Indeed, reading it from the beginning, this last ESR revision of the Jargon File just seems off somehow. Some entries are blatant techspeak (go look 'em up on Wikipedia, guys), some are (or were; this thing hasn't been updated in over a decade) only germane to the parts of Usenet ESR himself was interested in, specifically news.admin.net-abuse.*; and what's left seems like it was never in actual use, or just never caught on outside of the development circle that coined it.
Aside from a few entries, I have to wonder if this is worth updating.
And then there's the memes that were past their sell-by date even in 2004. Come on, ESR, that's like when my mom couldn't stop saying "the cake is a lie" back in 2007-2008. :P
Yeah, the last few revisions of the Jargon File weren't good, though much of the carried-over content was alright.
The diskless workstation was a bad idea and stayed a bad idea, though. Netboot is great for installation, but really stupid for operation; you need some local persistent storage. Flash cache would be sufficient these days of course. The real problem is that all storage is slow and networked storage is super slow.
Is there still a copy somewhere of the last Guy Steele Jargon File? I feel like at this point I'd be more interested in that as a piece of nerd/hacker/whatever history than in that merged with ESR's libertarian bullshit
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
^ There's an entire website dedicated to text files you know
It still amazes me that 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/780 copied memory by writing it to swap and pulling it back.
Such a different world. Now, most of the time, we have more CPU cycles than we can use but disk IO is a bottleneck. Then, that VAX would be serving 50+ simultaneous users on terminals and every single CPU cycle was precious. Writing to swap and pulling it back was handled by set-and-forget DMA, and that was way cycle-cheaper than CPU copying.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Weird mental jump: "You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette" was a sick burn back in 1999, and it only gets sicker as time goes by.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Is OS X Server 1.0 the one that was Mac OS 9's face grafted onto NEXTSTEP's body?
Oh, neat, I figured out what the differences were between all those damn Cirrus Logic chips after all these years. The 5420 is a basic true-color VGA with 1 MB RAM, the 5422 is a bit faster and supports an 80 MHz dot clock, the 5424 is local-bus capable, the 5425 has TV-out, and the 5426 has a blitter and 2 MB support (on par with the S3 Trio).
Ye Olde AVGA1 (CL-GD5402) isn't in this data sheet, but I suspect it was basic Super VGA and had 256k or 512k RAM. All of the Acumos-based chips had built-in 24-bit-capable RAMDACs, but you weren't going to get a lot of use out of those with less than 1 MB.
Oh, and apparently these chips could support Micro Channel if you wired them up right. I doubt many people bothered, considering that XGA and XGA-2 were pretty decent, and that IBM would eventually discontinue MCA in favour of PCI anyway.
MCA wasn't actually a bad architecture for its time, but IBM would have done better to make it have a small license fee and be free to all comers otherwise, instead of trying the same patented-interface-lockdown they were so used to doing.
Okay, so the AVGA1 and AVGA2 were really, really basic chips...the first could only handle 256k and might do VESA-standard 800x600 in 16 colors if you were lucky (not sure what the clock setup was like). The AVGA2 supported 512k but otherwise seems to be like the AVGA1. The CL-GD5420 is a respin of the AVGA3, which was the 1 MB version of those two.
All of these supported 256 colors, and the Acumos datasheet for the AVGA2 seems to imply they had hardware cursor support, but that's it. True-color support first appeared on the 5422.
All this babble about the AVGA2 is because my brother and I had gotten one second-hand back in 1992 or 1993, but (being poor at a time when VGA monitors were still expensive luxuries) we couldn't use it.
And now I'm reading up on the i-Opener. It or some other machine like it was the darling of Slashdot for a while because OMG YOU COULD PULL IT APART AND PUT TEH LUNIX ON IT.
Thing is, I wonder what drove people to attempt the Minitel service model (where you have to have a proprietary terminal) in the late 1990s, when the open Web was becoming a powerful force. Given the times, and the fact that most of these "network computers" died horribly after 2000, I'd say greed played a large part. :P
The IRC bot rollermine I have in #trashheap et al is written in a language called Factor which takes a lot of ideas from both Forth and Lisp. It's a pretty neat language if I do say so myself
Thought: The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 not only made video game consoles unsalable in the US and Canada for years, it also pretty much destroyed the home computer market for a good decade. After the NES, Master System and Genesis reclaimed consoles, there was no point in having a computer for games until MPCs became common in the early 1990s...people only got computers if they had to take home office work.
This is why the C=64 and Apple II were so big at the time...PCs just didn't matter yet outside offices. It also explains why PC Mag was so stodgy at the time; after all, no one ever got fired for buying IBM, and 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were still something like $500 each.
In Europe, though, the Amiga and Atari ST were reigning during that period. Neither really got much of a hold in the US even though both were from US corporations.
Okay, it turns out this is not a 386SX machine, it's a 486SX machine, and the thing can be upgraded to a DX-33 relatively easily (though it's not absolutely necessary right now). Oh, and the sound card isn't an old SB-16, it's an AWE64 PnP with an IDE port on it, which means I can use a CD-RW to walk things over until I can get a network card installed.
Both floppy drives work (yay), and the HDD is an old Seagate ST3660A (fairly decent for the time). Video is a Video7 216-32, one of those cards you keep hearing about (and that Microsoft loved so much as to have continually wrote their own drivers for) but never actually saw in the wild. Also, it has a 72-pin SIMM socket, which makes me wonder what its max RAM is...
However, my stash of 5.25-inch floppies proved to be a disappointment. Years of abuse and improper storage mean most of them have data errors, and most of them are program install disks for boring, useless crap like modem software (though I admit, I do kind of miss FlashLink). We don't have any data disks from the PCjr, Sanyo or 286 days anymore, sadly.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I'm curious...do you ever download old software from the Internet Archive or Textfiles?
Comments
http://textfiles.com/
Ok, so they have other stuff now, but text is where they started
also not working for me right now? i thought you were joking at first
Such a different world. Now, most of the time, we have more CPU cycles than we can use but disk IO is a bottleneck. Then, that VAX would be serving 50+ simultaneous users on terminals and every single CPU cycle was precious. Writing to swap and pulling it back was handled by set-and-forget DMA, and that was way cycle-cheaper than CPU copying.
Tcopypasting wordswith mous.5thLttr not copypasting anymor.