[Info-vax] [OT] Portable operating systems, was: Re: PowerX Roadmap -

[Bob Butler]

On 2016-09-20, GreyCloud <mist at cumulus.com> wrote:
> On 09/20/16 13:27, Bob Butler wrote:

> The DGs were for corporates that wanted internal security from each user.

Oh I don't know about that. As far as I knew and I could certainly be wrong,
the vast majority of DG systems went into academic environments. I had
access to a Nova and an Eclipse and I really wasn't impressed. At the time
they didn't offer much if anything beyond what a TRS-80 could do and the
TRS-80 had a CRT and all we had on the DG boxes was ASR-33s. Well, the tape
reader on the teletypes was handier and cooler than the cassette interface
on the TRS-80 but that's about it. I don't remember any special features for
security but that doesn't mean there weren't any. Thankfully I've forgotten
pretty much all my DG experiences but that's also for a reason.

> When NAVSEA let us go shopping for a new machine back then, DG set up a 
> nice huge buffet table, but only three of us showed up.  I just didn't 
> like how their fortran worked compared to what DEC showed us.

I didn't use early DEC FORTRAN much but they certainly took over the mini
space lock stock and barrell. Yet I don't think DG was ever in the running.
Maybe they were on price, I don't know. DEC had a nice solution and lots of
options and they scaled vertically fairly well AIRI.

>> A lot of what we have today in the Inteliverse is old, torn, moldy baggage
>> that stinks and stinks and never goes away. I don't think any company has
>> enough money and integrity and sense to straighten that out.
>>
>
> I believe that around the early 1990s they figured that 32-bit was 
> enough and didn't even bother to change the architecture.  I always 
> viewed them as quite slow and lacked the general purpose registers that 
> could've sped up things a lot.

In some ways 32 bits really is enough today and it's only the hardware
manufacturers abandonment of 32 bit along with the sloppy OS and software
that makes 64 bit necessary at all. You're right about the lack of registers
in Intel but there are a lot more problems than that. The 32 bit to 64 bit
transition in Intelistan still isn't complete and was never thought all the
way through.

I think 2 modes ought to be enough for anybody. Complexity is a big factor
in bugs and vulnerabilities today and anything we can do to limit that with
sane designs and simplicity will go a long way. We ought to get rid of a lot
of middleware and libraries and get back to having fewer layers and more
responsibility lying in the product. And we ought to be working on
programming by contract and having clear and well-defined APIs so we don't
ever have to go back to the mire they're wallowing in these days in
Intelfornia.

Bob