From clemc at ccc.com Thu Feb 4 00:43:40 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 09:43:40 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] for now to follow up - why a byte is 8-bits Message-ID: I will ask Warren's indulgence here - as this probably should be continued in COFF, which I have CC'ed but since was asked in TUHS I will answer On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 6:28 AM Peter Jeremy via TUHS wrote: > I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front. > Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on > 8-bit bytes? > Well, 'standardizing' is a little strong. Check out my QUORA answer: How many bits are there in a byte and What is a bit? Why are 8 bits considered as 1 byte? Why not 7 bit or 9 bit? for my details but the 8-bit part of the tail is here (cribbed from those posts): The Industry followed IBM with the S/360.The story of why a byte is 8- bits for the S/360 is one of my favorites since the number of bits in a byte is defined for each computer architecture. Simply put, Fred Brooks (who lead the IBM System 360 project) overruled the chief hardware designer, Gene Amdahl, and told him to make things power of two to make it easier on the SW writers. Amdahl famously thought it was a waste of hardware, but Brooks had the final authority. My friend Russ Robeleon, who was the lead HW guy on the 360/50 and later the ASP (*a.k.a.* project X) who was in the room as it were, tells his yarn this way: You need to remember that the 360 was designed to be IBM's first *ASCII machine*, (not EBCDIC as it ended up - a different story)[1] Amdahl was planning for a word size to be 24-bits and the byte size to be 7-bits for cost reasons. Fred kept throwing him out of his office and told him not to come back “until a byte and word are powers of two, as we just don’t know how to program it otherwise.” Brooks would eventually relent on the original pointer on the Systems 360 became 24-bits, as long as it was stored in a 32-bit “word”.[2] As a result, (and to answer your original question) a byte first widely became 8-bit with the IBM’s Systems 360. It should be noted, that it still took some time before an 8-bit byte occurred more widely and in almost all systems as we see it today. Many systems like the DEC PDP-6/10 systems used 5, 7-bit bytes packed into a 36-bit word (with a single bit leftover) for a long time. I believe that the real widespread use of the 8-bit byte did not really occur until the rise of the minis such as the PDP-11 and the DG Nova in the late 1960s/early 1970s and eventually the mid-1970s’ microprocessors such as 8080/Z80/6502. Clem [1] While IBM did lead the effort to create ASCII, and System 360 actually supported ASCII in hardware, but because the software was so late, IBM marketing decided not the switch from BCD and instead used EBCDIC (their own code). Most IBM software was released using that code for the System 360/370 over the years. It was not until IBM released their Series 1 minicomputer in the late 1970s that IBM finally supported an ASCII-based system as the natural code for the software, although it had a lot of support for EBCDIC as they were selling them to interface to their ‘Mainframe’ products. [2] Gordon Bell would later observe that those two choices (32-bit word and 8-bit byte) were what made the IBM System 360 architecture last in the market, as neither would have been ‘fixable’ later. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From joshnatis0 at gmail.com Thu Feb 4 18:41:29 2021 From: joshnatis0 at gmail.com (josh) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 03:41:29 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing Message-ID: Hello all, I'm looking to compile a list of historic "wars" in computing, just for personal interest cause they're fun to read about (I'll also put the list up online for others' reference). To explain what I mean, take for example, The Tcl War . Other examples: - TCP/IP wars (BBN vs Berkley, story by Kirk McKusick ) - The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate (it doesn't have 'war(s)' in the name but it still counts IMO, could be called The Microkernel Wars) - UNIX Wars Stuff like "vi vs. emacs" counts too I think, though I'm looking more for historical significance, so maybe "spaces vs. tabs" isn't interesting enough. Thanks, any help is appreciated : ) Josh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Thu Feb 4 19:21:30 2021 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 20:21:30 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Unix vs. DEC, of course; been there, fought that, still got the scars. Although there was Unix vs. Apollo (I could tell some stories about that, but I'm unsure about the Statute of Limitations, whereby I called an Apollo salesdroid a liar to his face in front of my $PHB; I survived). And of course Unix vs. VMS; OK, they can have the commercial market... Oh, the stories that I could tell, such as when the computing boss was known to be having it off with his secretary, and had to be rolled out of the computer room several times by the ops after he'd had a few for lunch. ∆As I said, Statute of Limitations; this stuff goes back to the 70s and early 80s; not to mention when I once wasted a few months with NECISA, whereby you did not get promoted unless you spoke Japanese (itself a long story). -- Dave, at 68 after the game with many stories From lars at nocrew.org Thu Feb 4 19:23:11 2021 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2021 09:23:11 +0000 Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing In-Reply-To: (josh's message of "Thu, 4 Feb 2021 03:41:29 -0500") References: Message-ID: <7w5z38kwzk.