16 Nov
2012
16 Nov
'12
9:25 a.m.
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 11/16/2012 11:09 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
One of these...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
4000 AXP Model 710. Got it 10 years ago, fiddled with it when I first
got it (it boots to one of two different versions of UNIX on two of
the 5 installed SCSI disks) but don't have much reason to use it
often.
One interesting historical note - it was formerly OSCAR, the card
catalog computer for the Ohio State University library system. I
picked it up from surplus for $50 because I wanted the included TSZ07
(and I can't ship a TSZ07 for $50!) I put more hours on the tape
drive reading old backup tapes than I ever put on the server.
It has one CPU and about 1/4 the max amount of memory.
-ethan
Nice. I have a couple of older Alphas (one is
*much* larger, with a
Futurebus+), so I know a little about the line, but not the later
models. I had no idea HP packaged them up with their hot-swap drives.
I've only ever seen DEC-badged Alphas in person.
What FB+ Alphas do you have? 
16 Nov
16 Nov
10:20 a.m.
On 11/16/2012 12:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Nice! Sounds like a HECnet node in the making!
I have a large number of TurboLaser Bus modules here, for
AS8000-family machines. I've been unsuccessful in finding one to put
them in...I want an 8200 or an 8400, but they seem to have completely
disappeared. I haven't seen one on the market for YEARS. I have no
idea of what's up with that.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
What FB+
Alphas do you have?
One of these...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
4000 AXP Model 710. Got it 10 years ago, fiddled with it when I first
got it (it boots to one of two different versions of UNIX on two of
the 5 installed SCSI disks) but don't have much reason to use it
often.
One interesting historical note - it was formerly OSCAR, the card
catalog computer for the Ohio State University library system. I
picked it up from surplus for $50 because I wanted the included TSZ07
(and I can't ship a TSZ07 for $50!) I put more hours on the tape
drive reading old backup tapes than I ever put on the server.
It has one CPU and about 1/4 the max amount of memory. 
1:06 p.m.
On 16/11/2012 18:20, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 11/16/2012 12:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I have a large number of TurboLaser Bus modules here, for
AS8000-family machines. I've been unsuccessful in finding one to put
them in...I want an 8200 or an 8400, but they seem to have completely
disappeared. I haven't seen one on the market for YEARS. I have no
idea of what's up with that.
The only TurboLaser I ever saw in the wild was an 8400 being field tested at
ICI Dumfries (Scotland) while I was installing a TruCluster of 4100s. It
looked very Heath Robinson and the engineer on site swore at it most foul
because of it's tendency to crash. These days I walk past its offspring
every day, we have several large Alphas in the warehouse at work, the
biggest being a GS60e which is the direct descendent.
I power 'em up from time to time, the noise of that, an AXP7710 and a
VAX6200 is almost music to my ears :)
--
Adrian/Witchy
Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator
Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer
collection?
What
FB+ Alphas do you have?
One of these...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
4000 AXP Model 710. Got it 10 years ago, fiddled with it when I first
got it (it boots to one of two different versions of UNIX on two of
the 5 installed SCSI disks) but don't have much reason to use it
often.
1:38 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Adrian Graham
<witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/11/2012 18:20, "Dave McGuire"
<mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
If I want the sweet sounds, I fire up the VAX8300 in the basement. I
still have production code for COMBOARDs on that (backed up several
ways, of course).
-ethan
On 11/16/2012 12:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> What FB+ Alphas do you have?
>
> http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
>
> 4000 AXP Model 710.
I power 'em up from time to time, the noise of that, an AXP7710 and a
VAX6200 is almost music to my ears :) 
2:44 p.m.
On Fri, 16 Nov 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Adrian Graham
<witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> wrote:
I had an 8250 with four RA-81 drives. Got that little beauty straight out
of the machine room at Mannesmann-Tally. Neat machine.
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!
On 16/11/2012 18:20, "Dave McGuire"
<mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
If I want the sweet sounds, I fire up the VAX8300 in the basement. I
still have production code for COMBOARDs on that (backed up several
ways, of course). On 11/16/2012 12:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> What FB+ Alphas do you have?
>
> http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
>
> 4000 AXP Model 710.
I power 'em up from time to time, the noise of that, an AXP7710 and a
VAX6200 is almost music to my ears :)
2:11 p.m.
On 11/16/2012 04:06 PM, Adrian Graham wrote:
I've never heard of one crashing. Bizarre.
We had two 8400s (8x 5/300) in the datacenter at a previous job. They
were really quite nice machines. They did a lot of offline processing
for a pre-Google search engine called Altavista.
