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Commodore PC Still Controls Heat and A/C At 19 Michigan Public Schools
jmulvey writes: Think your SCADA systems are outdated? Environmental monitoring at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools are still controlled by a Commodore Amiga. Programmed by a High School student in the 1980s, the system has been running 24/7 for decades. A replacement has been budgeted by the school system, estimated cost: Between $1.5 and 2 million. How much is your old Commodore Amiga worth?
I wish I still had mine. That, the C64 and the Vic20 are what got me started back in the good old days, tape drives, typing in games line by line from magazines then hunting down and fixing the errors because the magazine was misprinted. Loved it.
So less than 2 dozen schools need to spend upwards of $2 million dollars to... control the HVAC?
Really?
That is the bigger issue, IMHO...
So have they run out of high school students ? Why not just give one of them a raspberry pi and have them program up a replacement. Hell, get 2 raspberry pis and keep one as spare.
Nullius in verba
...why are they replacing it? It's not like it's being used for computing purposes, where leaving it within the network makes it a backdoor for malware. It's simply being used to control the HVAC, which could be done w/ an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. Or even an ancient PC armed w/ just FreeDOS. But if it's working, what's the compelling need to replace it, much less budget up to $2M for it?
Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000
$2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings. At that size you need a system that controls how much your heat plant or cooling system is producing, as well as controlling fans and baffles to ensure that the cooking classroom, with a dozen ovens operating(or 30 computers) on the 3rd floor of the sunny side of the building stays comfortably cool while the the traditional English room on the shaded side of the first floor doesn't actually freeze.
The reason it's $2M is the amount of programming and equipment replacement necessary, standard government waste, and the fact that they're no longer willing to let students/staff do it.
I don't read AC A human right
This.
Was exactly my first thought too.
It IS a PC, as in the generic sense of "personal computer". A Mac is a "PC" too. . .
I am going to assume there is a idiot involved in delivering this news and that the budget is for replacing a lot more than just controls.
Pi plus some student programmers - should be done for $1500. Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
I'm hoping that the $2 dollars is going to update a number of things, and not just the one system. Seems like you could rig up a VM to do the Commodore's work and a Raspberry Pi at each school to send the signals over the internet instead of OTA for probably about $5,000 in parts and $20k in labor.
Agreed. And the guy being interviewed seems to be on the same side of the argument we are. The media however are trying to spin this. I detect a hint of disdain in the tone of the anchorwoman as she goes over the list of repairs that were deemed a higher priority... Like replacing boilers, roofs, and removing asbestos... None of which are cheap. The bloody computer system works. It has its problems, but it works on 30 year old hardware. If it works on that there's no need to build out a 1.5 mil system to replace it. A modest modern desktop system to run the controller, upgrade the radios to get it off the communication frequency, and a good service contract with whoever you get that desktop from...you've got a system that'll last another 30 years for less than half the proposed budget.
big buildings have zones, ventilation intakes and exhausts and mixing chambers, filters, humidification, perhaps chilled water plant, etc.
you're going to need a lot of thermostats and alot of other sensors and controls.
why in the hell WOULD they upgrade....
For that much money, I'm assuming they are replacing more than the computer that controls the HVAC, they are probably replacing the HVAC system itself. Neither the article or the linked video make that clear.
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So anyone who can write a program for that platform that is still running problem-free after 30 years deserves to be making stacks of cash in the embedded/IoT space.
Also, shameless plug: http://amiga30.com/
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Wjats missing is giving the computersience department at all the schools 50k budget and the origional source code to implement on current hardware. This wpuld be the best use of the funds and save the rest. In fact let each school do a competition and give them a reason to really excel.
It's amazing how successfully IBM/MIcrosoft won the war over the word "PC": now only Windows computers can be called personal computers.
It's equally amazing how meaningless that victory actually is.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why the negative backlash here? I think it's AWESOME that stuff from the 80's is still running to this day, and I think that's a mark of quality construction if the Amiga still runs to this day. Why are they supposed to replace it if it does the job? It's not like there's any networking here or areas that are exposed to the public, just a computer controlling the temperature. If anything, I can understand replacing it because the maintenance is getting difficult (Amiga parts are quite hard to find nowadays), and maybe when something on the Amiga actually does break that puts it out of commission for good (the processor, for instance). Replacing it because ZOMG IT'S FROM THE EIGHTIES KILL IT WITH FIRE seems like a very irrational and kneejerk reaction to me. If nothing else, let me have it! I'd love to see how this person did it, seems like a very interesting project. I once did something similar with a system that controlled automatic doors - I don't know if it's still running or not though.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
So less than 2 dozen schools need to spend upwards of $2 million dollars to... control the HVAC?
Really?
That is the bigger issue, IMHO...
Well, if the new system ends up saving them more than $2 million over its lifespan (hardly a stretch of the imagination, given the cost of heating and cooling large buildings,) wouldn't they be fools to not have done this already?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Parts for the computer are difficult to find, Hopkins said. It is on its second mouse and third monitor.
Try ebay or Craigs list? Lots of it out there...
Since this was made by a student, why not have a new student project to replace this thing usign a Pi or *duino board, which are all the rage these days? Or for an even more interesting learning experience, go with a Zed board? Surely those and your free extracurricular club labor would save you a couple bucks?
Still, if it was something codeable by a student then, the idea that the replacement system would take $2 million is ludicrous. \
Have a competition for coding, award a $100k prize for the best system code, and implement that (plus give the winner a job for life).
-Styopa
you're going to need a lot of thermostats and alot of other sensors and controls.
You're also going to need some way to keep the kids from screwing with them.
Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000
$2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.
I think we're all forgetting that the HVAC system as a whole is that old. Pumps, valves, and compressors all have finite life spans. My first reaction was also to use some Rpi's at each location which could add up to under $200 per building I then considered the cost to forklift and upgrade the HVAC at each facility. This would be about right.
Coffee: The lifeblood of intelligence in civilization.
I am going to assume there is a idiot involved in delivering this news and that the budget is for replacing a lot more than just controls.
I am going to assume that the contractor is the superintendent's brother in-law.
Indeed.. they could buy a couple of used Amigas on Ebay. Don't laugh, I've seen it done by corporations who are desperate to support a legacy system.
Or, better yet, hire the kid (now adult) programmer to port the software to a more modern platform with a more secure method of control than unencrypted RF.
100k on the programmer, 50k on hardware.. all finished.
If they are only having problems with the hardware, why not just put an Amiga emulator on a new computer?
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
The alternative to using the term "PC" to describe IBM PCs and their descendants is to use some horribly convoluted terminology, along the lines of "Oh no, this isn't a Mac, this is a computer that implements standards comprising a descendant of the IBM PC architecture."
PC comes from "IBM PC". While the PC in those five letters were the initials of "Personal Computer", the name referred to a specific family of computers. You wouldn't use "PC/AT" to describe the latest Mac on the grounds that "But... it is a Personal Computer with Advanced Technology!" Likewise, if someone gave you a 3.5" disc in the 1980s and said "This has a PC emulator on it!" you wouldn't say "Ahem, my Amiga already is a personal computer, I don't need to emulate one on it." PC was understood to mean IBM PC based.
The Commodore Amiga was a personal computer. It was not a PC - well, not unless you added the Sidecar thingie, one of the Zorro 2/3 emulator cards, or ran one of the PC emulators, anyway..
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm not 100% sure it's governmental pork... commercial HVAC control systems can get hella expensive in a hurry, depending on what you're putting in. I suspect it's going to be more than just dropping in a new PC/server/whatever... a buttload of updated sensors and control equipment will likely have to go in along with it (esp. given the age).
Price it sometime, then scale that cost up for 19 large buildings. $2m comes to roughly $105k per school; as far as buildings of that size go, that ain't half bad.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Of course it is. "PC" and "personal computer" were in use well before the IBM PC came along.
Even Commodore called it a personal computer.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
While you are probably correct, I am sure there is much more to the story.
Do we know if the current situation is even efficient? That $2mil might be to upgrade all the systems enough that it will save $100k/yr in more efficient operation.
If you think about how long they have milked the current system, maybe they do well with their budgets.. just not enough info to decide if $2mil is wasteful.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I love that a 30 year old computer is doing the job just fine.
I love that a kid wrote the code ages ago, and presumably it has never even been patched.
I love that the Amiga was so damn rock solid that it has not had an emergent failure in 30 years.
I love that it uses walkie talkie beeps as a protocol
I love that somehow it is going to cost 2 million dollars to reproduce something a kid did in his spare time, presumably simply for the privilege of getting to play with a $1300 dollar computer.
And what do you do if a part dies? Where are you going to get parts for something that has not been manufactured for 20+ years?
Obviously it needs to be replaced just so you can have something that can be repaired. The $2mil probably includes upgrading a large part of the HVAC system. If you have a 20+ year old computer controlling the HVAC, then you probably have a 20+ old HVAC.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings.
And yet a high-school student from the 1980's was able to engineer a system with off the shelf computers and a little ingenuity. And managed to build a system that has lasted for 25 years.
Can't these be replaced with $150 multi zone thermostats?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
It raises the question. Begging the question means something completely different.
A bespoke system like this is difficult to modify or expand. It could also crap out at any time, leaving them to scramble for a replacement. It makes sense to replace it. It does not make sense to spend $2M to do so. They should track down the ex-student that wrote the original program, and pay him a few $k to port it to a new device. A Raspberry Pi would be a good choice.
"PC comes from "IBM PC"."
No, it doesn't. It was in use before there was an IBM PC, along with "personal computer" and "microcomputer." History proves you wrong.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I don't doubt a nice HVAC control could save money...
I just doubt that it needs to cost $2 million dollars...
Pi plus some student programmers - should be done for $1500. Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
In my old house, there was an analog thermostat.
This thermostat came with the house, probably cost $20, and worked just fine.
Me, being the foolhardy spendthrift I am, dropped TEN TIMES that on a fancy-shmancy programmable thing with all sorts of stupid, complicated bits inside.
As it turns out, my previous model--while perfectly functional--was really quite inefficient, and the new unit had pretty much paid for itself within a few weeks.
Doing things properly can save tons of money.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings. At that size you need a system that controls how much your heat plant or cooling system is producing, as well as controlling fans and baffles to ensure that the cooking classroom, with a dozen ovens operating(or 30 computers) on the 3rd floor of the sunny side of the building stays comfortably cool while the the traditional English room on the shaded side of the first floor doesn't actually freeze.
Uhh...yeah, we get all that. So care to tell me why the current bullshit system has been deemed acceptable for three fucking decades?
The reason it's $2M is the amount of programming and equipment replacement necessary, standard government waste, and the fact that they're no longer willing to let students/staff do it.
