte with criminal prosecution if he went near the dumpsters. A few months ago, they even took away the 5150 that the intro classes were using to explain "PC". They won't even willingly let me store my weapons of math instruction. (abacus, slide rule, board with 32 lightbulbs, 24" CADET? disk platter, etc.) Fortunately, they haven't been looking behind the books on my bookshelves :-) But one administrator has expresses an intent to forbid any of us having more than one bookcase! Wanna know WHY I'm grumpy?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" &lt;spc(a)conman.org&gt; To: &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 9:39 PM Subject: Re: "Nobody teaches assembly language" Universities are like any other buisines these days, costs go up so you reduce quality and raise tuition. Unlike a car tire that's built bad and causes an accident where the maker get sued, what recourse does a student have when he graduates from a university that didn't teach him anything useful?

It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated: So is all that loose oxygen in the air. Best have that removed too. You know, after reading that, I'm surprised my condo didn't spontaneously combust with the EPA fining me for having a toxic waste dump. Sheesh. You know, letting the students use the computers is just asking for trouble. Best to let the administrator know that so he can, you know, ban anyone from actually *using* the computers and soiling the keyboards and monitors. What an incompetent consluttant. What he should have done was ask all the instructors what they wanted and then told that to the administration. -spc (I'm beginning to think that mail order diploma mills are at least honest about what they're ofering ... )

Correcting an incorrect system time requires pleading with admin, or cracking the admin password (easier) In one of the labs, USB drives (flash memory) are banned, "because they might have viruses". They permit floppies, and the CMOS is set to boot from floppy! If I want to use the DDJ "algorithms books" CD-ROM, then I need to install the access software, and hide it or remove all trace of it when I'm done. One of the campuses has a unix box that we host some websites on. The central administration has declared that that has to go, and that ALL faculty websites must be designed and administered by them. There are NO gruntled employees here.

Who was he friendly with - with whom was he friendly -if you like ? It's usually the case - all these rats network like hell. Geoff.

The same goes for the VP who hired the consulting firm for Carrier Corporation. He was later fired after getting a great deal on central consulting for systems and network management. Everything was leased and the consultants didn't see a reason for the Carrier Engineering staff to use Alphas or Suns. Then, they too got a "great deal" on double the price, leased Dell computers (low-end business class machines, not the $2000.00+ US ones, that well, these lower class ones were priced above). The networking was a laugh too. The consulting firm convinced that same VP (before he was fired) that usin some no-name brand, P.O.S. series of routers and switches was far better than using Cisco equipment. When asked about the savings, he was told by the consultants, "oh, you'll save about 10-20% over buying or leasing the Cisco equipment." One of the engineers got a problem with his departmental router one day after the tiny hours the consultants kept and decided to call the manufacturer to repair said issues himself. First noticeable problem: international number, non-800. Second problem: when reaching them, they did not speak English. Third: It was a small custom builder/manufacturer out of Taiwan. Fourth and final: they had difficulty finding their own staff person who wrote the code for the router, let alone anyone who knew anything of that router series. True story. Most people were wondering why Carrier was doing so bad. It was dumb, money driven, hey it's Windows-based, morons who got put into control somehow. This year is the first year since that VP was fired and lo and behold: they are starting to rebound and actually hire more staff than do massive plant layoffs and shutdowns. I hear next year that they are going to try to get DEC Alphas and AMD Opterons in there for the engineers (Suns use Opterons now too =/ ). -John Boffemmyer IV At 03:15 PM 6/26/2004, you wrote: ---------------------------------------- Founder, Lead Writer, Tech Analyst and Web Designer Boff-Net Technologies http://boff-net.dhs.org/index.html ---------------------------------------