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> MIT AI lab and ITS versus Stanford AI lab and WAITS. From crossd at gmail.com Fri Feb 5 01:26:31 2021 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 10:26:31 -0500 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:34 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > I have to admit that I haven't looked at ARM assembler, the M1 is making > me rethink that. Anyone have an opinion on where ARM lies in the pleasant > to unpleasant scale? > Redirecting to "COFF" as this is drifting away from Unix. I have a soft spot for ARM, but I wonder if I should. At first blush, it's a pleasant RISC-ish design: loads and stores for dealing with memory, arithmetic and logic instructions work on registers and/or immediate operands, etc. As others have mentioned, there's an inline barrel shifter in the ALU that a lot of instructions can take advantage of in their second operand; you can rotate, shift, etc, an immediate or register operand while executing an instruction: here's code for setting up page table entries for an identity mapping for the low part of the physical address space (the root page table pointer is at phys 0x40000000): MOV r1, #0x0000 MOVT r1, #0x4000 MOV r0, #0 .Lpti: MOV r2, r0, LSL #20 ORR r2, r2, r3 STR r2, [r1], #4 ADD r0, r0, #1 CMP r0, #2048 BNE .Lpti (Note the `LSL #20` in the `MOV` instruction.) 32-bit ARM also has some niceness for conditionally executing instructions based on currently set condition codes in the PSW, so you might see something like: 1: CMP r0, #0 ADDNE r1, r1, #1 SUBNE r0, r0, #1 BNE 1b The architecture tends to map nicely to C and similar languages (e.g. Rust). There is a rich set of instructions for various kinds of arithmetic; for instance, they support saturating instructions for DSP-style code. You can push multiple registers onto the stack at once, which is a little odd for a RISC ISA, but works ok in practice. The supervisor instruction set is pretty nice. IO is memory-mapped, etc. There's a co-processor interface for working with MMUs and things like it. Memory mapping is a little weird, in that the first-level page table isn't the same second-level tables: the first-level page table maps the 32-bit address space into 1MiB "sections", each of which is described by a 32-bit section descriptor; thus, to map the entire 4GiB space, you need 4096 of those in 16KiB of physically contiguous RAM. At the second-level, 4KiB page frames map page into the 1MiB section at different granularities; I think the smallest is 1KIB (thus, you need 1024 32-bit entries). To map a 4KiB virtual page to a 4KiB PFN, you repeat the relevant entry 4 times in the second-level page. It ends up being kind of annoying. I did a little toy kernel for ARM32 and ended up deciding to use 16KiB pages (basically, I map 4x4KiB contiguous pages) so I could allocate a single sized structure for the page tables themselves. Starting with the ARMv8 architecture, it's been split into 32-bit aarch32 (basically the above) and 64-bit aarch64; the latter has expanded the number and width of general purpose registers, one is a zero register in some contexts (and I think a stack pointer in others? I forget the details). I haven't played around with it too much, but looked at it when it came out and thought "this is reasonable, with some concessions for backwards compatibility." They cleaned up the paging weirdness mentioned above. The multiple push instruction has been retired and replaced with a "push a pair of adjacent registers" instruction; I viewed that as a concession between code size and instruction set orthogonality. So...Overall quite pleasant, and far better than x86_64, but with some oddities. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From athornton at gmail.com Fri Feb 5 01:39:01 2021 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 08:39:01 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9843D646-BED5-47AE-9FFB-CEFB534EED25@gmail.com> > On Feb 4, 2021, at 1:41 AM, josh wrote: > > To explain what I mean, take for example, The Tcl War . Other examples: Peter da Silva. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. Adam -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Fri Feb 5 02:13:25 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 11:13:25 -0500 Subject: [COFF] now COFF V- ISA's Message-ID: On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 9:57 AM John Cowan wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:34 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > >> The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get. Required >> to know it, but so unpleasant. >> > > Required? Ghu forbid. After doing a bunch of PDP-11 assembler work, I > found out that the Vax had 256 opcodes and foreswore assembly thereafter. > Still, that was nothing compared to the 1500+ opcodes of x86*. I think I > dodged a bullet. > IMHO: the Vax instruction set was the assembler guys (like Culter) trying to delay the future and keep assembler as king of the