No, the reason it's $2M is because jobs, jobs, and jobs. Oh yeah, and jobs. Don't forget about jobs. It's all about job creation, whether it's needed or not.
Nevermind the fact that a few Pi boards could likely replace the whole damn thing and it could be a killer school project. Nope, jobs, jobs, and jobs.
The term is overloaded. Live with it. It can mean a general "personal computer" (microcomputer, typically), or an IBM-PC clone.
Table-ized A.I.
Really?
The article isn't exactly clear on what "system" is being replaced. Boilers, air con units, etc - all might need an upgrade.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000. $2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.
A pi was my first thought too. :-)
While you are probably correct that there is a bit of profit in that quote, its seems everyone is only looking at one half of the equation. What about the other side, increased efficiency and the cost savings that would result?
It is plausible that over another 30 year timespan the cost of the new system could be outweighed by the savings it generates. I'm not saying this is surely the case, just part of the equation that is being overlooked so we don't really have enough information to judge the project.
That said, pi's and clocks and temperature sensors and etc are fairly inexpensive. A modernized more comprehensive student built system could be an awesome project. The school could have a computer engineering club that maintains and enhances the system. The education benefit may easily outweigh any additional benefit a high tech commercial installation might offer. This education benefit would include something terribly lacking in traditional CS/CE programs, an appreciation for maintaining existing software.
A pi with some shell scripts controlling commercial scale heating and cooling system?
No.
Fuck no.
Jesus fucking christ no.
This isn't your home automation project were the worst thing that goes wrong is you don't get to spy on your cat while you're at work.
This is a serious deployment controlling a whole lot of non-trivial hardware. More importantly it's pivotal to the operation of the school itself. Fuck up the climate control for a week during any kind of unusual weather and you'll beg for a 2 million dollar fix when you need to unfuck the whole school year so your students can get their mandated educational hours.
2M quote isn't to replace some old amiga with an equivalent off the shelf PC. Considering they'll have to evaluate the entire system from boilers to blowers to ensure that it can be coupled properly with a modern control unit that's really not out of hand. They will probably have to replace some equipment that's incompatible or broken. That's a lot of man hours from skilled professionals. That's probably a lot of specialized not-cheap equipment too.
Also don't forget this is a school. Regulations regarding health and safety are much more strict. They're probably required to bring anything they touch up to current code by law. (This alone is why you see schools chugging along in really old buildings with really old infrastructure. Cost of code updates exceeds the cost of building whole new buildings. Renovations are essentially impossible.)
....and cue David Caruso putting on sunglasses.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
My Amiga would crash if I looked at it funny (then again, I had all kinds of things rigged up to it) -- although I remember doing the most amazing crap *ever* on a computer with that old Amiga 1000... Seriously, that was a wonderful, wonderful piece of hardware, and there's never been anything like it, even to this day. Dynamic ramdisk? We still don't have that in any other operating system.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I love how they're paying millions for something you can easily pull off with some SDR's and RasPi's.
I do the IT for schools.
The largest, most complex heating system I've ever seen is a bunch of thermostats, pumps, temperature sensors and boiler start-up times in a piece of crappy HTML running on a boiler control system which costs 1% of what the heating system cost (and most of that shit is software licensing and support, not programming).
Seriously, it gives a nice diagram with all the in and out temperatures for multiple boilers, spread over the entire site, with temperature reading for other places (including external), and a "program" (really just a table of values) for when to start up in the morning depending on what the outside temperature is and/or whether the system's water temperature is ramping up as normal in that area.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
A modern system might run proper cabling to / wireless sensors that don't interfere but would basically be the same thing. More likely, the system is just being replaced completely, including the majority of the HVAC equipment (or at least the centralised units if not the ducts / outlets / radiators / whatever).
In all the schools I've ever worked there are rooms full of boilers all over that cost millions. Usually they are run from a control panel with a tiny microprocessor and - if you're lucky - some kind of serial or Ethernet controller somewhere.
The hard part is not the software, or the schedules, or the algorithms involved, it's keeping the system running and integrating the parts you want to work with the system you want. Boiler manufacturers on that scale tend to want you to buy their controllers, and won't play well with anything else without a huge premium on the hardware.
I believe much of the HVAC system is actually much older than the Amiga. The Amiga was a replacement for an older refrigerator sized system which was decommissioned because of it's climbing costs. The old HVAC systems at the other buildings all rely on using radio modems to relay instructions. That radio modem system is actually thecrux of the problem as it is subject to interference from simple walkie talkies. Replacing those modems with something more modern is likely to be the expensive part of the project as it'll require custom hardware and who knows how much manpower to get it to work with the ancient systems. Replacing the Amiga that controls it all is probably going to be the smallest expense of the whole thing.
You're also going to need some way to keep the kids from screwing with them.
When I was in school the sure fire way to get us to mess with something like a thermostat was to put a lock of some kind on it. It was usually the threat of meeting with the "The Board of Education" that kept us in line. "The Board of Education" was very similar to a cricket bat with holes drilled in it that our principal kept on the wall behind his desk, which was labeled, "The Board of Education" in bright red outlined in black.
I'm guessing that between Ritalin and the constant distraction of cell phones, things like thermostats really wouldn't be noticed by students today.
Well, at least this student did. God only knows what kind of unholy messes the others made. Or, for that matter, how much cost accrued silently through inefficiencies over 25 years.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
My seventh grade Apple II teacher in 1983 called my Commodore VIC-20 a toy in front of the class. That's when I learned that I came from a "poor" family because we couldn't afford an Apple II. My parents got me a Commodore 64 the following year. I went through three C64 in the next ten years. My first PC after college was literally an old IBM PC/AT (286) that a roommate brought home work in 1995.
I wouldn't know; I took 14 seconds to create an account. Why don't you?
When I was going to GRCC (Grand Rapids Community College) in the late-90s I took a tour of the Grand Rapids Wastewater Treatment Plant (GRWWTP). They still used two commodore 64's (or were they 128's) to log sensor measurements for different pollutants. I believe for metals used in the automotive and chrome industry. They were nearly black they were caked with so much dirt and dust, but were still chugging along showing status on the attached TV monitor.
At the time (in my early 20s) I thought it was silly they were using such old computers. But now I think that as long as it keeps working there is no reason to replace it. When they eventually break they will need to be repaired or replaced, and likely replacement will be cheaper as the support for that platform is long gone. They'll use some fancy embedded computer, and it will chug along for 20 years and by that time, whatever embedded vendor they used is unlikely to assist in any way other than full replacement.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And what do you do if a part dies? Where are you going to get parts for something that has not been manufactured for 20+ years?
eBay, there is a TON of that stuff out there... the prices are cheap as well...
Remote, as in from China. Sigh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You're also going to need some way to keep the kids from screwing
FTFY...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
I think it is PC to call all PC's PC
I give credit to the lead in the solder for the hardware lasting that long.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why would it need to be replaced? It doesn't need USB, Bluetooth, Firewire, et al. No compelling reason to replace it.
My music project studio is running on Windows for Workgroups. All I need is MIDI. I don't need software plugins (I use hardware for that), I don't want it connected to the internet, I don't use it for any sampling or sample playback. And that's a circa 1993 machine that still works.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The original programmer is still around, and occasionally does some maintenance on the programmer -- he even comments extensively in the comment section for the linked news story about the specific challenges they face. (He's "Jeff").
The $2MM will be used for a general upgrade of all the heating/cooling facilities, which will include more modern control systems. Many of the systems that used to be controlled by the Amiga have already been replaced, and the Amiga doesn't manage those any more :)
I used to work for an HVAC controls company. Most controls contractors have a specialty, whether it be hospitals, schools, commercial offices, or whatever. The one I worked for specialized in schools. We would typically get the entire school district's business all at once, but individual buildings would be upgraded or added to over time. But occasionally, we would get a large project that involved multiple buildings or an entire take-over of a whole district's HVAC controls.
I have personally seen, held, and deposited a check for over $1 million from one such project. And that was the 20% kick-off payment. We outfitted 11 schools with complete direct-digital controls (none of that old pneumatic stuff), a web-facing control server, and a bunch of wire-runs to connect it all together. The price (as you may have calculated) was around $5 million. This was 10+ years ago, too.
That project covered a high school, 2 middle schools, and 8 elementary schools. The district administration offices were on the high school campus as well, and were part of the same system that covered the high school building itself.
The high school had (from memory):
- 300+ fan powered terminals (zone controller and thermostat for each)
- 7 or 8 air handling units (multi-program controller for each)
- 12 roof-top units (single-program controller for each)
- 1 network bridge
- 1 web-facing server
The middle schools had:
- 150 FPT zones (average)
- 3 or 4 AHU's each
- 6-8 RTU's each
- 1 network bridge each
The elementary schools had:
- 50 FPT zones (average)
- 1 or 2 AHU's each
- 3 or 4 RTU's each
- 1 network bridge each
All told, parts for that project cost us around $2-to-2.5 million. We generally bid things with a 100% markup over parts costs, which covered labor, design, documentation, management, and everything else. This company was and is profitable, but isn't making anyone wildly rich.
There is no pork in that barrel. It just costs money to build something like that.
As proof of my claim, I present the "NEC PC-8001," which preceded the IBM PC by 2 years. "PC" does not refer exclusively to IBM PCs, although after they were introduced they were often called just "PCs." Then there were "PC clones," and "PC compatibles," and "PC" most often referred to that architecture, because most of the PCs were that type. But not exclusively, and such usage was clear from context. The Amiga can properly be referred to as a PC.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
... regulatory compliance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Shame on me for RTFA, but yes, the $2M is for a complete replacement. The original system also used some custom RF hack to talk to the various buildings that operates on the same frequency as maintenance's walkie-talkies. But who could resist the opportunity for fresh pork spending? School administrators just love off-cycle bond elections with catchy names like "Warm, Safe and Dry" that few people show up for so they have a big fat piggy bank to spend.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
When the Amiga system originally went in it was controlling well over 100 buildings throughout the district, including the entire GRCC campus at the time. The Amiga replaced the head-end of the system, which was experiencing expensive hardware failures every year ... and you couldn't get parts for that mini-computer on e-bay. It is essentially acting as a huge database (schedules, configurations, control programs, history, etc.), system manager, and monitoring system ("head-end") for the remaining 19 buildings HVAC systems. If the Amiga goes down, the buildings will continue to operate using the configurations last received, with most of the individual device controls being able to be manually overridden inside each building, albeit with less energy efficiency. What you will loose is the ability to change schedules/custom control code/configurations and the ability to centrally monitor the performance of the buildings.
