Discussion Obsolete and Obsolescent: i286/386/486

[jnjnilson6]

Cheers.

Yes, I had omitted to mention, but I also ran Red Hat at the time, though it was out of curiosity rather than being put to serious use. My friend, who often called round to visit, was an IT professional and holds a doctorate in the subject always used to tell me, "For heavens sake, switch to Linux: as someone who has used UNIX in the past it will be right up your street"!

So, I was dabbling with Linux when AMD released their first 64 bit CPU. I grabbed one and one of the boards made for enthusiasts by the now long gone Abit manufacturer. I then, of course needed a 64 bit OS. I had heard good things about SUSE, and was particularly impressed by the documentation, so that became my OS of choice for the next decade.

Thanks for writing up!

Well, Fedora used to be really good, but they kinda messed it up. Debian is always very stable and Ubuntu is used as the mainstream Linux OS these days.

Windows NT and UNIX breathe the same air. NT was a huge step forward. Windows 95 and 98 were very cool, however Windows NT did bring the Windows OS to an entirely new level. Windows XP booted up on fast Pentium M laptops with Hard Drives for the same time Windows 11 boots up on fast SSDs today. Windows Vista and 7 had charm and beauty which got kind of lost in Win10 and 11; Windows 2000 and XP were very fast and lightweight, especially the former...

I remember how much 4 GB of RAM were in 2010. You could use Virtual Machines and multitask and play any game out there and it was plenty. Today, Windows 11 uses between 9-10 GB for me with nothing open but the drivers loaded and the few utilities that start on bootup.

Software is written by the masses and that's why it gets worse. The greatest software was conceived in single heads instead of thousands. It's like asking a hundred people to write out a great novel like 'The Great Gatsby,' in the end it would be a horrible mixture with neither brilliance, continuity, grace nor wisdom. The same thing is happening with Operating systems and software; people are writing software for money and that is the beginning of the end. And the few brilliant minds who shine out there are dimmed by the general monotony of the moneymakers and the high-paid position grabbers.

Thanks again for writing up. It seems you have a beautiful knowledge in the spheres.

 

[80251]

At my work we tasked an 80286 system to evaluating OS/2 Warp (the IBM OS), it was the first protected mode operating system for PCs and had certain BIOS requirements in order to run as well as an unheard of 8MiB to 16MiB of RAM (and this was when memory cost $45 a MiB), however the motherboard only supported some 640KiB of RAM when fully populated. Unfortunately, I was assigned to install 4 or 5 16-bit ISA RAM expansion cards in the AT so it would have the requisite memory. DIP switches had to be manually set on each card as to the amount of RAM installed and the beginning and ending physical addresses the RAM would occupy. This took forever and involved some trial-and-error because all the memory expansion cards were not of the same, exact type.

Interesting aside: the IBM AT was the first PC to utilize a switching PSU as opposed to a linear PSU. If you went with a IBM AT that didn't have a hard drive a large sandbar resistor was installed to provide the necessary minimum load on the +5V and +12V lines that the PSU required.

 

[Priscus]

At my work we tasked an 80286 system to evaluating OS/2 Warp (the IBM OS), it was the first protected mode operating system for PCs and had certain BIOS requirements in order to run as well as an unheard of 8MiB to 16MiB of RAM (and this was when memory cost $45 a MiB), however the motherboard only supported some 640KiB of RAM when fully populated. Unfortunately, I was assigned to install 4 or 5 16-bit ISA RAM expansion cards in the AT so it would have the requisite memory. DIP switches had to be manually set on each card as to the amount of RAM installed and the beginning and ending physical addresses the RAM would occupy. This took forever and involved some trial-and-error because all the memory expansion cards were not of the same, exact type.

Interesting aside: the IBM AT was the first PC to utilize a switching PSU as opposed to a linear PSU. If you went with a IBM AT that didn't have a hard drive a large sandbar resistor was installed to provide the necessary minimum load on the +5V and +12V lines that the PSU required.

I used to do that sort of thing back in the 8 bit (Z80/ 6502) days.

At work I had been provided with a CBM 8096. It provided three banks of 32MB, of which two at a time could be switched in to the 64MB address space. So I copied the idea onto my homebrew constructions: decoded a single memory address to yield an enable signal which activated a one byte buffer, and the content of this buffer then demultiplexed to get the range of chip enable signals to switch in the pages of memory desired. It did work flawlessly, provided you did not make coding errors in relation to paging. (All too easy to do.) I had for simplicity used static ram, which was more costly. So affordability was a limiting factor.

 

[Priscus]

Thanks for writing up!

Well, Fedora used to be really good, but they kinda messed it up. Debian is always very stable and Ubuntu is used as the mainstream Linux OS these days.

Windows NT and UNIX breathe the same air. NT was a huge step forward. Windows 95 and 98 were very cool, however Windows NT did bring the Windows OS to an entirely new level. Windows XP booted up on fast Pentium M laptops with Hard Drives for the same time Windows 11 boots up on fast SSDs today. Windows Vista and 7 had charm and beauty which got kind of lost in Win10 and 11; Windows 2000 and XP were very fast and lightweight, especially the former...

