Talk of XT-AT era computer software & hardware

[brichter]

And your computers don't have between 1 and 5 GB of RAM?  


I've got one laptop (Winblows) with 2, one laptop (MacBook Pro) with 6, and my Windows desktop machines have 4 since it takes a 64 bit OS to use more than that (and Windows  32 bit can only see ~3.5 GB max, with a command line switch in the boot.ini file), all my Linux and other 64 bit boxen have 16 to 32 GB.  

Of course those are servers, and some of them run multiple virtual machines...  

RAM is cheap (relatively speaking) and with any good OS more memory is a real kick in the pants in the performance department.

[Op-Bell]

RAM is cheap (relatively speaking) and with any good OS more memory is a real kick in the pants in the performance department.

*** COUGH CHOKE SPLUTTER ***

WHAT kind of OS? Oh hahahaha, silly me, for a moment I thought you said any GOOD OS ...

Oh wait a minute...

<walks dog>

Ok, calmed down now. So I have this computer, and I want it to do stuff for me. I will tell it what to do because I'm the owner. I give it some RAM to play with, and a hard disk to store stuff on. Because I'm lazy, I prefer not to have to tell it what sectors to load into memory, so I get it an "operating system" to take care of that. Imagine my surprise when the operating system pops up and tells me there isn't enough memory or HD space, because it (the operating system) has occupied FIVE HUNDRED MEGABYTES OF RAM AND TWO THOUSAND MEGABYTES OF HARD DISK and hasn't left enough over to do the job it was originally designed to do. So I give it more additional memory than existed in the world 10 years ago, and things improve, and I'm supposed to give credit to the OPERATING SYSTEM?

This is a bit like having a country and appointing a Government to keep things in order and run the Navy, and the next thing you know the Government has grown to the point where it takes half the GNP and appoints a bureaucrat per citizen to make sure nothing is done that it doesn't get a slice of. One doesn't solve this problem by doubling the size of the Government offices and then saying how wonderful it is that things get done a bit faster now than before. One solves it with pitchforks, torches and guillotines.

Microsoft, and to a lesser extent the Church of Linux, need to get it into their thick heads that nobody, ever, bought a computer to run a feckin' OPERATING SYSTEM. They bought it to run APPLICATIONS. A good operating system is one you never, ever see, and consumes negligible resources. A good operating system does what it's told and never tells its master it knows better than him. A good operating system does not expand to fill the resources available, or refuse to run because it can't manage with the resources that were perfectly fine for its predecessor. And mainly, a good operating system never says it can't run an old application that ran perfectly fine with its predecessor.

IMHO, there is at the moment no good operating system. Microsoft is consumed with how to extract money from people who don't need anything; their solution is to force people to upgrade to larger hardware so they get OEM sales. Linux is no solution - it can run on 64 cores at teraflops, but not a Flash application - but Unix was a terrible place to start anyway, more bloated than Windows at that time. Now we have netbooks, small memory, small disks, that don't suit either. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

[StatFreak]

And your computers don't have between 1 and 5 GB of RAM?  


I've got one laptop (Winblows) with 2, one laptop (MacBook Pro) with 6, and my Windows desktop machines have 4 since it takes a 64 bit OS to use more than that (and Windows  32 bit can only see ~3.5 GB max, with a command line switch in the boot.ini file), all my Linux and other 64 bit boxen have 16 to 32 GB.  

Of course those are servers, and some of them run multiple virtual machines...  

RAM is cheap (relatively speaking) and with any good OS more memory is a real kick in the pants in the performance department.

Yeah, I didn't word that correctly. What I was trying to say was that if RAM had kept up with the AT baseline, the typical home computer would have 32GB of RAM today instead of only 1-4GB.

[brichter]

Calm down, Op! Beware the BP, don't want to bust a vein... Let me rephrase that to "relatively good OS". Happy now?  

