I Guarantee its MFM, unless the controller was a very special RLL unit. If its the original, it definitely can't be IDE. I designed MFM and RLL controllers in the 1980's and they were almost all analogue (the digital ones were mostly cheap crap and did not work very well). They were not interchangable meaning Its very likely that the data can only be read by the controller that wrote it OTOH, it might actually be SCSI, and could be read by any modern Un*x with a SCSI controller. As someone else said "mount -t xenix" will probably work on any Un*x or Linux.
If its a 10MB drive, I would bet that there is not more than 5MB of data on the drive, and the serial chip is definitely not going to be a 16550 in a standard PC it will be terrible. I had a BBS in the '90s,
and paid a lot for high performance serial cards. However, its a Xenix system, and might have Zilog's SIO chips which can do 1MB synchronous serial (SDLC or HDLC) if you program them to.
I would not remove the HD from it under any circumstances if the machine can still boot. tar/home and/etc through the serial port to something else - who cares if it takes a month! If they get through ok, then tar the lot as a separate operation. Much better you boot it and get the data, than you shut down and re-start several times. If its going to die, it will die during a boot sequence for sure.
The OS will probably have been built without drivers for hardware thats not there, so unless you have access to the OS build tools, you wont have any ability to add hardware (that was normal i those days). An OS build would probably take 3 days (if you have the tools) It is basically the link stage of compiling a Un*x.
Xenix only existed because the '86 family's memory mapping was too poor for real Un*x, and you can expect it to perform like NetBSD scaled by clockspeed over 4 Ie if it has a 10MHz clock it will be 400 times slower than NetBSD on i386 on a 1GHz processor (ie grimly slow).
p
so your saying a website can't send and recieve forms as well as some government worker behind a counter?
I believe there is a substantial body of evidence showing that said forms are so complex that no government minister can understand them! In fact, it may not actually be possible to define "complete" in the terms of the forms, let alone the project.
Ther only thing you cna be certain of tis that the amounts recieved by EDS and Peter Mandleson (minister for corruption) for this will exceed the GDP of several small countries.
Those employed by the government maintaining roads, for example, provide valuable infrastructure support.
This might be true if the jobs were ever finished - as it is, most roads in the UK (well, in London, anyway) seem to have had a bit coned off since 1973, and the work is never actually completed!
The majority of people who work shit jobs do not them because that is the job they are best suited for.
Not here in the UK = its because the good jobs have been destroyed = plenty of well qualified, experienced engineers, chemists, and other technical people are driving trucks, collecting garbage or stacking shelves in the supermarket. Mismanagement of our economy means the jobs that the UK does well have been exported to countries where they are done badly, while we import people to drive down the wages at jobs anyone can do. In short, it is hard to imagine a worse run economy outside of Soviet Russia or Zimbabwe.
As for starting your own business - it currently takes three people to do the paperwork needed by a one man business! Our government's devotion to petty paperwork beats even the legendary Indian Raj (although we do have a good number of Indians to train us in how to do it).
I have he solution: the opinion should be expressed by a Rapper, then it could be copyright until 25 years after the Rapper is shot in a drive by.
Ideally, the Rappers works should be released on DVDs protected by DCMA, so the innocent don't actually have to listen to pump-and-dump promotion on MTV.
Not permanently running processes, libraries do not exist as an independent process, but are used by other processes. Regardless of the number of processes executing the code, only a single copy is ever loaded in memory - the entry points are made available via a table, and if anyone loads a copy, everyone has access to that copy (obviously with their own memory for variables). This is easy, because code and data sit in separate memory spaces logically, even though they don't do so physically. (And the code pages have the execute bit set, data doesn't - yes 20 years before Windows had this feature!)
"Single instance only" applied to all code - applications, libraries and OS. We often used to have 16 users on an 11/70 with 1MW of memory (ie 2MB) - all running the same program, so only one copy was resident. (or one of us was running the C or Fortran compilers:-)
isn't that how the BSDs do it today?