I have been following this with great interest, and trying to hold back on commenting until I see where it went. As a little background I have been programming since 1972. Started on a PDP-8 writing everything in PAL-8 off of teletypes with paper tape. I also developed many military systems using embedded processors with 4-8K ROM and 256B-2KB RAM. These days I own and operate a company which primarily programs Windows and Linux applications although we do some embedded systems work. 1) Reliability and Maintainability are more important than Memory/CPU Cycles these days. 2) Good Code or Bad code can be written in ANY environment. 3) Compilers are better than humans at doing things consistantly. The end result is that it is not necessary to spend the hours/days/weeks [many fondly remembered] to make a program a few bytes smaller or a few cycles quicker. I do not believe however that this justifies the writing of bad or horribly inefficient code. Most of what is written today is crap, but my statement is not based on size or speed, but rather the number of patches/updates that are required. Having a basic understanding of machine architecture and "what goes on under the hood" is critical to writing good code. Knowing the details [e.g. specific directives for implementing a macro] is not. I recently finished a job using a major microsprocessor [PIC] that DOES NOT HAVE A [accessable] STACK. There is NO concept of push arguments on the stack and call the sub-routine. The "C" compiler is actually a sub-set of the full language since recursion will not work [nor is it flagged as an error]. Parameters are stored in fixed locations allocated by the compiler linker. The potential call tree is walked during the compilation process to see what routines can share temporary storage locations. I would estimate that 90% of the progrmmers out there today, who are "qualified C programmers" could not easily understand this, or adapt their coding style to it [the advantage of parameters over global variables is minimized in this environment]. As far as teaching assembler, I would recommend a slightly different approach to the "tradiitional" one. Instead of focusing on writing code from scratch, focus on what the code means. This might include some of the following: 1) Provide a library of source "building blocks". Focus on usage and impact. Remove the emphasis from knowing the complete instruction set and all of the assembler directives. 2) If "C" is a pre-requisite, write/purchase/acquire a small x86 emulator written in "C". It should be small [and probably not need to support the full x86]. I have seen "the light go on" in a number of "apprentice" programmers who understand "C" [or at least belive they do] but are confused by machine language. Seeing the register set as a "struct", seeing instruction dispatch as a "switch", etc often provides a good mental link. 3) Work heavily with compiler generated assembler. Most of the students will not ever code by hand, but seeing the output from compilers for high level source [different methods, different compilers, different source languages, maybe even a brief MSIL] is something they should be able to look at and at least determine if it is "heavy" or "light", and do minor trace/debug operations 4) Be goal oritented. Have a target that is a fairly significant project [heck even a game!]. You could present the target at the beginning of the course ["By the end of the term we will...."], or keep it as a surprise for near the end ["...Now that we have learned the basics, lets put it all together]. I have used both methods. Where the learner is an unknown [as in a classroom prior to the start of the semester] I prefer the former. If I know the learner [typical when doing training with some of my long term clients] then I like the "surprise" element, if I believe the person will "stick through the boring parts" at the beginning. The goal is to show that you really can do useful stuff and it is NOT just an acedemic exercise. These are just a few of my ideas and experiences, and by no means complete or definitive. Feel free to contact me directly david(a)dynamicconcepts.us if you would like to discuss this in greater detail off-list. I fully realize that setting up a class in this fashion takes significantly more work. It does not map directly to any existing "TextBook". Going through a sememster of "OPCODE 0x32 is the MOV instruction which will....; OPCODE 0x33 is the CLR instruction which will...." is certainly easier on the educational institution [which explains why this seems to be hown many classes are taught, based on what I see recent graduates knowing (if anything)], but does not [IMHO] provide the student with any useful knowledge to apply in the real world. David V. Corbin President / Chief Software Architect Dynamic Concepts Development Corp Sayville, NY 11782 631-244-8487

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 21 June 2004 21:47, William Donzelli wrote: I picked up a copy of Machine Language for the Commodore 64 and other Commodore computers by Jim Butterfield this weekend. - -- Collector of vintage computers http://www.ncf.ca/~ba600

You may need assembly level programmers, but your entire industry is unlikely to employ them in sufficient numbers to be anything other than a blip on the radar. You also have the problem that your hardware is quite specialised and likely to diverge even more as time goes on from the general purpose CPUs that the rest of the world runs its code on. You presumably need people who understand the hardware at a sufficiently deep level. I'm not sure that machine level programming is enough for that (although I guess it *might* be a useful first step). I know that I started out with a bit of 8080, fortunately followed quite swiftly by Z80 (and CP/M). Then PDP-11 and VAX MACRO languages. So a trend of constantly increasing programmer friendliness. Then I had to pick up Alpha (PALcode, lovely stuff), MIPS (R5K, no branch delay slots that I recall), PowerPC, Solaris and more PPC. I learnt to be grateful for compiler's then. I still had to write machine code, but only to provide the basic underpinnings for the OS and maybe a few performance-critical bits. The rest of the time I'm either trying to make sense of debug info that spits out a bunch of registers or trying to squeeze the hardware by having it do multiple things at once. But if I look back on all of this, I still think I've spent 95% of my coding time reading and writing code in a HLL (I'm counting BLISS and C as HLL for the purpose of this message :-)) If the games industry in the UK pays well (and if it employs more than a few dozen programmers!) these days, do let me know. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

It was written... Remember... in the ART of assembler programming.... shaving off the size of the code is only 49% of the art. The 51% of the ART is shaving off cpu cycles necessary to run it by careful choice of instructions and algorithms and data structures :) Jay West

