Posts by IvyKing 366 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2009
I remember the BYTE article on dataflow architectures being the "new big thing". ISTR this was a mid 1980's issue, with BYTE's publication ending with the July 1998 issue.
Seems to me that the most common use is for signal processing as shown by the number of MAC blocks in most large FPGAs.
>The OG MIT License came in to being most likely in 1987, the OG BSD License definetly came to being in 1988, while the OG GPL came into being in 1989... AND RMS was working at MIT when he wrothe the OG GPL. So, if anything, MIT and BSD influenced the GPL not the other way around.
>Without MIT and BSD we would probably not have the GPL...
It could be said that the BSD license was influenced by the license SPICE was released with and SPICE was developed in the 1970's. SPICE being Simulation Package for Integrated Circuit Electronics.
The satellite and debris are in a low orbit, which means the drag from the atmosphere will quickly remove the objects from orbit. IIRC, SpaceX deploys the satellites at a lower orbit and then has the satellites boost themselves to the operational orbit. That way, a DOA bird will de-orbit in a relatively short time.
In case of a real Kessler Syndrome event, the lowest orbits will be cleared out in a relatively short time, but the more useful orbits will need some sort of active clearing to become usable.
The troll icon was appropriate for your post.
There was intent in my post to suggest anything negative about his degree, the comment about CAD was based his experience learning SolidWorks in high school compared with freshmen who apparently had no significant exposure to CAD prior to their start at Purdue. A related note, we went computer shopping with him, popped into a Best Buy and was pleasantly surprised that the sales droids had a decent clue. Turns out the younger one was an EE major at Purdue.
President Chiang was rather dismissive about AI in his speech at the 2023 graduation ceremony where my son was getting his BS degree. To be fair, he was commenting on the quality of AI generated text as opposed to applications where AI may be of real benefit. From what my son has said about his working with freshmen, it sounds like more emphasis is needed on CAD, although AI may be of help with dealing with CAD.
The ammeter on the battery in the downtown L.A. exchange was reported to have a 12,000A redline. There was a red stripe on the floor signifying that metal tools were prohibited beyond that point in order to prevent formation of metal plasma.
The batteries on USn WWII fleet subs had cells weighing one ton, and would be about the same size as exchange batteries. It is my understanding that exchange batteries were built with glass cases, which wouldn't work to well in a sub.
The point was that most of the "modern" Unix derivatives were not ported to the 8086 or the 80286 (Xenix/SCO was an exception). Lack of memory management precluded Unix being ported to the 8086, though Intel did build a few prototype machines with memory management (one of my classmates had one). The 80286 could support code that was originally written for the PDP-11 as both were 16 bit machines with tricks to extend the address space (16 bit segments in the case of the 80286), but the versions of BSD that were being ported to Intel architecture were originally developed on the Vaxen at UCB and the VAX had a 32 bit address space. The 80386 was the first in the x86 series to allow use of 32 bit segment and thus was more in tune with the way 32 bit Unix memory management worked. I would not want to subject any development to requiring use of 80286 code for any x86 software.
As far as "x86" code goes, the 8086 was designed so that 8080/8085 assembly code code be easily ported to the 8086. The 8080 was designed to allow easy translation of 8008 assembly code and the 8008 dates back to 1971.
The 80286 was designed before Unix was a niche OS and had some very impressive options for multi-tasking and multi-user systems. IIRC, OS/2 v1.x was designed around the 80286 and dynamic memory allocation involved the hardware more directly than more modern systems. One result was if 1K of memory was allocated, any attempt to access beyond that 1K would generate a fault.
A BSD tidbit. The CS department at Cal bought a PDP-11 to replace the loss of the CDC6400 "B" machine, which was running the KRONOS time sharing OS (I got a couple of exposures to using Kronos during my first quarter at Cal. That PDP-11 was rotated between 3 different OS's, one being an experimental OS from Bell Labs was prompted comments such as "If Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, The Phone Company would still be using vacuum tubes" and describing the "C" language an "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord".
