Mastodawn

Tom Lyon ✅1d ago

Mike Olson 1d ago

Hmmmmmm…

Tom Lyon ✅2d ago

#UNIX panel at upcoming #Princeton reunions.
Featuring some famous people, and me too.

Tom Lyon ✅2d ago

OTD 1989: Control Data shuts down ETA supercomputer subsidiary.

https://ethw.org/First-Hand:The_First_CMOS_And_The_Only_Cryogenically_Cooled_Supercomputer

Tom Lyon ✅2d ago

Poul-Henning Kamp 2d ago

If you program, you should read this piece.

"Ada's successes — the aircraft that have not crashed, the railway signalling systems that have not failed, the missile guidance software that has not misguided — are invisible precisely because they are successes. The languages that failed visibly, in buffer overflows and null pointer exceptions and data races and security vulnerabilities, generated the discourse. [Ada did not]"

https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html

The Quiet Colossus — On Ada, Its Design, and the Language That Built the Languages

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 12

OTD 1989: #SunMicrosystems announces the SPARCstation 1, aka Sun 4/60, aka "Campus".
Also first use of SBus.

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/sun-sparcstation-1

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 10

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Stuart Marks Apr 10

There’s a picture of this on Ken Shirriff’s @kenshirriff site, along with the consoles of the other 360 models. In the 360/44 pic, the knob is the bottom one of the trio of knobs at the center left.

https://www.righto.com/2019/04/iconic-consoles-of-ibm-system360.html

There is a general description of this feature on the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_44

and fortunately it has a link to original source material on bitsavers:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/functional_characteristics/A22-6875-5_360-44_funcChar.pdf (2/4)

Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old

The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 8

Amazon announces "S3 Files": https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launching-s3-files-making-s3-buckets-accessible-as-file-systems/

I guess they didn't get my message that NFS Must Die!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc

Launching S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems | Amazon Web Services

Amazon S3 Files makes S3 buckets accessible as high-performance file systems on AWS compute resources, eliminating the tradeoff between object storage benefits and interactive file capabilities while enabling seamless data sharing with ~1ms latencies.

Amazon Web Services

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 8

OTD 1982: I get my Sun offer letter.

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 8

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JohnMashey Apr 8

@aka_pugs @markd @SteveBellovin
But still, FORTRAN IV got lots of use especially on 360/50…85 in universities & R&D labs. i suspect not much on /30 /40.
I still think of 360 as a huge bet to consolidate the chaos of the 701…7094 36-bit path and the 702…7074 &1401 variable-string paths.
And for fun: I asked both Gene Amdahl & Fred Brooks why they used 24-bit addressing, ignoring high 8-bits… which caused a lot of problems/complexity later.
A: save hardware on 360/30, w/8-bit data paths.

Tom Lyon ✅Apr 8

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MarkD Apr 8

@SteveBellovin @aka_pugs If you were on the non-EBCDIC side of the fence you got the impression that IBM sales pushed EBCDIC pretty hard as a competitive advantage - even if their engineering covertly preferred ASCII.

The 32-bit word must have been a harder-sell for the blue suits since the competition were selling 60bit and 36bit amongst other oddballs.

Fortunately the emergence of commercial customers marked the declining relevance of scientific computing... Did IBM get lucky or were they prescient?

But yeah, the S/360 definitely marked the end of the beginning of computing in multiple ways.