I have a
large number of TurboLaser Bus modules here, for
AS8000-family machines. I've been unsuccessful in finding one to put
them in...I want an 8200 or an 8400, but they seem to have completely
disappeared. I haven't seen one on the market for YEARS. I have no
idea of what's up with that.
The only TurboLaser I ever saw in the wild was an 8400 being field tested at
ICI Dumfries (Scotland) while I was installing a TruCluster of 4100s. It
looked very Heath Robinson and the engineer on site swore at it most foul
because of it's tendency to crash. These days I walk past its offspring
every day, we have several large Alphas in the warehouse at work, the
biggest being a GS60e which is the direct descendent.
Very nice! Take them home!
I power 'em up from time to time, the noise of
that, an AXP7710 and a
VAX6200 is almost music to my ears :)
Glorious!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
17 Nov
17 Nov
12:25 a.m.
On Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:11:20 -0500
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
We had two 8400s (8x 5/300) in the datacenter at a
previous job. They
were really quite nice machines. They did a lot of offline processing
for a pre-Google search engine called Altavista.
Ohhh, Altavista! The mother of all
Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
--
\end{Jochen}
\ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}
12:42 a.m.
On 17/11/2012 08:25, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:11:20 -0500
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
I don't think it did, it was sold and abandoned just in front of the
steam roller that is google, very sad...
... even Babel Fish seems to have gone, and that underground homage that
was astalavista.net seems to have gone legit
--
Dave Wade G4UGM
Illegitimi Non Carborundum
We had two 8400s (8x 5/300) in the datacenter
at a previous job. They
were really quite nice machines. They did a lot of offline processing
for a pre-Google search engine called Altavista.
Ohhh, Altavista! The mother of
all Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
3:27 a.m.
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 08:42:18 +0000
Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
Sold and abandoned just like DEC, as I
wrote...
Interesting question: Would google have happened if Altavista wherent
ruined?
--
\end{Jochen}
\ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}
Ohhh,
Altavista! The mother of all Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
I don't
think it did, it was sold and abandoned just in front of the
steam roller that is google, very sad... 
7:09 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 17/11/12 6:27 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 08:42:18 +0000
Dave Wade<dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
Sold and abandoned just like DEC, as I
wrote...
Interesting question: Would google have happened if Altavista wherent
ruined?
Yes, because Google made the paradigmatic leap (MapReduce) that all its
competitors [almost inexplicably] failed to make.
http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
This is not to say MapReduce is 100% original, but somehow in Google's
architecture and implementation, they hit all the right buttons and
changed the game.
--Toby
Ohhh,
Altavista! The mother of all Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
I don't
think it did, it was sold and abandoned just in front of the
steam roller that is google, very sad... 
8:48 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
miss's the good old days of altavista aww the memories of school computing
with kidworks 2 haha :) my school got a computer lab in 93
11:23 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
Toby Thain wrote:
On 17/11/12 6:27 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
For me it was PageRank that made all the difference. I remember when
searching on the Internet meant using Archie or Veronica to find
interesting files on public FTP servers. When I created my first web
site ("Mosaic page") in 1994, you were supposed to send an email to UIUC
so they could update their page listing all the home pages in the world.
By the time Altavista came along, the web had grown enough that indexing
it all on a single workstation was a great demo of what the Alpha could
do and it was what DEC did to impress many pontential buyers. It soon
evolved into a separate business. But as the web continued to grow, it
became less and less useful as it became common for the link you were
looking for to be on page 8 or later of the results.
In 1998 I switched to Google because PageRank meant I rarely had to look
beyond the top half of the first page of the results to see what I was
looking for. The "I'm feeling lucky" button was meant to show off this
feature.
-- Jecel
Interesting question: Would google have happened
if Altavista wherent
ruined?
Yes, because Google made the paradigmatic leap (MapReduce) that all its
competitors [almost inexplicably] failed to make.
2:53 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 17/11/12 2:23 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Toby Thain wrote:
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the endlessly scalable and
fault-tolerant architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm
shifts were involved. No wonder Google won. :)
On 17/11/12 6:27 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
For me it was PageRank that made all the difference. I remember when Interesting question: Would google have happened
if Altavista wherent
ruined?
Yes, because Google made the paradigmatic leap (MapReduce) that all its
competitors [almost inexplicably] failed to make. searching on the Internet meant using Archie or
Veronica to find
interesting files on public FTP servers. When I created my first web
site ("Mosaic page") in 1994, you were supposed to send an email to UIUC
so they could update their page listing all the home pages in the world.