I've also used CDE on Sparcs as well as X86 (Solaris). Before CDE, I used HP's VUE, which was the original desktop environment based on Motif. I also have a copy of a book on the design of Motif, written when Motif was an HP project. FWIW, my favorite background for VUE and CDE was Ankh.
Thanks for the correction!
I remember looking through the documentation for GE's timesharing service that was being used by the college where my dad was teaching circa 1969. My first exposure to computer programming was at the local CDC office a mile east or so of UCSD, and learned to like the IBM keypunches.
Working from home is a little bit different when using a fiber optic internet connection with 20 million times the data rate used by the model 33, along with a key board that's easier to type on the the model 33.
Intel stated that the 8086 instruction set was designed for source code compatibility with the 8080, which was source code compatible with the 8008. Seattle Computer Products had a program from translating Z-80 assembly code to 8086 assembly code, hence the hooks in 86-DOS to convert CP/M system calls to Int21H calls used in 86-DOS and subsequently MS-DOS.
"I was hacking on the proto-BSD in C and assembler."
Which suggests you were at Cal ca 1976 and doing your dirty work in Evans Hall, or perhaps Corey Hall.
The first comment I heard about the C language was that it was "an abomination in the eyes of the Lord" and a comment "If Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes".
FWIW, I got a BS degree and MS degree from Cal in '76 and '78 respectively.
The author wrote that the Space Shuttle was launched "on a rocket", though the shuttle itself was part of the rocket. The X-37B, on the other hand, was the payload of the rocket.
Side note about the shuttle - the shuttle could have carried a bit more payload had it used the SSME's instead of OMS engines for final insertion to orbit but that would have meant that the external tanks would have had uncontrolled re-entry and landing who knows where.
IMO, the reason FOSS was good at code quality and to a lesser extant security was that code was being ported to a variety of Unices running on different processors. This porting effort revealed a lot of bugs that would have taken longer to find had project only having one target.
"it probably supplies pressure to the rear portion of the train (less than half)"
NO!!!!! The FRED (or EOTDD) DOES NOT have the ability to supply any pressure. All it can do is to release air in the trainline, which then causes to apply. The reduction in pressure when initiated by the FRED causes the pressure decrease to start in the rear and work its way forward at a few hundred feet per second. A very rapid decrease in trainline pressure would initiate an emergency brake application, which then would propagate at about 900 feet per second. What can happen if the locomotive brake valve is in the release position, the compressors on the locomotives could supply enough air to keep some of the brakes from applying.
FWIW, trucks and trains use different mechanisms to activate the brakes. Trucks use springs to activate the brakes. with air pressure acting against the springs to release the brakes and reduction in pressure then lets the springs apply the brakes. Trains use a brake valve that when the trainline pressure is reduced, causes the valve to release air from the service reservoir into the brake cylinder with the release ending when the service reservoir pressure drops to equal the pressure in the trainline.
CG1 is correct in that the FRED's valve performs the same duty as the conductor valve does in a caboose (cabin car for the Pennsy fans as well as a variety of other names). The worst case is the valve opening enough to trigger an emergency application of the brakes, though that is more likely to cause a break-in-two than a full blown derailment as the train would be under tension. The FRED doesn't have any means of increasing pressure in the trainline, so it can't act to release the brakes.
What hasn't been mentioned is security for distributed power control.
"Q-DOS was a 'quickly' cobbled together clone of CPM which Seattle Computer Products would sell."
Tim Paterson cloned CP/M's API at the source level to make easy to port CP/M programs to 86-DOS. This included a utility for reading CP/M formatted disks and a program to do most of the work translating Z-80 assembly code to 8086 assembly code. The underlying structure was very different, with use of software interrupt 21H for accessing OS calls. One very distinct difference was 86-DOS kept records of file size in bytes.
FWIW, my first computer was an SCP S-100 system that came with the 86-DOS documentation.
Finally, the IBM PC and clones never properly implemented the time of day function call - SCP used an AMD 9513 for the clock and the time was incremented in 10ms steps.
It might very well have a CDC only restriction. The 6000/7000 series machines were not amenable to 7 or 8 bit characters, hence the upper case only restriction imposed by 6 bit characters. String processing on those beasts was -um- interesting, though SNOBOL worked fine.
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