The ZX81's tape interface, and more importantly the ROM routines, were pretty poor. However the Spectrum vastly improved upon them.
The poor old ZX81 spoke to the tape at 300 baud, and the screen went blank when loading and saving since the poor old Z80 processor had to do everyting. You could not save arbitrary blocks of memory, just a program and all its variables etc. so if you wanted to save data, you had to save the whole program as well.
The Spectrum was more sophisticated. It spoke at 1500 baud, and could save BASIC programs and arbitrary blocks of memory (and the "display file" ie video RAM) making it much more useful. The ULA generated the TV picture so the screen stayed visible when loading and saving. The Z80 still generated the tones for the tape though.
My ZX81 had an add-in FORTH (multi-tasking, real time) ROM from Skywave Software, Bournemouth, which had much improved tape handling software over the standard BASIC ROM.:-)
The 386 had no hardware floating-point. For that you needed an 80387 coprocessor (c.f. 80287, 8087). The "sx" in 386sx denoted "single word exchange" and dx "double word exchange". The 386sx had a 16-bit bus, so that it could be used in cheaper motherboards (basically 286 motherboards) and the original 386, later renamed the 386dx had a 32-bit bus. The original 486 was, like someone already said, an optimised 386 core (better pipelining, introduction of an 8k L1 cache, some instructions optimised for single clock-cycle execution etc.) with a built-in optimized 387. The result was a proecssor that was about twice as fast as the saame 386/387 combination at the same clock frequency. The 486sx was a marketing exercise to use up 486 cores with broken FPUs. The 487 "coprocessor" for these machines was really just a proper 486 with an extra pin which disabled the 486sx already installed. You could actually buld a PC with only a 487 using certain motherboards if you knew what you were doing.
Just as a matter of interest, how did you and your colleagues get to be working from NASA? What sort fo career path have you had? I'm not looking for a job or anything, I'm just interested.:-) Did you, for example, start out doing research at a university? Thanks.
That's a long time we went struggling on with the segmented memory model, even though our hardware could do more. Hopefully the transition to 64-bit architectures will go more smoothly. Microsoft is really the key to the transition on the software side, since they have such a huge market share on the desktop.
It's funny you should say that, 64-bit processors started to come out about 10 years ago in workstations, and 64-bit UNIX soon followed. Microsoft even had a portable OS back then (NT 3.51) which ran on MIPS and Alpha, as well as intel, but only in 32-bit mode.
Microsoft os only now getting around to producing a 64-bit OS, having killed the nice portability they had built in, so they really limited their choice of processor architectures.
The reason the portability went away was that when NT went from 3.51 to 4.0 the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) went away in the interest of speed. A lot of stuff went in the kernel that shouldn't, with stability problems as a result.
a common complaint is that there is not enough support for specific hardware devices under (gnu/)linux
This is a myth which is a result of the status quo ten years ago. It is no longer true, but it is believed by pundits and the ignorant who have not kept up with recent developments. Nowadays the Linux kernel often gets support for new hardware before commercial OSs since many of the hardware companies employ engineers who are enthusiastic about Linux and knowledgeable enough to write device drivers.
Like you I have lots of ideas which I believe to be good and beneficial to my employer, but what I find is that most of them are so "way out", "normal" people can't understand them or see the potential benefit. Usually 5 or 10 years later the world starts to catch up.
When I was younger I would enthusiastically extoll the virtues of my ideas and suggestions to anyone and everything who would listen, and they'd just shrug me off and dismiss them. It was very frustrating for an earnest and positive-thinking young man.
What I reallise is what a lot of people have said here. You need to know who to talk to and how to tell them. You also need to realise that the vast majority of people are quite happy to continue with the status quo for an easy and quiet life, i.e. they "go with the flow", and are quite happy not to be challenging or to be challenged.
Armed with this insight I managed to persuade a manager to buy a new UNIX workstation. It took 18 months. However, that's what some managers are like.
I suggested many new safety-improving, mankey-saving and money-making ideas, but they were swept under the carpet.
I left for a more forward-looking employer.
I still have off-the-wall ideas, some of them original, but mostly just ideas for things I'd like to do. I don't try to waste them on the narrow minded any more and I don't get worked up about it. I have files where I write everything down, draw diagrams, do calculations, write code etc.
Employers, and people in general, have very little recpetiveness to change and new ideas. Those that do are few and far between.
The forward-thinking few are the ones who will excell.
The best advice I can give is to be calm, rational and business-like. Keep a note of your ideas. Always keep a look out for career opportunities with the more forward-thinking. Enjoy your ideas yourself. After all, they're yours, and if others are too slow to see their benefits, you can sit back smugly, smile and relax:-)
Perhaps they should just tap off an ant-eye matter stream from the warp core generator to create small force-fields where the buttons are supposed to be?
There will be a public outcry in the US and NASA will have egg all over its face when some ammateurs put up a working space craft. Big questions will be asked as to where all those bilions of tax-payers' dollars went for such apparently small return and large loss of life.
