On 12/12/24 09:20, Van Snyder wrote:
On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 18:42 -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> You have four times the RAM of the OP. 4G is incredibly marginal spec
> for a desktop 2024.
The first computer I was paid to write software for, in 1966, had 1,400
6-bit characters, not bytes,
Wasn't that data type named EBCDIC, or something like that?
I remember being taught about that, about 40 years ago, when we were
taught about the character codes, including the ASCII character code,
and IBM creating the first internet architecture, that I think was named
SNA. DEC developed an internet architecture, that I think was named DNA,
as opposed to DECnet, which was a DEC network architecture for creating
DEC computers, like PDP-11's and VAX-11's, with each node, and the
network server, running a DEC operating system.
That was when an internet meant a computer network that connected
computers using different physical architectures and brands of different
operating systems; so, whilst VAX-11's running VAX-VMS could connect to
PDP-11's running DEC operating systems, on a DECnet network, to connect
DEC computers running DEC operating systems (such as RS-X or RSTS-e
(operating systems that ran on PDP-11's), to connect them to an IBM mini
or mainframe computer, required an internet (and, so, also, would
connecting a VAX-11 running VAX-VMS, to a VAX-11 running BSD 4.2, I
presume). But, whilst, as a user, I accessed a VAX-11 running VAX VMS,
via DECnet, from a PDP-11 terminal on a PDP-11/44 running RSTS-e, as the
FORTRAN-77 ran on the VAX (with the VAX-VMS providing the filename
extension of version numbers), I was not aware of an internet at that
time, connecting a VAX running BSD 4.2, to DEC computers running DEC
operating systems, such as a VAX-11 running VAX-VMS.
not kB, not MB, not GB. That's why IBM
called it the 1401. It was the first mass-produced computer. IBM sold
more than 28,000 of them. It was about the size of a four-drawer file
cabinet. The clock speed was 83 kHz (not MHz, not GHz). Later in the
year it was upgraded to 16K. That added a box about the size of two
side-by-side two-drawer file cabinets. I have a 63-phase FORTRAN II
compiler for it that runs in 8K. When they added a Tape controller, it
was another four-drawer file cabinet. Each drive was the size of a
fridge. The card reader and the printer were about the size of a spinet
piano. But we did all the company's accounting on it, and accounting for
about 1,000 customers nationwide on three others like it. The Computer
History Museum in Mountain View, CA, has two of them that work. It's
cool that they moved into an old SGI building at 1401 Shoreline Blvd.
The last program I wrote before I retired was only about 300,000 lines,
but it kept a cluster with 384 cores and 24 GB per core busy for 15
hours per day, on average, doing satellite instrument data analysis.
Processing some days' data took 37 hours. Needless to say, if my code
had had memory leaks, it wouldn't have run that long. My employer had
much nicer computers than mine. The little "supercomputer" fit in one 9U
rack panel, but I wouldn't be able to afford water cooling or the
electricity bill at home.
In my earlier (but not the earliest) days of being taught computer
science, another student showed me, on the balcony of his flat, in a
block of flats, his PDP-11 that he had acquired, that he programmed in
octal, for fun. I think that was in the 1980's.
The first computer game that I played, was Star Trek, in 1978, on an IBM
1130 computer, at a university. I think the stack of cards, that had to
be fed into the computer, to run the game, was a couple of feet high,
and, the Klingon spaceships were the upper case 'X' characters that
appeared on the screen. At that stage, the main enemies of the crew of
the Enterprise, were the Klingons, and, they were not always "on the
Starboard bow"". The game was single user, and, the computer (IBM 1130)
was a single tasking computer.
When they COVID-exiled me, they wouldn't let me have the nice 8-core i7
with 32 GB that had been under my desk; they expected me to get by with
my home antique. I retired eighteen months later.
..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............
