Note: Never make angry the gods of code. Never. If you do, they will leave angry on Friday night, and come back with some *amazing* thing like this on Monday:
Obligatory: Brilliant Work. Brilliant.
"We wanted both and couldn't find it, so we built it and open-sourced the whole thing."
It was mostly written in COBOL. This is how I got into XENIX/UNIX. A machine went down that was a training machine: It required XENIX on a PC, because it ran on RM/COBOL on XENIX, because all the screens, and the encoding, already written were in COBOL. RM/COBOL had an ancient compatibility, but the code was extremely simple, having been ironed out many decades earlier. ( I got it in 1985, but all the creation dates were 1982. The original files must have been from the mid 1960s. I pointed this out, and someone called me on it. I found a training manual from 1966, and the screens were exactly The same, except of course for the 3270 status line.
It was fast on an 4.77Mhz IBM PC, and much faster on a 10Mhz V20.
50,000 transactions was pretty standard for a IBM Mainframe, now? The z/ Series is still about the same, but it scales up to 32 processors. ( excuse me, billions. per day )
Most of the systems used for GDS’s were in fact written in Assembler. I know as I have worked with a number of the systems. This is one, but not the only reason the different systems have remained on TPF machines.
Interesting - would have thought they all would be uploaded by now. I feel like I bought the set years ago when Dr Dobbs folded but I can't seem to dig them up. However I did find my Verity Stob archive CD :) (which looks like it might already be on the archive - I can't be sure as mine is still sealed in the shipping packaged, never opened it)
When someone mentioned that these were available for download, I printed them in high res tabloid, and had them enlarged 4x and put the best two on my wall.
It literally entered my though my pores... I became a better designer, a better illustrator, a better carpenter, a much better visualizer.
I used to live in San Rafael, and San Anselmo, a stones throw away from the Marin Civic Center, and two of his houses... I studied and sketched the Civic Center from many angles, and saw 'Gattica.'
"In 1981, he wired together the backplanes of two DEC VAX-11/780 systems and made the first multi-CPU Unix computer, preceding DEC's dual processor VAX-11/782"
"This model is essentially a copy of the "dual VAX-11/780" computers hand built by wire-wrapping the backplanes of two VAX-11/780 CPUs by then graduate student George H. Goble and undergraduate assistants at Purdue University as part of his work on his master's degree thesis on modifications of the Unix kernel for multi-CPU architecture."
Yes, he was the first. DEC had made a bunch of attempts, he got it to work, and DEC came running.
G. H. Goble and M. H. Marsh, "A Dual Processor VAX 11/780," Purdue University Technical Report, TR-EE 81-31, September 1981.
GOOD GOD! you know that 1 oz of LoX + 1 charcoal briquette = 1 stick of dynomite. I am so glad that only grills were hurt, and a few camera lenses as the sky went dark on the video, because the light was SO BRIGHT.
I am glad to have been 100s of miles away.
Thank you for your work, and of corse for the many many laughs.
One of the first videos you downloaded... Well, from the other end, when it went 'Viral' it maxxed out the OC line that Perdue had, for a week. completely. I saw it once, a year later... and of course... found it hysterically funny, and shared it with my students... "Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds."
"Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site."
Obligatory: Brilliant Work. Brilliant.
"We wanted both and couldn't find it, so we built it and open-sourced the whole thing."
\m/ \m/ /m\ /m\
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