I remember how much 4 GB of RAM were in 2010. You could use Virtual Machines and multitask and play any game out there and it was plenty. Today, Windows 11 uses between 9-10 GB for me with nothing open but the drivers loaded and the few utilities that start on bootup.

Software is written by the masses and that's why it gets worse. The greatest software was conceived in single heads instead of thousands. It's like asking a hundred people to write out a great novel like 'The Great Gatsby,' in the end it would be a horrible mixture with neither brilliance, continuity, grace nor wisdom. The same thing is happening with Operating systems and software; people are writing software for money and that is the beginning of the end. And the few brilliant minds who shine out there are dimmed by the general monotony of the moneymakers and the high-paid position grabbers.

Thanks again for writing up. It seems you have a beautiful knowledge in the spheres.

Once again, thanks for your comments. I was particularly interested in comments relating to UNIX and Linux from times past.

I was never proficient in UNIX, it had been a case of having to use it. My undergraduate project involved some heavy and very voluminous multiple regression analysis and Bayesian statistics.

Ended up needing to apply a DEC PDP12 mini computer to the analysis, which was my introduction to UNIX. I remember I had found UNIX without a GUI rather intimidating, so when My friend told me to switch to Linux because I had been a UNIX user, I took some time to accede to the suggestion.

When finally I did, I recall that I was quite impressed with SUSE, but do not recall why I had decided to move on from there, nor for that matter do I recall why I moved from Red Hat: maybe it is because SUSE 64 bit OS was getting all the attention at the time.

I had considered Ubuntu, but instead, I opted for the forked from Ubuntu, Linux Mint: I am lazy, so the included A/V codecs, that it found proprietary drivers for my Nvidia graphics cards, and it taking care of updating, sold it to me. I keep intending to try LMDE, the option forked directly from Debian and missing out the Ubuntu stage, but have not got round to so doing.

I do however use a number of Distros. I use AV Linux as it includes by default most of what I need for music and video, and I do like live Knoppix for fault finding, and Puppy or DSL for getting old hardware running!

But, I guess you are a fan , as you have chosen Tux as your screen pic. You have mentioned Red Hat and Ubuntu. What is your current distro of choice, and what journey have you encountered to get there?

(Edit)
PS. Or was it the PDP 11? I have managed to confuse myself. It was a long time ago!

Whichever, it was not the best machine for such a job, The Uni had a Cyber 72 mainframe, which I had also used, but they would only let me submit batch jobs, for which I used a statistical software package, but I needed interactive use, so it was the departmental PDP machines.

 

[80251]

@Priscus The PDP-11 those were the glory days of DEC. I still remember DEC's clunky "word processing" program MASS-11. PCs put a quick end to that DEC venture.
Did you ever use DEC's Rainbow? We had one at my work, it even had an OCR attached (the only one in the entire hospital) yet still no one ever used it.

 

[80251]

We had one (obsolete and unused) IBM AT system at my work that had a bizarre configuration of DIP memory: the DIP memory was stacked and soldered. I was told it was used to double the amount of memory that could be installed on the motherboard. I'm guessing the high order address bits were somehow used as chip selects for the stacked DIP memory chips. I was also told it was an old IBM mainframe trick (because they used DIP memory as well at some point).

 

[Priscus]

@Priscus The PDP-11 those were the glory days of DEC. I still remember DEC's clunky "word processing" program MASS-11. PCs put a quick end to that DEC venture.
Did you ever use DEC's Rainbow? We had one at my work, it even had an OCR attached (the only one in the entire hospital) yet still no one ever used it.

Hi.

Oddly enough, most of my working life was in a hospital were only myself, apparently, had the need to be using a computer until PCs became commonplace.

I only ever used the PDP, (probably both 11 and 12) for the statistical data analysis concerned with my project. I was interested in 'expert systems', though at the time that was a name which I had not yet encountered, I was trying to produce mathematical models of psychiatric diagnostic decision making.

So I had the need to revisit the multiple regression outcomes with revised weightings: I guess what more sophisticated analyses would allocate to machine learning. So I had to shift my work from the powerful CDC Cyber 72, to the department's PDP machines.

I have to admit that the experience did for a while put me off computers. I sat there in the evening, being the time they allowed me the interactive use, plonking away entering data, whilst seeing through the window, my contemporaries on their way to the bar. C' est la vie.

 

[80251]

@Priscus
Whatever happened to Cray supercomputers? I imagine they must be dead, just like DEC. I seem to remember IBM used to be developing their Power architecture, but I think they even gave up on that. I don't know what IBM does now. They sold off their PC, laptop and hard drive divisions.

Could you actually use external switches to set the values in the registers of the PDP-11? I never saw a PDP-11 myself, our shop was all Vaxes by them.

Your PDP-11 in all its glory:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...he-most-influential-minicomputer-of-all-time/

I never realized the PDP-11 was instrumental in the creation of both UNIX and C!