hill. That said, Dave Pressotto, Scotty Baden, and I used to fight with Patterson in his architecture seminar (during the writing of the RISC papers). DEC hit a grand slam with that machine. Between the Vax and x86 plus being part of Alpha, I have realized ISA has nothing to do with success (i.e. my previous comments about economics vs. architecture). Funny thing, Dave Cane was the lead HW guy on the 750, worked on the 780 HW team, and lead the Masscomp HW group. Dave used to stay "Culter got his way" whenever we talked about the VAX instruction set. It was supposed to be the world's greatest assembler machine. The funny part is that DEC had already started to transition to BLISS by then in the applications teams. But Cutler was (is) an OS weenie and he famously hated BLISS. Only the other hand, Culter (together with Dick Hustvedt and Peter Lipman), got the SW out on that system (Starlet - *a.k.a.* VMS) quickly and it worked really well/pretty much as advertised. [Iknowing all of them I suspect having Roger Gourd as their boss helped a good bit also). Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Fri Feb 5 03:34:49 2021 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 09:34:49 -0800 Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing In-Reply-To: <9843D646-BED5-47AE-9FFB-CEFB534EED25@gmail.com> References: <9843D646-BED5-47AE-9FFB-CEFB534EED25@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20210204173449.GB13701@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 08:39:01AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > > > > On Feb 4, 2021, at 1:41 AM, josh wrote: > > > > To explain what I mean, take for example, The Tcl War . Other examples: > > Peter da Silva. Now there???s a name I???ve not heard in a long time. I used to argue with him on comp.arch quite a bit. Smart dude. From athornton at gmail.com Fri Feb 5 04:11:08 2021 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 11:11:08 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Holy Wars of Computing In-Reply-To: <20210204173449.GB13701@mcvoy.com> References: <9843D646-BED5-47AE-9FFB-CEFB534EED25@gmail.com> <20210204173449.GB13701@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <96F7B407-FA52-4AA6-9D22-249C41517015@gmail.com> > On Feb 4, 2021, at 10:34 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 08:39:01AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: >> >> >>> On Feb 4, 2021, at 1:41 AM, josh wrote: >>> >>> To explain what I mean, take for example, The Tcl War . Other examples: >> >> Peter da Silva. Now there???s a name I???ve not heard in a long time. > > I used to argue with him on comp.arch quite a bit. Smart dude. I interviewed with him, for a job that would have involved a bunch of TCL, got the offer, but then decided on grad school instead. Adam From lm at mcvoy.com Fri Feb 5 12:53:49 2021 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2021 18:53:49 -0800 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <4db6108e-73f0-6498-fe45-3fd422d1f389@kilonet.net> Message-ID: <20210205025349.GM13701@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Feb 05, 2021 at 01:16:08PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > [ Directing to COFF, where it likely belongs ] > > On Thu, 4 Feb 2021, Arthur Krewat wrote: > > >>-- Dave, wondering whether anyone has ever used every VAX instruction > > > >Or every VMS call, for that matter. ;) > > Urk... I stayed away from VMS as much as possible (I had a network of > PDP-11s to play with), although I did do a device driver course; dunno why. Me too, though I did use Eunice, it was a lonely place, it did not let me see who was on VMS. I was the only one. A far cry from BSD where wall went to everyone and talk got you a screen where you talked. From peter at rulingia.com Fri Feb 5 19:09:44 2021 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 20:09:44 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 2021-Feb-03 17:33:56 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote: >The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get. Required >to know it, but so unpleasant. Warts upon warts upon warts. The complete opposite of orthogonal. >I have to admit that I haven't looked at ARM assembler, the M1 is making >me rethink that. Anyone have an opinion on where ARM lies in the pleasant >to unpleasant scale? I haven't spent enough time with ARM assembler to form an opinion but there are a number of interesting interviews with the designers on YT: * A set of videos by Sophie Wilson (original designer) starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhwwrSaHdh8 * A history of ARM by Dave Jaggar (redesigner) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6sh097Dk5k If you don't want to pony up for a M1, there are a wide range of ARM SBCs that you could experiment with. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From peter at rulingia.com Fri Feb 5 18:53:01 2021 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 19:53:01 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] AT&T 3B1 - Emulation available In-Reply-To: References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> Message-ID: On 2021-Feb-03 09:58:37 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: >but the original released (distributed - MC68000) part was binned at 8 and >10 There was also a 4MHz version. I had one in my MEX68KECB but I'm not sure if they were ever sold separately. ISTR I got the impression that it was a different (early) mask or microcode variant because some of the interface timings weren't consistent with the 8/10 MHz versions (something like one of the bus timings was a clock-cycle slower). >as were the later versions with the updated paging microcode called the >MC68010 a year later. When the 68020 was released Moto got the speeds up >to 16Mhz and later 20. By the '040 I think they were running at 50MHz I also really liked the M68k architecture. Unfortunately, as with the M6800, Motorola lost out to Intel's inferior excuse for an architecture. Moving more off-topic, M68k got RISC-ified as the ColdFire MCF5206. That seemed (to me) to combine the feel of the M68k with the clock/power gains from RISC. Unfortunately, it didn't take off. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From clemc at ccc.com Sat Feb 6 00:36:20 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 09:36:20 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: Moved to COFF - and I should prefix this note with a strongly worded -- these are my own views and do not necessarily follow my employers (and often have not, as some of you know that have worked with me in the past). On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:34 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get. Required > to know it, but so unpleasant. > BTW: Once again we 100% agree *on the architecture part of* *the discussion*. And frankly pre-386 days, I could not think how anyone would come up with it. As computer architecture it is terrible, how did so many smart people come up with such? It defies everything we are taught about 'good' computer architectural design. But .... after all of the issues with the ISA's of Vax and the x86/INTEL*64 *vs.* Alpha --- is how I came to the conclusion, *architecture does not matter nearly as much as economics and we need to get over it and stop whining. * Or in Christensen's view, a new growing market is often made from a product that has technically not as good as the one in the original mainstream market but has some value to the new group of people. x86 (and in particular once the 386 added linear 32 bit addressing), even though DOS/Windows sucked compared to SunOS (or whatever), the job (work) that the users needed to do was performed to the customer's satisfaction *and for a lot less.* The ISVs could run their codes there and >>they<< sell more copies of their code which is what they care about. The end-users, really just care about getting a job done. What was worse was at the time, it was the ISV's keep their own prices higher on the 'high-value platform' - which makes the cost of those platforms ever higher. During the Unix wars, this fact was a huge issue. The same piece of SW for a Masscomp would cause 5-10 more than a Sun -- why we were considered a minicomputer and Sun was a workstation. Same 10MHz 68000 inside (we had a better compiler so we ran 20% faster). This was because the ISV's classified Masscomp's competition was considered the Vax 8600; not Sun and Apollo -- sigh. In the end, the combination of x86 and MSFT did it to Sun. For example, my college roommates (who were trained on the first $100K architecture/drawing 3D systems developed at CMU on PDP-11/Unix and Triple Drip Graphic's Wonder) Wintel running a 'boxed' AutoCAD was way more economical than a Sun box with a custom architecture package -- economics won, even though the solution was technically not as good. Another form of the same issue did you ever try to write a technical >>publication<< with Word (not a letter or a memo) -- it sucks -- The pro's liked FrameMaker and other 'authoring tools' (hey I think even Latex and Troff are -- much ' better' for the author) -- but Frame costs way more and Word, so what do the publishers want -- ugh Word DOC format [ask Steinhart about this issue, he lived it a year ago]. In the case of the Arm, Intel #$%^'ed 101-15 yrs ago up when Jobs said he wanted a $20 processor for what would become the iPhone and our execs told him to take a hike (we were making too much money with high margin Window's) boxes. At the time, Arm was 'not as good' - but it had two properties Jobs cared about (better power - although at the time Arm was actually not much better than the laptop x86s, but Apple got Samsung to make/sell parts at less than $20 -- i.e. economics). Again, I'm not a college professor. I'm an engineer that builds real computer systems that sometimes people (even ones like the folks that read this list) want to/have wanted buy. As much as I like to use sold architecture principle to guide things, the difference is I know be careful. Economics is really the higher bit. What the VAX engineers at DEC or the current INTEL*64 folks (like myself) was/is not what some of the same engineers did with Alpha -- today, we have to try to figure out how to make the current product continue to be economically attractive [hence the bazillion new instructions that folks like Paul W in the compiler team figure out how to exploit, so the ISV's codes run better and can sell more copies and we sell more chips to our customers to sell to end users]. But like Jobs's, DEC management got caught up in the high margin game, and ignored the low end (I left Compaq after I managed to build the $1K Alpha which management blew off -- it could be sold at 45% margins like the Alpha TurboLaser or 4x00 series). Funny, one of the last things I had proposed at Masscomp in the early 80s before I went to Stellar, was a low-end system (also < $1K) and Masscomp management wanted to part of it -- it would have meant competing with Sun and eventually the PC. FWIW: Intel >>does<< know how to make a $20 SOC, but the margins will suck. The question is what will management want to? I really don't know. So far, we have liked the server chip margins (don't forget Intel made more $s last year than it ever has - even in the pandemic). I feel a little like Dr Seuss' 'Onceler' in the Lorax story ... if Arm can go upscale from the phone platform who knows what will happen - Bell's Law predicts Arm displaces INTEL*64: “Approximately every decade a new computer class forms as a new “minimal” computer either through using fewer components or use of a small fractional part of the state-of-the-art chips.” FWIW: Bell basically has claimed a technical point, based on Christenson's observation; the 'lessor' technology will displace the 'better one.' Or as I say it, sophisticated architecture always losses to better economics. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lm at mcvoy.com Sat Feb 6 00:56:18 2021 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 06:56:18 -0800 Subject: [COFF] [SPAM] Re: Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20210205145618.GE13916@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Feb 05, 2021 at 09:36:20AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > FWIW: Intel >>does<< know how to make a $20 SOC, but the margins will > suck. The question is what will management want to? I really don't > know. So far, we have liked the server chip margins (don't forget Intel > made more $s last year than it ever has - even in the pandemic). I think Intel is sort of in the same place Sun was. Fat, dumb, and happy with the profits they are making and can't see what is coming. It just didn't make sense to have $20,000 Sun workstations when a $2,000 PC was at least half as good. I advocated for SunOS on x86, to me, it was the operating system that delivered the value, everything just worked on SunOS, for any other OS you were doing the configure dance. Offer SunOS on x86 and capture the low end market. The East coast Sun did the road runner but West coast Sun sneered at it, patches for x86 were not processed very fast, if at all. It's a shame. If Intel doesn't want to make money off of the cheap, but very high volume, $20 SOC, Apple has shown that it has the chops to make a cheap, fast, and power sipping M1 chip. Pretty impressive and if I were Intel, I'd be nervous. Apple has shown they can switch architectures pretty painlessly repeatedly. The x86 lock in isn't much of a lock in these days. From cym224 at gmail.com Sat Feb 6 03:41:09 2021 From: cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 12:41:09 -0500 Subject: [COFF] AT&T 3B1 - Emulation available In-Reply-To: References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> Message-ID: <8cf725f9-7f6c-1c3b-7212-a496692bc0ec@gmail.com> On 02/05/21 03:53, Peter Jeremy via COFF wrote (in part): > Moving more off-topic, M68k got RISC-ified as the ColdFire MCF5206. > That seemed (to me) to combine the feel of the M68k with the > clock/power gains from RISC. Unfortunately, it didn't take off. I know not how much of the embedded market used ColdFire but I recall a lot of our embedded projects used ColdFire. N. From david at kdbarto.org Sat Feb 6 04:31:20 2021 From: david at kdbarto.org (David Barto) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 10:31:20 -0800 Subject: [COFF] [SPAM] Re: Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: <20210205145618.GE13916@mcvoy.com> References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> <20210205145618.GE13916@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: > On Feb 5, 2021, at 6:56 AM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > If Intel doesn't want to make money off of the cheap, but very high > volume, $20 SOC, Apple has shown that it has the chops to make a cheap, > fast, and power sipping M1 chip. Pretty impressive and if I were Intel, > I'd be nervous. Apple has shown they can switch architectures pretty > painlessly repeatedly. The x86 lock in isn't much of a lock in these > days. On my morning walk with a friend we discussed what iNtel is going to do about the M1 and coming M2, M3 chips from Apple. His contention was that iNtel can’t do much because each vendor will want a different configuration of the chip; more cores fewer GPU’s, more GPU’s fewer cores, more of both, more/less RAM on board, etc. It is unlikely that a SOC from iNtel can’t meet this varied selection so it is unlikely to move into that market. It does have a solid lock on the server market and it may just stick with that for the foreseeable future. The problem is that if the newer M2/M3 chips can perform at server performance while retaining the low power consumption that the M1 has done, iNtel may see that its best days are past. Disclaimer: I’ve got an M1 mini, and I have to say it is stunningly fast. David From athornton at gmail.com Sat Feb 6 05:16:21 2021 From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 12:16:21 -0700 