From: "Tom Hudson" &lt;tomhudson(a)execpc.com&gt; I recognize the situation. Back in my Philips (one ell, not two) days, I was working on a 32K (8 bit) mini system for local authorities. Everything was devided in 2K/8bit pages. The program was so big, that (1) in order to get a 10-20 byte routine, I had to split up a procedure in two parts (A and B) , where B could then be called from a procedure C. The reason to call B from C, was that I otherwise would not have room to end C with a RETURN instruction. Disgusting, but it teaches you about effective (in the sens of compact) programming. Another project in the system, had been "undersold" by the representative. He tought 32K was more then sufficient for RJE, 4-5 tellers, and 1x 3270 simulation. It wasnt. It ran efficiently on 64K, but the customer didnt want to buy 32 more K. The seller didnt want to admit loose of face, so what we did, was to implement a disk overlay routine on 8" SSSD floppies. God, it stank ! The traffic on the floppy was so intense, that we had to replace the floppy at least once a week. Totally worn out. However, the seller was happy, as he got his provision from a 32K sale Nico --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.701 / Virus Database: 458 - Release Date: 07-06-2004

I left one out Regardless of whether you actually USE it in the project, if you do not have an understanding of machine language, then is it possible to do a good job of designing hardware?

If you're a college student studying computer science and have never programmed in machine/assembler, turn in your degree, it wasn't worth it. Same goes for non comp sci students, but instead of machine/assembler... any computer programming language at all. Jay West

Incidentally, I bought a book last year which describes some experiments in home-made valves (vacuum tubes). Yes, they're pretty poor devices, but I applaud the author for actually having a go (using filaments taken repaired himself). At least he's trying which is more than most people do. First did that about 25 years ago. I think what bothers me (and it sounds much like what you're saying) is not that people can't design with ECC83s/12AX7s any more, but that they can't design -- period. They just don't know how to think. They're not interested in finding out how things work, how to repair them, how to improve them, and so on. 'PC modding' (I beleive that's the term) depresses me. Modifying a computer used to mean a lot more than installing random flashing lights on the cooling fan! How many people do you know who have a reasonable multimeter (not just something suitable for testing batteries)? An oscilloscope? An engineer's lathe? And how many people do you know who spend their spare time working with such things for fun. Hopw many can program in _any_ language (I include things like spreadsheet macros here) and can also justify the algorithms that they use? There have been discussions over here about teaching maths in schools, in that with the common use of calculators it's not necessary for students to understand things like long multiplications (the fact that's _exactly_ how every calculator I've ever examined does multiplication is another matter, but anyway). To some extent that's true, but then you should teach the correct use of calculators. Why some statements that are mathemetically correct are not suitable for machine calculation. The problem with itterations that converge far too slowly, or are unstable. Things like that. Problem is, that's _not_ what's taught. Actually, I am not convinced anything worthwhile is taught in schools any more :-( -tony

On 22 Jun 2004, at 08:53, Tony Duell wrote: Well I can think of one programmable calculator that I used in the early 1970s that did multiplication/division etc using logarithms. This had the neat side effect of giving 2x2=3.99999999 rather than the expected result (unless of course, you knew how it worked in which case the result was expected). ISTR that it used nixie tubes for output and that this thing cost heaps of money (like $10K in the days when the Aussie dollar was worth more than the US one!). Programming was achieved using a single punched card with pre-punched chads removed using some fancy tool (in my case a paper clip). The card was read by placing it in the card reader (duh!) which had lots of pins and contacts, where the holes were lead to completing a circuit so you basically had a card programmed ROM. I keep wanting to write that this calculator was a Wang, but I'm not really sure (it's been a while). I'm wondering whether the Physics Department still has it - I should ask. I don't know enough to comment, only that the results are generally disappointing. Perhaps I was atypical for my generation, but I read heaps of things when I was young (apart from lots of fiction, there were useful things like "Look and Learn") as we didn't have much TV and no computers to waste time with. Of course, I'm redressing this in my later years :-) Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

Both in lack of knowledge, and more importantly in a lack of any desire to learn more. I read very little fiction, but I must have several thousand non-fiction books (mostly on maths, engineering, electronics, etc), and I read them all the time. I must be the only person who regards 'radio and television serviceing' (annual volumes of circuits and service notes for radios and TVs) as light bedtime reading, but it's amazing how many useful tricks you learn analusing those circuits. All I can say is that when digital TV comes, I'm not going to bother buying a decoder. There are plenty more interesting things to spend my time doing. -tony

----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Pope" &lt;bpope(a)wordstock.com&gt; To: &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 7:41 AM Subject: Re: Modern Electronics (was Re: List charter mods & headcount... ; were students My short term memory sucks, therefore I have to learn how things work to solve problems. Most tests given at schools are based on just memorizing specific problems and puking them up on test day. If you have a picture perfect memory you do extremely well in your classes, but are you really learning anything? So if your designing complicated products you need to know how things work, if your practicing medicine or law your probably better have perfect memory.