Each building has one or more local control systems, and those systems communicate back to the central head-end over radio-modem (there was no district-wide network back then). Schedule and other control changes are sent to the buildings and alerts/reports are sent back. That old equipment in the buildings, even older than the Amiga, is what dictates the radio communications link. They incorporate specific protocols for keying up the radio that are not directly compatible with a newer serial to Ethernet type device that would seem like a logical replacement.
The control systems themselves gather temperatures, both inside and outside the building, look at trends and do predictive control of the equipment to accomodate scheduled use of various areas of each building. For the day, this was very advanced building control and offered significant energy savings, as well as comfort in the buildings.
Over time, as buildings have been updated, sold or replaced, the local controls withing those buildings have been replaced with newer/more modern controls that communicate with newer central control systems. Replacing these controls that are local to the buildings is what is responsible for the majority of the cost I would say.
As far as the Amiga system itself, I believe most of the components are still the original. The hard drive may have failed twice over the years, requiring a rebuild from backups. They did pick up or have donated a few Amiga systems to use as parts as needed, but the system has proven to be very resilient. Obviously, Monitors, Keyboards and Mice can only take so much use without needing to be replaced. Without this, the system likely would have become inoperable and unservicable many years ago, or been incredibly expensive to keep running.
From a technical stand point, the Amiga was selected because at the time it was the only "Personal Computer" (PC) that had a true pre-emptive multi-taskng operating system. It needed to be able to handle multiple processes simultaneously, including interfacing with the systems, maintaining settings in the database, monitoring the system as well as support for both local and remote access to the system simultaneously. Basically, its capabilities fit the need. While for nostalgia reasons I would hate to see it go, it has been 30 years and I think the system has done its job. Replacing a building's control system doesn't happen overnight, and when you are talking 19 buildings with ancient (yes I am calling myself ancient I guess) control systems, it is going to take money and time. The payback in energy savings, comfort and safe control of the buildings though I think justifies the cost.
Have a Day!
I blame Apple for this misuse.
Yeah it was used colloquially to refer to Wintel boxes before the ads, but Wintel has it's followers as well, and has for years before then as well. stretching back to the windows 3.0 days.
And the whole "PC Master Race" thing has taken it out of control
and the GP post illustrates the Apple ads bringing that mentality into play very well for me here. "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC"... you're both PCs. in ther personal computer term. HECK the APPLE IIe was a "Personal Computer". I find it funny that the company that's oft claimed to "have made the PC Personal" (see reviews of Macintosh circa 1984-1985 era, notably in BYTE magazine, I had an old copy from I believe October 1984 that had that exact phrase), scoffs at the term. It's something that annoys me personally. Looking at the hardware the only difference between a Mac and a PC these days is the OS. So yeah a Mac is a PC... as is a commodore 64... Sinclair ZX-80, the Altair 8000, and the Heathkit monstrosities of the 1970s.
I still have two Amigas (500 and 1200). IM me and you can have both of them for just $500K - that's a savings of $1M over your upgrade costs! /snark>
I've been to bowling alleys that actually had scoreboard displays/backends that ran on Amiga computers. Sadly, they've all dropped them in favor of other systems.
This seems like a reasonable price estimate to me. Sure $90,000 per school sounds steep, but consider the following: 1. If the computer hasn't been updated, nothing has been updated since 1980, so there is no way we're talking about just a computer. Their custom fan rigs and AC is probably all about to die along with that computer. 2. It's all custom hardware, have you ever heard of a radio controlled thermostat for a school district? Yeahhh, no. Kids would hack it so fast if they knew the school was running something like that. So this is all local made lowest budget hardware, probably because the school couldn't afford an amiga for each school and it's all hardware that can't be simply connected to a modern HVAC control system. 3. And don't forget the cost of hiring a crew to install all the hardware and get it working in 24 schools before the school year starts! Priceless. Based on what I know about big projects, this all sounds quite reasonable to me.
Now you just get Intel vs AMD or graphics cards (but they are the same names now)
The second model of the commodore 64 actually had "Personal Computer" written in plain view.
"Amiga -- It's what the Apple iThermostat should have been."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How the bloody hell did you go through *three* of them? I only had one, and it lasted until I gave it away many years later.
You could murder someone with a Commodore 64 after fishing it out of a swimming pool filled with beer and it would still run fine.
Old enough to know the cane? (bat, paddle) I missed by one year. So I am a run away youff.
And yet a high-school student from the 1980's was able to engineer a system with off the shelf computers and a little ingenuity. And managed to build a system that has lasted for 25 years.
And for all we know, it could be so blindingly inefficient that it's cost the school system hundreds of thousands or millions in wasted energy over that quarter century. See how uninformed assertions work?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The irony is that while "PC" often refers to machines running Windows, a free-software unix box is often much more personalized, due to both software capabilities and the user's interests.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
and removing asbestos
Sure, the blown asbestos messes up your lungs when it's blowing around but after it's in place? It makes a good insulator and about the best fire retardant ever. Leave it in place.
"The Board of Education" was very similar to a cricket bat with holes drilled in it that our principal kept on the wall behind his desk
My parents had one of those when I was a kid, but I don't think you're allowed to use them anymore.
Why replace it if it works today? All their systems are probably as old as that computer so the whole shebang is becoming less and less reliable. Having the heat kick off in the winter can be a problem. Damage from the heat going off over a winter break could easily be over a couple million. Also kids will hack the heck out of it now that the cat is out of the bag that the whole system goes down if a walkie talkie is left on in the area. And cell phone signals might be messing up their radio system too and a lot of people have cell phones these days. Plus blasting a whole school district with modem communication over walkie talkie frequency probably breaks a few FTC rules. So to me, this sounds like a system that was put in due to budget desperation but it's not a good system for the school district to keep using.
There is no solution to that. The best you can really hope for is encouraging them screw safely. Provide condoms, birth control, and STD testing, problem mitigated.
Around here, Planned Parenthood does that.
You could murder someone with a Commodore 64 after fishing it out of a swimming pool filled with beer and it would still run fine.
Yes, after you replaced the power supply.
The C64 self-destructed after 3.3 years of constant everyday use for writing, programming and video games. I had to send the floppy drive out to a repair shop after the voltage regulator shorted out. The EPSON NLQ dot matrix lasted another five years before I got a laser printer for my PC.
And for all we know, it could be so blindingly inefficient that it's cost the school system hundreds of thousands or millions in wasted energy over that quarter century. See how uninformed assertions work?
I must have missed the part in my post where I commented on how efficient the system was. I was replying the the GP who stated that the HVAC systems were complex and the issue was with keeping proper temperatures in the different zones of the buildings.
Woah. You saved $200 on heating costs in a few weeks? Just your savings represents about 2 months of heating costs for me, during the winter. What, exactly, was your old thermostat doing? Did you have to use cash money to light the pilot light?
Only PC can call another PC PC
Don't forget that a cooling tower shutdown, even because of a minor bug, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in chiller replacement alone. (Chillers will burst from pressure due to heat buildup, causing the rest of the chiller to come apart as well. It's similar to how a land mine causes a tank to come apart. You'll usually lose several other nearby expensive pieces of equipment at the same time.) Then add deadheaded pump replacement, valve replacement (too-high pressure trashes the packing), and all of the other fun that comes with it (cleanup from burst pipes, water leaks, and worst of all, refrigerant leaks).
$2 million is nothing.
The Amiga was a personal computer (lower case) but it never had "PC" as part of it's name like the IBM PC did. No one referred to "Personal Computer" at the time with uppercase letters except when it was part of the computer's name (upper case makes it a proper noun). As an acronym, I don't recall "PC" ever being used to describe the generic class of microcomputers.
In other words, the Amiga, Apple II, and IBM PC were all personal computers but only one of those could be called a Personal Computer or PC. This isn't just my view, compare how things are described on the wikipedia pages talking about Apple II for instance; they use "personal computer" when speaking generically and "PC" when talking about the IBM PC or PC clones. There was never any confusion about this in 1985, games were marketed as being for "PC and Amiga" for example.
The confusion never arose until the "PC clone" was used as a shorthand for "IBM PC clone" and then things became murky. Now "PC" is an insult to call something that when it is not an IBM PC clone. PC fans don't understand this because they don't understand the insult.
...and then spend the remaining $1,975,000 fixing all the security breaches and viruses that suddenly have access to your system now that its conveniently on the internet and running on familiar hardware.
To be fair, I repeatedly rebuilt my joystick, which was about the simplest possible piece of electronics you could attach to it. And the power bricks were crappy, but I got lucky on all counts. I've had to rebuild Apple power bricks an obscene numbers of times (small shitty wires, virtually no strain relief, etc.), but I never had to do that for my C64.
I did repeatedly have to drain the keyboard and clean it, inside and out. Never died on me though. I was speaking from experience about the beer...
Could be. On the other hand, it could just be because they'd like a system with a formal service contract, warrantee, liability insurance, etc. Having some former student come back to the school occasionally to perform incantations over a Commodore may not inspire great confidence that the system is well in hand. What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.
Something like this could probably be controlled by some fucking ardunios... so why the hell are they replacing the amigas with a 2 million dollar system when clearly a fucking high school student in the 80s could make something that worked?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But "personal computer" is not the same as "PC", and not the same as "Personal Computer". Commodore never used the PC acronym in its marketing or branding. PC was used primarily as a brand name, part of actual trademarks (and not just by IBM).
At work those near me work in the Advanced Systems Services group. I do not call them the ASS group even though that could be their acronym. So similarly, PC as an acronym is not always interchangeable with "personal computer".
>a classmate posting something questioning the pre-emptive multitasking capabilities of AmigaOS
Yes. The Amiga ran on a 68000. The 68000 didn't support instruction restart. So you couldn't properly do preemptive multitasking with it. It needed the applications to cooperate with the interruptions. So an application could undermine the preemption. The 68010 fixed this problem. There were also unix based 68000 workstations that had two 68000s, one running a clock cycle behind the other, so the state of the CPU could be rewound and the instruction restarted when necessary.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I can replace it for half that if you let me use a NeXT computer.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not 100% sure it's governmental pork...
Get with the program! If it's not your own state/county/town, then it's always "pork"!
A school district of that size can save that much in a single year on their electric bill with an intelligent HVAC system.
I don't sell HVAC systems but I've seen this happen firsthand in a school district. Proper energy management programs are critical.
85% or so of a school district budget goes directly to personnel. That piece of the budget is considering operating expense. Other operating expenses? Transportation, energy, internet, phone, etc. The other piece of the budget is capital--used for buildings, equipment over a certain threshold or life expectancy. In most states there are very strict rules and amounts of money provided for both operating budgets and capital budgets. You can't co-mingle money between the two buckets--you can't pay teachers out of capital funds for instance.
