Mastodawn

Tom Lyon ✅1d ago

OTD 2009: #Oracle buys #SunMicrosystems. Sigh.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-sun-042009.html

Tom Lyon ✅4d ago

Mike Olson 4d ago

Hmmmmmm…

Tom Lyon ✅4d ago

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

Tom Lyon ✅4d 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 ✅4d ago

Poul-Henning Kamp 4d 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

Show thread

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

Show thread

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.