[HN Gopher] Why Some Old Computers Are Interesting
___________________________________________________________________
Why Some Old Computers Are Interesting
Author : rbanffy
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-05-24 09:03 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hccc.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (hccc.org.uk)
| bigtimber wrote:
| There were 4 of the then state-of-the-art, fastest in the world,
| CDC-7600 and CDC-6600 computers installed at Lawrence Livermore
| Lab (LLL, now LLNL, Lawrence Livermore National Lab) when I
| worked there during the summer of 1972.
| StandardFuture wrote:
| > In fact, the operating systems that run on "old computers" are
| surprisingly sophisticated and complex.
|
| Are they? Or are we just slowly forgetting that everything in
| modern software is composed of concepts invented pre-1980 (and in
| fact pre-1970 for the most part)?
|
| It's called "Turing's Curse" [0]
|
| To clarify, it's the "surprisingly" part that is not true.
| Certainly the software is sophisticated. What is surprising is
| how often we think our modern software is "sophisticated".
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVZxkFAIziA
|
| EDIT: but, I guess we have done some modern cool stuff with GPUs,
| consensus algorithms including PoW, and a few cool ML model
| architectures and training techniques.
| handrous wrote:
| We have a lot more layers of abstraction, in the name of
| productivity. That's certainly more complex, and from a certain
| point of view, more sophisticated.
|
| Meanwhile (I can't be the only one who's noticed this?) it
| seems like it takes a team 5x as large 2x as long to write a
| program that does the same thing as some 80s or 90s equivalent.
|
| I'm not sure what to make of that.
| retrac wrote:
| > it seems like it takes a team 5x as large 2x as long to
| write a program that does the same thing as some 80s or 90s
| equivalent.
|
| While I can't attest to team performance, I wrote a toy
| compiler over the long weekend here just now. There were
| wizards who could do that 30 years ago in a weekend, of
| course.
|
| But I'm not one of them. It occurred to me that if I hadn't
| used Haskell and some great libraries, built with a compiler
| that takes hundreds of MB of RAM to run, and was instead
| using C or assembly even, I'd probably still be trying to get
| integers parsing correctly.
|
| The productivity increase of modern development tools seems
| real enough to me.
| swiley wrote:
| I've written parsers in C, you get used to it. It would
| probably take you as long to write an integer parser in C
| as it would take me in Haskell.
| retrac wrote:
| It's literally two lines, yet it handles hexadecimal and
| octal too. :) Of course, if you set up some parser
| combinators with a nice library in C, it could be a one
| liner in C too.
|
| I figure it's not the language, so much as the libraries
| and tooling around the language. Back in the day, one
| couldn't stick a term in the project definition, have the
| compiler automatically download and assemble a library,
| then invoke it with one line in the program code, all
| within 10 seconds. You'd have to start with "is this a
| digit?" and build up from there, like I did back in my CS
| courses with Pascal, once upon a time.
| swiley wrote:
| I think there was a certian degree of bravery (or foolishness
| really) that authors of older software had WRT their
| willingness to couple with certain things (poking registers/DMA
| with specialized hardware, monkey patching OS components etc.)
| marcodiego wrote:
| What I like about old computers: creative solutions. These
| machines were severely limited by today standards, so to do
| anything useful, interesting workarounds had to be developed.
|
| In the home-computer field, for example, using off-the-shelf
| cassette tape as storage, compiling code in multiple passes with
| persistence, simpler byte-code interpreting to increase code
| density, memory bank switching and other techniques are part of
| the charm of using that hardware.
|
| Also, it is usually impressive to watch anything useful and
| quickly being done by constrained hardware.
| rbanffy wrote:
| One thing I always notice on the CDC 6x00 family is that the
| vectors on screen are drawn so fast (to fit enough text on the
| high persistence phosphor before needing to redraw) that analog
| artifacts appear on the fonts themselves, giving them a
| whimsical, almost Comic Sans, look.
|
| Funny to see the analog side isn't able to keep up with the
| digital hardware. That's peak Seymour Cray.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| IMHO older computers are more interesting because you can have
| much better relative understanding of what they consist of, how
| do they work and and much higher relative degree of control over
| them. They induce senses senses of curiosity, flexibility and
| security this way.
|
| Compared to the computers from the previous century which could
| be built, modified, repaired and operated consciously, modern
| ones are more of disposable magic-button black boxes which will
| turn into pumpkins as soon as the vendor servers turn off and go
| extinct like ancient magical creatures as soon as the factory in
| Taiwan shuts down because nobody has a serious idea about all
| their internals and how to produce them anymore.
|
| Sadly, there already is a generation of programmers who aren't
| even interested in being able to assemble their own PC from a set
| of boards, let alone understanding anything about things like
| registers and the physics behind them.
|
| UPDATE: yes, I would say the same about cars.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I love watching retro computing channels on YouTube, and many
| of them does such a great job of explaining CPUs like 6502,
| 6510, Z80 or Motorola 68000. Especially the 6502 is
| interesting, not because it's a marvel of technology, but
| because you can learn how it work in a reasonable time frame. I
| took university courses in computer architecture, but I can
| explain how a modern PowerPC or AMD64 CPU work. The 6510 is
| something I can easily follow when some guy on YouTube explains
| how a C64 works and how he goes about debugging and repairing a
| broken system.
| coldpie wrote:
| Probably my favorite example of this is this guy's
| demonstration of an Altair 8800, one of the earliest PCs,
| back when they had physical switches on the front panel which
| you would use to manually enter machine code for the computer
| to run. Scroll down to the bottom for the earliest videos to
| see the introductory demonstrations. He builds on that to
| show how data was loaded from paper punch tape, then later
| audio cassettes and external disk storage:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/deramp5113/videos
| ilaksh wrote:
| There is an online Altair simulator
| https://s2js.com/altair/
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _I took university courses in computer architecture, but I
| can explain how a modern PowerPC or AMD64 CPU work._
|
| Just to avoid possible confusion, I think you meant "I _can
| 't_ explain", is that right?
| canadianfella wrote:
| > Sadly, there already is a generation of programmers who
| aren't even interested in being able to assemble their own PC
| from a set of boards
|
| Why is this sad? Is it sad when cab drivers buy new cars
| instead of kit cars?
| m463 wrote:
| I think it's all state-of-the-art vs grassroots-tech-tree
|
| Meaning - the state of the art stuff can't be explored by
| normal people, but over time the knowledge and tools trickle
| down and it becomes democratized.
|
| Older cars were accessible to shadetree mechanics, who could
| work on most stuff. When they became electronic, it cut some
| people off... until things like canbus became known, and later
| tools became generally available to folks with a laptop.
|
| Only twist nowadays is manufacturers are actively preventing
| some things through cryptographic signatures and the like.
| Hopefully, eventually, this will get tools to allow people to
| mess with things.
| jhvkjhk wrote:
| No need to sad, with the rise of RISC-V and the help of FPGA,
| many CS students nowadays take writing a soft core CPU as a
| hobby.
|
| When RISC-V and open source FPGA toolchain become more popular,
| I guess more and more programmers will come back to play with
| hardware.
| birktj wrote:
| I have been looking for a cheap fpga devboard for this sort
| of thing, but results have been somewhat disappointing. The
| tinyfpgas look great but have been sold out for a long time.
| I have seen some interesting ones on tindie but the selection
| is quite limited. Does anyone here have any good pointers?
| (Plus for one with a hand-solderable fpga)
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| The iCE40 from Lattice is pretty popular for its open
| source (reverse engineered) toolchain.
|
| As far as hand soldering an FPGA, you're gonna have a hard
| time finding _any_ that aren't BGA simply because of all
| the IO. They exist, but probably not in dev board form as
| they're really limited in IO and cells.
| [deleted]
| sigstoat wrote:
| the iCE40HX4K is available in TQFP-144, which can be
| reliably hand soldered after some youtube videos and
| practice.
|
| i think there are still xilinx CPLDs in TQFP too.
|
| should be boards floating around for any of them. if not,
| well, only reason you'd want to hand solder it is because
| you're making your own board. a simple dev board is great
| practice to make sure you've got your package correct.
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| I like and use the Upduino 3.0
| chaoticmass wrote:
| What is "interesting" obviously depends on the person. I always
| liked playing with old *nix workstations from the 90's. Something
| about tinkering on a box that would have cost over $50,000 new is
| interesting to me.
| nix23 wrote:
| I someone wants to test MVS-TK4- or VM370 here some resources:
|
| UpToDate MVS distribution: http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/
|
| UpToDate vm370 distribution: http://vm370.org/VM/V1R1.1
|
| 390 Emulator: https://github.com/SDL-Hercules-390/hyperion
|
| Best 3270-Terminal for windows:
| http://www.tombrennansoftware.com/download.html
|
| 3270-Terminal for *nix or Win: http://x3270.bgp.nu/
| rbanffy wrote:
| I need to put up a new Docker image for my VM/370 thing at
| https://hub.docker.com/r/rbanffy/vm370.
|
| I wonder if my 3270 font would work with Vista tn3270... It
| doesn't with x3270 :-(
| hulitu wrote:
| Because the SGI cases or SUN pizza boxes are unforgettable. Now
| computer cases are just disgusting.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Ah IBM Stretch - first (only?) computer fixed by giving it an oil
| change .....
|
| http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p...
| ecpottinger wrote:
| The college I went to had air cooled tape drives. For some
| reason one unit would get too hot and stop working.
|
| Solution: Go behind it and flap the large access door a couple
| of times, and then it would start up and finish a compile. As
| you were waiting for the printouts it would keep cooling down
| and do the next job if it was not too long.
| dekhn wrote:
| My favorite old computer is the Mark I perceptron, which was a
| neural network hardware computer (single layer) with light-
| sensitive visual receptors, weights controlled by self-turning
| potentiometers, and maually wired full connectivity:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_I_perceptron.jpeg
| TristanBall wrote:
| So, I guess video and network cards are the two most common
| remaining components that could be called "peripheral
| processors"?
|
| My interpretation of the ( frustratingly sparse ) documentation
| for the AWS Nitro hardware support seems to imply that it's
| pushed a bit more of the processing back out to the peripherals -
| which seems to buck the trend, but also seems highly effective.
|
| For example, so far as I can tell, AWS's NVME drives have a lower
| latency from within a Nitro EC2 vm than a 905P Optane accessed
| from a KVM VM with PCIE passthrough on my play machine at home -
| although it's possible I've done something wrong with the setup!
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| What has always fascinated me about old hardware/software is the
| "what if" aspect.
|
| Up until mid-90s, there was a real diversity of ideas and
| architectures in computing. 68K, PPC, x86, RISC, ARM, MIPS, i860,
| and I'm forgetting a lot of others. There were a lot of
| interesting ideas, some of which did become standard, while
| others died either for technical reasons (lack of adequate 3D
| capability on the Amiga) or because of business deals that didn't
| pan out (such as BeOS on Macintosh being dumped in favor of
| buying out NeXT).
|
| Of course x86 seems standard and humdrum today, but it wasn't
| necessarily meant to be that way.
|
| We could have been running BeOS on i860-based hardware, with
| MiniDiscs for removable storage, if things had panned out
| differently. And I find that fascinating to consider, when
| examining old computers.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even further back and you find that so many things we take for
| granted were just one of many options. Things I can think of
| offhand:
|
| 1. 8-bit bytes (7,6,9 were common) 2. Byte-level addressing
| (word addressing was common) 3. One's complement
| mrweasel wrote:
| > with MiniDiscs for removable storage
|
| I wonder why that never amounted to anything. If I recall a few
| drives was made, but the cost just meant they where out of
| reach. The disc was just so cool, like take out of a sci-fi.
| cogman10 wrote:
| They were pretty popular in the EU circa 2004ish. A lot of
| people used them for MP3 storage.
|
| I think what killed them was ultimately the iPod.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| Minidiscs for music were very popular before MP3 players
| had reasonable storage space, at least here in Denmark and
| AFAIK in most of Europe, and obviously in Japan.
|
| If you had to pick between an MP3 player with 32MB or maybe
| 64MB of fixed internal memory, or a Minidisc player where
| each disc could hold a full CD album and you could swap
| them as easily as a CD or a floppy disk, the choice was
| pretty clear, especially when you looked at it as a logical
| progression from a discman. The ATRAC codec is a mostly-OK
| lossy codec. Not full CD quality, but it was comparable to
| MP3 at the time.
|
| (Minidiscs never supported MP3 until right at the end of
| Hi-MD, otherwise they were ATRAC and eventually CD-quality
| PCM only.)
|
| The final iteration (Hi-MD) could hold 1GB of data or 94
| minutes of full CD-quality uncompressed PCM audio, but that
| was too little and too late when it came out in 2004.
|
| As for using Minidisc for _data_ , that was a slightly
| different kettle of fish. The format was absolutely capable
| of doing it and the original discs could hold 140MB
| (increasing with later format revisions), which would have
| been absolutely groundbreaking in the early 90s. _All_ of
| the technology was mature and proven and fully capable of
| displacing both the floppy disc and the CD. This was before
| the Zip disk, with higher storage capacity and actually
| reliable. The magneto-optical Minidisc could theoretically
| be rewritten millions of times, and sure each disc was a
| bit expensive initially, but they were super durable with a
| tough plastic shell, and 140MB of storage was more than a
| lot of people 's home computers had at the time.
|
| Unfortunately the record label arm of Sony were terrified
| of organized illegal copying and distribution, and because
| everyone was generally stuck in a mindset of seeing
| Minidisc as a cassette tape replacement rather than a
| general data storage format, it was stuck with real-time
| dubbing only (some devices with integrated CD and MD
| players offered high-speed dubbing, but it was still just
| dubbing, not data transfer). It didn't get data storage
| capability until the Hi-MD in 2004, which again was too
| little too late.
|
| Combined with Sony's general insistence on keeping their
| formats proprietary and locked down (see Memory Stick, UMD,
| Betamax, DAT and so on), everything just conspired to not
| let the technical capabilities of Minidisc come to
| fruition.
|
| There was an MD Data format, but it never really got off
| the ground. It used special incompatible MD Data discs,
| which were rare and expensive, plus the drives themselves
| were big, clunky and expensive.
|
| Minidisc was legitimately a big hit for a while, for
| portable music. But it never quite displaced the CD and it
| never became the data storage format it could have been.
| And now we've got cheap flash memory, so even the idea of a
| magneto-optical disc seems a bit quaint and antiquated.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Also around that era a usb drive of comparable size was
| available and pretty much worked with all computers for
| similar price points.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I actually have one family member that uses mini-discs.
| Mostly to listen to older stuff that she only have on mini-
| disc, but that's also an indication of how durable those
| things are. Getting new mini-discs plays is however getting
| extremely difficult, and expensive.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'll throw out a reference to the Burroughs "large systems" line:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
|
| These are the lineage of machines Knuth implemented his famous
| ALGOL-60 compiler on. There's a nice video about the B6500 that
| was discussed on HN years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7880027
|
| I did some work adjacent to a UNISYS ClearPath "A Series" machine
| and later a PC-based version back in the early 2000s. Watching
| the operators and field service technicians working on it I got a
| feeling of a very mature environment. (Not necessarily fun to use
| by the look of it.) I got a bit of an IBM AS/400 feeling watching
| users interact with it in terminal emulation. For somebody with a
| Unix and MS-DOS background it just seemed odd.
|
| After that contract was up I mostly forgot about it. I heard a
| talk where Alan Kay referred to some old Burroughs system. I got
| to reading about Burroughs and learned UNISYS was a successor.
| That led down a rabbit hole that ended up at these
| B5000-descended machines.