By the time Altavista came along, the web had grown enough that indexing
it all on a single workstation was a great demo of what the Alpha could
do and it was what DEC did to impress many pontential buyers. It soon
evolved into a separate business. But as the web continued to grow, it
became less and less useful as it became common for the link you were
looking for to be on page 8 or later of the results.
In 1998 I switched to Google because PageRank meant I rarely had to look
beyond the top half of the first page of the results to see what I was
Yes, you and millions of others :D
Once you got used to the idea of the page you want being #1 most of the
time (as is still the case IME), then one quickly forgot about the other
engines...
--Toby
looking for. The "I'm feeling lucky"
button was meant to show off this
feature.
-- Jecel
3:21 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012, Toby Thain wrote:
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the endlessly
scalable and
fault-tolerant architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm
shifts were involved. No wonder Google won. :)
Google has branched out into a lot of other Information fields.
I remember when they were frantically building a "war chest" in
expectation of MAJOR confrontations with Microsoft.
Once you got used to the idea of the page you want
being #1 most of the
time (as is still the case IME), then one quickly forgot about the other
engines...
During their early days, Google did a surprisingly large amount of their
relevance ranking MANUALLY! Then they apparently expanded into letting
more of their ranking be alfgorithmically done with Saltonin vector Space
and cosine measures. I wonder what they are doing now. Have they
published any of their algorithms in any of the Information Science
journals?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
4:15 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 17/11/12 6:21 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Yes, various aspects are published.
* http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
* There is also a paper, "Page Rank Algorithm" from Dept of
Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but
ironically Google's search results make it impossible for me to copy a
sane link, and when I click it, I don't get a copyable link in the
browser either.
--Toby
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012, Toby Thain wrote:
A lot of their endeavours build on the same infrastructure. BigTable,
BigFS, etc.
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the
endlessly scalable and
fault-tolerant architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm
shifts were involved. No wonder Google won. :)
Google has branched out into a lot of other Information fields.
I remember when they were frantically building a "war chest" in
expectation of MAJOR confrontations with Microsoft. Once you got used to the idea of the page you
want being #1 most of the
time (as is still the case IME), then one quickly forgot about the other
engines...
During their early days, Google did a surprisingly large amount of their
relevance ranking MANUALLY! Then they apparently expanded into letting
more of their ranking be alfgorithmically done with Saltonin vector Space
and cosine measures. I wonder what they are doing now. Have they
published any of their algorithms in any of the Information Science
journals?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
4:32 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 11/17/2012 07:15 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
* There is also a paper, "Page Rank
Algorithm" from Dept of Mathematics
and Statistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but ironically
Google's search results make it impossible for me to copy a sane link,
and when I click it, I don't get a copyable link in the browser either.
Cleaning up Google's result links is easy...Install the GreaseMoneky
plugin, and within that, install the "Straight Google" script. It
filters the results on the fly, no visible difference, but the URLs are
put back the way they belong, instead of being put through Google's
(probably highly profitable) statistics-gathering redirectors.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
5:08 p.m.
New subject: Greasemonkey cleans up Google search URLs - Re: Google v AltaVista
On 17/11/12 7:32 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 11/17/2012 07:15 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Great tip, thankyou. Firefox isn't my usual browser, though. :/
--Toby
* There is also a paper, "Page Rank
Algorithm" from Dept of Mathematics
and Statistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but ironically
Google's search results make it impossible for me to copy a sane link,
and when I click it, I don't get a copyable link in the browser either.
Cleaning up Google's result links is easy...Install the GreaseMoneky
plugin, and within that, install the "Straight Google" script. It
filters the results on the fly, no visible difference, but the URLs are
put back the way they belong, instead of being put through Google's
(probably highly profitable) statistics-gathering redirectors.
-Dave
4:47 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
> published any of their algorithms in any of the
Information Science
> journals?
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012, Toby Thain wrote:
Yes, various aspects are published.
* http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
* There is also a paper, "Page Rank Algorithm" from Dept of
Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but
Thank you!
It's a dark and dreary day; those will be a welcome diversion
ironically Google's search results make it
impossible for me to copy a
sane link, and when I click it, I don't get a copyable link in the
browser either.
and not even a "send this to others" link
3:31 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Nov 17, 2012, at 17:53, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 17/11/12 2:23 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and fault-tolerant than
VMS? Because those may be fightin' words around here. :-)
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista ran on VMS or
not.
- Dave
For me it was PageRank that made all the difference. I remember when
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the endlessly scalable and fault-tolerant
architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm shifts were involved. No wonder Google
won. :) 
4:06 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista ran on
VMS or
not.