So a $2M capital purchase that saves $2M in operating expenses directly impacts a district's ability to put teachers in the classroom. Then the HVAC system is a fixed asset, depreciated over the life expectancy of the building or buildings it serves and the financial impact on the budget is lessened.
As a taxpayer you may not care about this mundane detail and only want to scream about the expense. A more proper response is to scream to your state legislature about this arcane set of rules that forces school districts to make decisions like this.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Yeah, that'd go over well with me as a kid. Or my parents.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You are correct. HVAC is ridiculously expensive. Unlike the computer marketplace, there are a very limited supply of HVAC solutions, and many (not all) of the vendors like to keep their circuit and programming technology proprietary.
We just bid out the controller circuits for our school's HVAC system this year in our school district. We have two buildings joined by a hallway on a common campus; 38 blowers and over a hundred dampers control air flow into each room in the building, and each needs a control circuit. Estimated cost was $150,000. Mind you, this cost is -strictly- for control circuits and software to manage them. (Our elementary building had HVAC equipment that was only 10 years old, and 23 years old in the high school. The equipment works fine, but when the circuits were upgraded with the construction of the elementary school in 2005, the contractor used an HVAC control solution that was already outdated. We could only find one vendor in the whole state that was able to service the system.)
For 19 buildings, $2 million is certainly reasonable.
Controlled by an RS232 port?? Just run the program under an emulator hosted by a *nix box. Done! Move on.
Life is not for the lazy.
o one referred to "Personal Computer" at the time with uppercase letters except when it was part of the computer's name (upper case makes it a proper noun). As an acronym, I don't recall "PC" ever being used to describe the generic class of microcomputers.
I don't know where you lived, but we used "PC" that way consistently. No one had a IBM PC in high school: our PCs were C64s, Amigas, Ataris, and the one lucky guy who could afford a Mac. We never needed a word for "IBM PC clone" as non of us had one.
Maybe it's regional, like the whole "what kind of coke would you like" thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Beautiful, isn't it? Without even looking at this I know that my company can undercut the bid by at least 65% and still come out OK.
You can't handle the truth.
Just like engine management systems, building management system have gotten quite a bit more complex over the years. We work with building automation system data when we are brought in to improve the energy efficiency and air quality of a building. I've written software that pulls data from these systems and analyzes it. We've done a number of schools. An automation system at a high school we are working with now tracks almost 1500 data points. The interactions within the systems now are much more involved. It's not just scheduled start up times.
It's true though that you don't need a particularly high powered system to run the software. A library for at least one of the "standard" protocol stacks used to communicate with the devices has been ported to Raspberry Pi. However, the industry is moving toward adopting a java based system that individual controls manufacturers can customize.
These systems have gotten sophisticated enough that they are beyond what a typical high school instructor and students could put together and adequately test. For example, as buildings have become better insulated, making sure that there is an adequate number of air changes is critically important. Do you really want a high school instructor and a bunch of students in charge of making sure the automation system does what it needs to do? Even if you got some rock star teacher, what if they leave? It seems to me to be a huge liability.
You drone on about "history". Meanwhile, many of us LIVED through those years and yes indeed most of us non-kludge clone users would have viewed the branding of our chosen alternative as an INSULT.
Commie users certainly would have viewed their machine being called a "PC" as an insult. PCs were a brand associated with IBM and later Microsoft. It represented the ultimate in crapulence unworthy success.
I don't think DOS users in those days would have been happy to have their machines lumped in with Apples or Ataris either.
The generic non-brand terms were "home computer" and "microcomputer".
Some of us actually lived this shit and aren't just regurgitating bad wikipedia articles.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It sounded to me like they were using APRS for the comms, which would match up nicely to the 155mhz business frequency the school uses. The problem is that they used the single allocated channel for both voice and data traffic.
It sounds like the Amiga is part of a control system that was replaced in the 80's, I would imagine that they are replacing the control system once again, including actuators. $2mn isn't enough to replace all the HVAC stuff in 19 schools.
The purchase of school AC systems is an arena in which organised crime seems to thrive. I have seen it first hand as a specialist employed for school AC systems. Units that use water towers are particularly suspect. In warmer states any boilers in a public school are highly suspect. For example I have seen a large twin boiler unit that was operated for 40 years that really did next to nothing yet it ran continuously. It only acted to feed a warming tray in the cafeteria and cost a ton of money every year. A simple electrical warmer that cost next to nothing could have easily done the job and since electric warmers warm quickly it could be turned on just before lunch and shut down after lunch. Those boilers probably cost well over one million to install and keep running. The reason why is someone powerful owned a company that got the installation contract. This stuff is continuous. If organized crime can get into county school that often have budgets over one billion per year and simply rake off 5% it can be perpetual and so expensive to investigate and prove that those who want to can't stop it from continuing.
NOT a C64. Its an Amiga 2000.
That's just a controller. That controller needs to talk to hardware, and 20 year old hardware may be getting quite crufty and in need of replacement or upgrading just to bring it to something we can interface with.
And most of that cost is probably in the installation - you're not just replacing an Amiga, you're replacing the stuff the Amiga controls that talks to the air handling systems, all of which are probably located in weird, long dusty locations covered in 20 years of dust and dirt. At the same time, you probably have to upgrade the wiring as well, and that is probably a good chunk of the cost.
Oh yeah, it probably has to be done in the summer as well, so your installers will be sweating it out installing replacement equipment.
A few Pis, a few sensors, a few relay boards, cheap stuff. but all the installation work and replacement of wiring, etc, probably accounts for the vast majority of the money.
The alternative to using the term "PC" to describe IBM PCs and their descendants is to use some horribly convoluted terminology, along the lines of "Oh no, this isn't a Mac, this is a computer that implements standards comprising a descendant of the IBM PC architecture..
IBM PC compatible or IBM PC clone is what your looking for.
You cut $200 off your utility bill in a few weeks with a new thermostat...
My conclusion is that you could not figure out how to turn in on an went without any sort of heat or AC for several weeks.
Commodore never used the PC acronym in its marketing or branding.
Yes, they did. For their IBM PC clones, for the C128 in some markets, and for the Amiga. Your theory that "PC" referred exclusively to IBM PC compatibles is not true. It did eventually come to mean that, but in the 1980's it simply meant "personal computer".
IIRC, the first Amiga had cooperative multitasking, but the kernel was written for preemptive multitasking, and following models had it. It was a big deal at the time, about 5 years before Linux made proper multitasking available to the masses.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
PC may or may not be the PC term for this PC and its PC boards.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That reminds me of:
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/...
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
Had someone accidentally spill a glass bottle (the real ones, not the minis today) of sprite directly into the vents at the top of my C64 at a party while it was on.
It was fine, they just kept playing the game they had loaded.
of course they'll bill for the trips to the john. I'm a consultant, and I do that all the time. You think I have a billing code for "trips to john"?
Seem to recall there was (micro)Emacs included though.
Obviously, these days, we all do it the other way around and make use of the Amiga-heating-and-ac-emulator extension to Emacs.
Years before the IBM PC there was the Commodore PET Personal Computer http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... even said so on the name badge.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
eBay, there is a TON of that stuff out there... the prices are cheap as well...
If you're in a position to place critical infrastructure in the hands of ebay then please quit your job, better still quit the industry.
Commie users certainly would have viewed their machine being called a "PC" as an insult.
Well, I don't know about insulting, but at the time I would have considered it confusing. After all PCs were for boring things like spreadsheets or cooking recipe databases, my C64 is for rocking the video games man!
I never had the Amiga but this was their fault (and I share some accountability). I had, and still have, a working PET and a VIC-20 (with several extra power supply bricks) but never went to the Amiga. See, the Amiga was mostly marketed as a game system. It was compared with the Atari of the day. At this time I was now needing something bigger (I thought) and something more business specific. I had an Apple at home, there were some in the lab at school as well, but I decided to take the plunge and go with Trash 80s. Commodore went out of business not too long after and I suppose I made the right choice at the time.
However, this is not really all that surprising, I mentioned that I still have a variety of working older computers. I keep them, some of them, setup in my basement. Old hardware is just as capable as it was when you purchased it. If your compute needs have not changed then they are still as suitable for the tasks they were originally used for.
As an aside, it is a bit amusing to see the RISC chip design returning to/gaining popularity in the consumer market.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
We run and control several large machines at our plant from relay logic. Better still some of it controls emergency shutdown functionality. I see your 30 year old computer and will happily raise you our 45 year old relay based system.
That said I'm not sure any of the relays are still 45 years old. We had a massive amount of reliability problems a good 10 years ago which saw most of the relays replaced due to tin whiskers
Replace it with a Raspberry Pi 2, running Amiga emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I do IT at an electronics manufacturing plant - the HVAC uses a JACE BacNet controller that is on the network, so somehow I'm the one that has to deal with any/all HVAC messes (It does plug in the wall after all!)
$2M for 20 buildings (rounding up) is $100k - which compared to multiple quotes for retrofit I've gotten over the past two years is a fucking STEAL!
Hell it cost us that much to replace just three dual-compressor Ground Roof Top Units (don't ask, I didn't name them) on our existing system.
Also we are not government, just industrial. None of the HVAC companies I use are government either.
This isn't "pork" by any stretch, it's just how HVAC is.
You can argue it shouldn't cost that much, just like I can argue Oracle software or Sun hardware probably shouldn't cost that much, but unless you live off eBay (or use a c64 and student labor to write code) it's just simply a fact.
Yes, after you replaced the power supply.
Heh, no doubt. Pro tip: A fan pointed at the power supply made them last a lot longer. We built a wooden housing with a wire mesh grill and took a fan out of an old oscilloscope, it worked great!
You're right about "PC" as used in the past. The 80s were a time when there were a lot of choices for a home computer -- not just different brands that behaved identically (e.g. dell v. lenovo), but totally different visions about home computers: Atari, TRS-80 (I had a 16k CoCo), Commodore, Apple, IBM, TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam (my cousin had one of these), and I'm probably missing a dozen other manufacturers or more.
These were all distinctive systems and back then, "PC" really did mean an IBM, and then later "PC Clone/Compatible" came into vogue for non-IBM computers that functioned like an IBM. Nobody called a C64 a "PC Clone" exactly because people expected "PC" to mean something that worked like an IBM PC.
Today though, it seems the distinction has sort of faded away. IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, even the clone market is highly consolidated, and the hardware is basically intercompatable no matter where you get it -- you can install Windows on your Apple if you want and people have been doing hackintoshes for quite a while (running OSX on non-Apple hardware). Somewhere along the way in all of this, PC seemed to become a rather generic term -- I can't pinpoint when -- maybe around the time Apple went Intel.
It's a shame in a lot of ways that there is so little computer variety anymore -- maybe someday we'll suffer a "great computer famine" due to the intensive monocropping consumer computer gear has experienced.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
So, you're saying it's a mainframe?
