Qooper on 21/12/2024 at 16:15
Quote Posted by taffernicus
Now I just need access to ancient hardware if the book is also ancient :D. Also that's why retrocomputing is interesting
Would you be interested in a challenge? Each participant comes up with their own fictional console with fictional hardware, which they then write an emulator for. A simple CPU with an exotic ISA, some kind of simple and weird graphics chip and a bizarre sound chip. The rule is that it has to feel retro, and exploring it should be exciting and not predictable.
DuatDweller on 21/12/2024 at 16:16
Quote Posted by taffernicus
I'm no embedded , OS and bare metal afficionados, but reading references and explanations of the inner workings , origins & design decisions behind < a,b,c,d,x,y,z > OS or something along that lines isn't taxing at all for me. I find The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice Bach and UNIX internals by Uresh Vahalia fascinating to read. Could not recommend it highly enough for you wants to get into the weeds of that. Even the web(non book) Unix Clone tutorial from James Molloy) is quite excellent. There are many other books that are more updated. I found some educational ones that were released in 2013, 2015 and 2022.
On a funny note I worked with Sun Sparc stations and they were using a custom Unix OS, Sun OS, the first version was based on BSD, the latest directly on Unix system V.
Oh yes it was a graphic interface with mouse support, very windows like but totally Unix.
Well last I tried to read Mein Kampf, but it was so boring and repetitive I stopped mid book.
I wont recommend it unless you love boredom, and shouting hate in every paragraph.
:erg:
In this case curiosity bored the cat.
taffernicus on 23/12/2024 at 05:31
Quote Posted by Qooper
Would you be interested in a challenge? Each participant comes up with their own fictional console with fictional hardware, which they then write an emulator for. A simple CPU with an exotic ISA, some kind of simple and weird graphics chip and a bizarre sound chip. The rule is that it has to feel retro, and exploring it should be exciting and not predictable.
that would be so challenging and brilliant. Don't forget to implement that on breadboard or fpga
taffernicus on 23/12/2024 at 05:54
Quote Posted by DuatDweller
On a funny note I worked with Sun Sparc stations and they were using a custom Unix OS, Sun OS, the first version was based on BSD, the latest directly on Unix system V.
Oh yes it was a graphic interface with mouse support, very windows like but totally Unix.
Well last I tried to read Mein Kampf, but it was so boring and repetitive I stopped mid book.
I wont recommend it unless you love boredom, and shouting hate in every paragraph.
:erg:
In this case curiosity bored the cat.
SystemV kinda reminds me of UNIX wars, together with SGI IRIX, novell netware, sco unix, Xenix , NeXTSTEP, etc. That ship has sailed long time ago but luckily we have a lot of unix-like OS right now
Well at least SystemV ABI is still exist in GNU/Linux
i have never read mein kampft myself, but I like the story that started from Bradenburg- Prussia , continued to von Bismarck and then weimar republic to anton drexler's NSDAP
DuatDweller on 23/12/2024 at 16:43
Well Solaris is still out there and is Unix System V based too, AIX, Euler OS, HP-UX, MacOS, Tru64 Unix, OSF/1, z/OS (current IRIX was already mentioned so...).
heywood on 23/12/2024 at 17:27
I was like a kid in a candy store during the UNIX wars. I remember one of the first things I did as a university freshman in 1989 was to get a UNIX account so I could try out the new DECstations. They ran ULTRIX, a BSD-variant with DECwindows on huge (for the time) 21" monitors. That was the first time I touched UNIX. My school had a relationship with the old Digital Equipment Corporation and we always had their best stuff, purchased at a discount or loaned to us for testing. The workstations were internet connected. The WWW didn't exist yet, not even Gopher or Archie, but there was email, Usenet, and a lot of anonymous FTP archives if you could find them.
During my senior year, I started using SunOS in one professor's lab. Like DuatDweller said, that was based on BSD, but running OpenWindows (aka Open Look) and NeWS, which is a pretty unique GUI that made full use of a 3-button mouse, which was optical and needed a special gridded mouse pad. I liked it better than the X11/Motif-based CDE everyone eventually standardized on. NeWS was pretty cool too. Sun had the best software engineers back in those days.