According to this thread: DEC's AltaVista was on Tru64 UNIX due to lack of
64-bit support in VMS at the time:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036548.html
This post shows the hardware backing AltaVista:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036587.html
5:14 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 17/11/12 7:06 PM, Nigel Williams wrote:
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM, David
Riley<fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
I didn't see a date on that post, but some cross-referencing puts that
hardware configuration circa 1996-1997?
Also, they offered an "Appliance" version:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Powerful+AltaVista+Search+Technology+Extends+…
--Toby
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista
ran on VMS or
not.
According to this thread: DEC's AltaVista was on Tru64 UNIX due to lack of
64-bit support in VMS at the time:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036548.html
This post shows the hardware backing AltaVista:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036587.html
5:49 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 11/17/2012 5:14 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
On 17/11/12 7:06 PM, Nigel Williams wrote:
I am coming to this thread late so, I apologize if already mentioned. I
had a couple of the AltaVista servers. They were given away or sold
cheap in the San Francisco area. All the ones I had, or ran into, were
DS20E with the faceplate removed. One of mine was the development's
teams test server. Had the whole source tree and build environment for
their engine. Well did before the disk died. They were all Tru64.
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM, David
Riley<fraveydank at gmail.com>
wrote:
I didn't see a date on that post, but some cross-referencing puts that
hardware configuration circa 1996-1997?
Also, they offered an "Appliance" version:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Powerful+AltaVista+Search+Technology+Extends+…
--Toby
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista
ran on VMS or
not.
According to this thread: DEC's AltaVista was on Tru64 UNIX due to
lack of
64-bit support in VMS at the time:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036548.html
This post shows the hardware backing AltaVista:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036587.html
18 Nov
18 Nov
9:59 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Nov 17, 2012, at 5:49 PM, mc68010 wrote:
On 11/17/2012 5:14 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Yes, they were stored my storage units. I got tired of having them and asked if they
could be disposed of. Along with a large number of DS20's there were also a fair
number of DS10s. In addition to the CPUs there were several TBs in disk arrays (built
using 4GB, 9GB and 18GB drives?it was a lot of drives).
TTFN - Guy
On 17/11/12 7:06 PM, Nigel Williams wrote:
I am coming to this thread late so, I apologize if already mentioned. I had a couple of
the AltaVista servers. They were given away or sold cheap in the San Francisco area. All
the ones I had, or ran into, were DS20E with the faceplate removed. One of mine was the
development's teams test server. Had the whole source tree and build environment for
their engine. Well did before the disk died. They were all Tru64.
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM, David
Riley<fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
I didn't see a date on that post, but some cross-referencing puts that hardware
configuration circa 1996-1997?
Also, they offered an "Appliance" version:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Powerful+AltaVista+Search+Technology+Extends+…
--Toby
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista
ran on VMS or
not.
According to this thread: DEC's AltaVista was on Tru64 UNIX due to lack of
64-bit support in VMS at the time:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036548.html
This post shows the hardware backing AltaVista:
http://rbnsn.com/pipermail/info-vax_rbnsn.com/2011-October/036587.html
17 Nov
17 Nov
4:11 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 17/11/12 6:31 PM, David Riley wrote:
On Nov 17, 2012, at 17:53, Toby Thain<toby at
telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
No, I am referring to their software architecture, not the operating system.
--Toby
On 17/11/12 2:23 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and fault-tolerant than
VMS? Because those may be fightin' words around here. :-)
For me it was PageRank that made all the difference. I remember when
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the endlessly scalable and fault-tolerant
architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm shifts were involved. No wonder Google
won. :)
Of course, I don't recall whether AltaVista ran on VMS or
not.
- Dave
18 Nov
18 Nov
4:54 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 06:31:06PM -0500, David Riley wrote:
On Nov 17, 2012, at 17:53, Toby Thain <toby at
telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
Yes. It scales from tiny embedded machines (the smallest I use daily has IIRC
32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) to massive supercomputers with more than
1024 CPUs running (multiple) GHz clockspeed . It scales from machines with 32
MB of memory to machines with 256 GB and more of memory. It scales from tiny
filesystems (a couple MB, just enough to hold a minimized compressed system
image and kernel) to massive systems of dozens, hundreds of TB. With the right
software setup, Linux based machine setups scale from a single node to tens of
thousands of nodes.
And fault-tolerance .. there is more than one way to cook that egg. You can
build hardware clusters that will not fail[1]. Or you can build software
environments that accept hardware failures as normal[0] and deal with it
gracefully. The later approach is usually taken in very large scale Linux
environments. Heck, we did it in our own cluster software for Linux.
The art _has_ moved on from when VMS was king of scalability.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Kind regards,
Alex.
