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People* don't really remember full urls any more, they just search for the closest and Google sorts the rest.

Oh, c'mon.. how difficult is it to remember http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com?

I remember when the original URL was http://altavista.digital.com/

In the early days it even recognized Pathworks Mosaic 1.0 by its user agent, and served up a really, really simple HTML page just for it.

There was even a Personal version of the search engine that you could download and run on your own server to index your Intranets.

Sad to see it go because the world really needs more diversity when it comes to search engines. If there is something the Big Engines don't want you to have, it might as well not exist.

No, I think he meant the altavista service by Digital... which was under the http://altavista.digital.com/ URL... and not the altavista.com domain which IIRC was owned by a farmer haha.

Stupid old world-wide-web trivia.

my fingers still occasionally, start to type http://altavista.digital.com/ when my brain wants results from something that isn't google.

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

I don't know if you're joking, but somoene agrees with you. Automated (and pretty poor)translation here, sorry I don't have time to do a better job.

3) Or is the headline total flamebait, and I'm a sucker?

Why don't you find out? Go to Babelfish and try translating some text into and out of Hebrew, just to see how well it does.

After looking closely at the language options presented, ask yourself if there is anything hard to believe about the /. headline, summary, linked article, and even linked article from the linked article.

AltaVista was started by Digital Equipment Corporation employee volunteers who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[citation needed] AltaVista was launched public as an internet search engine on 15 December 1995 at http://altavista.digital.com/

HotBot was one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors.

In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!".

Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers. The Veronica database can be searched from most major Gopher menus.

Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.

I was paraphrasing the 21164 reference manual there... FWIW. You can download it from:

http://ftp.digital.com/pub/Digital/info/semiconduc tor/literature/dsc-library.html

-- Terry

With AltaVista I waded through pages and pages of results trying to find what I was looking for. Even from the begining I found relevant results near the top of Google. Also I seem to remember that back in the 14.4 dialup days Google's pages loaded faster.

Last, Altavista just didn't seem to understand the value of a simple web address. For the longest time you had to go to http://www.altavista.digital.com/ and they didn't even own altavista.com. I never knew about av.com until this thread.

I still use bablefish though. :)

Years later, a somewhat similar verifier for Modula III was developed at DEC Western Research Labs, but it died with DEC.

Microsoft Research is now developing something called Spec#, an extension to C# for formal verification. Much of the effort there focuses on object consistency, and, for the first time, somebody is finally handling the consistency issues associated with object call-out and callback. (This is badly needed in the Microsoft world, where the GUIs call round and round and back in, without proper theory to support that.)

Absolutely, one can write reliable code in Fortran, too. Excellent supporting tools like SCA (Source Code Analyzer) and DTM ( DEC Test Manager) have been around since a long time, not to mention the superb VAX/VMS Fortran compiler.

I just would not agree with you on the global variables and initialization. Complexity of data exchange via global variables beats every attempt to debug such code. Your initialization helps to avoid some mistakes, but the basic problem remains. Exchange of information through side-effects (global, private, doesn't matter) is always more complicated to understand than exchange of information through a list of input and output arguments at every function call.

People also tend to think that bad things happen because variables were not initialized. I have heard more than once from OOP advocates that constructors are important, because they allow the software developer to implement an automatic initialization of variables. The truth often is that worse things happen if they are initialized, typically with something like zero, than having a random value. Because, if they are initialized with zero, then chances are that your code runs through without any obvious problem, although the result may be worthless. And you may not notice it. I completely avoid global variables (or private variables in classes). For testing purposes I initialize local variables with NaN's instead (for floating point variables), which happen to be huge integer numbers, too. Of course I also rely on the compiler's ability to detect the use of variables which have not been assigned a value before, something that cannot work with global/private variables. But the compilers have their limitations. However, a dummy intialization, like the method you mentioned or a typical C++ constructor implementation, would completely defy the compiler's test for uninitialized variables (that is initialized with a correct value, not with something like a zero). In any case, my favorite ultimate test utility is a debugger. From my own past experience (almost 3 decades, more than a dozen languages) I find any whateveryounameit-oriented black box concept less useful for debugging (say "testing step-by-step").

One can make the same mistakes in Fortran, Java, C++ etc.. The more things change, the more they stay the same; as the mentioned example on IBM's "aspect-oriented code" Java web page shows.

That must have been when it was http://altavista.digital.com/ and not just altavista.com

You forgot the warning in 72-point type: "Use ONLY in a Well-Ventilated Area."

