Posts by Tore Sinding Bekkedal

Call off the firing squad: HP grants stay of execution to OpenVMS

Re: Ooooh yeah

At a VMS Boot Camp a few years ago, I got a few laughs by running simh/VMS on my mobile phone. People could telnet in and everything.

Re: hmm

Ironically, the original term for lazy programmers taking too many non-defined aspects of their platform for granted was "all the world's a VAX" :)

Re: The whole 9 yards

There's a hefty tome, "VMS Internals and Data Structures". It's probably the best book of the "OS walkthrough" genre I've read. It doesn't hurt that the OS design itself is so good.

<fanboy mode>I got mine signed by Ruth Goldenberg!</fanboy mode>

Remembering the CDC 6600

Some notes on the article

Hey, I want to congratulate you on writing this article.

Some notes:

1) There is one (Well, OK. A later, but binary-compatible one) still in use at cray-cyber.org. They give you user accounts. They are also excellent folks. Feel free to dump money at them so that they can do cool things for us.

2) IIRC, there was actually only one peripheral processor, but it was a barrel processor, that is, it executed the responsibilites of each logical CPU. This changed, at some point. And they weren't speedy at all.

3) It might be worth noting that the displays are actually vector displays. That is, every letter is drawn as a vector, and the CRT ray is controlled as a vector, not as a drawn raster. It's also pretty damn fast, and can monitor RAM as code is executing in it. Which is a lot of fun to watch.

4) The CDC 6600 was FAST. Holy shit was it ever fast. It was an order of magnitude (in some instructions, two OOMs) faster than anything IBM had at the time. Very very fast. Whoosh.

5) You mention "aging silicon" - actually, I think the CDC6600 was based on germanium, not silicon, transistors. Don't quote me on that, though.