[0] If you have a sufficiently large number of machines (10K+), the MTBF
_will_ catch up with you and you _will_ have failures every day.
[1] Except when they do. Yes, human error _does_ count.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
On 17/11/12 2:23 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and fault-tolerant than
VMS? Because those may be fightin' words around here. :-)
For me it was PageRank that made all the difference. I remember when
Yes, you are quite right, but you need the endlessly scalable and fault-tolerant
architecture as well. So you could say two paradigm shifts were involved. No wonder Google
won. :) 
5:57 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
Are you saying
Linux is more scalable and fault-tolerant than VMS?
[Linux] scales from tiny
embedded machines (the smallest I use daily
has IIRC 32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) The art _has_ moved on from when VMS was king of
scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"?
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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6:16 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
what game was this?
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
I went through my larval phase on VMS on an 11/780, and I think it had
something like 60M of _disk_ (well, for my first year or two on it;
after that, I think we got two 300M washing-machine drives). If you
think 32M of RAM is "tiny", you've already succumbed to serious
bloat-tolerance. (Perhaps the best videogame I've ever played occupied
a total of 24K - that's 24576 bytes - of ROM. Including the code and
all the graphics constants.)
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and
fault-tolerant than VMS?
[Linux] scales from tiny embedded machines (the smallest I
use daily
has IIRC 32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) The art _has_ moved on from when VMS was king of
scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"?
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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19 Nov
19 Nov
6:01 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 08:57:18PM -0500, Mouse wrote:
I went through my larval phase on VMS on an 11/780, and I think it had
something like 60M of _disk_ (well, for my first year or two on it;
after that, I think we got two 300M washing-machine drives). If you
think 32M of RAM is "tiny", you've already succumbed to serious
bloat-tolerance. (Perhaps the best videogame I've ever played occupied
a total of 24K - that's 24576 bytes - of ROM. Including the code and
all the graphics constants.)
The first machine I ever played around with had a bit under 32 KB of RAM
and ran on a U880 (eastern bloc copy of the Z80). First machine I bought
with my own money had 120 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, 1 GB disk and was a serious
powerhouse at the time.
Well, these for anything that is not some kind of embedded system? Yes.
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and
fault-tolerant than VMS?
[Linux] scales from tiny embedded machines (the smallest I
use daily
has IIRC 32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) The art _has_
moved on from when VMS was king of scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"? Sic transit gloria mundi.
Well ... yes, there is bloat. Part of that comes from "nobody"[0] doing
assembly language anymore and instead using high level and script languages.
But we are also _doing_ a lot more with the machines these days, things that
were flat out impossible due to a serious lack of computrons 20-30 years
ago are now just normal.
I'm looking forward to you demonstrating realtime 1080p video decoding
on a 11/780 ;-)
Kind regards,
Alex.
[0] in quotes because I know that there is still asm in use, both for very
low level kernel/driver work and for special optimization
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
20 Nov
20 Nov
2:02 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 11/18/2012 07:57 PM, Mouse wrote:
I went through my larval phase on VMS on an 11/780, and I think it had
something like 60M of _disk_
My first Linux machine had less* disk than that! :-) It was blessed with a
capacious 8MB of RAM though (I think the minimum was 2MB at the time,
although it went to 4MB not long after)
* It was an 89MB drive, but IIRC I only gave 30-something MB over to Linux
initially until it was clear that it was stable enough for me to do the
bulk of my work on.
I suppose it's so cheap these days that it makes no meaningful difference
to the cost of a device to give it 32KB or 32MB; may as well give it the
larger value and offer a more choice to the masses. There are probably
cases of certain OSes refusing to run because the host platform has _too
much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
I don't like bloat either, but I suppose the question is whether VMS would
have swollen equally if it existed with the same set of features as Linux
does. In a closed-source environment and with talented developers I expect
it might be considerably better, but still require vastly more resources
than the VMS of years ago.
There's the age-old question of where "the OS" ends and "support
programs"
begins to consider too, I suppose.
cheers
Jules
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and
fault-tolerant than VMS?
[Linux] scales from tiny embedded machines (the smallest I
use daily
has IIRC 32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) The art _has_
moved on from when VMS was king of scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"? 
3:16 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 20 November 2012 22:02, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
I suppose it's so cheap these days that it makes
no meaningful difference to
the cost of a device to give it 32KB or 32MB; may as well give it the larger
value and offer a more choice to the masses. There are probably cases of
certain OSes refusing to run because the host platform has _too much_ RAM,
but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
BOS was a bit picky sometimes....
http://www.global3000.co.uk/comphist.html
Now that was/is a nice OS - back around 1990 I brought a copy home and
had it running three concurrent users, each with four tasks, on an
Amstrad PC1512 (8086, but upgraded to 640K RAM and a 10Mb after-market
hard drive) - I was using BBC Micros as terminals.. I loved the way
you could copy applications and user-data between widely different
architectures without a thought.
