Interesting that in the space of a few years, computing performance went from 5 operations per second for the German device... to about 2 million binary operations per second for the Colossus...
And then the world went back to a sleepy couple of hundred operations per second after the end of the war when all the Colossi were safely melted down for scrap metal and the designs were carefully locked away in nice wood filing cabinets which were then carefully set on fire.
Probably safe to say that the Colossus may not be the first computer (were mechanical looms a kind of programmable computer to put patterns into fabrics?)... but it certainly was the first supercomputer.
IIRC, he made his first fortune by "accidental" tax fraud (driving a vanload of LPs over to France, claiming the 15% VAT refund, then returning to the UK with vanload of unsold LPs... rinse and repeat)... But it gave him enough money to launch his Virgin music stores and with his profits, he paid it back (with interest).
I cannot see where Mo's is and... I thought the Quik-e-mart was supposed to be near the drive-in theatre... He is supposed to be able to watch movies from his rooftop garden. Haven't found the retirement home yet... but isn't it supposed to be next to the Fireworks and pet store?
IBM has always looked at the long view - the short term stuff never really mattered to IBM.
OS/2's Death was a simple case of smothering the baby because their hands were tied... In order to be competitive in the consumer PC sales circus, IBM PC-Co signed a deal with MSFT to license the OEM Windows 95... Without that deal, IBM would have to bundle the full retail edition of Windows 95 and it would make their PCs uncompetitive. Unfortunately, the contract had a clause which was the knife which killed OS/2 - IBM could not sell/bundle OS/2 nor could they develop it.
IBM is basically focusing on what the industry would look like in 10 years time. In the long term, the software is essentially free, consumer hardware is sold at cost (it practically is nowadays) and all the money to be made is in consulting and customizing the software.
The major benefit of something like Linux is a single architecture which works on a wide range of hardware... from simple embedded low-power systems to high performance clusters. It makes it attractive as the skills are the same on all of them - simply the hardware may be tuned easily for the application.
When IBM looks at Linux, they see it as a platform which they can launch themselves from. This was how they treated OS/2 - as a vehicle to sell their consultancy. The retail sales of OS/2 never justified it's development costs. However, the retail "public" presence of OS/2 was important: It's very difficult to sell services on top of a system which the customer has not heard of before. In many ways, for IBM, Linux is better than OS/2... They do not need to spend so much effort to market it. It already has a penetration into the minds of the public and generally the public perception is "It's free; it's fast; it's secure... sometimes difficult to understand" but the last bit is not a bad hurdle - it just means that the customer already expects to hire someone to put it all together.
I am pretty sure that IBM makes a lot of its profits in consultancy and custom programming. Ok, their mainframe deals can be pretty sweet for the revenue - but such big iron costs big bucks in the first place. The software front, IBM knows that it can be painful to move faster than the smaller guys (think of IBM as some kind of dancing elephant)... They are using the nimbleness of the FOSS movement to develop the foundation... all the driver support (the old PITA for OS/2 users) is actively worked on by the community (face it, if peripherial vendors wouldn't write an OS/2 driver, they wouldn't work on a Linux driver either)
Hmm... Like any long posts, I kinda forgot what my original point was...
Can you imagine us Penguinistas trying this kind of weak shit on Microsoft? "Hey, Boss! I've got a study from the Henry David Thoreau Institute! Bill Gates didn't actually write MS-DOS, he bought it from Tim Paterson, so we better not run anything from Microsoft. Besides, Windows crashes all the time
The fault in your argument is that your assertion above is largely true whereas Brown's assertions are largely false...
But who wrote the version of Basic that started bill gates on his path to riches?
That is simple to answer.... I remember an old interview on TV where Billy Gates himself admits that he went dumpster diving behind DEC for the discarded printouts which had the source code for DEC BASIC... Which Billy Gate's BASIC was heavily based upon.
DEC, who became Digital, who got swallowed up by Compaq, who was eaten by HP, were the real authors behind Micro Soft BASIC.