In RSX/11, programs could be "installed" so that they made their location on disk known to the OS, so when you ran a program, it was not necessary to search the file system for it. The location on disk, and offset to the entry point, was already known. A program could have multiple entry points (like grep, egrep etc), and libraries just used this mechanism. The dynamic linker stored the program (library) name and index into a table of entry points. I think early implementations statically linked the code to hack this stuff, before it became part of the OS.
If the search of the program you asked for found nothing, then the directories were searched. It was laziness of the users that meant the default strategy was used for most applications. I think VMS continued to support the install option, but I cant remember. I don't think Un*x ever did.
Programs only loaded the pages that were in use, and pages not in use were eventually swapped out. So huge programs did not take for ever to load - you loaded the first page, and jumped to it - then loaded which ever pages execution went to - so you did not need to spend years designing overlay strategies! This was possible because pages could load anywhere - the PDP11 supported "position independent code" (All modern 16 and 32 bit processors could still do this).
Don't you young people know anything? I know this, and I didn't even do computer science in college!
You can get it, install it and have it - and all the applications you are likely to need - running in 40 minutes, for nothing! (on a 450MHz processor), and quite possibly need only another 40 minutes maintenance, with no reboots, in the next two years. Any scripts you write will probably run on future versions for the next 10 years without modification. It is by far the lowest maintenqance infrastructure you can get in the long term
Obviously for a commercial webserrver, not a domestic workstation.
Disclaimer: Yes, I have done this myself. I have used BSD since 1980, and OpenBSD since it was first released. Mostly on sparc/sparc64 hardware.
Thinking that somehow it's magically safer because nobody uses it is just plain backwards.
Thinking nobody uses it is pretty ignorant too. If you were doing online money transfer or telecomms billing, you would probably use it (I use it for these things).
If you use Windows servers for financial transactions, you may have had a dose too many of "KGB" brand brain-wash (available from spamemrs everywhere).
If it is anything like the rest of the present government policies, the actual requirement is to put a tick in a box labeled "Data is secure",
and then apply a signature resembling "D. Duck" at the bottom of the paper, which is then filed along with 2,000,103 other pieces of identical
paper with no way of tracing which piece applies to which equipment. My Guess is that Donald Duck had best be afraid... very afraid. As should
anybody in the UK who would prefer his personal data is not on sale at a market somewhere in India at this very moment.
It is quite safe to assume any statements above about the government's supposed competence are the work of paid shills.
In the last 10 years, the government has not previously shown any signs of competence.
a) "It is illegal to import a potato knowing it to be Polish" "Honest, Sir, I did not know that potato was Polish. It does not even have a Polish accent!"
b} "What will the government say if it gets out in the press?" "We will plead corporate insanity"
The people so stupid they buy games that need an always-on network connection are to blame. They are in the same league as people who by fake drugs from spammers.
Other than cisco routers and switches, you can't really fine hardware that has a serial port on it.
A quick visit to any factory where they actually make stuff will reveal that, in the real world (ie outside of IT), product life cycle is
nearer to 7 years, and the development of the production environment and design is another three. This means that a lot of current production equipment
is over 10 years old. Loads of it depends on serial ports because they require very few transistors compared to USB, and when USB has gone, whatever replaces it
will have adaptors to serial available for it.
Plenty of wireless test sets, oscilloscopes, signal generators, and other test equipment costing $20,000 each use RS232, and no one will want the learning curve of
replacing them while they are still in use - which is even more expensive than the equipment.
If the signals need to be delivered in real-time, however slowly, RS232 will beat USB every time, because the propagation delay is known and repeatable.
A UART needs one hundredth the number of transistors of USB, and proportionately less testing. For low production run devices, and high volume devices that is important.
From practical esperience, a raft can easily be constructed that will sail at 2MPH, but wont quite steer as well as intended.
Given that a sailing boat is powered 24 yours a day, we are talking a 4 days journey, not necessarily to the intended destination. No great achievement.
Lets say some scum are after you and your family, so you got on your fishing raft to sail up the coast a few miles, and accidentally lost your steering contrivance. 4 days later, you are in Crete, with your wife and kids, and possibkly an in-law or two, or the daughter's boyfriend - anyway, enough to start a new family if you are not too fussy about incest. Or manybe Fidel Castro's ancestors were after you and a whole load of you set off over
a period of months.
Either way, 4 days at sea is not a very tough journey in the Med, its not like 4 days in the North Atlantic in Winter. I have spent several days at see in a small sailing boat in the North Sea, and not eaten tinned food for the whole trip! Its not that tough! The worst bit was having to have cheap instant coffee instead of the real stuff! (And an incident where I washed my hair with Fairy Liquid and tried to rince it off with sea water!)
Here in East London, the traditional patter for people flogging fake perfume is "Its the same as you buy in Selfridges/Harrods, the only difference is... it came out the back door instead of the front. So you pay £10 instead of £40. A bargain. How can you resist?"
The answer to the question is "Cos it smells like cat's piss!"
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If its a 10MB drive, I would bet that there is not more than 5MB of data on the drive, and the serial chip is definitely not going to be a 16550 in a standard PC it will be terrible. I had a BBS in the '90s, and paid a lot for high performance serial cards. However, its a Xenix system, and might have Zilog's SIO chips which can do 1MB synchronous serial (SDLC or HDLC) if you program them to.
I would not remove the HD from it under any circumstances if the machine can still boot. tar /home and /etc through the serial port to something else - who cares if it takes a month! If they get through ok, then tar the lot as a separate operation. Much better you boot it and get the data, than you shut down and re-start several times. If its going to die, it will die during a boot sequence for sure.
The OS will probably have been built without drivers for hardware thats not there, so unless you have access to the OS build tools, you wont have any ability to add hardware (that was normal i those days). An OS build would probably take 3 days (if you have the tools) It is basically the link stage of compiling a Un*x.
Xenix only existed because the '86 family's memory mapping was too poor for real Un*x, and you can expect it to perform like NetBSD scaled by clockspeed over 4 Ie if it has a 10MHz clock it will be 400 times slower than NetBSD on i386 on a 1GHz processor (ie grimly slow). p
I believe there is a substantial body of evidence showing that said forms are so complex that no government minister can understand them! In fact, it may not actually be possible to define "complete" in the terms of the forms, let alone the project.
Ther only thing you cna be certain of tis that the amounts recieved by EDS and Peter Mandleson (minister for corruption) for this will exceed the GDP of several small countries.
This might be true if the jobs were ever finished - as it is, most roads in the UK (well, in London, anyway) seem to have had a bit coned off since 1973, and the work is never actually completed!
Not here in the UK = its because the good jobs have been destroyed = plenty of well qualified, experienced engineers, chemists, and other technical people are driving trucks, collecting garbage or stacking shelves in the supermarket. Mismanagement of our economy means the jobs that the UK does well have been exported to countries where they are done badly, while we import people to drive down the wages at jobs anyone can do. In short, it is hard to imagine a worse run economy outside of Soviet Russia or Zimbabwe.
As for starting your own business - it currently takes three people to do the paperwork needed by a one man business! Our government's devotion to petty paperwork beats even the legendary Indian Raj (although we do have a good number of Indians to train us in how to do it).
Pls mod parent +1: Politically correct!
Ideally, the Rappers works should be released on DVDs protected by DCMA, so the innocent don't actually have to listen to pump-and-dump promotion on MTV.
You must be new here!
It might stop you, but it wont stop me! (Try processing dates or times with Excel!)
"Single instance only" applied to all code - applications, libraries and OS. We often used to have 16 users on an 11/70 with 1MW of memory (ie 2MB) - all running the same program, so only one copy was resident. (or one of us was running the C or Fortran compilers :-)
isn't that how the BSDs do it today?
In RSX/11, programs could be "installed" so that they made their location on disk known to the OS, so when you ran a program, it was not necessary to search the file system for it. The location on disk, and offset to the entry point, was already known. A program could have multiple entry points (like grep, egrep etc), and libraries just used this mechanism. The dynamic linker stored the program (library) name and index into a table of entry points. I think early implementations statically linked the code to hack this stuff, before it became part of the OS.
