- I spent 20 years at Xerox, including research. Even in the 90s and beyond the company had no interest in anything that didn't involve putting dots on paper. Now it's stuck in a rapidly shrinking industry and buying competitors to capture market share. Oh, what could have been.
- An article on networking was definitely not a place I was expecting to see my old high school mentioned.
- Usenet was the only resource for asking questions about pretty much anything back in the early 90s. All you needed was a modem, UUCP, and enough disk space to hold everything. You just had to be patient for the answers to arrive.
- The SparcStations I used in grad school were so much more powerful than anything had access to at work. Sun and the others totally blew it, just like the minicomputer companies had when the Unix workstations arrived.
- What an absolute mess (the situation, not the site). It's devolved into a machine that gives money to lawyers. Such a shame.
- The PDP-11's interrupt handling kept it going in embedded and industrial environments long after it was supplanted in other markets.
- What was special about its interrupt handling?
- The PDP-11 was one of the first systems to use vectorized interrupts and interrupt chaining. This meant that when an interrupt occurred, the CPU could jump directly to a specific handler for that device, execute its code, and even pass control to other handlers if needed. Once completed, execution would resume exactly where it left off.
For example, a sensor connected via a bus card could trigger an interrupt when new data was available, allowing code to store the value in memory or write it to disk automatically, without the main program needing to check for updates. This eliminated the need for wasteful polling, making the system more efficient and responsive by handling events asynchronously in the background.
- I had a client using a vax 11/750 in 2016. I remember touching the cabinet and saying “Easy girl. Your job is almost done “.
- I played with this a long time ago when Apple first introduced it. Interesting to see there's some folks still working on it.
- In my VAX days the VT220 was the terminal to work on. The keyboard was excellent and you could stare at the screen all day without a problem (or maybe just because I was younger).
- I had forgotten all about the Transputer. Never really considered it RISC but apparently it was.
- i remember the hype and there was an article saying that sir clive sinclair of zx spectrum fame was looking at the transputer idea as a way to jump back into computing after the sale of sinclair. my thought that he was just about crazy enough to do it, make it work and sell it for a pittance :-)
- I so wanted the ATW-800 from Atari to ship and be a thing.
- I used OS-9 68000 back in the 90s on a telecom project. The feature I liked best was using "cd ..." to take you to the parent's parent directory.
- To my enormous surprise, forty-plus years later triple period now means something like recursive wildcard subdirectory in the Go language
# lists your standard library packages and workspace packages
go list ...
# Builds just your workspace as opposed to "go build ..." which is much more exciting, don't do that
go build ./...
I am rather jealous of the M68K as on a 6809 in the 80s running OS-9 Level 1 we were somehow ALWAYS out of both floppy disk space and memory.
- More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet