[rescue] Linux

[Carl R. Friend]

   Dave McGuire comments:

> On Thursday, November 28, 2002, at 08:27 PM, Carl R. Friend wrote:
> >    The OS is part of the history as much as (some might even
> > venture to say more than) the iron it runs atop.  If all we want
> > to do is run *BSD (to pick a random OS), we can run it atop the
> > latest PeeCee silicon available.
> 
>    Agreed...but given a choice (and we ALL have the choice, no matter 
> how much we may try to claim otherwise) wouldn't you rather run it on a 
> real computer, and get some performance and stability? ;)

   I think that some of the "problem" here is that probably a
quite a few good folks on this list have more recent iron than
I have in my humble abode.  The most recent SPARC box, for
instance, that I have is a SPARCserver 20 (aside from my
Netra NFS-150 - an Ultra-1 under the covers - that I cannot
bring home because there's no space left).  The machine I sit
in front of, habitually, is a 1995-vintage 90 MHz (mHz?)
Pentium-class box running Linux (it does what I need it to,
why should I "upgrade"?).  The rest of my "herd" dates from
anwhere from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s.  I get decent
stability out of all of them.

>    Running modern software on classic hardware can be very interesting 
> and educational in itself, because for many years, hardware advances 
> far outstripped those of software.

   That model broke, badly, when the 80386 (in PeeCee terms) gt
introduced.  Up until that point, I had a challenge open to
anyone I knew at the time where I'd take any of my "antiques"
up against a PeeCee with a mumble-frotz CPU so long as I could
get a good handle on the problem and do my coding in assembler.
By the time the 80386 came along, good software architecture
practises had gone out the window and we were looking at the
hardware advances to keep the whole house of cards standing.
I gave up at that point.

   I think that the modern interest in simulators is a good thing
as it'll give folks who cannot get their hands on physical "classic"
iron a chance to delve into the operating environments of the time.
After all, how many of us can afford the space and power it takes
to run, say, an all-up DECsystem 1090?

   Porting modern software to "classic" hardware, however, remains a
mystery to me.  If I boot up a classic machine, I want that machine
to show off what its designers had in mind for it.  If I want modern
software, I'll run it on modern machines that I don't have to wait for.

   How many of us remember the vaunted measurement of the MIPS?  How
many of us would be happy to sit in front of a one MIPS box today?
The paradigms are completely different - so different that I suspect
that there can be no comparison.

>    That said though, I'll be running RSTS/E on my PDP11/70 when I can 
> cut that new system disk.

   Kudos!

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+