New Computer

[MinnesotaEric]

Shortly after I started at the newspaper, I think in the early 90's, they started using UNIX on Sun Microsystems hardware when converting from manual markup to electronic pagination of ads. They were elegant things of beauty and paid for themselves quickly. Our other systems ran on VAX's and VMS. Those were OK, but VMS was pretty complicated compared to UNIX.

I had to laugh at this story from 1988...
We'd cringe every time we had to consult the 5' wall of books to find out how to do something in VMS. We could pretty much figure it out on our own with UNIX.

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain. Ed.]

​

I used to sell Sun and SGI along with mostly Macs and high end networks back in the nineties. A local power company used a bank of 20 Sparks plugged into an aging VAX system for billing but mostly we were selling into the printing industry.

 

[WinterDeere]

Yeah, the pentium was a stall. It was a 32 bit processor that came out a year or two after DEC Alpha 64 bit processor came out. They didn't hit 64 bit for 10 more years.

Yes, it was only 32-bit (excepting 36-bit P-Pro), but it was the first consumer-accessible superscalar processor, and also the first x86 built around multiprocessing. It also used an external 64-bit databus for memory and FPU. It's what really enabled the push into non-deterministic and fully-graphic GUI, for average consumer and business machines, since Mac wasn't willing to open source anything.

I was also using Sun and SGI at school, but no one had anything like that at home, excepting a possible text-only dial in to a Sun OS machine. Had a Mac and a Pentium side by side on my desk thru mid-90's, but the Mac was always double the money (or more) for the same hardware, so I went all PC by the late 1990's. It was fun watching MS chase Mac on OS developments, as Mac was always one generation ahead of PC, at the time.

 

[kenmbz]

Geez , SGI for graphics rendering and Apollo workstations.
Now that brings me back...

 

[scootr]

My desktop computer is a 2015 27" iMac with four aging i7s stumbling along at 4.0Ghz, 32GB RAM and terabytes of different SSD storage all used for video editing. Editing 4k video and even downsampling 4k video takes a lot of time now.

I will keep the old Dell as a backup. It's definitely still got some life in it. The plan is to clone the tiny 256 SSD onto something bigger once I get moved over to the new unit and keep it in the family where an outdated graphics card is not an issue.

 

[tradosaurus]

I upgraded my computer last year. My old computer was 13 yrs old.

I remember when 10 mb of hard drive was great.

 

[scootr]

I upgraded my computer last year. My old computer was 13 yrs old.

I remember when 10 mb of hard drive was great.

I remember when speed dialing was forcing the rotary dial backwards between numbers.

 

[MossRoad]

I remember when speed dialing was forcing the rotary dial backwards between numbers.

I had a net modem at home on a 2nd line. Anytime the computer needed internet access, it would automatically dial the modem and connect at 56.6(on a good day ).

Miss that sound....

 

[buckeyefarmer]

ATT had a great Unix front end, Novell bought it and it went by the wayside.
It was too bad as that would have given Novell a front end for their servers and made them more competitive. The CEO was removed not too long after this fiasco and his purchase of word perfect.

I have a friend who still insists on using word perfect.

I remember using Novell

 

[MinnesotaEric]

I remember when speed dialing was forcing the rotary dial backwards between numbers.

Back then Hacker magazine 2600 could teach you how to make free long distance calls.

 

[kenmbz]

My brothers friend had a box that worked at payphones. So many memories of the IT wild west.

 

[riptides]

Shortly after I started at the newspaper, I think in the early 90's, they started using UNIX on Sun Microsystems hardware when converting from manual markup to electronic pagination of ads. They were elegant things of beauty and paid for themselves quickly. Our other systems ran on VAX's and VMS. Those were OK, but VMS was pretty complicated compared to UNIX.

I had to laugh at this story from 1988...
We'd cringe every time we had to consult the 5' wall of books to find out how to do something in VMS. We could pretty much figure it out on our own with UNIX.

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain. Ed.]

​

Ken also called Unix snake oil. That caused some cavitation in the DEC Unix marketplace.
VMS was way ahead of its time. So was Alpha.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

My brothers friend had a box that worked at payphones. So many memories of the IT wild west.

It made a tone at 2600 hrz which then allowed free phone calls. Hence the name of the hacker magazine 2600 since it was about the first thing a person could "hack."

 

[Oaktree]

I remember when 10 mb of hard drive was great.

ISTR that you had to remember to park the heads before you shut down back in those day. Apparently those early drives didn't do that automatically when powered off.

 

[Oaktree]

We'd cringe every time we had to consult the 5' wall of books to find out how to do something in VMS. We could pretty much figure it out on our own with UNIX.

​

Maybe I'm confusing it with something else, but ISTR VMS commands to be very similar to DOS. Never used unix so I can't comment on its command structure.

 

[riptides]

Maybe I'm confusing it with something else, but ISTR VMS commands to be very similar to DOS. Never used unix so I can't comment on its command structure.

VMS commands were very user friendly. Then there were systemic functions available too. Lexicals IIRC. The O/S was very resilient. Some systems went close to decades of uptime without crashing or reboots.

 

[/pine]

Anyone else still keep (rent) a shell account..?

 

[buckeyefarmer]

My brothers friend had a box that worked at payphones. So many memories of the IT wild west.

There was a box that would descrambler over the air movie channels to watch without paying. (pre cable tv). So I was told.

 

[MossRoad]

There was a box that would descrambler over the air movie channels to watch without paying. (pre cable tv). So I was told.

I think the signal was just phase shifted, or so I've been told.

 

[MossRoad]

VMS commands were very user friendly. Then there were systemic functions available too. Lexicals IIRC. The O/S was very resilient. Some systems went close to decades of uptime without crashing or reboots.

We had a UNIX system that was running out of disk space. I looked around and found some huge file where I thought it shouldn't be, so I deleted it and gained a ton of space.

Several weeks later, we had a power outage, and that system shut down. When the power came back up, it would not come up, and gave a message that it couldn't find the kernel. Ruh-roh Scooby.

Apparently that file was important.

Fortunately, we had a service contract, and "the guy" showed up. He found what file the system was looking for, but could not find the file in the location it was looking in. He made some calls, and got some Guru to tell us we were screwed unless we had a backup copy of the file somewhere. We had a copy of the partition on a backup disk, and were able to retrieve the missing file from there. Yikes! Lesson learned.

I did have a windows NT server that ran for several years without intervention. It would reboot itself at power outages and that's it. I used it for an internal Intranet documentation web server for notes that I wanted to be able to access anywhere in the building. My boss found out about it when I called it up from his desk to look for something. He was impressed, and he had me turn it into a "How To" resource for most of the user systems in the building. All they had to do was start a web browser and type http://help on any computer inside of the building and it would pop up with a menu of systems and sub menus of help articles under each system.

I got a nice coffee mug for that.

 

[BravoXray]

We had a UNIX system that was running out of disk space. I looked around and found some huge file where I thought it shouldn't be, so I deleted it and gained a ton of space.

Several weeks later, we had a power outage, and that system shut down. When the power came back up, it would not come up, and gave a message that it couldn't find the kernel. Ruh-roh Scooby.

Apparently that file was important.

Sounds like the FAA contractors that deleted some files a couple of weeks ago and took down the NOTAM system.