Years ago, I am pretty sure I had a handful of AVI files of Bill Gates... from him saying "Cool!" to the infamous 640K quote and one of him saying that OS/2 is the operating system for the 1990s.
One of these days, I will have to dig through my old sub-100MB hard drives and see if I can recover any interesting stuff.
It is more likely that InterTrust wanted to be paid with a lump sum instead of by royalties...
The last company who licensed technology to Microsoft on a royalty basis ended up getting nothing from Microsoft because they gave it away for 'free' so there was no royalty to pay.
You may have heard of them: The company is SpyGlass... the software they wrote is what you know now as Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The directors behind SpyGlass tried to sue Microsoft - but ran out of money. So they have quit the PC Software business alltogether.
So, IMO, InterTrust is smart to negotiate a lump sum payment... Obviously, they couldn't trust Microsoft to honor their side of a royalty-based agreement.
BTW, there are other situations where Microsoft licensed technologies on a royalty basis and then gave them away 'free' to avoid having to pay any royalties.
I am pretty sure that silicon becomes more like a metal at higher tempretures (conductivity increases) and becomes more like an insulator at lower tempretures.
So... Lowering the tempreture too much turns the silicon into a brick.
What cooling would help is to dissapate the waste heat caused by the circuits shorting the power to ground - in an ideal world, the switching of the gates would be perfect and the processors would consume very little power but it is currently the state that every time a logic gate switches state, there is a moment where the supply power is shorted to the ground.
When the gates get hotter, they get more conductive and more power gets shorted... so more heat is generated. In the extreme case, this turns into a +ve feedback and the result is a burnt-out chip.
So these cooling systems are useful at getting rid of the waste heat (which are incidentially a side effect) The cooling of the chips probably slows down the switching time of the gates as the semiconductor becomes more of an insulator.
Solutions
If it is possible to fabricate more perfect switching pair of FETs, the power consumption and heat output would go down. Of course, this would be the Holy Grail but probably won't be realisable until we can construct each gate atom-by-atom...
Another idea is to fabricate processors from a different semiconductor whose operating range is at a higher tempreture so the chip is harder to burn-out and possibly reach higher switching speeds... but the problem is so much time/money is invested on Silicon, that there is little interest in researching the use of other semiconductors.
But for the overclockers... if they can regulate the tempreture of the silicon to be nice and warm (so the switching speeds are good) but are able to move enough watts to keep the temp from running away...
The chances of anyone outside of IBM ever seeing the JFS1 source code is practically nil. AFAIK, it is pretty scattered and embedded all over the AIX kernel.
Now, JFS2 is a different beast. IIRC it was developed as part of "Project Owl" by a bunch of programmers and one of the primary goals was it to be a clean implementation of JFS based on specifications of the operation of JFS1. To ensure it is 'clean', it was developed on OS/2 and then subsequently ported to AIX.
The Linux port of JFS2 was based upon the "Reference Source"... ie, the OS/2 version of JFS2.
I wonder how hard it would be to cram 64 200MHz 486 class CPUs onto a single die. It would give an theoretical max 'speed' of 12GHz. Maybe give it a nice wide 128bit planar bus and clock it at the same speed.
Have to tune the OS to handle that many CPUs efficently but it should still be a pretty nimble (and relatively low power) computer.
Reminds me of an April Fools article several years ago I think PCW magazine had where someone made a computer of a couple of hundred Z80 class CPUs each clocked at 100MHz... and claiming supercomputer performance figures.
I simply hope is isn't like "Contact" where everyone wished that Carl Sagan was still alive so that whole subplots weren't ripped out of the film to make space for too-long special-effects shots. That they rewrote the screenplay after Douglas Adams' death does give ample grounds for concern...
Makes me wish that Hollywood and the BBC resolved their licencing spat right from the start - we wouldn't have this long wait.
But I am going to prepare to be disappointed.