Also, these warnings are printed in eight different languages, all translated by Babelfish.

Personally, I'm suprised babelfish.altavista.digital.com still works.

If you want both machines running X, you need to use x2x, as vncserver on *nix creates a virtual display.

Google really fell in my eyes, even more than they did after their DMCA fiasco... Altavista had much more dignity when they treated the domain owner with much more respect, while they were still at altavista.digital.com. And they didn't send C&D letters to AstaLaVista, a search engine for cracks.

Google sucks. Let's show them by turning "google" into a generic term! Use this word when you google for hot deal on eBay, google for information on AllTheWeb and google for porn at Booble (not that there is much porn to google for). :)

Here are some notes from a gathering of the original IBM SQL team members The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics

Some quotes:

"We called it Structured English Query Language and used the acronym SEQUEL for it."

"A bunch of things were happening at about this time that I think we ought to mention just in passing. One was that we had to change the name of our language from SEQUEL to SQL. And the reason that we had to do that was because of a legal challenge that came from a lawyer. Mike, you probably can help me out with this. I believe it was from the Hawker Siddeley Aircraft Company in Great Britain, that said SEQUEL was their registered trademark. We never found out what kind of an aircraft a SEQUEL was, but they said we couldn't use their name anymore, so we had to figure out what to do about that. I think I was the one who condensed all the vowels out of SEQUEL to turn it into SQL, based on the pattern of APL and languages that had three-lettered names that end in L. So that was how that happened."

What surprised me most was the URL of the story!

I remember using Excite as my search of choice for full-text searches, back before Yahoo! started charging for everything, including directory listings. Then, there was Webcrawler, once the home of the canonical robots.txt standard.

I even remember back in the day, when not all AltaVistas were created equal.

Then came Google's PigeonRank system, and it's been downhill (or uphill, whichever you see as a positive metaphor) ever since.

So the Excite.com link was a trip down memory lane. Not that I'm expecting the Good Old Days to return; when I tried to access the home page with my Opera browser, I got an error message: "The browser you're using is not allowing you to sign in to Excite." Don't worry, Excite.com... I won't be trying again.

Interestingly, this link works too, the original link for it back when Altavista was just a technology demo.

You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google.

Alta Vista was very good in its time. Trouble is, "its time" was before people start heavily spamming the search engines.

When people learned how to abuse the system, it broke. Now people are learning how to abuse PageRank.

Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"

That's a very interesting observation.

Agreed. And not only that, but the big computer corporations often started with class A (16 million addresses) blocks, and acquired more over time. HP, for one, has its own class A, Compaq's class A, Digital's class A, and I believe also has Tandem's class A as well. That's 48 million IP addresses. I bet that a full .001% are actually in use. And all the other old IT companies (IBM, Sun, SGI, etc.) probably are similarly inefficient.

Okay. Check out the linked articles, yes, but also search SourceForge, Freshmeat and Google Advanced Search for what you're after.

Between these three, with a bit of intelligent searching, you should be able to find something related.

If you can't, your project is esoteric enough that you'll need to be looking thru' Google Groups and other such weird equivalents.

Enjoy,

Back in 1997, while spending some time at Digital Equipment Corp. (aka Compaq, aka HP) as part of my 1-year industrial placement, instead of getting any work done I kept planning my degree's final year project: a client-side search tool, using intelligent agents (I loved that expression back then) to crawl the web and rank pages according to how they link to one another (what I called web-communities). I had this grand idea of using this client as the beginning of a massive peer-to-peer search engine, that would collect the results of the distributed indexing and provide a unique front end for it. I even went as far as buying a domain name for it.

Why didn't I do it? Because Google arrived.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one disappointed with the search tools of the time, trying to come up with a better one. But Google was it. It was the next big thing, so I happily shelved the megamap project.

In my opinion they have the right approach to everything they do (well, a few minor exceptions perhaps), including the right way to rank pages, the right way to present results, the right approach to advertising, the right way to conduct a .com business, the right approach to you name it.
And above all, the right approach to the users, the people.

Have you ever thought about why there isn't any willingness within the open-source community to produce a large-scale open source search engine?
Could it be because there is no need for one? Google, in listening to it's users, and sometimes even providing more than what we asked for, ensures loyalty and keeps garage duos happy*. For example, after acquiring Deja, the Google folks went through the trouble of ensuring all the old hyperlinks to deja Usenet articles got properly forwarded to the new google URLs. As one person in Usenet said, and I try to quote as closely as I can: "they weren't forced to do it. it's pure public service".