In grad school my research area was computational electromagnetics. I took a parallel programming course with the hope of speeding up my algorithms, and got to play with some neat stuff: a MasPar, a Connection Machine, an Encore Multimax, and Sequent Symmetry. I can't remember what they ran. But none of my attempted parallelizations on these machines could keep up with the single-threaded code running on a DEC Alpha. I remember my best friend's dad was an independent PC builder when the Intel Pentium came out at 60 MHz and he suggested that could speed up my runs. I told him the workstation I had right now was running at 150 MHz. He didn't believe me. By 1995 when I left, we had 266 MHz and 300 MHz Alpha 21164 test mules at school that I was running bigger problems on. That architecture was so far ahead at the time. DEC was so far ahead, and then disappeared so quickly. As did the whole computing industry around Boston. So many deunct computing pioneers, it's a bit of a shame: DEC, Data General, Wang, Allaire, Pyramid, Sequent, Apollo, Thinking Machines, Viatron, KSR that I can remember.
I got my first taste of Solaris in 1995 when I left school. Back then it was a mishmash of OpenWindows and Motif on the surface, and a mishmash of UNIX System V and BSD underneath. Those were the early days of unification and Sun's approach with Solaris 2 was to maintain backwards compatibility, so you could take a makefile or shell script written for a BSD-based OS or a shell script written for a System V-based OS and they both would probably just work on Solaris with minimal edits. DEC's Mach-based OSF/1 on the Alphas was more strict and I remember always doing some customization or hacking to get 3rd party software to build, even for very common software distributed with autotools like Emacs.
At the end of the 90s I restarted my career, and as a software engineer in the 2000s I got to work on HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and Solaris again. But by then they were all samey, and all came with the bare bones CDE.
Linux is a whole other story, but I do miss the days when high end UNIX workstations ruled. Sorry for making you reminisce with me.
Qooper on 23/12/2024 at 19:38
That sounds exciting and inspiring! In my childhood we had an MSX and a 386 that we used for playing DOS games. Ultima Underworld I and a bit later System Shock I. Those were magical times, and computer games could be anything (instead of the samey same we have today).
Quote Posted by heywood
Sorry for making you reminisce with me.
Don't apologize, sir. It's like saying "I'm terribly sorry for all this treasure everywhere. You can have as much as you want, but I understand if you don't want any."
DuatDweller on 27/12/2024 at 18:52
Guys now a days these server AMD EPYC CPUs have 192 or 256 cores 384MB cache L3 and waste no less than 500W! (oh just nearing 15K USD, cheap!) God only knows how many Tera of RAM.
This thing sucks more power than my receiver does (260W), granted music power is transitory (milliseconds) and not an electric heater but still.
:erg:
LordBooford on 28/12/2024 at 10:21
What am I reading? On the influence of American McGee's Alice I read Alice In Wonderland ....and what a disappointment it was. No real plot, totally unconnected chapters and when it coms t the supposed climax of the book she literally wakes up and finds it was all a dream. The characters are goofy and annoying rather than endearing. The prose is very bland. My guess is that exactly because it's so sparsely and vaguely written people can read into what they want to, like a semi blank canvas for their imagination. Some people seem to read mathematical and philosophical stuff into, I just saw a nonsensical mess. If people start spluttering with indignation...."but...but....it's a timeless classic!" that why we have a word called 'overrated' to describe things that aren't as good as their reputation indicates. But I'm glad it was written anyway because the video game was cool af
Anyway that's me spoken my mind, you guys can get back into your micro processor computer talk.
Sulphur on 28/12/2024 at 17:09
And peering through the looking glass, Alice found a tiny missive scrawled on a table: a joyless and cynical rant almost certainly penned by a snark. 'How frumulous,' she said almost beneath her breath, and flitted on to things she found curiouser and curiouser.