Not mentioned is who will be the voice of the Book - the starring role. They need a good no-nonsence clear-speaking narrator. Also - I hope they don't try to "sex-up" the Book's "computer" graphics... It was part of it's charm was it's green-screen simplicity (but I'll let them get away with real computer graphics with a bit more colour instead of the original hand-drawn ones)
I think film producers love to wait for the death of an author before they make the film... It allows them to completely screw up without the author saying "I told you so!"
Knowing Hollywood, they would use location shots on expensive bugets what the original acheived with a model, a cheap lightbulb and some bedsheets...
What I want to patent is a method for self-identification and verification.
What is claimed
1. That an individual may identify themselves. 2. That the identity of the individual is made regardless of wether the individual is present or otherwise. 3. The individual itentifies themselves by a mark or impression. 4. The individuals unique mark or impression may be stored by another individual for verification purposes. 5. The individuals unique mark or impression may be represented on any media by either descriptive or literal means. 6. The individual may make his unique mark or impression by using a stylus or other instrument so that the mark or impression be recorded onto the storage media.
Hmm... I think 25 cents for every instance where this happens is a fair levy for such an ingenious way. Just imagine: People can promise to pay someone something without actually having to be there, they can just send the promise in the post and the bank will verify it (after sending me 25 cents for the privilege) And instead of carrying money around, you can just hand out promises for money...
This will revolutionize consumer-vendor interaction!
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Nicola Tesla hold some of the original patents on boolean algebra and binary arithmetic?
Interesting that in the space of a few years, computing performance went from 5 operations per second for the German device... to about 2 million binary operations per second for the Colossus...
And then the world went back to a sleepy couple of hundred operations per second after the end of the war when all the Colossi were safely melted down for scrap metal and the designs were carefully locked away in nice wood filing cabinets which were then carefully set on fire.
Probably safe to say that the Colossus may not be the first computer (were mechanical looms a kind of programmable computer to put patterns into fabrics?)... but it certainly was the first supercomputer.
IIRC, he made his first fortune by "accidental" tax fraud (driving a vanload of LPs over to France, claiming the 15% VAT refund, then returning to the UK with vanload of unsold LPs... rinse and repeat)...
But it gave him enough money to launch his Virgin music stores and with his profits, he paid it back (with interest).
I cannot see where Mo's is and...
I thought the Quik-e-mart was supposed to be near the drive-in theatre... He is supposed to be able to watch movies from his rooftop garden.
Haven't found the retirement home yet... but isn't it supposed to be next to the Fireworks and pet store?
IBM has always looked at the long view - the short term stuff never really mattered to IBM.
... In order to be competitive in the consumer PC sales circus, IBM PC-Co signed a deal with MSFT to license the OEM Windows 95... Without that deal, IBM would have to bundle the full retail edition of Windows 95 and it would make their PCs uncompetitive. Unfortunately, the contract had a clause which was the knife which killed OS/2 - IBM could not sell/bundle OS/2 nor could they develop it.
... all the driver support (the old PITA for OS/2 users) is actively worked on by the community (face it, if peripherial vendors wouldn't write an OS/2 driver, they wouldn't work on a Linux driver either)
OS/2's Death was a simple case of smothering the baby because their hands were tied
IBM is basically focusing on what the industry would look like in 10 years time. In the long term, the software is essentially free, consumer hardware is sold at cost (it practically is nowadays) and all the money to be made is in consulting and customizing the software.
The major benefit of something like Linux is a single architecture which works on a wide range of hardware... from simple embedded low-power systems to high performance clusters. It makes it attractive as the skills are the same on all of them - simply the hardware may be tuned easily for the application.
When IBM looks at Linux, they see it as a platform which they can launch themselves from. This was how they treated OS/2 - as a vehicle to sell their consultancy. The retail sales of OS/2 never justified it's development costs. However, the retail "public" presence of OS/2 was important: It's very difficult to sell services on top of a system which the customer has not heard of before.
In many ways, for IBM, Linux is better than OS/2... They do not need to spend so much effort to market it. It already has a penetration into the minds of the public and generally the public perception is "It's free; it's fast; it's secure... sometimes difficult to understand" but the last bit is not a bad hurdle - it just means that the customer already expects to hire someone to put it all together.
