Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. I think all the well-known ones have been thoroughly covered by this point. I can think of one or two obscure ones. For example, 3D workstation companies Stellar and Ardent were acquired by the same investors, who forced them to merge into Stardent--did they manage to achieve anything interesting before fading into oblivion? Then there were Alias and Wavefront, who also combined together. You don’t hear much about these any more (though the memory of Alias|Wavefront lives on in the “.obj” format, still popular for 3D data interchange, because of its sheer simplicity).
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  2. 26:10 I was wondering when you were going to mention minicomputers. But I was thinking of the original minicomputers, mainly from the 1960s through to the 1980s, offered by companies like DEC, DG, HP, Perkin-Elmer, Prime and others. They showed that small computers, while less powerful, could be a lot more versatile than big ones.
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  3. 7:33 In 🇲🇾 there is a town called Taiping. I was told it means “peace forever”. Its founding (or at least renaming?) was part of the settlement of a long-running feud between two different groups of Chinese migrants in the area.
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  4. 1:24 There was some controversy over describing the original 68000 processor as “32-bit”, since this was seen by some as marketing exaggeration. I think the best way to describe it was as a cut-down 32-bit design. When the first true 32-bit member of the family, the 68020, was released, you could see that the 32-bit extensions were mostly just a matter of filling in gaps in the original implementation. Unlike certain other vendors, whose 32-bit chips involving sticking unsightly architectural bags on the side of their older 16-bit designs.
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  5. 9:26 That gadget in Enrico’s hand is a slide rule. They had pretty much died out by the 1970s, superseded by the pocket calculator.
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  6. 12:57 When a stronger culture copies from a weaker one, it’s called “cultural appropriation”. When a weaker culture copies from a stronger one, it’s called “colonization”. Either way, you have to wonder if there isn’t some kind of cultural-purity agenda going on ...
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  7. The Unix vendors were willing to (grudgingly) agree to a core common standard. But then went out of their way to build extra proprietary parts on top of that, to try to make it difficult for customers to migrate away from one vendor’s products to another. This is what “fragmentation” means, and it weakened the Unix community collectively, making it easier for Microsoft to sweep in with their Windows NT product and wipe out Unix.
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  8. It’s worth remembering the context of the time. In the early 1960s, the surfaces of the other planets were a mystery. We have a lot of science fiction up to that time (e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” and “Amtor” books) which assumed that they were not that different from Earth. NASA’s Mariner Mars fly-by missions in the latter 1960s showed that Mars was quite dry and desolate, and heavily cratered, with no sign of the fabled “canals” or any liquid water. So that put an end to one whole line of sci-fi stories. But Venus, with thick clouds hiding its surface, was another matter. Hence the effort put into finding out whether there was any chance of life on its surface. Before that idea, too, was reluctantly abandoned.
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  9. 2:51 There is a phrase from this era, when companies would routinely send you these cards for you to send back to them: “do not fold, spindle or mutilate”. It was a reference to the fact that your very identity was tied up in these coded cards.
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  10. Worth noting that probably about 30 ARM processors ship for every Intel x86 one. I think RISC-V is already catching up, and has already pushed MIPS into second place.
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  11. I used an ICL 2903 (or was it a 2904) briefly in a summer job over 1979/1980, writing FORTRAN code. You were supposed to submit written coding forms and the data-entry staff would punch your code into cards. I got fed up with their continual typos, so I did it myself. The fact that I could touch-type also helped.
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  12. NFS was designed to be “stateless”, which caused no end of problems for Unix software that was expecting a baseline of sane behaviour from the filesystem -- ironic for a Unix-centric company, don’t you think?
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  13. 13:54 Even as its workstation sales disappeared, Sun continued to be highly profitable selling servers for this whole new “Internet” thing. They still had a reputation for high performance and reliability. Meanwhile, a few do-it-yourself cheapskates were experimenting with running this free Linux OS on cheap x86-based hardware, and finding they could achieve a little bit lower performance and reliability at much less cost. This took a few years to have an impact, but eventually it ate away whatever was left of Sun’s ability to make a profit.
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  14. 29:36 I thought 43xx was more of a midrange. The high-end mainframes were the 308x machines, then later 3090.
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  15. Back then, “workstation” meant something in terms of superior hardware for networking and graphics, high-performance interconnect busses and so on. Nowadays that meaning has gone. But I think it still means something in terms of software. Consider that the Unix workstations had something of both desktop-style and server-style functionality in a single package. Microsoft’s Windows NT “Workstation” actually did away with this, with any server-like functionality carefully crippled, making customers pay extra for a separate “Windows NT Server” product to get that capability back. Nowadays, the only OS in widespread use with this workstation-style mindset is Linux.
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  16. Open-source tools have existed for longer than any surviving proprietary product. Ones like SPICE have undergone decades of real-world use and refinement.
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  17. 10:26 1989 was just about the “Big Bang” year for RISC. All the Unix workstation vendors, previously so fond of Motorola’s 68k architecture, were moving to new RISC-based designs around this time.
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  18.  @greglinwood  You need to do a YouTube video on it.
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  19. Apple stuck with Motorola right through to the 68040, which was a very capable chip (for its time). But then the 68k line just ran out of steam.
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  20. No mention of KiCad? I gather
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  21. CERN has been sponsoring its development.
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  22. SoftWindows was an x86 emulator that ran on a range of RISC Unix workstations. Gave you your full range of Microsoft Windows apps.
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  23. 19:01 They do look more colourful and more appealing than the stodgy old IBM gear, you have to admit.
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  24. Not a “Silicon Valley” company as such, but I wonder if anybody has covered CDC. They started out trying to sell business-oriented machines to compete with IBM. But they made the ... “mistake”... of hiring one Seymour Cray as one of their hardware engineers. He was a smart guy, who figured out how to take existing circuit-fabrication technologies and push them to their performance limits. He masterminded the CDC 6000 series, which completely blew away anything that IBM (or any other mainframe vendor) could offer at a comparable price, offering something like 50× the performance of the then-top-end of IBM’s System/360 range -- basically, he created the world’s first production “supercomputer”.
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  25. Talking of supercomputers, there was an outfit called Convex, from the 1980s. Not sure how successful they were. Also Thinking Machines Corp, who were building massively parallel configurations from around the same era. They were notable for hiring Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman as a consultant. He took a different approach to analyzing the circuit density, that they didn’t quite understand--or trust, at first. But it turned out to be the only way to get a working machine. Then there was the Transputer, from the UK. They were an early attempt at putting massively parallel cores on a single circuit board. They had their own programming language, Occam, based on Tony Hoare’s “Communicating Sequential Processes” concept. Unfortunately, they didn’t last long.
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  26. And the ARM architecture created by Acorn went on to become the most popular CPU architecture in the world.
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  27. 9:46 Chimneys to channel hot air from the vacuum tubes. Funny I can’t recall seeing anything similar for other vacuum-tube computers from that era. Something to do with Italy’s warmer climate?
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  28. 28:52 I have this memory of reading about this machine when I were a wee lad, in an issue of Reader’s Digest that must have come out shortly afterwards. One thing I remember was that it had 500 transistors in it.
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  29. Java on mobile phones had no security separation -- all the apps ran on a single JVM. Also Oracle were charging an arm and a leg for J2ME licensing. Google basically outmaneouvred Sun/Oracle by using the open-source J2SE as one of the pieces for the Android development/deployment stack. And the Oracle vs Google lawsuit was Ellison’s revenge.
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  30. CDE was an OSF/1 thing. Sun’s GUI was called “Open Look”.
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  31. 0:11 My father had a typewriter very much like that, on which I learned to type. Note that there is no “1” key, you have to use either “l” or “I” in its place. Also no “=” character.
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  32. Try Dodoid’s channel. Did this years ago.
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  33. Apart from the all the Asians involved, I guess ...
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  34. If you were doing dumb things, you didn’t need smart processors like ARM. Apple didn’t pioneer using ARM chips for high-performance uses: look at the Top 500 supercomputer list, and you will see more than one ARM-based machine at the top end.
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  35. Speaking of Pick -- there’s another one. Dick Pick created this OS he named after himself, built around a (nonrelational) DBMS--I think we’d call it “schemaless”. It also had its own dialect of BASIC, as I recall. He promoted it as perfectly suited for business needs, unlike this Unix thing that some were adopting for the purpose (mid 1980s or so). I think, as machines got more powerful, it became possible to implement the whole Pick system as an application suite on top of Unix or other multiuser OS. Not sure it continued for much longer after that.
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  36. Proprietary products come and go. And what happens to your valuable data locked up in proprietary data formats?
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  37. 4:17 Oh come on, VT50s were long obsolete by the time the VAXes came along. At least show a VT100, if not a VT220/240 for contemporary consistency.
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  38. The 68000 was best considered as a cut-down 32-bit processor. Moving to the 68020 was mostly a matter of filling in the gaps. Unlike all the contortions Intel had to go through with the evolution of the x86 line.
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  39. There is a concept called the “disruptive technology”. This is where some new technology comes along that the existing players either cannot or will not adopt, perhaps because it runs counter to their business model, or is even antithetical to their existing customers. Windows NT on lower-cost x86 machines was that disruptive technology to the Unix market. Just as Linux is now being disruptive to them both.
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  40. Back when Windows NT first came out, the US Government had a requirement that all its divisions buy “open systems”. This specifically included POSIX compatibility. So Windows NT initially shipped with a POSIX “personality layer”, just to satisfy the purchasing requirements. In fact, this was never really used in production, since all the customers were quite happy to run software specifically developed for NT’s own proprietary APIs. The internal modularity in Windows that allowed the creation of these alternative personality layers has long since bit-rotted away. Which is why their more recent attempt to emulate Linux APIs in WSL 1.0 didn’t work very well.
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  41. Maybe it is, for other Englishes ...
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  42. RS-232C was an absolute pain to work with. Back when a serial connection, plus Kermit software, was the easiest way to transfer data between PCs with incompatible floppy disk formats, you still had to figure out, not just what speed they were using, but whether it was 7 or 8 data bits, and if there was a parity bit, and whether it was even or odd, or even something completely useless like always 1. I was quite handy with a breakout box ... for a while.
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  43. They are certainly trying desperately to be cool with all da Linux kidz, with their belated discovery of the power of the command line, revamped Windows Terminal and Notepad and WSL and all the rest of it.
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