3:27 p.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On Nov 20, 2012, at 5:02 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
I suppose it's so cheap these days that it makes no meaningful difference to the cost
of a device to give it 32KB or 32MB; may as well give it the larger value and offer a more
choice to the masses. There are probably cases of certain OSes refusing to run because the
host platform has _too much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
I don't like bloat either, but I suppose the question is whether VMS would have
swollen equally if it existed with the same set of features as Linux does. In a
closed-source environment and with talented developers I expect it might be considerably
better, but still require vastly more resources than the VMS of years ago.
I should point out that it's still maintained. Someone
else would have to say how much it's bloated over the
last VAX-capable release, since I don't have any Alpha
or IA64 hardware to play on (yet). However, 7.3 runs
quite happily in its default install state on a 64 MB
SIMH emulation, and I could probably cut that down to
32 MB with little problem.
All the scalability numbers pointed out so far appear
to be roughly *equal* to VMS numbers of a decade ago,
and I can't imagine it's gotten worse. My assertion
isn't that VMS is always the best OS for the task (in
plenty of cases, it's not, and I'd actually love to
hear a list of things it's decidedly better for from
someone more experienced with it), but that it had
extremely good scalability way back when and can still
compete with the best Linux has to offer in terms of
scalability now.
The art _has_ moved on from when VMS was king of
scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"? There's the age-old question of where "the
OS" ends and "support programs" begins to consider too, I suppose.
Well, yeah. My impression (not having done loads of
Linux clustering) is that it's much easier to write
clustered applications in Linux than to utilize any
OS-level clustering support. But I may be entirely
off-base there, since it's not my domain.
- Dave
4:02 p.m.
New subject: What VMS is good for [was Re: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)]
My assertion isn't that VMS is always the best OS
for the task (in
plenty of cases, it's not, and I'd actually love to hear a list of
things it's decidedly better for from someone more experienced with
it),
Well, based on experience that's some 25-30 years old, and from a
relatively unsophisticated point of view even then....
- VMS is much better at keeping application-layer programs that should
be separate actually separate.
- Its privilege model totally blows away anything Unixy, possibly
excepting some of the capability systems (and I'm not sure how Unixy
I count them - I don't know any of them well enough to really make a
fair comparison, either with my memories of VMS or with the vague
cluster of characteristics that I collectively call "Unixy").
- The I/O subsystem is much better-designed for "go do this and tell me
when it's done" async operation. Indeed, sync I/O is just a wrapper
around "make this async request and then block until it's done".
I'd be interested to know what people who know VMS better than I, or
who know more recent VMS, think of those points.
but that it had extremely good scalability way back
when
That, I never had anything to do with, so I can't comment.
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4:07 p.m.
New subject: "tiny" machines [was Re: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)]
There are probably cases of certain OSes refusing to
run because the
host platform has _too much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any
right now.
Some of NetBSD's ports have had such issues, either because too much
RAM means more page tables than various parts of the system are
prepared to deal with or because of addressing issues (eg, a pre-PAE
i386 kernel may well have trouble with more than 4G of RAM). Not
often, but it has happened.
There are other issues - such as the time required to take a kernel
coredump - but they aren't "refusing to run".
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21 Nov
21 Nov
3:54 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 20 Nov 2012, at 23:02 , Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
wrote:
There are probably cases of certain OSes refusing to
run because the host platform has _too much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any
right now.
Different versions of Windows 2000 have (artificial) limitations on the maximum hardware
specs: Workstation supports up to two CPU's and four GB of RAM, Server handles up to
four CPU's, Advanced Server up to eight CPU's and eight GB of RAM, and Datacenter
Server supports up to 32 CPU's and 64 GB RAM.
I strongly suspect these limitations are in fact artificial, since Win2K Workstation will
support four CPU's on the SiliconGraphics Visual Workstation 540 if it is installed as
an upgrade over the SGI-specific four-CPU install of NT4.
.tsooJ
--
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
- Alfred Renyi (referring to Paul Erdos)
--
Joost van de Griek
<http://www.jvdg.net/>
22 Nov
22 Nov
6:47 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 21 November 2012 11:54, Joost van de Griek <gyorpb at gmail.com> wrote:
On 20 Nov 2012, at 23:02 , Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
The #CPUs limit is artificial. The RAM one is not, inasmuch as W2K was
only ever 32-bit (and XP vastly predominantly 32-bit) and without PAE
a 32-bit x86 OS can only address 4GB of memory address space.