I am pretty sure that IBM makes a lot of its profits in consultancy and custom programming. Ok, their mainframe deals can be pretty sweet for the revenue - but such big iron costs big bucks in the first place. The software front, IBM knows that it can be painful to move faster than the smaller guys (think of IBM as some kind of dancing elephant)... They are using the nimbleness of the FOSS movement to develop the foundation
Hmm... Like any long posts, I kinda forgot what my original point was...
You forget that Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister is the "Child of Shatner" in his delivery of speech...
If you are ever misfortunate enough to watch any of his speeches, you'd see what I mean.
Can you imagine us Penguinistas trying this kind of weak shit on Microsoft? "Hey, Boss! I've got a study from the Henry David Thoreau Institute! Bill Gates didn't actually write MS-DOS, he bought it from Tim Paterson, so we better not run anything from Microsoft. Besides, Windows crashes all the time
The fault in your argument is that your assertion above is largely true whereas Brown's assertions are largely false...
Of course, the English for historical reasons prefer #390...
But who wrote the version of Basic that started bill gates on his path to riches?
That is simple to answer.... I remember an old interview on TV where Billy Gates himself admits that he went dumpster diving behind DEC for the discarded printouts which had the source code for DEC BASIC... Which Billy Gate's BASIC was heavily based upon.
DEC, who became Digital, who got swallowed up by Compaq, who was eaten by HP, were the real authors behind Micro Soft BASIC.
Ho hum...
Here is a list of personal computers I have had and their respective clock speeds.
ZX81 1MHz
IBM PC 5150 4.77MHz
286 12.5MHz
386SX 25MHz
486SX 40MHz
486DX2 80MHz
Pentium 100MHz
Dual PentiumMMX 200MHz
Pentium III 1000MHz
Pentium 4 2600MHz
Except for the 486->Pentium transition, I have tended to nearly double the speed each time.
Years ago, I am pretty sure I had a handful of AVI files of Bill Gates... from him saying "Cool!" to the infamous 640K quote and one of him saying that OS/2 is the operating system for the 1990s.
One of these days, I will have to dig through my old sub-100MB hard drives and see if I can recover any interesting stuff.
You're of course assuming the USA and countries using NTSC... A lot of countries are using PAL at 25 fps (50 1/2 fps)
But aren't movies filmed at 24 frames per second?
It is more likely that InterTrust wanted to be paid with a lump sum instead of by royalties...
The last company who licensed technology to Microsoft on a royalty basis ended up getting nothing from Microsoft because they gave it away for 'free' so there was no royalty to pay.
You may have heard of them: The company is SpyGlass... the software they wrote is what you know now as Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The directors behind SpyGlass tried to sue Microsoft - but ran out of money. So they have quit the PC Software business alltogether.
So, IMO, InterTrust is smart to negotiate a lump sum payment... Obviously, they couldn't trust Microsoft to honor their side of a royalty-based agreement.
BTW, there are other situations where Microsoft licensed technologies on a royalty basis and then gave them away 'free' to avoid having to pay any royalties.
When the opportunity arises... Sailing, skiing, walking...
Or just the good old dinner and movie with the wife.
Here's my 2 cents worth..
I am pretty sure that silicon becomes more like a metal at higher tempretures (conductivity increases) and becomes more like an insulator at lower tempretures.
So... Lowering the tempreture too much turns the silicon into a brick.
What cooling would help is to dissapate the waste heat caused by the circuits shorting the power to ground - in an ideal world, the switching of the gates would be perfect and the processors would consume very little power but it is currently the state that every time a logic gate switches state, there is a moment where the supply power is shorted to the ground.
When the gates get hotter, they get more conductive and more power gets shorted
So these cooling systems are useful at getting rid of the waste heat (which are incidentially a side effect) The cooling of the chips probably slows down the switching time of the gates as the semiconductor becomes more of an insulator.
Solutions
If it is possible to fabricate more perfect switching pair of FETs, the power consumption and heat output would go down. Of course, this would be the Holy Grail but probably won't be realisable until we can construct each gate atom-by-atom...
