The University of Hawaii had a very similar problem in the 1970's... that's why they invented "Ethernet". Although it worked even better when shoved over wires and commercialized, the original Ethernet ran "through the ether" over RF links between islands.
(Disclaimer: I never worked with the original, nor have I had any significant contact with UofH -- I just remember the story.)
The concept of a "ram-disk" or "solid state disk" dates back to at least the late 1970's. There was a company that would buy "reject" memory chips from the various manufacturers, and re-test them. A lot of them would have either the "bottom" half working, or the "top" half working. This company (sorry, I don't recall the name) would put these half-working chips into special boards that would only use the good half, and these, in turn, were shoved into "solid state disk drives" (the idea was to get as much speed as possible -- back when 6.0 MHz was a "fast" CPU). Remember, too, that disk drives were the size of a washing machine back then.
There was a report, I believe yesterday, on BBS World Service (though might have been on an NPR show) saying that Sweden was working on 100% broadband service, making the top four Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (I may have that order off a bit) with the U.S. lagging behind in fifth place.
In general I agree. Although "by day" I'm a software engineer, I have a reputation for having something of a "reverse Midas touch" for new software -- I tend to find bugs in anything I touch. Occasionally something in OSS will pique my interest enough to download the binaries, and give it a whirl, and then give the developers some (hopefully) constructive feedback based on having been tinkering with computers since just after Neil Armstrong made "one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind". However, I definitely don't have any spare time to waste on having to compile source code, and so won't fiddle with something that's not available as a binary. (The installation package is, obviously, one of the first places to find bugs!:-)
A bit of sadness on the end of an era... the first VAX that I used was an 11/780 under VMS 2.something. I'd just gotten out of college where we had Version 6 of Unix (back in the days when you'd get Unix from Bell Labs) running on a PDP 11/34.
The VAXen (at least the "big box" versions) were one of the few successful machines to have "writable control store" -- when I ended up being system manager some years later for an 11/730, it meant that I had to keep the tape with the "standard" instruction set in the machine whenever I wasn't using that weird little drive for something else -- otherwise the machine couldn't reboot after a power failure.
My main impressions where that VMS Ver. 2.x was quite a bit behind Unix. However, it kept improving while the basic Unix was more-or-less stagnating, so that by VMS Ver. 5.2 it was a much better OS than Unix. However, two things have led to success for Unix: much wider distribution on many more platforms (especially with Linux), and NFS being "seamless".
Either system, however, was far superior to the others that I used in the same time period (e.g., IBM's VM/360 -- yeuch).
By far the biggest hole in all Unix file systems is that of "versioning" -- this was a very powerful tool when used properly under VMS. The EDT editor also had a nifty "journaling" system where it recorded every keystroke in a file so if something when wrong (e.g., the wall outlet crashed) you could recover all but the last few keystrokes. Real fun to watch!:-)
One memory I won't miss from the early VMS days (it was fixed later) was having to program around bugs in the debugger!
One other point of trivia: In the last years that I worked much on a VAX, I frequently had to do things that I knew would take it an hour or so to do -- so I would go for a walk while I waited. Unfortunately, the newer machines are much faster, and we have "distributed builds", so I can barely go for a cup of coffee. Has had a BIG negative impact on my health.:-(
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The University of Hawaii had a very similar problem in the 1970's... that's why they invented "Ethernet". Although it worked even better when shoved over wires and commercialized, the original Ethernet ran "through the ether" over RF links between islands.
(Disclaimer: I never worked with the original, nor have I had any significant contact with UofH -- I just remember the story.)
The concept of a "ram-disk" or "solid state disk" dates back to at least the late 1970's. There was a company that would buy "reject" memory chips from the various manufacturers, and re-test them. A lot of them would have either the "bottom" half working, or the "top" half working. This company (sorry, I don't recall the name) would put these half-working chips into special boards that would only use the good half, and these, in turn, were shoved into "solid state disk drives" (the idea was to get as much speed as possible -- back when 6.0 MHz was a "fast" CPU). Remember, too, that disk drives were the size of a washing machine back then.
There was a report, I believe yesterday, on BBS World Service (though might have been on an NPR show) saying that Sweden was working on 100% broadband service, making the top four Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (I may have that order off a bit) with the U.S. lagging behind in fifth place.
In general I agree. Although "by day" I'm a software engineer, I have a reputation for having something of a "reverse Midas touch" for new software -- I tend to find bugs in anything I touch. Occasionally something in OSS will pique my interest enough to download the binaries, and give it a whirl, and then give the developers some (hopefully) constructive feedback based on having been tinkering with computers since just after Neil Armstrong made "one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind". However, I definitely don't have any spare time to waste on having to compile source code, and so won't fiddle with something that's not available as a binary. (The installation package is, obviously, one of the first places to find bugs! :-)
A bit of sadness on the end of an era... the first VAX that I used was an 11/780 under VMS 2.something. I'd just gotten out of college where we had Version 6 of Unix (back in the days when you'd get Unix from Bell Labs) running on a PDP 11/34.
:-)
:-(
The VAXen (at least the "big box" versions) were one of the few successful machines to have "writable control store" -- when I ended up being system manager some years later for an 11/730, it meant that I had to keep the tape with the "standard" instruction set in the machine whenever I wasn't using that weird little drive for something else -- otherwise the machine couldn't reboot after a power failure.
My main impressions where that VMS Ver. 2.x was quite a bit behind Unix. However, it kept improving while the basic Unix was more-or-less stagnating, so that by VMS Ver. 5.2 it was a much better OS than Unix. However, two things have led to success for Unix: much wider distribution on many more platforms (especially with Linux), and NFS being "seamless".
Either system, however, was far superior to the others that I used in the same time period (e.g., IBM's VM/360 -- yeuch).
By far the biggest hole in all Unix file systems is that of "versioning" -- this was a very powerful tool when used properly under VMS. The EDT editor also had a nifty "journaling" system where it recorded every keystroke in a file so if something when wrong (e.g., the wall outlet crashed) you could recover all but the last few keystrokes. Real fun to watch!
One memory I won't miss from the early VMS days (it was fixed later) was having to program around bugs in the debugger!
One other point of trivia: In the last years that I worked much on a VAX, I frequently had to do things that I knew would take it an hour or so to do -- so I would go for a walk while I waited. Unfortunately, the newer machines are much faster, and we have "distributed builds", so I can barely go for a cup of coffee. Has had a BIG negative impact on my health.