|
| It looks like it was a well thought-out architecture that
| persists today (albeit in software, rather than hardware). The
| operating system, MCP, is still under development.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The operating system, MCP, is still under development.
|
| MCP is, by far, the most user hostile OS I've ever seen. It's
| no surprise Bonnie McBird, who wrote Tron's screenplay and is
| Kay's wife, used it as the name of the villain.
| mrandish wrote:
| There were a few other possible tie-in. The word TRON itself
| was a command in several MSFT Basic interpreters of the 8 bit
| era. It was short for TRACE ON and its companion for TRACE
| Off was TROFF. They shortened strings because space was
| limited in the 8K ROM.
|
| Good times...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Holy crap, I had no idea that the screenwriter for Tron was
| connected to Alan Kay. Thanks for that tidbit. Sounds like
| she became romantically connected to him after meeting him
| while researching the movie. Neat.
|
| I'd love to see her original script before it got ruined.
| Sounds like her and Kay were pretty bitter about it.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030109182549/http://www.tron-s.
| ..
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd like her take. I don't like too much the
| movie either. I'd like the programs to be more alien, more
| funhouse mirror images of their creators, and be portrayed
| as AI semi-autonomous agents.
|
| But that'd be a lot to demand on that age. They already had
| artificial life for their credits and that's impressively
| prescient.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| ... That is officially awesome. End of line.
| gnufx wrote:
| It's normally worth reviewing original work in a field for
| understanding and lessons. Some current work inspired by the 6600
| from all those decades ago is https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-
| risc-v/m-class/updates/mod...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > But the PP concept and the offloading of the OS from the main
| CPU is still a very interesting idea - and one which is unlikely
| to be explored in foreseeable future machines.
|
| Interestingly, a lot of the system services on macOS run on the
| power efficient but slow cores on the M1, keeping the beefy cores
| to user applications. I wonder if Linux can have an attribute for
| executables that indicate a preference of which kind or processor
| it should be preferably scheduled to.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Could always just sort processes to cores by nice value.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Can the kernel do it transparently on asymmetric core
| machines? Intel did show one some time ago and you can kind
| of manufacture cores with bigger caches and more execution
| ports by turning off SMT for them, turning an 8-core x86 into
| 8 "cores" with smaller cache and another 4 with twices as
| much L1.
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't think you can be totally transparent; [1] if the
| cores are really asymmetric, there will likely be timing
| differences. But, you could certainly do things like if
| only the big cores support AVX, indicate AVX support to the
| program, and if it's running on the little core when it
| hits an AVX instruction, the kernel handles the invalid
| operation fault by rescheduling it to run on the large
| core.
|
| If the program does a bunch of AVX once in a while, that
| can work well. If it's mostly AVX, and multithreaded, then
| you might likely spawn too many threads. If it's like one
| AVX instruction in each loop, that would also tend to be
| bad.
|
| Balancing load would probably be a lot trickier than with
| SMP, but today's SMP is already tricky because frequency
| changes with the number of cores in use; it's not always
| optimum to run N threads on N cores anyway.
|
| [1] and really, I think this meaning of transparent is
| really opaque; you don't want the program to know what core
| type it's running on.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think the best way would be two different approaches.
| One, perhaps based on nice values or other priorities,
| that would push scheduling to the smaller cores and one,
| one-way, where some form of program metadata indicates
| which kind of core would be optimally suited to run it
| without the program having any awareness of it.
| dhosek wrote:
| 370 assembly language was interesting in so many ways.
| Applications were responsible for maintaining their own call
| stack and there were processor-level instructions for converting
| a number encoded in EBCDIC and converting it to a machine level
| int.
| ilaksh wrote:
| This is only just slightly related, but I am working on a
| project based on Algorand, and one of the interesting things
| about it is that the smart contracts are written in something
| somewhat like an assembly language. It actually is deliberately
| not Turing complete because it does not allow looping or
| recursion, but has a few interesting features and constraints.
|
| For example, it has built-in cryptography instructions.
|
| The need to execute as many "programs" as possible to have a
| high transaction rate has pushed the design towards these
| intriguing constraints.
