[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 04:16:36PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Almost no living programers today would even know how to write code  
> for a machine that was not based on 8/16/32/64-bit 2's compliment CPUs  
> and not too many more have any idea how to deal with a machine that is  
> not Intel based or running a video console.

I don't know, It's been a long time, but I still could probably dredge
up with a few days time one of, BAL (IBM 360/370) (and channel programs), 
COMPASS (CDC-6400) (and some familarity with the IO processors),
IBM 1130, and if I really had to HP 2100. The HP 3000 and Buroughs used
Algol, and I probably could dig that up too, though I don't think I wrote
Algol code for them, but I seem to remember writing it for something.

I might even be able to figure out again Comodore 64 (6502) and 
Z80 assembly language too having written a few lines of code in them.

Gone forever are passing aquaintance with SHAL-A (Philco 1000/2000)
and 1401 Autocoder, which I looked at but never really wrote anything.

On the other hand, some of the newer processors I've written code for
such as the 8088, 680x0, PPC, AT&T 3B2, 80386 onward, and so on
was done in C, and I can't seem to remember much differences between
them that the C compilers did not take care of. 

I'm not sure besides "folk tales" if they really mean much today. If I
were going to pitch myself as a BAL programmer who could write
300 lines of tested and commented code a day on a long term project
or a PERL/Bash code monkey, you can guess what I would do. :-)



> This is only the tip of the iceberg though... a good portion of  
> software today WILL NOT EVEN RUN without a network connection.
> 
> That's just pure stupidity.

No, it's good business. :-) Think of it as pay-per-view software.

Remember Sun's "the network is the computer"? That's the business
model with 99.99% "local offloading". IMHO the worst of both worlds.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM