Star Raiders yet! Made me wish I could afford
an Atari 800 back then.
I still have new-in-the-box copies of Star Raiders
for both the 2600 and the computers, that I bought for a dollar each
many years later. I'll put them on ePay when I retire.
Atari also made the first wide-body pinball machine.
It was incredibly dull, though, and on top of that they used some unique hardware
that didn't work very well, rather than tried-and-true generic parts.
Also, they might well use two strings of 40 LEDs each. That way they'd get brighter lights from cheaper LEDs at the cost of reliability and a little extra wire.
It's not that I've bothered to check (this being Slashdot, after all),
but maybe they convert AC to DC with, um, like, diodes?
Somebody mentioned 80 LED strings, and with them in series, they'd get around 2V peak (which is reasonable) and the whole string would pull 1 or 2 amps.
(It isn't practical to wire LEDs in parallel, because they aren't particularly uniform in resistance, and besides,
the transformer to put out 2V at 2 amps would be too expensive for Christmas lights.)
By the way, while LEDs have their advantages, they are not, generally, more efficient than other lamps. A current 'super-bright' LED yields around 2 to 5 lumens per watt, with high-end ones (which again are too expensive to be in these Christmas lights) about 10 lm/W.
Normal incandescents are around 6 lm/W, although the tiny coloured ones in Christmas light strings are indeed most likely less efficient.
Halogen incandescents give around 20 lm/W, and fluorescent tubes around 80 lm/W.
Minister of Justice Sheila Copps has announced that, beginning in 2003, all Canadians will be required to spend three days a year in prison. "It's just become too costly to identify the few actual criminals among the population. The only efficient way to make sure we punish the guilty is to punish absolutely everyone. A few people may object, but they're obviously criminals in the first place. The rest will go quietly; they understand that we know what's best for them."
Pretty much anything will do. I've done it with a cardboard box top slit with a utility knife, and a cheap laser keychain. The interference pattern was clearly visible, if not as bright and pretty as a textbook picture.
Pretty sure the first 64-bit UNIX was UNICOS for the Cray X/MP, around 1983-1985 or so. Second was probably HCR's System V port to the Control Data Cyber 180, around '85. What was next? AIX? OSF/1 for the Alpha shipped in '93. Solaris didn't make it all the way until relatively recently. Not sure about IRIX or HP-UX.
"64-bit OS", on the other hand, doesn't mean much without a reason why precisely 64-bit machines matter more than earlier machines with long-but-not-64-bit words. And shit, I've got a 15-year-old calculator with a 64-bit OS (FSVO OS).
Me too.
The first machine I ever programmed was a friend's HP25. (I was 9 years old; I couldn't afford my own.) Now I make my living programming.
Thanks, Bill.
I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, I know they use RPN in heaven. God would have taken more than a seven days to create the world if he had to remember how many parentheses he had open.
Was it this or this that killed him? I'm sorry he lived to see what happend to his once-great company.
Presumably this post is a joke, since you can't buy a new VAX any longer, but yes, Bell Labs UNIX does run on the VAX. 32V is a port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the VAX. The Eighth Edition of Bell Labs research UNIX runs on the VAX only (and I think the same is true of Ninth and Tenth), though that is derived from BSD UNIX. I doubt that System V Release 4 has ever run on the VAX, but I could be wrong.
My mistake. Looks like that might be claims 6 through 11 of this patent which essentially covers a video terminal with extra bits for each character to identify fields (though not for display appearance attributes, which were invented later). But it's not clear to me through the patentese whether this covers a video terminal cursor as such, or just the implementation of a cursor using a cursor attribute bit. Unfortunately the earlier patents it references are not in the IBM database.
The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO
and Sun.
SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with
Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.
If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free
from SCO.
The UNIX version at that link is apparently System V Release 2,
so the description, "The Unix system that started it all. BSD split shortly after this was released." is way off on both counts. System V Release 2 dates from 1984, which makes it about fifteen years too late to have "started it all". The first BSD stuff appeared in the late 70s, and diverged from Sixth & Seventh Edition research Unix, not System V. In fact it was with System V that the USG branch (AT&T's commercial UNIX, distinct from Bell Labs research UNIX) started incorporating BSD software -- things like csh and vi.
ULTRIX ran on various VAXen and on the MIPS-based DECstations. Most models of both are well supported by NetBSD: VAX, MIPS. Most ULTRIX binaries can be run under NetBSD.
There was also ULTRIX-11 for the PDP-11, but you're almost certainly not thinking of that.
Slashdot Mirror
SMP = symmetric multi-processing = fungible processors
qubit.org
The computer programmer will write a program to find out, and report:
Star Raiders yet! Made me wish I could afford an Atari 800 back then.
I still have new-in-the-box copies of Star Raiders for both the 2600 and the computers, that I bought for a dollar each many years later. I'll put them on ePay when I retire.
Atari also made the first wide-body pinball machine. It was incredibly dull, though, and on top of that they used some unique hardware that didn't work very well, rather than tried-and-true generic parts.
Oops, typo in the above post. Watts.
Also, they might well use two strings of 40 LEDs each.
That way they'd get brighter lights from cheaper LEDs at the cost of reliability and a little extra wire.
It's not that I've bothered to check (this being Slashdot, after all), but maybe they convert AC to DC with, um, like, diodes? Somebody mentioned 80 LED strings, and with them in series, they'd get around 2V peak (which is reasonable) and the whole string would pull 1 or 2 amps.
(It isn't practical to wire LEDs in parallel, because they aren't particularly uniform in resistance, and besides, the transformer to put out 2V at 2 amps would be too expensive for Christmas lights.)
By the way, while LEDs have their advantages, they are not, generally, more efficient than other lamps. A current 'super-bright' LED yields around 2 to 5 lumens per watt, with high-end ones (which again are too expensive to be in these Christmas lights) about 10 lm/W. Normal incandescents are around 6 lm/W, although the tiny coloured ones in Christmas light strings are indeed most likely less efficient. Halogen incandescents give around 20 lm/W, and fluorescent tubes around 80 lm/W.
foo
Vulcan.
I want that brain cell back.
Minister of Justice Sheila Copps has announced that,
beginning in 2003, all Canadians will be
required to spend three days a year in prison.
"It's just become too costly to identify the few
actual criminals among the population.
The only efficient way to make sure we punish
the guilty is to punish absolutely everyone.
A few people may object, but they're obviously criminals in the first place.
The rest will go quietly; they understand that we know what's best for them."
Pretty much anything will do. I've done it with a cardboard box top slit with a utility knife, and a cheap laser keychain. The interference pattern was clearly visible, if not as bright and pretty as a textbook picture.
I'm also a vi user; I map Escape onto the left-thumb Delete key, symmetric with Return. Works well for me.
I also map the otherwise useless Insert key to Mod5 and dedicate it to window manager operations, so I rarely have to take my hands off the keyboard.
Try Bob Supnik's simh.
Sure they did. One of their early successes was the Softcard, a Z80 card for the Apple II, running CP/M.
What was *mumble*?
Pretty sure the first 64-bit UNIX was UNICOS for the Cray X/MP, around 1983-1985 or so. Second was probably HCR's System V port to the Control Data Cyber 180, around '85. What was next? AIX? OSF/1 for the Alpha shipped in '93. Solaris didn't make it all the way until relatively recently. Not sure about IRIX or HP-UX.
"64-bit OS", on the other hand, doesn't mean much without a reason why precisely 64-bit machines matter more than earlier machines with long-but-not-64-bit words. And shit, I've got a 15-year-old calculator with a 64-bit OS (FSVO OS).
... in a computer context, I think of disk drives and printers, not some upstart video game. Sad that no one else has mentioned them yet.
In vi editing mode, type ESC Ctrl-V
In emacs editing mode, type Ctrl-V
Me too. The first machine I ever programmed was a friend's HP25. (I was 9 years old; I couldn't afford my own.) Now I make my living programming.
Thanks, Bill.
I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, I know they use RPN in heaven. God would have taken more than a seven days to create the world if he had to remember how many parentheses he had open.
Was it this or this that killed him? I'm sorry he lived to see what happend to his once-great company.
I understand California is experiencing a shortage in electricy supply.
Given the shit HP sell today, attaching a pair of generators to Messrs. Hewlett & Packard ought to solve that problem.
(Current owner of HP45, HP97, HP9815, HP31E, HP34C, HP41CV, HP16C, HP28S, HP38, and two HP48G calculators, HP9845B, HP85, and HP45711B computers, HP1707B oscilloscope, and HP1615A logic analyzer.)
Presumably this post is a joke, since you can't buy a new VAX any longer, but yes, Bell Labs UNIX does run on the VAX. 32V is a port of Seventh Edition UNIX to the VAX. The Eighth Edition of Bell Labs research UNIX runs on the VAX only (and I think the same is true of Ninth and Tenth), though that is derived from BSD UNIX. I doubt that System V Release 4 has ever run on the VAX, but I could be wrong.
My mistake. Looks like that might be claims 6 through 11 of this patent which essentially covers a video terminal with extra bits for each character to identify fields (though not for display appearance attributes, which were invented later). But it's not clear to me through the patentese whether this covers a video terminal cursor as such, or just the implementation of a cursor using a cursor attribute bit. Unfortunately the earlier patents it references are not in the IBM database.
The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.
SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.
If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.
For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.
The UNIX version at that link is apparently System V Release 2, so the description, "The Unix system that started it all. BSD split shortly after this was released." is way off on both counts. System V Release 2 dates from 1984, which makes it about fifteen years too late to have "started it all". The first BSD stuff appeared in the late 70s, and diverged from Sixth & Seventh Edition research Unix, not System V. In fact it was with System V that the USG branch (AT&T's commercial UNIX, distinct from Bell Labs research UNIX) started incorporating BSD software -- things like csh and vi.
Probably not from DG, since EMC reportedly trashed everything.
I suggest asking on comp.os.aos
ULTRIX ran on various VAXen and on the MIPS-based DECstations. Most models of both are well supported by NetBSD: VAX, MIPS. Most ULTRIX binaries can be run under NetBSD.
There was also ULTRIX-11 for the PDP-11, but you're almost certainly not thinking of that.