| bullen wrote:
| Whenever people talk about old computers I need to mention the
| C64 that really laid the foundation for PCs today, new releases
| are coming every day: http://csdb.dk
| fortyrod wrote:
| The university I went to had used Xerox Sigma 6/7/9s. One of them
| is now in the living computer museum. Yeah! After programming
| 6502 assembler in high school, having multiple blocks of 16
| 32-bit registers was breath-taking. My brain was wired to the
| 6502 X/Y/A thing so I doubt I ever used more than 5-6 of them at
| a time. After doing a lot of 8-bit micro and X86 assembly, doing
| ARM assembly for the first time felt similarly freeing.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Most things are interesting simply due to the fact that they were
| produced by and through the constraints of their time. Seeing how
| people solved these contextual problems very often is
| fascinating. And then there's the spirit/aesthetics/goals of the
| era.
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| its why the demoscene is not what it used to be :)
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think we were touching this subject on another thread about
| Japanese samplers (AKAI MPC), where technology becomes so
| capable there's no challenge.
| Kye wrote:
| Breakbeats basically came about as a way to overcome the
| limits of early samplers. A competition to invent the
| spiciest Amen break slice.
| limbicsystem wrote:
| Old computer systems are fascinating from many points of view:
| The article discusses the software used to wring the last drop of
| performance out of hardware that we would probably now consider
| to be inadequate for running a disk controller. It's super cool
| that many of these systems are now available as emulators! I was
| a little surprised that the author only got twice the performance
| of the DtCyber in an emulator until I saw that they were
| emulating on an 800MHz P3 :)
|
| In addition, visiting these old devices IRL is pretty
| instructive: one thing that always strikes me when I visit the
| Computer Sheds in Yorkshire (http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/ -
| an absolute gem BTW) is the enduring problem of thermal
| management. Up close, those old mainframes are basically huge air
| conditioning systems with some chips attached. My understanding
| is that managing heat is >still< the ultimate factor limiting
| performance (otherwise we could just stack up silicon in 3D)...
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| > hardware that we would probably now consider to be inadequate
| for running a disk controller.
|
| Wasn't the disk controller chip in the BBC Micro significantly
| more powerful than the main CPU? I think some games used it as
| a coprocessor.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's ludicrous. The 6502 is the best 8-bit processor that
| ever existed ;-)
|
| Now, on a more serious tone, any processor in the machine you
| could detect could be used to offload some processing from
| the CPU. I wonder if that wasn't done with 1541 or 1571
| Commodore floppy drives. I know there was software that wrote
| new functionality onto the drive's memory to make disk IO
| faster.
|
| With enough memory, you could sort a text file and write the
| output to a new file without ever bothering the CPU. I don't
| think that was ever actually done, but the drives also ran
| 6502 processors, and the 1571 ran at twice the main
| computer's clock.
| pkroll wrote:
| The 1571 was the drive meant for the C-128, which could
| also run at double speed (2 megahertz!) with the C-64 video
| chip disabled and the 80-column video running.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| One thing you could setup on the Commodore drives is file
| copying from on drive to another without it going thru the
| computer, they just talked to each other. You could also do
| the same thing if you had a straight text file and sent it
| to the printer (I am not sure which printer models) with
| again not using the computer after the handshaking was set
| up.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| On the C64/1541 you could definitely upload code to one or
| more of the 256-byte 1541 disk buffers and make the drive
| execute it. The problem is you have 3 pins to transmit your
| data and those are not connected to any communication
| facility like an ACIA - you have no choice but to involve
| the CPU in some bit banging there.
|
| The 1571 used the burst mode of the CIA IIRC (also IIRC it
| wasn't done in the 1541 to be compatible with the VIC20) so
| there were more possibilities there.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The problem is you have 3 pins to transmit your data
| (...) you have no choice but to involve the CPU in some
| bit banging there.
|
| Well... As long as the code takes longer to compute than
| it takes to push/pull the data, it's still a win.
|
| I really can't think of any practical usage, of course.
| Maybe transforming ASCII files to EBCDIC ones without
| involving the CPU, or generating CRC32 values for the
| files on disk.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| Did not fast loaders for the drive put a small program on
| the disk drive?