I bet it was the new thermostat that told you that. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We didn't have airconditioning in my schools growing up (midwest). We seemed to have survived...
my C64 is for rocking the video games man!
Time for some Commando!
Yes. The Amiga ran on a 68000. The 68000 didn't support instruction restart. So you couldn't properly do preemptive multitasking with it. It needed the applications to cooperate with the interruptions. So an application could undermine the preemption.
I don't suppose you could provide some documentation on that?
Because there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in any of the various generations of Developer Guides or AmigaNews bulletins I have about kludging apps for co-operative multi-tasking, and I was one of the people who taught people how to use pre-emptive multi-tasking on the Amiga. I used the same design methods that had worked for me on multi-processing IBM mainframes and lived to tell the tale.
I cannot recall offhand any MC68000 instructions that in fact could be broken by interrupts the way a System/370 MVCL instruction could be (had it itself not supported interruptions). I do believe that there were spin-lock instructions in the MC68000 instruction set, though. So if you could mention a few, I'd appreciate it.
There were certainly OS resources that ran interrupt-disabled, but no more so than IBM's OS/MVS or Linux. And the Amiga supported the ability of higher-priority interrupts to kick in while lower-priority interrupt services were executing, which is something that I'm not sure the IBM hardware could handle until about the time the PCI bus took over. And certainly the IBM/Microsoft OS's weren't up to the task until quite late in the century.
The Amiga's various co-processors did perform instructions sufficiently complex that interruptability would be an issue, but they were essentially co-processors assigned and scheduled as resources, not task-switching units in their own right.
Then you must have lived on Mars or something.
As someone who attended Atari user's group meetings as a kid, I can tell you first-hand that people got pretty annoyed and quickly corrected you if you referred to our machines as PC's. PC's were expensive boring turds that none of us wanted. Personal computer was acceptable. PC referred to IBM crap or a clone later on.
i'm abusing my hp48 pretty much daily since 1997 and it hasn't shown signs of aging, let alone failure. Even the buttons are still as tactile as the day i bought it. Took me through high school, university, post-grad and beyond.
I have no other device, outside of my body (if we extend "device" to biological organs), that have endured so much and not even changed appearance. Even my swiss army knife has failed and needs replacement.
They say that after some abuse the ATTN button (if you say ON button imma bash you over the head with the 48) doesn't work right and you have to fiddle with it, but so far so good.
Woah. You saved $200 on heating costs in a few weeks? Just your savings represents about 2 months of heating costs for me, during the winter. What, exactly, was your old thermostat doing? Did you have to use cash money to light the pilot light?
In this case, it was A/C. Like I said, the house was old: it had a very old, inefficient central A/C unit at the time (which we also replaced, once we could afford to.) It wasn't a big house, but it was a drafty house, so it didn't exactly hold its temperature all that well.
So instead of having a house that basically always kept itself cool (I'm somewhat forgetful and distracted, especially first thing in the morning; my wife and I rarely thought/remembered to crank the temp when leaving for the day), the new thermostat always remembered to turn off for half the day--and the hottest half, at that. The fact that it was a stupid-hot, stupid-humid Maryland summer counted for something, too.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Ask him if he still has it. It's probably worth enough to list on eBay.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
GP is probably Al Gore incognito. Heating or cooling his mansion could easily use that much energy.
Bwahahaha! Oh, man, that's fresh.
Al Gore. Heh.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Nonsense, you could buy 20 spares of everything for cheap and have spare parts for years...
I didn't say "wait until it breaks, then go and find spares", I said you could get spares today, cheap.
So do so...
You cut $200 off your utility bill in a few weeks with a new thermostat...
My conclusion is that you could not figure out how to turn in on an went without any sort of heat or AC for several weeks.
Haha, yes! I am that stupid! No wonder I was sweating buckets and passing out all summer!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I see a lot of people seemingly missing the bigger issues.
1. Savings over time with a new HVAC system
The HVAC system in place has obviously been in use for 30+ years. In that time a lot of efficiency in these systems has occurred. In 5 years the school district will probably recouped a significant portion of that in energy savings.
2. Just replacing parts may work, but doesn't change the fact that the whole HVAC system is 30+ years old.
You can't expect to just replace one boiler out of say 2 or 3 and expect the other(s) to last another 30 years till they consider doing the whole system.
3. Control system that it will be replaced with probably not much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
Most of the cost is probably the AC and heating units and LABOR. The control part are probably the least of the costs.
FWIW. It is really bad that we have to have the Governments of the world to tell manufacturers to improve their products efficiency. Mostly I think of autos, but there probably are alot of things (Energy Star?) that have improved because of the governments rather than bringing the best product to market in the first place.
\o/ fellow HP48 user :-)
Sadly one of my HP48SX on button doesn't respond 99% of the time :-( ... Makes it a bitch to turn on or off. These days I just use an emulator for the HP48GX so I don't have to worry about changing batteries.
Amiga was essentially the first microcomputer that really caught the imagination of computer professionals who were used to working with and programming on advanced operating systems daily. Certainly Mac caught on with the design crowd too, even though under the hood it was pretty basic. Everything else in the micro world really seemed derived from the CP/M style of systems, where the "operating system" was nothing more than a glorified boot loader and monitor system.
And yet a high-school student from the 1980's was able to engineer a system with off the shelf computers and a little ingenuity. And managed to build a system that has lasted for 25 years.
Which sounds like praise. But you don't know if you're praising something that was actually a long-term financial disaster, or merely serviceable, or what.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We didn't have AC, either. But we didn't have schools designed for AC. Our classrooms had windows that could be opened.
Sorry, he is ---> that* way ...
* CSI: Miami - Horatio Caine's Sunglasses Moments / One Liners
Couldn't take the three additional characters to write "Commodore Amiga"?
Yes, I know, the Amiga is technically a "PC", but since Commodore did actually release a line of PC clones that were actually branded "Commodore PC", I consider the headline inaccurate.
FC Closer
The problem really is one of local patronage. The school district builds a huge new school, one that is actually a palace of learning. No expenses are spared.
Who gets the contract to supply the materials and build the thing? Somebody with a lot of pull at the local School Board.
Pretty sure they don't make Amigas anymore. And no, the PPC "Amiga" boards (not accelerators, but the boards with no classic hardware) don't count.
FC Closer
motion detector attached to flame thrower pointing down from ceiling tile and electrified locked box over the thermostat :P
Wasn't the full title of the original Atari 800 "Atari Home Computer System"? Just like the game system was called the "Video Computer System".
("video" being code for "video game" back then)
Daniel Klugh
Did the sprites render faster after that?
emt 377 emt 4
Whoa, talk about a trip down memory lane. I haven't seen that Deluxe Paint picture of King Tut in ages. Great find !
To be more correct, the 68000 certainly could support multitasking, both cooperative and preemptive -- it just could not fully support instruction restart after certain types of exceptions ( and this could not support virtual memory ala UNIX).
An early Sun (or Apollo?) workstation worked around this by running two 68000 CPUs with the same stream at all times, one slightly ahead of the other, to allow one to have state the main one required on order to properly recover. I dont' t have the reference handy but google it if you're curious.
Been there, can't fit the T-shirt anymore, but this comment is pretty close to the word on the street Circa '85.
Not so sure about the commies though. I did meet and become friends with a fellow who was Russian, who was was on a team reverse engineering the ZX Spectrum in the 80's though.
Personally I was"rocking" a PDP-11 and DSM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS)
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
In my opinion, what's being missed is the opportunity to have a "teachable moment."
30 years ago, some kid wrote this. I'll bet you could find a few kids at each school who would be interested in this from the software side. So figure out and install the hardware, sure, but how about having a contest to come up with the software? Let any school that is interested come up with software to handle it. Let professionals QA the software to make sure it works. Anything that doesn't work loses. If they all lose, send it all back with a list of found bugs and let everybody try again. Establish appropriate criteria in the event that there's more than one that does the job correctly.
The school might save a little money, but they've actually educated some kids in the process. Sounds win-win to me,
As I remember it, it was an Apollo workstation that used that method.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
They've probably already burned at least one million $ in efficiency losses over the past ten years just by staying with the current system. Regardless however, I have a lot of respect for his programmer and the maintenance staff that's helped keep it running as long as it has.
History proves you wrong.
Back then people would argue about whether PC meant IBM derivative or personal computer, in general. And they still do today.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Bouncing a ball while formatting a disk? Hell, we could do that on a Atari 800 back in 1979! And, from what I know about the Commodore 64, you can do it there too. And the TI-99/4A could probably do it too; what with it having a graphic co-processor that could efectively (albeit slowly) act as a CPU.
Daniel Klugh
Not really. If I had to guess, the C64 turns things off and on. A modern system optimizes energy performance, is variable volume or variable temperature, monitors CO2 levels to increase outside air when needed, etc. While BMS controls are overpriced relative to comparable consumer devices, $2MM would be around $500/point for a typical school.
Keep in mind the numbers likely include new sensors, actuators, and all that fun stuff...
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Uhm, or if the administration has a half a brain between all of them, they order a set (or two, or three) of replacement parts BEFORE they fail.
I have 3 replacement Palm Tungsten Cs sitting, waiting for my primary to die. I'm not stupid enough to wait for something I rely on so heavily, that's THAT old, without having backups sitting around.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
This is why it's so critical to include scheduled malfunctions in your control logic. That way you'll get called in every 6-9 months to "fix" the system, which you'll be able to do very quickly since it is just a matter of resetting the timer for next time. You'll make a few hundred dollars each time, and everybody will recall you fondly as the indispensable genius who is the only person who knows just how to keep the system running. Just be sure to randomize the timeouts a bit so that nobody catches on ;^)
(disclaimer: I'm joking; I don't really advocate doing this)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Does it have any security software so the Chinese can't control things?
It replaced a computer that was "about the size of a refrigerator.
I'm sure the Amiga isn't as efficient as newer tech. It probably can't control zones as well or as accurately as a current commercial system either. But It's probably a far sight more efficient for it's own power consumption than the "refrigerator" sized system it replaced. I'm sure it was a hell of a lot cheaper to purchase at the time it went online, and to maintain over the last 25 years.
If it performed it's function at least as well as the system it replaced, then no, it probably wasn't a financial disaster.
Beautiful, isn't it? Without even looking at this I know that my company can undercut the bid by at least 65% and still come out OK.
It's good that you're confident in your company's abilities; but in order to win the contract, you'd have to gain the confidence of the decision-makers in the school district as well. As any company involved in outsourcing over the last decade can tell you, a cheaper up-front quote is no bargain if the delivered product is screwed up.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I won't argue with anything you are saying, I am talking about realities and the realities are that costs in the USA are completely out of bounds of reason and I have proven it already enough times with my clients that I can make bold statements like that and again, still come out on top.
