Posts by Christoph R. Hawley

BOFH: Hordes unleashed... by a RAM upgrade

perfect counterpoint

When the BOFH / PFY wage evil, they win ten times out of nine. (Math error? Why, no... Has sir counted sir's change of late?)

On the atypical occasion when their behaviour diverges from strictly evil (a naïve observer might misidentify their actions as "positive" or even "charitable" – stop sniggering, damn it), *that's* when they reap a shafting of truly Royal Order.

Thus is balance reflected in the Tao.

BOFH: A safe bet

A Momentary Lapse of Holiday

Dear PFY,

No, no, no. "It's an *EASTER* miracle!" is the traditional comment, if you must tread that path.

BOFH: The Boss gets Grandpa Simpson syndrome

Bah! (waves paw)

IBM 1401 - a napkin-sketched prototype for the 360, with all the power of the same ill-used bar napkin and Shiny! Radix_40! Addressing! to access its four thousand (not 4k, four zero zero zero decimal) native storage locations made of ferrite beads. Yes, they were eight bits wide, and no, they weren't bytes. (Hint: parity bit.)

SCO XENIX86 - ten users on a vanilla XT (4.77 MHz, 640kB). Never actually sold as an official product AFAIK, but *small* ==> less opportunity for suckage.

BTDTGTtoo-small-to-wear-anymoreTS. Someone hand me the large coat, willya?

--

And the men and women (well, the men) who went to the moon? Well God bless 'em, they did it with no mouse, and a text-only black and white screen and THIRTY-TWO KILOBYTES OF RAM. Hah!

-- Three Dead Trolls, "Every OS Sucks"

Security boffins unveil BitUnlocker

Chills run up my bus

Gotta love old-tech approaches to data extraction. The cooling thing works much better than you might guess; back when CirKitChill was (legally) sold in cans, a grad student demonstrated by stopping the CPU clock mid-cycle while polling the bits on the bus. Took nearly a minute for the first bit to evaporate.

'81 or '82; Z-80 (over-)clocked at ~4 MHz to zero. (Yes, I *am* an old fart, why do you ask?)