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| There's every chance I'm remembering it wrong - the double
| the clock speed certainly rings a bell. Got a weekly video
| call with a friend who still regularly hacks on a Beeb, so
| will try and clarify and update my comment tomorrow :)
| rbanffy wrote:
| The Beeb and the Ataris ran at 2 MHz. Apple II, VIC-20,
| C64, and 1541 all ran at 1 MHz. The 1571 ran at 2 MHz,
| same as the C128 (except when pretending to be a 64)
| forinti wrote:
| The beeb had an additional advantage: RAM ran at 4MHz, so
| the CPU and the video chip didn't have to compete for
| access.
| bullen wrote:
| Same for the C64... RAM at twice the Hz so the 6510 and
| SID/VIC-2 accessed it interleaved.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _My understanding is that managing heat is >still< the
| ultimate factor limiting performance_
|
| It seems fitting that I'm hearing the fans spin up to full
| blast on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop supercomputer as I
| compile some code in an Ubuntu VM while starting up a CPU-
| hungry Point Of Sale system in a Windows VM, and reading your
| comment on the Windows host OS.
|
| It is nice that I can step away from the computer and just
| listen for the fans to quiet down again to tell when everything
| is ready to go.
| bserge wrote:
| Are you monitoring temperatures on it?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Not specifically, but the top of the keyboard does get warm
| when all this is going on. Do you or anyone have any
| recommendations for temperature monitoring software for a
| ThinkPad running Windows with various other OSes in VMs?
|
| In any case I think the POS software may be the main
| culprit, as it normally runs on a standalone machine and
| wasn't designed for power savings. I did set the Windows VM
| it runs in to "Power saver" but it doesn't seem to have
| helped much.
|
| (Sorry if this is off topic for the thread!)
| nix23 wrote:
| Have you activated VT-x VT-d etc in the bios?
|
| If not prepare for a performance boost, and a quiet Fan
| ;)
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. Yeah, "Intel Virtualization
| Technology" and "Intel VT-d Feature" are both enabled by
| default in the BIOS (in fact it doesn't let you turn them
| off).
| nix23 wrote:
| Ah ok, i have seen some bios's where both are deactivated
| plus hyper-threading too :)
| bserge wrote:
| NotebookFanControl is the only one that works on newer
| machines in my experience.
|
| https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc
|
| I'm asking because I'm wondering how often it hits 99
| degrees and throttles. And if it doesn't, I really need
| to take a closer look at it, because that would be
| incredible.
|
| Dell and HP machines have this problem, 6 core Intel
| processors run _slower_ than 4 core ones because the
| former always throttle (even though the TDP is supposedly
| the same).
|
| If you want, you can use Throttlestop to set better
| controls/limits on clocks and power (and possibly
| undervolt it) for better performance, battery life and
| temperatures.
| ahelwer wrote:
| I don't have a thinkpad, but I like OpenHardwareMonitor
| for my computers: https://openhardwaremonitor.org/
| mobilio wrote:
| I'm using ArgusMonitor for this:
| https://www.argusmonitor.com
| listic wrote:
| SpeedFan? https://almico.com/speedfan.php
| p_l wrote:
| Well, at least it's Thinkpad X1E...
|
| We had much less going on when we joked that you know who is
| compiling or running any sort of serious work in the office
| by hearing whose MBP was whining hard with its fans.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Ah yes, these fans may get loud, but they are nothing like
| an office back in the day full of hackers on ASR-33
| Teletypes!
|
| Each one had a noisy keyboard and a noisy printer. The
| keyboard didn't have a nice click like a modern keyboard,
| more of a loud scrunchy sound. The printer was even louder
| and rang a bell if you had a line too long.
|
| You could always tell when the mainframe crashed.
| Everyone's Teletype printer stopped all at once, and
| everyone started mashing down every key on their keyboard
| out of frustration.
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