You can't handle the truth.
Y'know, sane people make sure they have rare spare parts on hand before the system breaks. Then you repair with the on-hand parts while ordering a new set of spares.
Which is not meant to imply that that's what's being done in this case. No clue about that. But the right thing to do is have the spares on hand, unless they're the kind of spares that you can find in any hardware store in town....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So less than 2 dozen schools need to spend upwards of $2 million dollars to... control the HVAC?
Really?
That is the bigger issue, IMHO...
I didn't care to read the article... but they are probably replacing the A/Cs with new units etc...
Why do we need toilets and electricity? People managed thousands of years without them.
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You're absolutely full of fail today.
Things have a shelf life, old electronics especially so. I would put no more faith in a 20 year old replacement part as the part that just died in service. It's the whole reason we have the concepts of "hot-spares"
Meh. We don't even call them PCs anymore. They're desktops or laptops, Mac or Windows.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
An old commodore running an HVAC, that's cute. Doesn't hold a candle to the PDP's still running nuclear plants. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/
To call an Amiga by the TRADEMARKED name "PC" is slander.
Until circa 2000, PCs were braindead compared to even a basic 68000-based Amiga, and not even close to the 68030/68040 versions.
The OS has real-time hooks for interrupt and scheduler management, which are still not common features, plus both lightweight and full processes.
The Amiga was (and is) NOT a PC!
Enjoy.
http://www.bytecellar.com/wp-c...
And did you live where people drink soda, coke, or pop?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When I was in school, our A/C was regulated by an electric tea kettle, that we placed underneath the thermostat in order to trick it into keeping the room at a temperature below "Shake 'n Bake"
A steel rod rolling mill I worked at in the early 1990s had Amigas displaying details of what was going on at each point in the line. The graphics was line drawings that looked very much like "Hitchhikers Guide" style. They were along the line and in the finishing area so a very hot and dusty environment with sealed plastic covers over industrial keyboards and sealed monitors.
That was the monitoring system, the control system was something else and a bit older.
Atari made a point of doing "everything the Amiga could do". It was mainly because Jack Tramiel of Atari held a grudge against his former company (Commodore).
But the Atari computers didn't have the graphics co-processors or heavyweight DMA capabilities that the Amiga did. So they did what the Amiga did, but they had to make the CPU do all the work instead of being able to dump bit-blits and the like off onto the secondary processors.
The C64 and TI computers had hardware sprites, but not full bit-blit, and I don't think that either of them had the ability to do the framebuffer-hopping that allowed you to smoothly pull one display down over another while animation was in full swing.
We really didn't see that outside the Amiga until PCI bus graphics cards started loading up on processors. And even then, I saw pictures "tear" when they scrolled for years.
This is a serious deployment controlling a whole lot of non-trivial hardware. More importantly it's pivotal to the operation of the school itself.
The PI is the prototype. Of course you don't rapid prototype until you figure out what you need.
OSEK is a standards body that has produced specifications for an embedded operating system, a communications stack, and a network management protocol for automotive embedded systems. Nothing about this should cost $2M. You could easily build an OSEK compliant car with an open source software (GPL3) They're finally getting open source PLCs
There is no reason HVAC should cost what it does. The only reason it does cost that much is because each company is closed source and has separate networking protocols.
In addition to being cheaper in 40 years when they decide to replace it no one will wonder where the guy was that programmed it or if the company that built it is still in business. They'll have the full drawings and source to the project.
....to just run the software on an Amiga emulator and make some sort of adapter for whatever hardware ports they are using. It sure would cost less than $2 million.
That's not strictly true. Just multitasking could run from a regular timer IRQ which surely did save all the needed CPU state to context switch and restart from where you left off. (Otherwise, *single* tasking wouldn't work...)
What you *couldn't* do was virtual memory properly, because lacking any built-in support for an MMU, even if you added external independent MMU hardware when it signalled a bus fault in the middle of a complex instruction, the instruction could be neither rewound nor restarted from the middle.
The kicker there is things like the multi-register save/load (MOVEM) instructions - for things like IRQ you can just wait till they're over before taking the interrupt, but for bus error used for VM faults you really have to stop immediately, and only the 68010 pushed enough info onto the stack to allow RTE at the end of the fault handler to continue from the middle of an instruction.
If it ain't broke... Let's spend millions replacing this one thing that works perfectly well and has worked without flaw or repair for almost 30 years!
Our HVAC ducts were lined with safe, fireproof asbestos.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Commodore made the Colt (I think) PC (as in "IBM Compatible PC") during the same era as the Amiga 2000, so it's valid to question what's being talked about here, IMO.
Actually the other main processor, the Fat Agnus, ran on alternate clock cycles from the 68k. That's why it had a 28 Mhz clock crystal for a 7 Mhz processor from my understanding.
I do not know which timing the gate array (Gary), video chip (Denise), or sound (Paula) were on however.
Yes. These things bubbled up slowly from my subconscious since earlier today. Years of crypto has ruined my CPU architecture skills.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Do you think he also did all the HVAC control work? crawling through the 19 schools ceilings, installing sensors, calibrating equipment?
Or do you think they asked the only kid who knew anything about these new fangled computers to read the manual and "programme" the system.
There are a million assumptions that people are making in the comments. I can control my buildings HVAC and security from my desk. Does that mean it was free to get it to that point? Everyone is focusing on the kid who works with the system. BFD, any facilities maintenance worker can programme an BACnet type system to the degree they wish to learn about it!
-
I didn't view my A500 being called a PC an insult, why would I? It was a personal computer far ahead of the Apple PCs (Macs didn't exist yet), IBM personal computers and a bit more advanced than Atari personal computers.
I didn't view my A2000 being called a PC an insult, nor my A4000, why would I? It was a personal computer that ran Amiga software, Mac software and MS-DOS software all on the same hardware, and at speeds faster than actual Macs ironically.
I don't view my current "Amiga" installation being called a PC an insult, I think it's pretty cool to still be using software productively in my daily life under emulation. I always wanted a portable Amiga, and for the past decade I've had and used one.
It was pretty hard to insult such a device, that performed in every aspect better than the more expensive alternatives. The only thing it lacked was effective marketing in the States, but it was the predominant player overseas.
I never heard anyone use your term "home computer" and it wasn't mentioned in computer classes that came into being later that I saw. Personal computers, microcomputers and mainframes were, dumb terminals too of course.
I'll contract to do it for them tomorrow for $750,000. Such deal.
They can fly me out and I'll spend a week examining all the specs I need to examine in person. Delivery: 6 months.
I mean, Holy Crap, people. If an Amiga can do it, $2 million is clearly ridiculous.
Oops... I mean... "Eh, MAYBE I could come down that far."
The article you linked to says " "to beg the question" sometimes also means "to raise the question" ". So the difference is still not clear to me
Simple rule of thumb: If you see the phrase in writing, it is almost always used incorrectly, to mean raise the question. If someone is refering to circular reasoning, they will usually just say "circular reasoning" or "assuming the conclusion".
In your own writing, you should just avoid the phrase entirely. You will look either ignorant or pretentious. There are better phrases to use for any meaning of "begs the question".
I'm thinking its time for a new robotics project at school to build an Arduino controller for it. Cost maybe $100, a world of education experience, and most likely uses less power than the Commodore so the school will save money. Spend the $2 million on the students for lab resources and materials.
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Yeah, that'd go over well with me as a kid. Or my parents.
Thank god my wife always understood my posession to store old power supplies into our garage.
What if something goes horribly wrong with the system and causes damage to the building? May not be Jeff's fault, but Jeff may be involved in the legal fallout.
Also, what happens if Jeff gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Who will maintain it then?
I don't read AC A human right
Students do complicated things all the time. Doesn't meant that the individual bits can't be simple.
I don't read AC A human right
I disagree with your interpretation of the advert. It's not that Apple were saying they don't make a PC, it's that there are PCs and there are Macs.
A bit like saying do you want a phone or an iPhone, do you want a fizzy drink or a Coke.
It's demonstrating their brand as above the average.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
That all depends on how fancy you want to be. When I say 'complicated', I should really have specified 'compared to your average house'. My parent's house has a single thermostat device to control the heating and AC. Mine has two - but doesn't have AC. It's two heating zones.
I figure the 'update' includes replacing the sensors with more capable ones - going from ones that report only that they're requesting heating or cooling, to ones that actually report the temperature, along with other changes.
I don't read AC A human right
You drone on about "history". Meanwhile, many of us LIVED through those years and yes indeed most of us non-kludge clone users would have viewed the branding of our chosen alternative as an INSULT.
Commie users certainly would have viewed their machine being called a "PC" as an insult. PCs were a brand associated with IBM and later Microsoft. It represented the ultimate in crapulence unworthy success.
I don't think DOS users in those days would have been happy to have their machines lumped in with Apples or Ataris either.
The generic non-brand terms were "home computer" and "microcomputer".
Some of us actually lived this shit and aren't just regurgitating bad wikipedia articles.
Yes, I also lived the era. Here's the deal, PC has always meant Personal Computer. Very few computers actually used 'PC' in their name, because that is generally all those companies produced, computers for personal use. When IBM came along with their IBM PC, it was to disguise that they weren't referring to one of their servers, or big business machines they sold. IBM PC meant it was a computer for personal use.
And that being said, everyone I knew in Seattle and online called IBM PC "compatables". That was because hardly anyone actually own an IBM, but they owned an IBM "Compatible" computer. We also referred to these computers as "Dos" machines, since that was the OS we used to play games on it.
So while people do mistakenly think PC means x86 instruction set compatible computer, the truth of the matter is, that was wrong. We knew it at the time, we didn't care. But now later in life, it's doing an injustice to the old machines because people think the PC started with MS in the 1990's.
my 2 cents.
Be seeing you...
Too much talking. Not enough YYYYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! http://cow.org/csi/
I'm betting it includes the entire HVAC system, not just the computers controlling it. 20 years is ancient for heating/AC, it's probably terribly inefficient.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Raspberry PI, emulator software for the Amiga. One student to write thelayer between the software and the hardware.
You're wrong. It's perfectly fine to use "PC" to describe "Commodore Amiga". I've lived through the personal computer revolution and PC doesn't exclusively refer to "IBM PC". I have an Amiga and it's a PC. However it is not "IBM PC". Those machines were for spreadsheet suckers.
Devices other than "IBM PCs" were marketed as PCs. For example Commodore 64c has a sticker on top of it and bottom which says that it's a "Personal Computer" aka. PC. And ads frequently referred it being a personal computer for the whole family. Furthermore HP sold a highly programmable calculator that was marketed as a PC before the PC revolution even started.