Google is the people's web search engine. As long as they keep the people happy (and yes, that involves to keep innovating), they will keep growing stronger and bigger. (whether growing bigger is a good thing is open to debate)

* for those who didn't follow: garage duos are those who, when unhappy with something, produce the next killer application ;)

Well, I just happened to have these links lying around, as I work on VMS/VAX systems at work (Gyroscan Intera system). These links are sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...

Core OpenVMS
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/

OpenVMS Future Release Contents, Schedules
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/open vms_roadmaps.htm

OpenVMS and Core Layered Product Documentation
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/

Core OpenVMS Support Search Engine URLs, FTP Patch Area http://askq.compaq.com/
http://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/ecoinfo/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/axp/...

The OpenVMS Freeware
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/freeware/

Encompas
http://www.encompassus.org/

Tech Help OpenVMS
http://askq.compaq.com/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...

Well, I just happened to have these links lying around, as I work on VMS/VAX systems at work (Gyroscan Intera system). These links are sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...

Core OpenVMS
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/

OpenVMS Future Release Contents, Schedules
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/open vms_roadmaps.htm

OpenVMS and Core Layered Product Documentation
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/

Core OpenVMS Support Search Engine URLs, FTP Patch Area http://askq.compaq.com/
http://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/ecoinfo/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/axp/...

The OpenVMS Freeware
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/freeware/

Encompas
http://www.encompassus.org/

Tech Help OpenVMS
http://askq.compaq.com/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...

Well, I just happened to have these links lying around, as I work on VMS/VAX systems at work (Gyroscan Intera system). These links are sort of the OpenVMS equivalent of gnu.org, gnome.org, redhat.com, and so forth...

Core OpenVMS
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/

OpenVMS Future Release Contents, Schedules
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/roadmap/open vms_roadmaps.htm

OpenVMS and Core Layered Product Documentation
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/

Core OpenVMS Support Search Engine URLs, FTP Patch Area http://askq.compaq.com/
http://ftp.digital.com.au/pub/ecoinfo/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/axp/...

The OpenVMS Freeware
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/freeware/

Encompas
http://www.encompassus.org/

Tech Help OpenVMS
http://askq.compaq.com/
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/wizard/
ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/vms/vax/...

Wow.

Just the other day I was looking through the bookmarks I have saved in Lynx on an old shell account. The search engines I'd bookmarked were Lycos as lycos.cs.cmu.edu and Altavista as altavista.digital.com. Neither of them had a www at the start, and both still resolve today.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for some of the gopher:// links I had in there too. :(
We've come a long way in a very short time...

>Anyone remember archie ?

Not much, but I do remember ftpsearch.ntnu.no.

Old web addresses are fun, I wonder if this one still works: altavista.digital.com.

Even better: www.digital.com redirects to Compaq which redirects to HP.

vnc is suppossed to be good and it works for free

VNC rawks. I just compiled x0rfbserver for a Debian Woody box (you'll also need the xclass libraries) and I can even see my :0 display and use Win2VNC (Think x2x, but using Windows 2000 and some VNC frippery). Plain ol' VNC on a *NIX machine spawns an additional display.

OK, if you walk into the temple and they're sacrificing penguins or daemons, turn around and walk out FAST! (If on the other hand they're sacrificing WinXP CDs, kindly let the rest of us know so we can join the fun :))

Seriously now, bring copies of every major distribution you can think of - off the top of my head at least RedHat (7.2), Debian (Potato or Woody, whatever the latest stable release is) and SlackWare (haven't kept up but whatever the latest is). I've also heard good things about Mandrake and SuSE but I've never used either personally.

Make sure you bring something that works on Macs too just in case (you may want to actually spring for a copy of OSX if they are running recent Mac hardware. Also, on the off chance that they have some genuinely freaky hardware, bringing along a NetBSD CD couldn't hurt.

You should also bring along soft copies of every howto you think you'll need (and at least hard copies of everything you'll need to get a system installed and running in case you hit any snags). Since you said your Spanish is marginal, you may want to run some of the howtos through babelfish. The translations are quite honestly crappy, but they're good enough that they should be workable.

Best of luck - You'll probably need it!

I hope so, if only so that the memory and research of Digital Equiptment Corp lives on. (man those guys were cool!)

Many years ago, Digital did this with their Alphas when they first came out around 1990. They did everything they could to bring attention to these fast guys, including putting out a number of white papers detailing its architecture and core design. Somehow they still could not break the Intel barrier despite their speed.