Why XP still wants 3-4GB of pagefile on a machine with 3-4GB of RAM,
therefore, is left as an exercise for the reader. :?)
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
There are probably cases of certain OSes refusing
to run because the host platform has _too much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of
any right now.
Different versions of Windows 2000 have (artificial) limitations on the maximum hardware
specs: Workstation supports up to two CPU's and four GB of RAM, Server handles up to
four CPU's, Advanced Server up to eight CPU's and eight GB of RAM, and Datacenter
Server supports up to 32 CPU's and 64 GB RAM.
I strongly suspect these limitations are in fact artificial, since Win2K Workstation will
support four CPU's on the SiliconGraphics Visual Workstation 540 if it is installed as
an upgrade over the SGI-specific four-CPU install of NT4.
6:57 a.m.
New subject: Google v AltaVista - Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 20 November 2012 22:02, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
There are probably cases of
certain OSes refusing to run because the host platform has _too much_ RAM,
but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
Win95 tops out quite low - 512MB of RAM or something like that, and I
think some timing loops fail on a machine of over 500MHz or something.
Ref:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/14/54640.aspx
Win98 struggled with over 768MB of RAM but that was fixed in 98SE, I think.
Ref:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
Ah, apparently *all* the Win9x codebase struggles with approaching a gig.
For some of them, you can't /install/ with more than a certain amount,
but once it's running you can put the extra RAM back in.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
18 Nov
18 Nov
4:06 p.m.
On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 12:27:27PM +0100, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 08:42:18 +0000
Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
Sold and abandoned just like DEC, as I
wrote...
Interesting question: Would google have happened if Altavista wherent
ruined?
Yes, because they came up with a much better algorithm to determine
relevance of web pages.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Ohhh,
Altavista! The mother of all Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
I don't
think it did, it was sold and abandoned just in front of the
steam roller that is google, very sad... 
5:13 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:38:52PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 11/18/2012 07:33 PM, ben wrote:
Algorithms don't have ads. Greedy suits do.
So all that money to build datacenters, buy lots of machines, pay lots of
people just comes from social security? I don't think so. You've got to find a
way to pay for it somehow. Or are you willing to pay 50 cents[0] every time
you do a Google search?
Kind regards,
Alex.
[0] Random number, no idea what would be realistic.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Yes,
because they came up with a much better algorithm to determine
relevance of web pages.
The one with the most ads sadly.
20 Nov
20 Nov
2:11 p.m.
On 11/18/2012 07:13 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
Or are you willing to pay 50 cents[0] every time you
do a Google search?
That's an interesting question. The world might be a better place for it
(while it's nice to have answers at our fingertips, I can't help feeling
we're losing something when people don't communicate with each other; I see
the kids do it all the time, and they might end up with the right answer,
but they don't know *why* it's right)
3:56 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jules Richardson" <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 11/18/2012 07:13 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
Why would it be? Most of what is googled is entertainment fluff anyway.
Technology today keeps everyone at least a few layers away from knowing if
the answer the computer spits out is the real answer or not. And as far as
communication goes, nothing beats face to face especially if you are looking
to see if somebody is telling the truth or is very uncomfortable in
responding to a question (withholding key information). Real communication
went out with the phone and email.
Or are you willing to pay 50 cents[0] every time
you do a Google search?
That's an interesting question. The world might be a better place for it
(while it's nice to have answers at our fingertips, I can't help feeling
we're losing something when people don't communicate with each other; I
see the kids do it all the time, and they might end up with the right
answer, but they don't know *why* it's right)
18 Nov
18 Nov
5:03 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 05:33:04PM -0700, ben wrote:
On 11/18/2012 5:06 PM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
Well, you've got to pay for all that hardware (and the crew running it, and
the engineers building the system) _somehow_. At least the ads are clearly
marked as such and you can't go "here is some cash, make my site the top
search result".
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Yes, because they came up with a much better
algorithm to determine
relevance of web pages.
The one with the most ads sadly. 
17 Nov
17 Nov
1 a.m.
8:28 a.m.
On 11/17/2012 03:25 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
I think we all did. It was a good system.
We had two
8400s (8x 5/300) in the datacenter at a previous job. They
were really quite nice machines. They did a lot of offline processing
for a pre-Google search engine called Altavista.
Ohhh, Altavista! The mother of
all Web search engines. I used it a lot
back in its days. A shame that it went down the drain with DEC...
Yep. Damn suits.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
12:14 p.m.
Found this bit of info years ago, Altavista hardware.