You have 2 issues here:

1) Backwards compatibility: As applications require more resources, and those resources are made available in hardware, the OS needs to change to be able to manage the new hardware.If the application demands 1GB of RAM and the OS can't address that much, the application plain won't run. Is that the fault of the OS? No, it's the fault of the application for exceeding the capabilities of the OS. The application demanded the memory requirements it was written with when it loaded. The more the hardware/OS changes, the harder (read: more expensive) it is to keep backwards compatibility. But, there's a solution: Run those old apps on their old OS inside a virtual machine on new hardware.

2) OS bloat: You have a point here, but it's not necessarily the fault of the OS, but of the consumer who wants the computer to do internet, email, photo processing, movie editing, etc., etc., etc., out of the box. So, the OS manufacturers bundle the kitchen sink into the OS, because the customer wants it. You can strip most OSes down pretty small by uninstalling all the crapware, and the *nix kernels will usuallly go a lot thinner than the Winblows OS, and a lot of that is due to not having to deal with the dreaded HAL.

[brichter]

[
Yeah, I didn't word that correctly. What I was trying to say was that if RAM had kept up with the AT baseline, the typical home computer would have 32GB of RAM today instead of only 1-4GB.

Ok, gotcha! 

[Op-Bell]

Calm down, Op! Beware the BP, don't want to bust a vein... Let me rephrase that to "relatively good OS". Happy now? 

<calms down>

...but of the consumer who wants the computer to do internet, email, photo processing, movie editing, etc., etc., etc., out of the box.

BUT! Every one of those things is an application. All that is required of the operating system is to load and manage multiple applications, something they had cracked back in Windows 3.1 when the operating system fit on a few floppies. The memory limitation is a feature of the CPU, not the operating system. 32 address lines = 2^32 bytes = 4GB. The CPU itself can't represent a number high enough to request data above 4GB. The original 8088 only had 20 address lines. 2^20 is 1 megabyte, hence the limitations of the original PC/XT.

Linux will go thinner, maybe, but I was shocked when I first tried to put Ubuntu on my laptop and it said 256M of RAM wasn't enough. Shoot, it was enough for XP! I got used to Linux but I still don't like it. There are two major apps I run every day that don't run in Linux, so I will never make a complete break from Windows. As for the Mac, I've heard of it.

[jdkmunch]

You know why windows 7 installs faster than vista?

Among other things -
500Mb of print drivers have omitted  

Don't get me wrong I think it's a great idea.  No need to have Gigabytes of crap lying around that you don't use.  IMHO Bloat is totally out of control.   No reason for it.

[brichter]

The memory limitation is a feature of the CPU, not the operating system. 32 address lines = 2^32 bytes = 4GB. The CPU itself can't represent a number high enough to request data above 4GB. The original 8088 only had 20 address lines. 2^20 is 1 megabyte, hence the limitations of the original PC/XT.

Linux will go thinner, maybe, but I was shocked when I first tried to put Ubuntu on my laptop and it said 256M of RAM wasn't enough. Shoot, it was enough for XP! I got used to Linux but I still don't like it. There are two major apps I run every day that don't run in Linux, so I will never make a complete break from Windows. As for the Mac, I've heard of it.

Point 1: Yes, but the OS must support the same addressable space as the hardware, DOS 6.22 can't address 8 gigs of RAM. That's why we now have separate versions of OSes, either 32 bit or 64 bit. (unless you get into *nix, with the whole concept of 64 bit kernels, and 32 bit userspace where the applications run ).

Point 2: That's because Ubuntu (like all other consumer-based OSes nowadays) throw in the kitchen sink as far as applications go so the consumer will be happy. .

Now here I go off on a tangent like Stat or Bunker:

 

Microsoft gets around this by having 8^43 versions of each OS (Win XP Home, Professional, Media Center, Ultimate, Professional+, Media Center ++, Ultimate Super Duper, Media Center Super Duper Pooper Scooper, etc., I'm sure I left a couple out by accident   ), each with a different hardware requirement.

Since the Linux coders are geeks, you just get every possible option at install time, and they expect CLI package managers like yum and rpm will allow the user to remove anything they don't need. They keep dreaming of Linux as a Windows replacement, but they just don't understand their target market, or rather the target market doesn't have a snowball's chance in you-know-where of understanding their OS.
Most computer users nowadays would melt down if they ever had to type a CLI command, and that stuff is documented so cryptically in Linux that a non-technical person would just throw their hands up in disgust and spend money on more RAM.