Term "PC" was in use in e.g. marketing of various microcomputers well before IBM PC Model 5051 was introduced. I believe that some of the first "modern desktop computers" to be described as "PC" are from early 1970's. Any device which, to quote Wikipedia, "is a general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities and original sale price make it useful for individuals, and is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator" can be and should be described as a "PC".
Here in Europe people often did refer various devices as PCs even if they were not from IBM. People also used to call their systems "microcomputers", "home computers" or by the name of the machine e.g. "Commodore" or "Atari" or "IBM Compatible" (because the software sold had stickers like "for IBM PC and 100% compatibles").
Around 1999 this practice died since there were no other PCs than IBM PC clones at the PC market marketed for the general public. IBM PC, like Rollerblades (with roller skates), have become so synonymous with PC, that when people talk about PCs they tend to refer to IBM PC (clones) running Microsoft Windows. Furthermore Apple's marketing has taken advantage of the whole "Generic Trademark" thing and established themselves as "Mac" even though they're exactly same hardware.
I need more beer. I cannot read these threads otherwise.
Its what used to be known as "The IBM way"....
Admittedly not in the sense of randomised failure events, but certainly in the upgrade path. In the old days of punch card machinery, IBM would lease kit at various price/performance levels. An entry level system would be pretty slow. Eventually the need for faster throughput would become evident, and the friendly suit would advise a "field upgrade" ro the next performance level.
Given the go-ahead the IBM engineer would arrive, shoo everyone out of the machinery room, remove the covers of the tabulator, sorter, whatever and move the drive belt from the small diameter pulley to the next one up. He might also dust around with a lint brush, oil a few bearings. He'd then replace the covers, settle down and update his paperwork/read his newspaper until the time allocated for the upgrade had passed. Tah-Dahhhh!!!!
Of course, that might be all urban myth. :-)
Amiga hardware is anything but cheap these days, at least the higher end 2000/3000/4000 models. Most of them also suffer from a few known problems (leaking clock batteries, blown capacitors). I still have a couple of amigas in the garage, and they would fetch more on the used market than any of the much newer hardware i have.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The only difference here is that the critical infrastructure is custom designed...
There are MANY cases where a piece of ageing critical infrastructure is actually a black box purchased from a vendor who are long since out of business, which is actually a much worse situation than these guys are in.
The Amiga may be a proprietary system, but it's also one that is well understood and has been well documented over the years. Several people who worked on development of the Amiga hardware are still active online (e.g. Dave Haynie). The custom control system sitting on top of it belongs entirely to these guys, they have the source code and still have access to the original developer.
Similarly, Amiga hardware is common enough that spares are easily available, and there are also a number of places which specialise in repairing Amiga hardware to extend its lifespan.
They could get the original developer to port the system to a new platform (although any platform current today will be just as obsolete as the amiga in 20 years and might not be as prevalent).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Newbie. I worked for the first Commodore PET reseller east of the Rockies. Sold (and built, for some of them), IMSAI, North Star, Cromemco, Apple, PET, Osbourne, Xerox, IBM PC, Compaq and others.
Yes, "PC" was used for things other than the IBM PC.
Yes, your shit memory is BS.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
just run an emulator on a pi.
if it's serial or parallel it speaks out through, trivial to tweak it to work.
and ebay has plenty of working amigas for many years..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Using an aggressive setback on a programmable thermosat can save substantially a bit. A $200 programmable thermostat is a more costly than usual; thats typically the price point for a learning thermostat (which attempt to be programmable thermostats for lazy people, but aren't as good).
For example I set back from 68 to 50 during the night when I sleep and during the day when I am working. For "average" outdoor temperature of lets say 30F, I slashed heating bill by 48% durring that setback. Since I am working and sleeping 75% of the day. Total savings are 36%. Utilities are cheap here, I pay ~$700 to heat and cool my place. So I don't save much (though, incidentally, enough to pay off a very cheap programmable thermostat in less than a heating season) Some people are spending $3000-$4000 to heat and cool moderately sized houses. Few weeks = 3 to 5 * 3000/52 = $173 to $288 in heating costs. Slashing that by 30% gives you at least $18-24/week savings.
And this guy could easily have an extra ordinary situation such that he is measuring payback in weeks instead of months. e.g., in a heating climate he could have an St. Paul 1890 5900 sq ft house with an oil boiler from the same era, or in cooling climate Yuma AZ, a 1994 AC with uninstalled duct work running through the 160F attic. Yeah, in both situations they could substantially and cost effectively reduce operational costs using other methods, but this is the type of crap that permeates american construction.
I was puzzled by TechyImmigrant's comment and found the same thing. The 68000 saved enough state to handle interrupts which is needed for preemptive multitasking but not bus fault exceptions which are needed to support virtual memory like with a 68451 MMU.
I am not aware of any CPUs which support interrupts that cannot support preemptive multitasking.
I grew up in Las Vegas.
That would be a non starter.
Plus this is in the notoriously humid Pacific North West. Doesn't get very hot, relative to Vegas but it does get a littttllle damp.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If a system programmed by a student in the 80's has worked adequately for this long, it's too bad the Grand Rapids Public School System didn't learn anything from this. There is no doubt that instead of putting 1.5 -2 million dollars of taxpayer funds into a replacement, they could instead replace this system with some additional student programming effort and some Raspberry PI units, at a minuscule fraction of that kind of expense. I'm glad I am no longer a taxpayer in the Grand Rapids area, this kind of spending of taxpayers' funding used to make me insane.
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
There was a wholeline of Commodore PCs. The computing school I learnt at was a pure-Commodore shop, and it had some PCs that we students didn't ever care about.
I think the bigger point that is missed is THIS is how to do computer science in schools. We see articles all the time on here about how to teach a 3 year old how to code some shitty popup in javascript. This is the way computers were learned in the 80s, it's how I learned, you sit down and you figure something out related to a project you're interested in. You can sit a hundred students in a classroom and just go through a workbook it isn't fun, it isn't engaging, and for most of them it won't be remembered or used, and for the 3 kids in the class that want to actually learn how to use a computer/program a workbook is the last thing to give them they'll either have it completed before the teacher even gets to the section and worse will probably be scolded for working ahead for not following along. Set them up with a raspberrypi and SD card (unimaged) a box full of simple electronic sensors and give them time to figure things out. I think the message here is that I can't imagine a school district allowing a student to setup the HVAC controls for their buildings in this day and age, and I don't think it is entirely that everything is already pre-packaged, I think it's the mindset of adults that allowing a kid to touch something might break it and they don't understand how to fix it so they don't want the risk. Obviously sourcing a student to do this you would have to be careful, but even just allowing students to be part of the actual project would be useful, maybe you get the tech students that will go in to HVAC in with the project designers during the meetings and then you put them out there after school with the people doing the install so they can get some first hand knowledge. Instead the students will sit in their insulated bubble of a classroom learning about these things in an abstract way while the same skills and knowledge could be taught in an engaging way if they would literally just go to the basement and help set it up.
Even unused, electronic components fail with age. Capacitors leak. Wires corrode. Plastics become brittle. Ceramics crack. Don't expect the same lifespan from your cold spares as you have gotten from your live device.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Around here, it gets so humid in the summer that we had to swim to get to school.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
It raises the question. Begging the question means something completely different.
No. Begging the question DOES mean raising the question.
Here's the thing: words and phrases can mean different things depending on the context. "Begs the question", when followed by a question means raises the question. "Begs the question" when talking about an argument means the obscure and antiquated English mis-translation of the older Latin mis-translation of the Greek phrase.
I suggest that you give it a rest. You're fighting the same losing battle that was fought over "gay" and "hacker". You won't change the public's mind, so the best outcome you'll ever get is looking like a pompous blow-hard. So, if that's what you're after, then have at it. Otherwise, learn to shut your trap and roll with it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Usually, the older the hardware, the better it was built. I can still turn on my old computers from the 1980's and they all boot under one second. Do I trust my old hard drives from 2000~2005? Not so much.
I don't trust anything made past ~1995. That's around the time companies realized that they didn't have to make hardware that could last for decades because upgrades would make their new shiny obsolete long before that.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
It took a lot longer than a few weeks to break even for me, but it was less than a year. Allowing different thermostat settings at different times and on different days made the house quite a lot more efficient.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh you can't have opening windows! The stupid fuckwit kids would fall out! We must protect the stupid so they can reproduce and make even more stupid people! Have we forgotten how evolution works?
Well, if that amiga is still running for over 30 years, it means it's one hell of a computer (have an amiga 500 myself in my garage somewhere)..
And if it still works then why replace it..
Also the blah blah million dollar is for replacing the whole system (AC/heating systems included) and not only the computers, otherwise there is something very VERY wrong, as replacing the computer itself with some software shouldn't be more than a couple of grand (mainly due to rewriting the software)..
"Warm Safe and Dry"?!? Are these kids or kittens? For goodness sake....
LOL +1 Would YEAH! again
My first reaction was also to use some Rpi's at each location which could add up to under $200 per building I then considered the cost to forklift and upgrade the HVAC at each facility.
Having been on both sides of this equation, I've come to the conclusion in my old age that rolling your own solution is rarely ever the right solution. Sure it might save you some money up front, but by the time you document things properly (you are getting full design, code and hardware documentation right?) you have probably spent as much, and you're still pretty much dependent on that one person not getting bored, or hit by a bus, or otherwise keel over.
As much as I love to build things and hack on them, the reality is that for situations like this, the right solution is to go with a control system that will be supported by a manufacturer that will likely be around for a while. Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, etc... When shit goes down, you have somewhere to call.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Who sits there and types 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 every hundred and eight minutes
-ARF!
A high-school student was able to "engineer" a system that requires all of the walkie-talkies to be turned off for 15 minutes to operate. That is to say, not engineering at all because of the failure to start with defining requirements such as what other systems will be running simultaneously.
"I just doubt that it needs to cost $2 million dollars..."
Why do you doubt this? What is the largest HVAC control you have ever installed? What research have you done on the cost of HVAC control for comparable sized installations?
Do your doubts have any foundation?
The article explicitly states that it is becoming too hard to source replacements for failing parts, so in fact it *is* breaking.
Take your incompetence and stuff it.
Even a 6502 can make a pre-emptive operating system (though you hit all kinds of limits that are unpleasant).
The problem with instruction restart (or continuation depending on the cpu) _only_ relates to bus control and as such to memory management (which is typically what causes the bus error).
The 68000 design is lacking the necessary parts for accessing an address and having the OS recover and handle it when it is pointing to void and nothing or just a part of the address map where nothing lives.
The 68010 added the necessary states and instruction to work together with an external MMU to do this.