If you have enough equipment I completely agree with this. The days of having to make sure your source code was perfect before submitting a card desk, not having any interactive debuggers, are long gone. The number of people who have to write "enter source, run perfrectly first time" code is an even smaller percentage than those who will write significant amounts of machine level code!

Fred Cisin wrote: I administer the RedHat certifications, which are all performanced-based. No multiple guess or true/false; here's a computer, there's something wrong with it, we want you to make it do <this>. As long as your fix survives a reboot and doesn't break anything else, we don't much care whether you use the point&drool tools, vi, ed, or voodoo. Then, here's a baremetal box, here's the install media. We want a computer that does <that> and <the_other_thing>. Install media includes the RedHat Admin Guides, all man pages are available, and the incidental howtos and changelogs installed by each software package. I really like that. You don't have to just guess well as in a written test. You also don't have to memorize everything. You have to be able to think under pressure, you have to *read* the instructions and follow them (and I have seen many candidates go home losers because they couldn't do that), you have to effectively budget your time, and you have to know where to go for information. Holy Crap. It's a real-world skills test! :) Doc

Me too. I taught Operating Systems one semester at McGill, and my exam was open-everything; I did my best to design the exam so it required thought and awareness of principles rather than regurgitation of memorized information. I even included a joke (clearly marked as zero points, to be sure) as the last question on the final. (The course was unusual in some other ways, too.) The students seemed to split into two camps: one was "whoa, man, this is strange and different, I don't like it" and the other was "whoa, man, this is new and different, give me more". Practically nobody seemed to feel any other way about it. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 24 Jun 2004, at 07:51, Tony Duell wrote: Acknowledging that you don't pretend to know everything means that you are more than just a pretend engineer (I was going to use the word wanker but this is a family mailing list :-). Tony please don't take this as something personal, it's just I'm fed up with (generally younger IT people telling me how to suck eggs...). Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

Father always told me: Expert EX previous-has been pert <spurt> - a drip of water under pressure so ex-pert is a has been drip..... George Rachor ========================================================= George L. Rachor Jr. george(a)rachors.com Hillsboro, Oregon http://rachors.com United States of America Amateur Radio : KD7DCX On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Tony Duell wrote:

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 22:58, Tony Duell wrote: I seem to recall for my degree anything requiring databooks would be done as coursework, not as an exam in an exam hall - which seems the logical approach. We used eurocard-based 68000 machines for learning assembly, and I can't for the life of me remember who the darn things were made by. I was lucky in that I'd done quite a bit of x86 assembly beforehand, so the 68k stuff was a breeze. I'm not sure if I agree with the current trend toward open book exams - yes, in the real world, chances are you will have reference material handy. But the current attitude of most people I've known who have taken such exams is that they don't need to actually know anything, because they can just bluff their way through it in an exam by reading the book and get sufficient marks to pass. Then these people go out into the real world and they can't think for shit - as soon as an oddball problem hits them they're just incapable of working it through to a solution as they're too used to just being able to read the answer in a book right when they need it. I know I'm perhaps a little younger than the average age of people on this list, but I feel I was one of the last generation who was lucky enough to do an old-style degree course. We had access to real (and diverse) systems rather than things being emulated, and we were given a lot of grounding theory in the way things actually worked, and more importantly we weren't given an easy ride - no such thing as an open book exam then, no whizzy graphical tools to do half the work for us etc. I'm amazed at how often the fundamentals that we were taught have helped me work some problem out - and I've lost track of how many of the later generations of graduates I've had to deal with who just can't think properly because all they've been taught is how to push a mouse around a screen. Interesting the point somone made about the games industry stagnating because there's no innovation any more. I think that's true of the whole industry - the current generation of students are rarely taught the basics and how to drive a GUI. They get good pass marks for doing this, the university's performance figures look good, and that's what the industry on the surface of things think they want. I do wonder quite where things will be in ten years when there's almost nobody left who can actually think for themselves though... Anyway, rant over :-) cheers Jules

der Mouse wrote: I would agree generally there. However, I'd also say it's important to have some stuff memorised, so you don't end up referring to books for trivial problems. Dan