I'm not saying that all NASA's work has been in vain, but since Apollo, it's all been in the wrong direction.
NASA has singularly failed to make manned access to space safe, cheap and reliable.
To qote Billy Milano (off Milano Mosh fame) from M.O.D. : "Save that shit for Poison, And bands like Motley Crue, Or when you come to see us, We'll mosh all over you! Fistbang mania, fistbang mania (etc.)."
I know what you mean, I was just making the point that it's a thriving scene nowadays with much more exposure. You're right about the Nu Metal stuff, there's a lot of safe, conformist, unchallenging commercial stuff there. I saw Maiden at Download in July for the first time. They ruled. At least Slayer are still on the go. I don't listen to music radio much. We used to have cable TV and had the Kerrang channel and Total Rock. They were OKish. I missed out on som much good music when I was a teenager because I used to have these "friends" who said that anything lighter than Metallica (pre-black album) was "gay", and to be caught with such music was a mortal sin. So I went and listened to some jazz...
Thanks, but I've already got Angel Rat and the Outer Limits. I bought Angel Rat in 1991 when I was fed up with "thrash" and the crap Metallica were doing. When I've got $0.02 to rub together, I'll buy the whole Voivod back catalogue, as well as the first two Primus albums.
How come I never got 3D glasses with The Outer Limits?
No, clubs were a necessary evil when I was a student and in my early tweties to be with friends and meet people. Nowadays I enjoy a quiet country pub or a glass of wine in the house with my wife. Clubs are dreadful places.
As well, probably close to 50% of the club hits this year have been covers and remakes of the shite produced in the 80s... Corey Hart, Madonna, etc...
Pathetic isn't it?
the 80's are a time that should be forgotten, not rejoiced.
Quite. For a young man into rock music, they were dreadful times. Things got a bit better in the early '90s. Nowadays the kids are spoilt for choice with all the new metal bands. Even Metallica are going heavy again. I never was a country and western fan.
Try Voivod by Voivod. They're French-Canadian prog/sci-fi rockers, heavily influenced by Hawkwind.
Then there's Primus, who are just plain weird. They're a cross between rock, funk and stuff like Pink Floyd and the Police.
Zwan are pretty cool too. There's loads of psychadelia in there mixed with T-Rex and New Order. If you like them, try Smashing Pumpkins (now defunct and a bit more rocky).
Oh I wish I'd been American. It sounds like you missed out on Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, Sonia and all the other Stock, Aitken and Waterman drivel in the late '80s and early '90s.
Re:Expanding thier OPEN SOURCE committment?
on
Novell Buys Ximian
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· Score: 1
Sun, for one, will be quite interested in having GNOME and associated apps supported under Solaris as they've chosen it for their next UI.
Yes, that's why they've done a heck of a lot of work on GNOME for Solaris themselves already, and continue to do so. Very little of what they have done has anything to do with Ximian.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so you're a pedant. Point taken.
The poor old ZX81 spoke to the tape at 300 baud, and the screen went blank when loading and saving since the poor old Z80 processor had to do everyting. You could not save arbitrary blocks of memory, just a program and all its variables etc. so if you wanted to save data, you had to save the whole program as well.
The Spectrum was more sophisticated. It spoke at 1500 baud, and could save BASIC programs and arbitrary blocks of memory (and the "display file" ie video RAM) making it much more useful. The ULA generated the TV picture so the screen stayed visible when loading and saving. The Z80 still generated the tones for the tape though.
My ZX81 had an add-in FORTH (multi-tasking, real time) ROM from Skywave Software, Bournemouth, which had much improved tape handling software over the standard BASIC ROM. :-)
As you say, those were the days.
Yes, they need to to be able to run Windows 9x and ME.
The 386 had no hardware floating-point. For that you needed an 80387 coprocessor (c.f. 80287, 8087). The "sx" in 386sx denoted "single word exchange" and dx "double word exchange". The 386sx had a 16-bit bus, so that it could be used in cheaper motherboards (basically 286 motherboards) and the original 386, later renamed the 386dx had a 32-bit bus. The original 486 was, like someone already said, an optimised 386 core (better pipelining, introduction of an 8k L1 cache, some instructions optimised for single clock-cycle execution etc.) with a built-in optimized 387. The result was a proecssor that was about twice as fast as the saame 386/387 combination at the same clock frequency. The 486sx was a marketing exercise to use up 486 cores with broken FPUs. The 487 "coprocessor" for these machines was really just a proper 486 with an extra pin which disabled the 486sx already installed. You could actually buld a PC with only a 487 using certain motherboards if you knew what you were doing.
You mean like the Loki super Spectrum?
Yes, it has 20 megs of RAM, a 10Mbit network card and a 100MB disk. Slackware runs fine :-)
Because all mysery and no fun makes the world a dull place.
This should run like the clappers on my old 486/25sx.