Apple gets around this issue on the Mac by manufacturing the hardware and writing the OS and much of the software, so it is a lot simpler to get everything to play nice in the sandbox. The Mac does a pretty good job of being the perfect OS for the non-technical user, and there's enough stuff available (being based on FreeBSD) that the geeky engineering types can live with it also. And, Apple spends a lot of money on the look and feel, so people feel like they're getting more than just another box. the only problem is that Windows users someetimes have a hard time switiching, because theMac OS interface seems dumbed down to Windows users, and it takes a while to learn how to do all those advanced things Win users were accustomed to doing with a right click. Sometimess I think operating a Mac is not so much using it as it is sneaking up behind it and clubbing it into submission to get it to do what I need.
Heck, it took Apple decades to realize that a mouse needed more than one button!

Me, I just don't give a crap. I have to use them all, so I think they all suck, just in different ways.

/

[brichter]

You know why windows 7 installs faster than vista?

Among other things -
500Mb of print drivers have omitted 

Don't get me wrong I think it's a great idea.  No need to have Gigabytes of crap lying around that you don't use.  IMHO Bloat is totally out of control.   No reason for it.

Yeah, but you know there's going to be 10 million users peed off because that old dot matrix printer won't work any more...

[jdkmunch]

That's the great thing-  all you have to do is click on Windows Update and it pulls only the driver you need!

It works well.  I'm very happy with Win7.

[stayouttadabunker]

This thread is fantastic reading    but shouldn't it be in the computer talk area? LOL

[jdkmunch]

lol 

[brichter]

This thread is fantastic reading    but shouldn't it be in the computer talk area? LOL

No, because the thread is about CES...

[StatFreak]

This thread is fantastic reading    but shouldn't it be in the computer talk area? LOL

No, because the thread is about CES...

Could have fooled me.

[stayouttadabunker]

I give up!      

[jdkmunch]

That should be a standard keyboard with huge 5 pin DIN connector, right?

Nope - the XT had some weird thing going on.  You may remember that years ago keyboards had an XT/AT switch on them.  If the keyboard had that switch then it would work.  I tried AT keyboards, Tandy 1000 keyboards - all no good.  I just bought and original one on eBay for $40.   Last year they were $100 - That's why I  didn't go for it. 

[brichter]

So what kind of connector?

I remember the ones with the switch, but mine were either pre-switch or post-switch.

[jdkmunch]

The connector is that huge 5 pin din thing.

[rickhunter]

AT keyboards used a bi-directional protocol, while XT keyboards only worked one way.  On an AT keyboard, the idle state is data and clock  high, on an XT keyboard clock is high and data is low. 

[jdkmunch]

When I get the keyboard this week I'll send some video. 

I wonder if Chrome OS is going to tackle the OS Bloat. 

[stayouttadabunker]

I had fun loading these up into my old machine in front of my boys...
They asked me..."Dad, what in the world are those?"...
They've never heard of floppy disks...LOL

I especially like the IBM statement on the box>>>
"...deliver your business message with pizazz!"
 
say "pizazz" really, really slow...

[jdkmunch]

Lol! That's great!!

[StatFreak]

Stout, would you please pass me a piece of Juicy Fruit?

If you guys keep this up, I'll have to go into digging in my garage and post a picture of my 8 inch floppy disc. How many here remember those?

Even more interesting is its content: a copy of the programming language FORTH. I didn't use if for robotics, which was, I believe, its primary purpose. I used it to program a synthesizer to play music back in college.

[Stolistic]

I remember writing a program on the IBM System 36 to do backups on 8" floppies.  There were 5 floppies in a hard plastic magazine, and 2 magazines in total.  The machine could pull out one floppy at a time and write to it, then put it back into the magazine and move to the next.  Oh yeah, it was written in RPG II if I remember correctly.

[bob in phx]

having been there back in the day,,, all I can say is "turbo button".........