Newsgroups: alt.os.multics,alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!egsner!sdf!esl
From: esl@sdf.saomai.org (Eric S. Lamemond)
Subject: Retro-Computing! 
Message-ID: <D5yxwn.5BG@sdf.saomai.org>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 23:43:34 GMT
Lines: 59

Hi there!

I'm Eric S. Lamemond.  Many of you may know me for my wonderful editing
skills.  This post is about retro computing. 

In the old days, computer rooms need raised floors, extensive cooling systems,
and huge power requirements.  The machines were composed of cabinets the
sizes of freezers and usually only had the computing power of the Zilog 80. 
Disk drives were enormous and could be often mistake as a washing machine.

One of biggest resource hogs was the Honeywell MULTICS.  Running a MULTICS 
is like trying to air condition hell and do their accounting on an intel
286 under XENIX.  Although the i286 and the MULTICS fair about the same in 
processor power, the intel superior design flaw leaps centuries beyond 
Honeywell.  

The operators (sysadm in UNIX) of the computer room did their work from
printing terminals (X-windows stations in UNIX) usually at 300/1200bps.
I can recall my very first modem my father bought me .. it was a 2400bps
Hayes compatible.  I thought that was slow!  gaaaad zooks!

The Decsystem20 was also another resource hog.  If you ran one today, you'd
be looking at spending $1500 a month in just power and cooling.  The brains
of the Decsystem20 was TOPS-20 Monitor (OS in UNIX).  The monitor was nothing
but a glorified program loader (VP/IX in UNIX). PDP-10 programmers are often
called hackers because nothing worked on the Decsystem20 and always had to
be "hacked" to work.  Some of the tools of the day were TECO (VI in UNIX)
and DDT.  Fortunately these days no one needs to use a debugger.  In the
superior operating systems (such as SunOS, ULTRIX, AIX and LINUX) the system
does what is called a PANIC .. the machine then just needs to be rebooted
therefore debugging is not necessary.

Symbolics machines were prone to such errors.  For instance, GENERA (The OS
in UNIX) offered a cheap windowing system, an archaic filesystem and useless
version control.  At times the GENERA's flakey windowing system would lock
up and dump the poor user to the Cold Load Stream (init 6 in UNIX).  The
user would have to debug the problem or abort totally!  The Symbolics 3600
series were so inferior to machines such as the VAX that they needed what
was called a FEP (AMI bios in Pentium UNIX) to boot them!  The FEP was 
probably the most advanced component of the Symbolics 3600 series because 
it had a motorola 32 bit processor.  I've often wondered why they just didn't 
run UNIX on the FEP and make the machine multiuser. 

"lose! lose! lose!"  ;^) ;^* (*smooch*) (*giggle*)

Todays computing room is not filled with such dinasaurs.. We lead the
race in the computer information superinflux with SGI and SunSPARC stations.
You will find most computer rooms are carpeted and quiet enough that the
sysadm can listen to Handel or Bach and not be disturbed by fan noise or
disk activity.  All computer speak the same language and now run truly 
OPEN systems.  We also take less power, less room, less costs .. very 
attractive to the millions of advertisers waiting to get their web page
on the "NET".

-esl
-- 
Eric S. Lamemond - SunOS sysadm gcc g++ LINUX "Ralph Nader, will you marry me?"
#include <std.disclaimer> - Segmentation fault - core dumped ;^) |+) rm -rf / 
/* dmr: "So, what do you think of STEAMS Ken?"  Ken: "?" */ 8) &8^) sed2perl