If the search of the program you asked for found nothing, then the directories were searched. It was laziness of the users that meant the default strategy was used for most applications. I think VMS continued to support the install option, but I cant remember. I don't think Un*x ever did.
Programs only loaded the pages that were in use, and pages not in use were eventually swapped out. So huge programs did not take for ever to load - you loaded the first page, and jumped to it - then loaded which ever pages execution went to - so you did not need to spend years designing overlay strategies! This was possible because pages could load anywhere - the PDP11 supported "position independent code" (All modern 16 and 32 bit processors could still do this).
Don't you young people know anything? I know this, and I didn't even do computer science in college!
Get off my lawn.
The world is gasping for a Linux version of "International Mapouka Challenge" using the Wii balance board! Even I would pay $10 for it!
Obviously for a commercial webserrver, not a domestic workstation.
Disclaimer: Yes, I have done this myself. I have used BSD since 1980, and OpenBSD since it was first released. Mostly on sparc/sparc64 hardware.
Thinking nobody uses it is pretty ignorant too. If you were doing online money transfer or telecomms billing, you would probably use it (I use it for these things).
If you use Windows servers for financial transactions, you may have had a dose too many of "KGB" brand brain-wash (available from spamemrs everywhere).
It is quite safe to assume any statements above about the government's supposed competence are the work of paid shills. In the last 10 years, the government has not previously shown any signs of competence.
a) "It is illegal to import a potato knowing it to be Polish" "Honest, Sir, I did not know that potato was Polish. It does not even have a Polish accent!"
b} "What will the government say if it gets out in the press?" "We will plead corporate insanity"
Great Idea ... I shall order my staff to implement this tomorrow. Its far better than the policy I got from Dilbert last year!
The present UK government should plead "not competent by way of corporate Insanity"
Most people cant tell talk from mutter, as certainly cant tell ACTA from Will Smith.
Damned right it is! No user: no problems.
I have found a dialogue box saying "The system is totally stuffed" with a single button labeled "Oh, Fuck" works quite well.
Au contraire, mon amis
The people so stupid they buy games that need an always-on network connection are to blame. They are in the same league as people who by fake drugs from spammers.
No, no re-fund, bot plenty went into the Mandleson fund.
A quick visit to any factory where they actually make stuff will reveal that, in the real world (ie outside of IT), product life cycle is nearer to 7 years, and the development of the production environment and design is another three. This means that a lot of current production equipment is over 10 years old. Loads of it depends on serial ports because they require very few transistors compared to USB, and when USB has gone, whatever replaces it will have adaptors to serial available for it.
Plenty of wireless test sets, oscilloscopes, signal generators, and other test equipment costing $20,000 each use RS232, and no one will want the learning curve of replacing them while they are still in use - which is even more expensive than the equipment.
If the signals need to be delivered in real-time, however slowly, RS232 will beat USB every time, because the propagation delay is known and repeatable.
A UART needs one hundredth the number of transistors of USB, and proportionately less testing. For low production run devices, and high volume devices that is important.
Who has a patent on "scummy business tactics"?
Does this ruling apply outside the USA?
Posting on /. and you have not realised its the nerds that are the outcasts?
You must be new here.
Given that a sailing boat is powered 24 yours a day, we are talking a 4 days journey, not necessarily to the intended destination. No great achievement.
Lets say some scum are after you and your family, so you got on your fishing raft to sail up the coast a few miles, and accidentally lost your steering contrivance. 4 days later, you are in Crete, with your wife and kids, and possibkly an in-law or two, or the daughter's boyfriend - anyway, enough to start a new family if you are not too fussy about incest. Or manybe Fidel Castro's ancestors were after you and a whole load of you set off over a period of months.
Either way, 4 days at sea is not a very tough journey in the Med, its not like 4 days in the North Atlantic in Winter. I have spent several days at see in a small sailing boat in the North Sea, and not eaten tinned food for the whole trip! Its not that tough! The worst bit was having to have cheap instant coffee instead of the real stuff! (And an incident where I washed my hair with Fairy Liquid and tried to rince it off with sea water!)
The answer to the question is "Cos it smells like cat's piss!"