They gave logins to anyone who asked for one in order to see what could be done with the systems. They were always overloaded and it seemed like there was great interest in the machines, but eventually $$$ and non-native Intel compatibility limited them. Good luck to IBM.

I can't provide direct links (damn frames), but if you want to be able to read the web pages mentioned in this story in English, go to Babelfish, select "Japanese to English," plug in the URL from the story, and click Translate. Granted, the translation isn't much better than AYBABTU, but it's a start.

---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!

AMSTERDAM - TEASERS
TEASERS
(EX-CHooters)
Damrak 36
1012LK Amsterdam
T. 0031-20-4287508

FIRE WARM UP PARTY in the Teaser's to 22.04.00 of 13.00 - 16,00 o'clock

The Teasers of sport bar, typical American bar, was always the meeting place of the NFL Europe fan (particularly with the Scots) for their Party's.

Special flag are the waitresses, who are inferior to our Pyro's hardly. And if one has then times birthday, then the waitresses let themselves also which "nice" be broken in (not truely, Living putting)! Who would not loving have exchanged with you gladly!

Freely after the slogan: Man, those are thick, man!

By the way: The Teasers was called in former times Hooters , like the American branches. The name did not change, but in the concept to anything. It continues as in the Hooters. It was probably probable more a license problem. The Disco is inferior also during the day no Discothek. A D.J. with a violent sound system and Lightshow brought still each Partymuffel in tendency. The meal is very good in addition, not cheap. The Damrak connects the Dam Square with the main station. The bar can be attained by both workstations within 5 minutes. Beside the Teasers an excellent typically Dutch Frittenbude with megaportions of Pommes and thousands saucen is direct.

Safeweb, AskJesus, Babelfish, etc.

These are all examples of a fairly simple web application that pretty much destroy all hopes of this filtering methodology every flying. Are all these applications to be blacklisted as "obcene", "occult", or "too useful"?

Just like the porn, they'll never get em all.

The resolution: Just have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.

Bogus.

You can download Linux v0.01 here.

You can still download Unix V5, V6, and V7, along with a PDP-11 simulator to run them on, here. Hope you know ed though...

And who would WANT to run anything else on that page anyway? Never mind the legality of it all.

The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.

SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.

If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.

For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.

Digital (Compaq) developed an x86 Dynamic Binary Translator running on Alpha called FX!32. FX!32 won Byte Magazine's "Best Technology" award at Fall Comdex '95.

Dynamic in this case means that some code is emulated on the fly, and some is translated. This approach was pioneered for bytecode systems in Smalltalk implementations in the 80's, and of course is now used in Sun's HotSpot and other dynamic adaptive JVMs.

Static binary translators have been around for even longer, and were used (among other things) for running VAX programs on Alpha. A useful overview of this sort of technology appeared in the Digital Technical Journal 4:4 (1992). HP also performed binary translation between the HP3000 and the Precision architecture, but I can't find on-line info on that, just a citation to a paper article (1987). There is also a useful survey article on static and dynamic binary translation.

What is presumably novel in Transmeta's approach is that their instruction set architecture (ISA) is tuned specifically for dynamic translation (see page 12ff of Transmeta's paper The Technology Behind Crusoe Processors . Some microcode architectures have been designed specifically for general emulation (most have been tuned for a particular macroinstruction ISA), e.g. the early Lisp Machines (1976-81).

Digital (Compaq) developed an x86 Dynamic Binary Translator running on Alpha called FX!32. FX!32 won Byte Magazine's "Best Technology" award at Fall Comdex '95.

Dynamic in this case means that some code is emulated on the fly, and some is translated. This approach was pioneered for bytecode systems in Smalltalk implementations in the 80's, and of course is now used in Sun's HotSpot and other dynamic adaptive JVMs.

Static binary translators have been around for even longer, and were used (among other things) for running VAX programs on Alpha. A useful overview of this sort of technology appeared in the Digital Technical Journal 4:4 (1992). HP also performed binary translation between the HP3000 and the Precision architecture, but I can't find on-line info on that, just a citation to a paper article (1987). There is also a useful survey article on static and dynamic binary translation.

What is presumably novel in Transmeta's approach is that their instruction set architecture (ISA) is tuned specifically for dynamic translation (see page 12ff of Transmeta's paper The Technology Behind Crusoe Processors . Some microcode architectures have been designed specifically for general emulation (most have been tuned for a particular macroinstruction ISA), e.g. the early Lisp Machines (1976-81).

