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

[GreyCloud]

On 09/21/16 00:59, Bob Butler wrote:
> 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 didn't know that and wasn't aware of their difficult transition.

>
> 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.
>

Actually, VMware and VirtualBox have to use another mode, but which one 
I don't know, to keep the host and the guest operating systems apart 
from each other.   Right now, I'm trying to get Qt 5.7 developement 
envirionment on the latest OpenSuse to work. I still have a lot of 
reading to do, but it has to its favor that one can download their 
environment (for C++) for OS X, Windows, and Linux and possibly others. 
  Free for hobbyists, and a price for commercial uses.  Pretty much 
cross platform.  I'm staying away from win10, as it seems from all 
reports I've read to be Orwellian in nature.  In the EULA, it says that 
if you agree to the terms then any of their corporate partners can 
pretty much paw through your files remotely and just take what they 
want.  Not for me.
And I'm still got my old G4 iMac nicely wrapped up.  I consider the old 
G4 with its orthogonal registers better than any thing that Intel has 
yet to release.  It may be slower compared to current Intels, but at 
that time it was superior.