Posts by Stoneshop

This is why DEC nearly went under, AIUI, and Compaq saved them.

"Save" is rather charitable. "Plundered" is more like it, as Compaq wanted DEC for its services and got the hardware side to go with it that it didn't know what to do with. Which in turn made Compaq a nice morsel for HP.

Also, the VAX9000 happened late in the 1980s; I was still with DEC FS and got sent to Galway for a month of training. Two years later Alpha was everywhere, along with the 6xxx and 7xxx as the biggest VAXen, and the few 9xxx that had been installed (about a dozen in the whole of NL) were about to be scrapped if they hadn't been already.

Compaq only came along after several years of Bob <spit> Palmer, close to Y2K.

Re: Public clusters?

Of course, there are cluster filesystems on Linux. These are typically aimed at wider area sharing - so have different tradeoffs - and do not (mostly) include a distributed lock manager (such things also exist separately as well, of course).

There are at least three different clustering models to use with Linux, and you'll have to pay your dues to Ken, Dennis and the ghost of Brian to help choose the right one for your situation.

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

Firstly, you have to realise this was before on-demand printing so even the logistics were impressive. Estimates of product sales determined initial print runs for manuals - and indeed the number of distribution tapes for the software itself. Inventory had to be warehoused. Update pages had to be distributed periodically to relevant customers.

When I started at DEC I was assigned as site engineer for DEC's Nijmegen (JGO) site[0]. Housed in a former Singer[1] plant, about half of it was repair and parts stock, the other half was documentation which was nearly all stock with maybe three or four VAXen running the inventory housekeeping (repair had a far bigger bunch of VAXen plus a few PDPs, but they were basically the network and parts hub for all of Northern Europe). During the years I was there repair got a separate building that was designed around cleanrooms, not cleanrooms sitting in a former and notsoclean warehouse. And I saw the documentation group installing a serious Kodak laser printer so that they could now do on-demand printing of manuals.

#201462

[0] the Philips, now NXP, chip bakery that looks like a DIL package was next door.

[1] Yes, the sewing machine company. They had a division that made papertape-controlled typewriters that could even do bits of arithmetic using a box full of relays and the guts of an actual mechanical calculator with solenoids pushing the buttons. This gave you a bit of business automation, in the 1950s.

the 11/780, 750 and 730 were all designed by different teams but didn't have the range of price/performance that could really justify three separate manufacturing lines and inventory.

Not when you consider the machines themselves, but if you add their operating environment you can see why a customer would buy an 11/750 or an 11/730 where they could not have justified an 11/78x.

11/78x: needs 3-phase power, drawing 3kW minimum, and is the size of a decent wardrobe[0][1]

11/750: half as high, half as wide, single phase power, you could run it from a wall socket provided you didn't have a toaster or a kettle on that circuit too, and a standard domestic aircon unit could manage the cooling. Storage still needed at least one extra cabinet.

11/730: standard-width 3ft high cab that had room for a disk unit as well and it didn't object to sitting in a corner of an office area (but defensive and offensive anti-cleaner options were never offered). The 11/725 was essentially a repackaged 11/730 explicitly meant to sit next to someone's desk, like the BA23 and BA123 packaged mVAXes appearing a little later.

[0] I know of someone who had an 11/780 in his bedroom, and built his bed on top of it. I suspect he didn't run it when we wanted to sleep.

[1] one time I was asked to gut a decommissioned 11/780 so that it could be turned into a bookcase for the Orange Wall.

Re: How clustering should be

Clustering started with CI interfaces, stubbornly stiff coax cables (four per system, two in, two out) and Star Couplers. Maximum cable length was 30m/100ft IIRC, so all supported systems (11/750 and up) basically had to be in the same computer room, or maybe ones on both sides of a corridor. LAVC allowed a bit more leeway, but that was primarily meant for workstations as a way to have them being served the storage from the big'uns down in the computer pen.

As various newer/faster interconnects appeared you could also cluster over DSSI, FDDI and SCSI, and for about a decade we had a cluster running over dedicated gbit Ethernet, with five nodes in three DCs 70km apart.

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

As an administrator?

I'm one. Although the systems are slated to be phased out, but that should have been over with six years ago already.

The main sticking point is that a lot of the programs that were running on them were written in Pascal, and the pool of competent developers with the right domain knowledge was getting rather dry. So stuff was rewritten in C on Linux, or turned into whatever it is that you feed into WebLogic or JBoss.

Oh well. Less than five years to retirement.

Re: And Ukraine might wish it could brick all Antonov aircraft used by Russia.

16k, against 18k+ for the An2, with the Beech Bonanza and two fighter planes in between

Re: DRM and theft prevention

Not that I know of, but if Ukraine thinks it can build or improve them using JD parts they'll probably just do so.

Crafty buggers, they are. Just look at the videos of octocopters dropping antitank grenades meant to be just thrown by hand (for which they 3D-printed tail fins) right on top of tanks and armoured vehicles, and in one case I saw right through the open sunroof of a 4WD.

And even helicopters will look like a tank if you have an ATGM and are Ukrainian enough.

Re: GPS & Automated Vehicles

Or you could take the pay to plant option

Russian bank and credit cards are blocked from making foreign payments.

Re: They can be completely bricked, sadly

I once did a job where we had to use a fairly large scissor lift, working height 10m/30ft. Movement (including driving[0]) was entirely controlled[1] from a box with a joystick and a couple of switches and indicator lights. Fully electrically wired. It too was GPS tracked, and while you can only drive it at a little over walking pace no-one is going to question a flatbed driver with some transport company's livery on the cab moving the lift onto the flatbed.

[0] Fun fact: where in a car your steering more or less self-centers when on a level road, so that when you let go of the steering wheel you end up going straight ahead again, steering a scissor lift requires that you actively have to center; tell the steering to make a turn and it will continue the turn until you use the joystick to find the 'straight ahead' steering position again. That ... takes some getting used to.

[1] Those machines have some controls on the engine panel, but it's the aforementioned box on the work platform which has the joystick. You can do a few things from the engine panel such as controlling the leveling jacks and raise/lower the platform so you can raise it to "out of reach level" when you leave for the night. For driving and obviously working at height the ignition key needs to be in the platform box, disabling the engine panel controls, but in case of an emergency there is a lever someone on the ground can pull, opening a valve to lower the platform. During the time we were working on that project there was the King's birthday, which means Amsterdam is even more filled with drunken yobbos that it is otherwise. Half a dozen of them had managed to activate a cherrypicker-type lift (not ours, but the same manufacturer), raised it and constantly blared the horn. Which is FSCKING LOUD. They refused to stop and get back down, and in the end the police had to call in the fire brigade to get a platform engine next to the louts and teargas them at height. Had we known about the problem (we happened to be a couple of streets over, even), we could have shown them the lever to pull.

Re: Wifi-- NEVER!

Cannot say the same for my coworkers who choose to use wifi.

The newest batch of our W10 work laptops doesn't even have an RJ45 port. Mentioning the lack of this essential bit of connectivity I got a load of waffle about security[0], and only after being able to get a word in sideways could I explain that due to the layout of the house, the location of the access point and the stuff between that AP and my room a wifi link would be outperformed by a 56k modem, and be more stable to boot. Which before now hadn't been a problem as everything in my room, including the previous work laptop, runs via wired gigabit. This was countered with the irrelevant (to me) matter that they just had 80 Ethernet dongles for the entire batch. "So now it's 79". But after some more grumbling from their end I got promised a dongle, which actually arrived two days later[1].

Several colleagues would rather also have one, but have failed to extract one from the grasp of the Office Automation dorks. In which case I would just buy one from wherever, and expense it.

[0] as if, and in the end the (encrypted) bits will pass through the same VDSL link anyway

[1] after the initial connection that pulled in an amazingly large number of updates, the Ethernet link on an USB3 port replicator I happened to have around started working, so the dongle I was sent is now idle. But if they ever find out and want it back they can go fsck themselves.

How much would China trust Russia's ability to pay them?

Russia has oil.

I don't doubt that China wouldn't be averse to being paid in kind.