Just as a matter of interest, how did you and your colleagues get to be working from NASA? What sort fo career path have you had? I'm not looking for a job or anything, I'm just interested. :-) Did you, for example, start out doing research at a university? Thanks.
It's funny you should say that, 64-bit processors started to come out about 10 years ago in workstations, and 64-bit UNIX soon followed. Microsoft even had a portable OS back then (NT 3.51) which ran on MIPS and Alpha, as well as intel, but only in 32-bit mode.
Microsoft os only now getting around to producing a 64-bit OS, having killed the nice portability they had built in, so they really limited their choice of processor architectures.
The reason the portability went away was that when NT went from 3.51 to 4.0 the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) went away in the interest of speed. A lot of stuff went in the kernel that shouldn't, with stability problems as a result.
So use Debian or Slackware or.... whatever.
...it's a good bit of entertaining sport. :-)
This is a myth which is a result of the status quo ten years ago. It is no longer true, but it is believed by pundits and the ignorant who have not kept up with recent developments. Nowadays the Linux kernel often gets support for new hardware before commercial OSs since many of the hardware companies employ engineers who are enthusiastic about Linux and knowledgeable enough to write device drivers.
I'd recomend LART'ing the clueless Windoze luser, and yourself while you're at it.
When I was younger I would enthusiastically extoll the virtues of my ideas and suggestions to anyone and everything who would listen, and they'd just shrug me off and dismiss them. It was very frustrating for an earnest and positive-thinking young man.
What I reallise is what a lot of people have said here. You need to know who to talk to and how to tell them. You also need to realise that the vast majority of people are quite happy to continue with the status quo for an easy and quiet life, i.e. they "go with the flow", and are quite happy not to be challenging or to be challenged.
Armed with this insight I managed to persuade a manager to buy a new UNIX workstation. It took 18 months. However, that's what some managers are like.
I suggested many new safety-improving, mankey-saving and money-making ideas, but they were swept under the carpet.
I left for a more forward-looking employer.
I still have off-the-wall ideas, some of them original, but mostly just ideas for things I'd like to do. I don't try to waste them on the narrow minded any more and I don't get worked up about it. I have files where I write everything down, draw diagrams, do calculations, write code etc.
Employers, and people in general, have very little recpetiveness to change and new ideas. Those that do are few and far between.
The forward-thinking few are the ones who will excell.
The best advice I can give is to be calm, rational and business-like. Keep a note of your ideas. Always keep a look out for career opportunities with the more forward-thinking. Enjoy your ideas yourself. After all, they're yours, and if others are too slow to see their benefits, you can sit back smugly, smile and relax :-)
Perhaps they should just tap off an ant-eye matter stream from the warp core generator to create small force-fields where the buttons are supposed to be?
I'm not saying that all NASA's work has been in vain, but since Apollo, it's all been in the wrong direction.
NASA has singularly failed to make manned access to space safe, cheap and reliable.
I know what you mean, I was just making the point that it's a thriving scene nowadays with much more exposure. You're right about the Nu Metal stuff, there's a lot of safe, conformist, unchallenging commercial stuff there. I saw Maiden at Download in July for the first time. They ruled. At least Slayer are still on the go. I don't listen to music radio much. We used to have cable TV and had the Kerrang channel and Total Rock. They were OKish. I missed out on som much good music when I was a teenager because I used to have these "friends" who said that anything lighter than Metallica (pre-black album) was "gay", and to be caught with such music was a mortal sin. So I went and listened to some jazz...
How come I never got 3D glasses with The Outer Limits?
I'll check out Laundry. They sound cool!
Cheers.
No, clubs were a necessary evil when I was a student and in my early tweties to be with friends and meet people. Nowadays I enjoy a quiet country pub or a glass of wine in the house with my wife. Clubs are dreadful places.
As well, probably close to 50% of the club hits this year have been covers and remakes of the shite produced in the 80s... Corey Hart, Madonna, etc...
Pathetic isn't it?
the 80's are a time that should be forgotten, not rejoiced.
Quite. For a young man into rock music, they were dreadful times. Things got a bit better in the early '90s. Nowadays the kids are spoilt for choice with all the new metal bands. Even Metallica are going heavy again. I never was a country and western fan.
Here's hoping :-)
Did you used to have a ZX81 by any chance?
Then there's Primus, who are just plain weird. They're a cross between rock, funk and stuff like Pink Floyd and the Police.
Zwan are pretty cool too. There's loads of psychadelia in there mixed with T-Rex and New Order. If you like them, try Smashing Pumpkins (now defunct and a bit more rocky).
Tori Amos is a good song writer.
Oh I wish I'd been American. It sounds like you missed out on Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, Sonia and all the other Stock, Aitken and Waterman drivel in the late '80s and early '90s.
Yes, that's why they've done a heck of a lot of work on GNOME for Solaris themselves already, and continue to do so. Very little of what they have done has anything to do with Ximian.