Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 21:52:59 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Andrew C. Hornback" <hornback@wireco.net> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Now a little OT but RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Message-ID: <15024.15515.195623.598446@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <02d401c0acf8$833e77f0$0f00000a@eagle> References: <15024.1411.79596.364926@guru.mired.org> <02d401c0acf8$833e77f0$0f00000a@eagle>
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Andrew C. Hornback <hornback@wireco.net> types: > Egads... someone's showing their age... or am I showing my lack > thereof? Is there a difference. > I don't remember this... but it sounds like it was from the late > 70s/early 80s. Heck, I barely remember Amdahls at all... I've only > seen pictures of 'em, as far as I know. *grins* Well, if I've seen an Amdahl, I didn't notice it. The places I worked with IBM hardware was true blue. I *have* helped judge Amdahl bids in response to an RFQ, though. > > There may not have been a crossover of manufacturers, but there was > > pretty clearly a customer migration. I watched it happen - and my > > career followed, going from big iron to minis to desktop > > workstations. So far I've managed to avoid anything that > > looks like MS > > OS support, and have no plans at all to change *that*. > In the installations that I've seen, the move was from 'frames to > client/server. Sign of the times, the colleges that I went to just > decomissioned their ES/9000 and Vax installations in the past couple > of years. To make matters worse, both institutions are stuck with > thier old big iron until the next remodel of the buildings come along. > Seems that in the last remodel at each facility, someone figured that > the big computer would be there for years upon years, and they did the > remodel in a manner that wouldn't allow either machine to leave the > premises. Yeah, minicomputers were basically indistinguishable from from mainframes at the end user level. While minicomputers could replace mainframes, there wasn't a lot of incentive to do so. The end users really didn't see a difference, as they had terminals on their desk in either case. All that really happened was that you probably had to buy new applications and convert all your data for a new platform. Minicomputers sold because they let smaller units control their own information. DEC called the PDP/VAX 11/780 a "minicomputer" because a lot of companies would let regional office buy "minicomputers" without corporate approval. No definition I know for "minicomputer" describes a 780, though. I still remember editing card images on a departmental PDP-11/70 running v6 to submit to the computer center 370 running MVS. Seen in that light, desktop computers are the next logical step in pushing computing from a data center out to the user. The first sales I know of were to small companies that couldn't afford the $50K-$100K for a low-end mini, but didn't have any problem dropping $10K on a high-end micro (those were typically S/100 MP/M boxes with somewhwere between 256K and 1024K). Client-server is the result of making it convenient to share data after PC's got both cheap and useful enough to put on people's desk (and we'll ignore the role of big blue having a PC legitimizing them in the eyes of corporate IT managers). > > The original comment was about standardization and the PC market. > > Most of the people playing with PC hardware I knew in the early days > > had done the migration. They took incomparability between > > manfacturers > > as a given, and they didn't push for any kind of standardization. > I'm out of my tree here, probably, since I've only been working with > PCs for about 16 years... and back then, it was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 > with the 2k RAM pack and interpreted BASIC... *Grins* This was a bit earlier than that. TRS-80 model 1s, for instance. Those S/100 system, only running CP/M and less memory were more popular - so much so that you could get a couple of different flavors of CP/M for the TRS-80. There were even C compilers and stripped down emacs commercialy available for CP/M. OS/9 was the best of breed, though. It was *almost* Unix. Same set of file operators, tree-structured directories, good things like that. It ran multi-user quite nicely on a 2MHz 6809 with 64K of ram. Radio Shack sold a version for their Color Computer, and you could actually hang a terminal off the serial port and log in remotely. > > > Which reminds me... has anyone seen the new Intel > > vision of what a > > > consumer PC is going to be? It's basically a stack of > > boxes, like an > > > Aztec temple, each one holding a component or two. > > Foundational box > > > holding the motherboard, processor and memory. Next step > > up holding > > > the DVD-RAM drive, followed up the next steps containing > > the HDD, the > > > other removable media drive (looked like a Zip drive), and the top > > > being the control and I/O panel with all of the ports on > > top. Gone > > > are your PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, replaced by > > USB. Gone are > > > your serial and parallel ports, replaced by USB. > > Ok - what's the drive interconnect? Are they actually running IDE to > > external boxes? > They're using USB to interconnect the drive hardware, and since you > can just add on USB devices whenever and have up to 127 possible > devices per USB chain... they think that'll make for all the > expandability you'll ever need... Well, they may well be right about not needing any more devices, but I don't think USB is going to cut it for speed on disks. Was there a firewire port hiding somewhere? > > Actually, it all already is, in the sense that you can buy > > newer/faster/better hardware. > Newer/Faster/Better isn't always the case. Intel's 8xx motherboard > fiascos and the introduction of RIMMs... need I say more? Better isn't always better, either :-). I have a long history of picking things for being the best technology available. I also have a shed full of orphans. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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