Digital (Compaq) developed an x86 Dynamic Binary Translator running on Alpha called FX!32. FX!32 won Byte Magazine's "Best Technology" award at Fall Comdex '95.

Dynamic in this case means that some code is emulated on the fly, and some is translated. This approach was pioneered for bytecode systems in Smalltalk implementations in the 80's, and of course is now used in Sun's HotSpot and other dynamic adaptive JVMs.

Static binary translators have been around for even longer, and were used (among other things) for running VAX programs on Alpha. A useful overview of this sort of technology appeared in the Digital Technical Journal 4:4 (1992). HP also performed binary translation between the HP3000 and the Precision architecture, but I can't find on-line info on that, just a citation to a paper article (1987). There is also a useful survey article on static and dynamic binary translation.

What is presumably novel in Transmeta's approach is that their instruction set architecture (ISA) is tuned specifically for dynamic translation (see page 12ff of Transmeta's paper The Technology Behind Crusoe Processors . Some microcode architectures have been designed specifically for general emulation (most have been tuned for a particular macroinstruction ISA), e.g. the early Lisp Machines (1976-81).

Digital (Compaq) developed an x86 Dynamic Binary Translator running on Alpha called FX!32. FX!32 won Byte Magazine's "Best Technology" award at Fall Comdex '95.

Dynamic in this case means that some code is emulated on the fly, and some is translated. This approach was pioneered for bytecode systems in Smalltalk implementations in the 80's, and of course is now used in Sun's HotSpot and other dynamic adaptive JVMs.

Static binary translators have been around for even longer, and were used (among other things) for running VAX programs on Alpha. A useful overview of this sort of technology appeared in the Digital Technical Journal 4:4 (1992). HP also performed binary translation between the HP3000 and the Precision architecture, but I can't find on-line info on that, just a citation to a paper article (1987). There is also a useful survey article on static and dynamic binary translation.

What is presumably novel in Transmeta's approach is that their instruction set architecture (ISA) is tuned specifically for dynamic translation (see page 12ff of Transmeta's paper The Technology Behind Crusoe Processors . Some microcode architectures have been designed specifically for general emulation (most have been tuned for a particular macroinstruction ISA), e.g. the early Lisp Machines (1976-81).

The problem is how do you define a version? At the operating system level when the OS gets a request to write some physical block, does it count that one request as a new version, a string of requests as a new version?Im not sure how it works, but VMS will present the most recent (highest version) if none is specified ie: somefile.txt;5 vs somefile.txt;1. The symantics work perfectly with Digital's VMS, anyone interested can go see about Files 11 & Spiralog here

FYI: VMS/VAX blows (IMHO)... I cant wait to pull the plug on my cluster...

Tru64 has a hobbyist license for $99.

Check out http://www.unix.digital.com/noncommercial-unix/

You need to grab the cxx compiler from compaq and recompile POV with it. The increased optimization (expecially against the compaq math libs) might breathe a little life back into your 21164. Info is at: This Page

--It seems to me there has been a lot of whining about P4 power consumption. This isn't meant as a flame, but the P4 is supposed to be a high performance microprocessor. Honestly, 66W is not a lot in the performance arena. Take a look at the power consumption of the alpha 21264 @ 550Mhz... 100W.

ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/Digital/info/semiconduct or/literature/21264ds.pdf

I think a little perspective is required before jumping on these "P4-consumes-too-much-power/generates-too-much-hea t" bandwagons.

-just my opinion.

Check this page: project description at Compaq/Digital
The Jukebox Manager is a program which runs on Linux. It is not Linux. It is proprietary software which uses the Fraunhoeffer MP3 encoder. They can't release the source to the Fraunhoeffer code even if they wanted to.
How many other companies selling MP3 players give you the source code to the example jukebox program with a documented API? I think the jukebox guys are to be commended for being so open, not bashed because they didn't happen to release all of their code under GPL.

One small correction to the timeline: Apple Computer used the ARM CPUs in the Newton PDA (which Steve Jobs killed off after he took over again - not one of his better decisions).

It was Apple that insisted that Acorn Computer divest itself of the ARM development team, so that they could be buying from a supplier that wasn't directly competing with them in the computer systems market. Thus was Acorn RISC Machines (ARM), Ltd. born.

The collaboration with DEC came later, and that produced the StrongARM.

You can find out for yourself how well UNIX V7 runs on a PDP-11, as simulators from DEC are still available!

Be prepared to do without modern conveniences like vi, though... heh heh heh.