The other interesting solution was to run _2_ 68000 cpus in lockstep where the hw was designed to detect this and switch to the other cpu to run the offending instruction (there would obviously have to be some cleanup and mapping change before it could do so). Can't remember the name of the system that did it, but it was a Unix-like IIRC. Someone will now find a link to it in 5... 4... 3...
What research have you done on the cost of HVAC control for comparable sized installations?
Do your doubts have any foundation?
Yes... a 30 year old desktop computer is running the system today, its replacement shouldn't cost 200 times as much...
How much of the total power consumption is down to the control unit?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It was in use before there was an IBM PC, along with "personal computer" and "microcomputer." History proves you wrong.
Tricky.
"Personal Computer" definitely precedes the IBM PC - the British magazine "Personal Computer World" started in 1978. It also used the abbreviation PCW. I'm sure I had a book called "The Personal Computer Book" too but it annoyingly disappeared.
Looking at a 1980 issue of "Personal Computer World" right now. The ad for the Sinclair ZX80 describes it as a "Personal Computer". However, skimming through the pages, the dominant term is "microcomputer" or "micro" and I certainly don't see any uses of the abbreviation "PC" jumping out at me from the pages (and I don't recall using it at the time) apart from the aforementioned PCW abbreviation of the magazine's title.
Its pretty inconceivable that, since "personal computer" was in use, nobody ever abbreviated it, and I think someone's already posted an example of a computer with PC in the name. I think, though, its quite possible that the IBM PC popularised the use of PC as a stand-alone abbreviation.
(Pity, because I don't like to give any credit to the mediocre pseudo-16-bit clunker of a CP/M box that stifled innovation for decades)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
For crying out loud. Get rid of those crummy Amigas & put in proper C64's.
Big fucking deal. I take care of a number of large critical needs facilities who's phone systems have been around since the early 1990's (and a handful of older ones too). The shit works - why replace it?
As usual, your shitty posting history is confirmed by yet another piece of shit post. The 68010 had nothing to do with "instruction restart". Jesus Christ.
Yes it did. It had a prefetch buffer added and retained enough state to undo an instruction when it hit a memory fault half way through executing the instruction. I have designed computers using the 68010 that took advantage of that.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Yeah, that'd go over well with me as a kid. Or my parents.
So yeah - that's how it works and how it has worked for a long time. And if they replace them, it will be an "internet of things' solution, which the high school hackers will screw with anyhow.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not just a question of context. It stems from a misunderstanding of the use of "beg" to mean "assume" instead of "ask for."
True. The mistake of using begging to mean assuming has been kicking around since the 16th century when "petitio principi" was mis-translated. Like you say, too late to do anything about it now.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's because the power supply was dipped in epoxy resin - which is actually the major cause of C=64 power supply failures. The power supplies were very prone to overheating due to the epoxy encasement and were pretty much unserviceable due to the difficulty of getting to the components.
Yours didn't fail due to spillage of sprite because the power supply was in effect waterproof.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Son, I was there. Owned 3 Amigas.
Amigas were NOT PCs - and saying so in the wrong circles would get you shot.
"PC" meant it ran MS-DOS.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Amen brother.
My 3 Amigas were NOT "PC"s. 2 of them were "PC compatible", thanks to Bridgeboards.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The 1541, on the other hand, would misalign if you looked at it funny.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
-MB- is that you?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
No, it was fully preemptive right from the start. It was a major selling point.
It was the Mac that did cooperative.
Mind you, preemptive on a 68000 wasn't flawless. Saw a lot of GURU in the day.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
It has nothing to do with "better built". Fundamental construction of electronic components haven't changed much over the years. Tin and silver components still grow whiskers. Exposed metal still corrodes. Electro-chemical components dry out and fail.
Very few if any decent electronics fail due to shoddy design or engineered to fail reasons. Yes cheap shit Chinese crap with gobs of solder everywhere fail, but they are new releases and haven't displaced quality equipment in the slightest. The quality is still very much available if you care to look.
Electronics have a MTTF whether they are hot or cold throughout their life. Many of the failure modes don't care in which state the equipment was kept. I hope you learn this the easy way rather than someone teaching you the hard way.
The 68000 design is lacking the necessary parts for accessing an address and having the OS recover and handle it when it is pointing to void and nothing or just a part of the address map where nothing lives.
The 68010 added the necessary states and instruction to work together with an external MMU to do this. The other interesting solution was to run _2_ 68000 cpus in lockstep where the hw was designed to detect this and switch to the other cpu to run the offending instruction (there would obviously have to be some cleanup and mapping change before it could do so). Can't remember the name of the system that did it, but it was a Unix-like IIRC. Someone will now find a link to it in 5... 4... 3...
Early Apollo workstations.
Several things have changed over the years with electronics.
1: everything has got much smaller, as a general rule the smaller something is the harder it is to repair and the more vulnerable it is to things like tin whiskers,
2: there are a much greater number of specialist short lifecycle parts used nowadays.
3: hardware vendors have stopped releasing schematics for their products and the complexity of the boards has reached a level where noone is going to reverse engineer said schematics.
4: in the early 2000s the EU introduced RoHS and effectively banned the use of lead in new electronics (with a handful of exceptions). Even if you don't live in Europe you were affected by this as manufacturers decided it was more economical to have one RoHS compliant product for sale worldwide than have seperate EU and non-EU versions. Lead-free solders and component finishes are far more prone to whiskers and cracking than lead based ones.
The overall result of this is that newer hardware is often much harder to keep going than older hardware.
Having said that you do want to be careful and keep an eye out for problems. Afaict the biggest cause of "damaged beyond economic repair" in 80s hardware is when a memory backup battery leaks over the main PCB and this goes unnoticed causing severe corrosion.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So, back in the early 90s when we Amiga fans were thinking that the Amiga was the machine of the future, this wasn't really what we would have expected - that one of the last serious uses of one would be controlling an AC system... Well, at least while it controls their AC, they'd be able to still properly multitask and play MOD music and have several layers of side-scrolling beauty, haha. Times have changed.
1. And that helps your 20 year old PC because? The size was the size back then. Also see point 2.
2. False. There are plenty of specialist parts used nowadays that are specifically engineered to last. Your AC unit is not likely to be controlled by some built to the cheapest price HP piece of shit, but rather industrial parts which amongst other things don't go for latest and greatest specialist fads, aren't built to the lowest possible price, and to tie in with point number 1 frequently don't even feature miniaturised components, quite the opposite really as size and frailty are a well known correlation. e.g. I have a new off the shelf Modicon PLC CPU card sitting right next to me now, not a single surface mount component inside. Actually they use the same standard pitch connectors now as they did 20 years ago. Not everything is being crammed into your mobile phone.
3. Why are you repairing old broken electronics rather than following clear end of life and upgrade path recommendations? Please go back to the top of the thread. Reviving and keeping alive old electronics = really REALLY bad practice.
4. I agree with this in principle, but RoHS is an engineering problem, nothing more. Of note is that you don't see tin on connectors anymore. In fact you don't see a lot of poor reliability practices like tin plated circuit boards etc in general as the problems are known and engineered around. For example people often cite whiskering as a problem because lead was initially added to the tin to stop the problem, however they assume that the world has stood still in the meantime. There are many other alloys of solder now many of them immune to the problems that RoHS was initially blamed for. Heck for the most part tin whiskers can be stopped in their tracks by conformally coating a circuit board after production and placing dummy connectors on terminals which aren't in use or better still use individually shrouded female connectors on the board, a practice that I see used universally in industrial electronics these days but simply didn't exist back in the day. Oh by the way mixing of different soldering alloys is bad and is another reason why schematics aren't published and equipment is sent back to the manufacturer for repair.
But some problems were real and were blameable on RoHS .... initially. For the most part when the switch was made to lead free there was little engineering knowledge of the impact on production. Lots of solder joints were cracked not because there was no lead in the solder but because the new composition wasn't engineered for, specifically higher melting temperatures, slower cooling times when baking, and thermal stress and expansion. Many of these problems have been solved on a part level by manufacturers.
Anyway in summary the only reason people perceive electronics as getting less reliable is because of the new existence of really cheap and nasty electronics. Pay the correct price and you get the same reliability you always had, and understand that EOL means EOL for a reason, and not because vendors are simply trying to screw you by selling you cheap crap.
try the Amiga versions - they're even better! and yes, when I read the headline, I as well as most of the known universe presumed this was an old Commodore PC clone and not an Amiga.
That is not what the money is for. You seem to be confusing your opinion with the facts of the matter, which would explain why you just made an obvious statement no-one disagrees with, which have nothing to do with the story in question. You might as well have said "but bananas are yellow!" - it makes just as much sense. It's sad because you are clearly intelligent.
Offer them a "deal" - one for $500k, both for $750k
the fire alarms at schools already spray dye on those who trip them. probably a more realistic system, make easy to find perp, to make example to deter others
I was puzzled by TechyImmigrant's comment and found the same thing. The 68000 saved enough state to handle interrupts which is needed for preemptive multitasking but not bus fault exceptions which are needed to support virtual memory like with a 68451 MMU.
I am not aware of any CPUs which support interrupts that cannot support preemptive multitasking.
I too was puzzled by how I muddled up preemption with instruction restart for paging or virtual memory. I wasn't even drunk.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Well, you do have to find someone to do that work, and pay them, and also pay them to warranty their work when it inevitably breaks. Nothing costs just parts, you have to include labor and the example you just gave is all custom (which is exactly what they've got now, just with modern hardware). $2M may be too much but why don't you go submit your bid for $5k and let me know how that works out for you.
Upstream both ways!
i still have my old Atari 800 XL and Commodore 64. Those are the first PCs i'd ever programmed/designed a video game on (of my own creation).
Read this:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_list
The Atari could certainly do that split-screen stuff via the "Display List". The Amiga was partially based off of the Atari. Some of the same engineers worked on the Amiga. It even has a more advanced version of the Atari's Display List functionality.
And screen tearing stopped being a problem with the Atari. But usually only games try to v-synch with the screen. Those, and some text file viewers which support smooth scrolling. Of course you won't see anything like that in a window system; only full-screen programs. And remember that if you try out one of these old machines in an emulator, that your monitor's refresh rate must match, or be a multiple of, the emulated computer's refresh rate to see smooth scrolling.
(make sure to activate the emulator's "vsync" feature as well)
Daniel Klugh
Sure but that comment... why post it anonymously? Afraid of reprisals?
"1. And that helps your 20 year old PC because? The size was the size back then. Also see point 2."
Look fuckwit, you're simply wrong. Older computers (and everything else) are far more reliable, for reasons that the other guy already explained, and which everyone with eyes already knows from years of long experience. Now fuck off.