Another idea is to fabricate processors from a different semiconductor whose operating range is at a higher tempreture so the chip is harder to burn-out and possibly reach higher switching speeds... but the problem is so much time/money is invested on Silicon, that there is little interest in researching the use of other semiconductors.
But for the overclockers... if they can regulate the tempreture of the silicon to be nice and warm (so the switching speeds are good) but are able to move enough watts to keep the temp from running away...
The chances of anyone outside of IBM ever seeing the JFS1 source code is practically nil. AFAIK, it is pretty scattered and embedded all over the AIX kernel.
Now, JFS2 is a different beast. IIRC it was developed as part of "Project Owl" by a bunch of programmers and one of the primary goals was it to be a clean implementation of JFS based on specifications of the operation of JFS1. To ensure it is 'clean', it was developed on OS/2 and then subsequently ported to AIX.
The Linux port of JFS2 was based upon the "Reference Source"... ie, the OS/2 version of JFS2.
The 486DX4 was clock-tripled. (the DX2 were clock doubled) and there were 133MHz and 150MHz processors (with 33MHz and 50MHz system bus respectively)
I don't think it would be too much of a stretch for that little extra...
Except that Microsoft would keep its hands around the victim's throat regardless of the victim's choice.
Interesting point...
I wonder how hard it would be to cram 64 200MHz 486 class CPUs onto a single die. It would give an theoretical max 'speed' of 12GHz. Maybe give it a nice wide 128bit planar bus and clock it at the same speed.
Have to tune the OS to handle that many CPUs efficently but it should still be a pretty nimble (and relatively low power) computer.
Reminds me of an April Fools article several years ago I think PCW magazine had where someone made a computer of a couple of hundred Z80 class CPUs each clocked at 100MHz... and claiming supercomputer performance figures.
I think that the CG in Star Trek V was done on Amigas with VideoToasters and LightWave... Check out the floating Klingon Blood shots.
I recall reading it in a magazine years ago...
Already have a Ravenous Bugblatter beast - got a cat who blatts and eats bugs all day!
I simply hope is isn't like "Contact" where everyone wished that Carl Sagan was still alive so that whole subplots weren't ripped out of the film to make space for too-long special-effects shots. That they rewrote the screenplay after Douglas Adams' death does give ample grounds for concern...
Makes me wish that Hollywood and the BBC resolved their licencing spat right from the start - we wouldn't have this long wait.
But I am going to prepare to be disappointed.
Not mentioned is who will be the voice of the Book - the starring role. They need a good no-nonsence clear-speaking narrator. Also - I hope they don't try to "sex-up" the Book's "computer" graphics... It was part of it's charm was it's green-screen simplicity (but I'll let them get away with real computer graphics with a bit more colour instead of the original hand-drawn ones)
I think film producers love to wait for the death of an author before they make the film... It allows them to completely screw up without the author saying "I told you so!"
Knowing Hollywood, they would use location shots on expensive bugets what the original acheived with a model, a cheap lightbulb and some bedsheets...
There is no fury,
Whenever a PC dies.
Control-Alt-Delete.
What I want to patent is a method for self-identification and verification.
What is claimed
1. That an individual may identify themselves.
2. That the identity of the individual is made regardless of wether the individual is present or otherwise.
3. The individual itentifies themselves by a mark or impression.
4. The individuals unique mark or impression may be stored by another individual for verification purposes.
5. The individuals unique mark or impression may be represented on any media by either descriptive or literal means.
6. The individual may make his unique mark or impression by using a stylus or other instrument so that the mark or impression be recorded onto the storage media.
Hmm... I think 25 cents for every instance where this happens is a fair levy for such an ingenious way. Just imagine: People can promise to pay someone something without actually having to be there, they can just send the promise in the post and the bank will verify it (after sending me 25 cents for the privilege)
And instead of carrying money around, you can just hand out promises for money...
This will revolutionize consumer-vendor interaction!