----------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams
From: ehr... at his.com (Edward Rice)
Date: 1997/02/10
Subject: Re: Chinese restaurants; Alta Vista
The Hardware Behind AltaVista
AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk.
AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site.
They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends
queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.
Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB
memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful
computer built by Digital. These servers run the query
engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most
requests take less than a second.
Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID
disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches
pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web
indexer.
Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory,
180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and
serves as a central distribution point for new index data.
News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB
disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news
spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all
the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it
serves is much smaller than the Web index.
News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID
disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News
Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of
you who don't want to know about news servers but want to
read news.
Those aren't typos, either -- those are machines with many, MANY megabytes
of RAM, and they're hooked up to some of the fastest random-access backing
store in the world with capacities in the many, many gigabyte range.
AltaVista is fast because DEC threw some phenomenally capable resources at
the problem.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Snyder
Butler, PA
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2012 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: Big Alphas (was Re: FS: HP AlphaServer DS15)
On 11/16/2012 04:06 PM, Adrian Graham wrote:
I've never heard of one crashing. Bizarre.
We had two 8400s (8x 5/300) in the datacenter at a previous job. They
were really quite nice machines. They did a lot of offline processing
for a pre-Google search engine called Altavista.
I have
a large number of TurboLaser Bus modules here, for
AS8000-family machines. I've been unsuccessful in finding one to put
them in...I want an 8200 or an 8400, but they seem to have completely
disappeared. I haven't seen one on the market for YEARS. I have no
idea of what's up with that.
The only TurboLaser I ever saw in the wild was an 8400 being field tested
at
ICI Dumfries (Scotland) while I was installing a TruCluster of 4100s. It
looked very Heath Robinson and the engineer on site swore at it most foul
because of it's tendency to crash. These days I walk past its offspring
every day, we have several large Alphas in the warehouse at work, the
biggest being a GS60e which is the direct descendent.
Very nice! Take them home!
I power 'em up from time to time, the noise
of that, an AXP7710 and a
VAX6200 is almost music to my ears :)
Glorious!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
18 Nov
18 Nov
1:46 p.m.
On 17 November 2012 20:14, Daniel Snyder <ddsnyder at zoominternet.net> wrote:
Found this bit of info years ago, Altavista hardware.
----------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams
From: ehr... at his.com (Edward Rice)
Date: 1997/02/10
Subject: Re: Chinese restaurants; Alta Vista
The Hardware Behind AltaVista
AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk.
AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site.
They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends
queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.
Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB
memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful
computer built by Digital. These servers run the query
engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most
requests take less than a second.
Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID
disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches
pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web
indexer.
Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory,
180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and
serves as a central distribution point for new index data.
News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB
disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news
spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all
the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it
serves is much smaller than the Web index.
News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID
disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News
Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of
you who don't want to know about news servers but want to
read news.
Those aren't typos, either -- those are machines with many, MANY megabytes
of RAM, and they're hooked up to some of the fastest random-access backing
store in the world with capacities in the many, many gigabyte range.
AltaVista is fast because DEC threw some phenomenally capable resources at
the problem.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Snyder
Butler, PA
Remarkable specs for 1997. Really extraordinarily high. This must have
cost very serious money. No way Altavista ever paid for itself, not by
several orders of magnitude.
This is why the discovery of an efficient parallelising algorithm -
viz, Map/Reduce - was such an extremely big deal for Google.
Map/Reduce and PageRank made Brin & Page their tens of billions, and
for once, I don't begrudge them it at all. They earned it fair and
square through extreme brilliance, I think, unlike Gates or Jobs...
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
16 Nov
16 Nov
11:25 a.m.
Ethan Dicks [ethan.dicks at gmail.com] wrote:
I have a DEC 4000-610 in storage. AFAIK the DEC 4000 line was the only
set of computers that DEC produced that used FB+. DECnis also used
FB+ (or FB?, I forget the exact details ...) but I remember being told
that there were some incompatibilities, so, even with some new software
and a hammer, you'd still never be able to get cards from either one
to work in the other.
Antonio
arcarlini at iee.org
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Dave McGuire>
<mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
What FB+
Alphas do you have?
One of these...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=895
4000 AXP Model 710. Got it 10 years ago, fiddled with it when I first
4413
days inactive
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mcguire＠neurotica.com -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG -
nigel.d.williams＠gmail.com -
p.gebhardt＠ymail.com -
robert＠irrelevant.com -
tdk.knight＠gmail.com -
teoz＠neo.rr.com -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au -
witchy＠binarydinosaurs.co.uk