Subject: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: > On Feb 5, 2021, at 7:36 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > > I feel a little like Dr Seuss' 'Onceler' in the Lorax story ... if Arm can go upscale from the phone platform who knows what will happen - Bell's Law predicts Arm displaces INTEL*64: > “Approximately every decade a new computer class forms as a new “minimal” computer either through using fewer components or use of a small fractional part of the state-of-the-art chips.” > > FWIW: Bell basically has claimed a technical point, based on Christenson's observation; the 'lessor' technology will displace the 'better one.' Or as I say it, sophisticated architecture always losses to better economics. … As it happens, I got my M1 Macbook Air on Tuesday. Nothing seems slower than my 2018 Air, which is kind of astonishing given that I know most of the applications are still Intel-native and being run under Rosetta emulation (and x86_64 is not a particularly easy architecture to emulate). And, oh my goodness, the battery life. I’ve been unplugging it first thing in the morning, and I don’t have to plug it in again until 2PM-ish. I have Slack and Discord open, both of which were horrendous CPU hogs on the Intel Air, and am doing light Python development with it, albeit not tons of compilation. My Intel Air’s CPU temperature was usually 65C, going up to 80C if I did a video call. The M1 is at 32.2C, which given that the ambient temperature in my office is probably 22C (Tucson, during the winter, with the doors and windows open), is pretty impressive, especially since it has no fan. Last night it did a 3-1/2 hour video call from the battery without any complaint whatsoever. So…arm64 is cheap, fast, and remarkaby power-efficient[*]. I am impressed. Adam [*] not that I didn’t know this before. The first four items at https://mvsevm.fsf.net/ are running on a single Pi 3B+ running 64-bit Ubuntu. It doesn’t have a battery, but I think it’s drawing at most 5W, and the CPU temperature is 52C (also passively cooled). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dave at horsfall.org Sat Feb 6 08:02:11 2021 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2021 09:02:11 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] [SPAM] Re: Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode In-Reply-To: <20210205145618.GE13916@mcvoy.com> References: <202102030759.1137x7C2013543@freefriends.org> <202102030858.1138wuqd011051@freefriends.org> <27567.1612399305@hop.toad.com> <20210204013356.GA16541@mcvoy.com> <20210205145618.GE13916@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 5 Feb 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > I think Intel is sort of in the same place Sun was. Fat, dumb, and > happy with the profits they are making and can't see what is coming. I guess we'll find out soon enough; there is a history of companies "too big to fail" of failing. > It just didn't make sense to have $20,000 Sun workstations when a $2,000 > PC was at least half as good. I advocated for SunOS on x86, to me, it > was the operating system that delivered the value, everything just > worked on SunOS, for any other OS you were doing the configure dance. > Offer SunOS on x86 and capture the low end market. The East coast Sun > did the road runner but West coast Sun sneered at it, patches for x86 > were not processed very fast, if at all. It's a shame. I actually got to play with a Road Runner at a Sun conference (its hostname was "milpitas" of course) and came away impressed that one of the best OSes ran on the worst possible architecture :-) > If Intel doesn't want to make money off of the cheap, but very high > volume, $20 SOC, Apple has shown that it has the chops to make a cheap, > fast, and power sipping M1 chip. Pretty impressive and if I were Intel, > I'd be nervous. Apple has shown they can switch architectures pretty > painlessly repeatedly. The x86 lock in isn't much of a lock in these > days. Well, when you're big enough to be able to make both your own HW and SW then things will go smoothly (which is why my MacBook works so well). I look forward to Brian Krebs' "Patch Tuesday" announcements; I can only think that it's some form of "Stockholm Syndrome" despite there being many free alternatives. Heck, I remember in the days of the Pee-Cee "grey imports" that if it didn't run Flight Simulator then it was illegal; shortly afterwards if it didn't run FS then nobody would buy it... Ah, "schadenfreude" is such a beautiful word :-) -- Dave From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Sat Feb 6 13:01:07 2021 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2021 10:01:07 +0700 Subject: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode (Clem Cole) Message-ID: I have to agree with Clem here. Mind you I still mourn the demise of Alpha and even Itanium but then I never had to pay for those systems. I only make sure they run properly so the customer can enjoy their applications. My 32-1/2 cents (inflation adjusted). Take care and stay as healthy as some of my 25 year old servers :-) Cheers, uncle rubl >From: Clem Cole >To: Larry McVoy >Cc: COFF >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 09:36:20 -0500 >Subject: Re: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode >BTW: Once again we 100% agree on the architecture part of the discussion. And frankly >pre-386 days, I could not think how anyone would come up with it. As computer >architecture it is terrible, how did so many smart people come up with such? It defies >everything we are taught about 'good' computer architectural design. But .... after all of >the issues with the ISA's of Vax and the x86/INTEL*64 vs. Alpha --- is how I came to the >conclusion, architecture does not matter nearly as much as economics and we need to >get over it and stop whining. Or in Christensen's view, a new growing market is often >made from a product that has technically not as good as the one in the original >mainstream market but has some value to the new group of people. -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Sat Feb 6 13:15:52 2021 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2021 10:15:52 +0700 Subject: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode (Clem Cole) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Before some start, I didn't mean 25-year old AlphaServers or Itanium boxes. I meant some fine aDEC400Xp and DECpc MTE servers, powered by Intel 80496 (some even 33MHz!). The oldest AlphaServer, a DS10, is from 1996 (has a new motherboard though). The oldest HP rx-server, two rx1620, are from 2006. Cheers, uncle 'miereneuker' rubl On 06/02/2021, Rudi Blom wrote: > I have to agree with Clem here. Mind you I still mourn the demise of > Alpha and even Itanium but then I never had to pay for those systems. > I only make sure they run properly so the customer can enjoy their > applications. > > My 32-1/2 cents (inflation adjusted). > Take care and stay as healthy as some of my 25 year old servers :-) > Cheers, > uncle rubl > >>From: Clem Cole >>To: Larry McVoy >>Cc: COFF >>Bcc: >>Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2021 09:36:20 -0500 >>Subject: Re: [COFF] Architectures -- was [TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode > > >>BTW: Once again we 100% agree on the architecture part of the discussion. >> And frankly >pre-386 days, I could not think how anyone would come up with >> it. As computer >architecture it is terrible, how did so many smart >> people come up with such? It defies >everything we are taught about >> 'good' computer architectural design. But .... after all of >the issues >> with the ISA's of Vax and the x86/INTEL*64 vs. Alpha --- is how I came to >> the >conclusion, architecture does not matter nearly as much as economics >> and we need to >get over it and stop whining. Or in Christensen's view, >> a new growing market is often >made from a product that has technically >> not as good as the one in the original >mainstream market but has some >> value to the new group of people. > > -- > The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. > -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. From mparson at bl.org Wed Feb 10 03:58:34 2021 From: mparson at bl.org (Michael Parson) Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2021 11:58:34 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] Typing tutors In-Reply-To: References: <5cb7edc8-7d43-aa3a-334f-18e17aa2fa16@gmail.com> <2ffbcab8-b651-c3f9-d4ed-e9ff792cfde6@mhorton.net> <1a7a35b7-4105-20b7-65ed-1eabb663d0ca@mhorton.net> <60205C88.6070808@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 2021-02-07 23:29, Doug McIntyre wrote: > On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 04:32:56PM -0500, Nemo Nusquam wrote: >> My Sun UNIX layout keyboards (and mice) work quite well with my Macs. >> I share your sentiments. > > Most of the bespoke mechanical keyboard makers will offer a dipswitch > for what happens to the left of the A, and with an option to print the > right value there, my keyboards work quite well the right way. I've been using the CODE[0] keyboard with 'clear' switches for the past few years and have been very happy with it. Has the dipswitches for swapping around CTRL/CAPS and the meta/Alt, probably others as well. When I don't have hardware solutions to this, most modern OSes let you remap keys in software. Being a gnu screen user, CTRL & A being right next too each other makes life easier. I've used enough keyboards over the years that didn't even have an ESC key (Mac Plus, the Commodore 64, the keyboard on my Samsung tablet, probably a few others), that I got in the habit of using CTRL-[ to generate an ESC and still do that most of the time rather than reaching for the ESC up there in the corner. > I did use the Sun Type5 USB Unix layout for quite some years, but I > always found it a but mushy, and liked it better switching back to > mechanical keyboards with the proper layout. Before I got this keyboard, I used a Sun Type 7 keyboard (USB with the UNIX layout). It had the CTRL and ESC keys in the "right" places (as noted above, ESC location doesn't bother me as much), but yeah, they're mushy, and big. Much happier with the mechanical keyboard for my daily driver. I've been eyeballing the TEX Shinobi[1], a mechanical keyboard with the ThinkPad type TrackPoint, cut down on reasons for my fingers to leave the keyboard even more. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX [0] http://codekeyboards.com/ [1] https://tex.com.tw/products/shinobi?variant=16969884106842 From crossd at gmail.com Fri Feb 12 21:58:10 2021 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2021 05:58:10 -0600 Subject: [COFF] Fwd: [TUHS] nothing to do with unix, everything to do with history In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The COFF folks may have a bead on this if no one on TUHS does. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: ron minnich Date: Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:33 AM Subject: [TUHS] nothing to do with unix, everything to do with history To: TUHS main list There's so much experience here, I thought someone might know: "Our goal is to develop an emulator for the Burroughs B6700 system. We need help to find a complete release of MCP software for the Burroughs B6700. If you have old magnetic tapes (magtapes) in any format, or computer printer listings of software or micro-fiche, micro-film, punched-card decks for any Burroughs B6000 or Burroughs B7000 systems we would like to hear from you. Email nw at retroComputingTasmania.com" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peter at rulingia.com Thu Feb 18 17:32:24 2021 From: peter at rulingia.com (Peter Jeremy) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2021 18:32:24 +1100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <26484818-2f05-37d3-adff-6e34d383e117@gmail.com> <399f2cdc-d790-c4fe-18e3-0cb6b4c76554@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> <55d60220-c22d-c99f-f40c-68a741183213@gmail.com> Message-ID: => COFF since it's left Unix history behind. On 2021-Feb-16 21:08:15 -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote: >I like SQLite and Berkeley DB in that they don't require a full RDBMS >running. Instead, an application can load what it needs and access the >DB itself. I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it just runs inside the client instead of being a separate backend server. (BDB is a straight key:value store). >I don't remember how many files SQLite uses to store a DB. One file. I often ship SQLite DB files between systems for various reasons and agree that the "one file" is much easier that a typical RDBMS. -- Peter Jeremy -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Sun Feb 21 03:23:35 2021 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:23:35 -0700 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <26484818-2f05-37d3-adff-6e34d383e117@gmail.com> <399f2cdc-d790-c4fe-18e3-0cb6b4c76554@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> <55d60220-c22d-c99f-f40c-68a741183213@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 2/18/21 12:32 AM, Peter Jeremy via COFF wrote: > I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it > just runs inside the client instead of being a separate backend server. > (BDB is a straight key:value store). Fair enough. I was referring to an external and independent daemon with it's own needs for care & feeding. > One file. I often ship SQLite DB files between systems for various > reasons and agree that the "one file" is much easier that a typical > RDBMS. *nod* -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Sun Feb 21 12:33:41 2021 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2021 09:33:41 +0700 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. (Grant Taylor) Message-ID: I've been maintaining a customer's application which uses C-ISAM as database interface on SCOUNIX, TRU64 and HP-UX. Simple and above all in 'C' ! As wiki says "IBM still recommends the use of the Informix Standard Engine for embedded applications" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Informix_C-ISAM Mind you, the page hasn't seen significant changes since 2006 :-) Of course not having C-ISAM as a shared library can make executables a bit big unless included in a custom made shared library which I never really tried on SCOUNIX, but did on the newer UNIXes. A diskette used on SCOUNIX for certain offline salvage actions just isn't 'spacious' enough. Cheers, uncle rubl . >From: Grant Taylor >To: coff at minnie.tuhs.org >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2021 10:23:35 -0700 >Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. >On 2/18/21 12:32 AM, Peter Jeremy via COFF wrote: >>I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it just runs inside the client >>instead of being a separate backend server. (BDB is a straight key:value store). > >Fair enough. > >I was referring to an external and independent daemon with it's own needs for care & >feeding. >. >>One file. I often ship SQLite DB files between systems for various reasons and agree >>that the "one file" is much easier that a typical RDBMS. > >*nod* > >-- >Grant. . . . >unix || die -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. From dave at horsfall.org Mon Feb 22 08:22:16 2021 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2021 09:22:16 +1100 (EST) Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <26484818-2f05-37d3-adff-6e34d383e117@gmail.com> <399f2cdc-d790-c4fe-18e3-0cb6b4c76554@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> <55d60220-c22d-c99f-f40c-68a741183213@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 20 Feb 2021, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: >> I also like SQLite and use it quite a lot. It is a full RDBMS, it just >> runs inside the client instead of being a separate backend server. (BDB >> is a straight key:value store). > > Fair enough. +1 for another happy SQLite user; it "just works". -- Dave, who implemented "join" under BDB