Sad day for Intel and America...

[Ricketty C]

On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 2:32:56 AM UTC-4, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 22:35:23 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Ricketty C
gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
3734fe3a-d18c-4b1a-a260-5fe2da3b6cf2o@googlegroups.com>:

It\'s funny that you think Hogan\'s Heros and Stalag 13 is anything like rewriting history. That\'s a real laugh. You do know
it\'s a comedy based on truly absurd characters, right?

It is what the UK citizens are fed over and over again and they believe it.


bunch of ranting drivel snipped

For lack of arguments you refer to insults.
Better fix your opensource thingy!

Really? Did you intend for any of that to be other than for entertainment purposes only?

Bill is right, it wasn\'t ranting. It was just a bunch of silliness. No insult intended. Just the facts, mam.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:14:25 -0700 (PDT)) it happened
pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote in
<5e755238-2da6-4dfd-a662-22e24e2cbeaco@googlegroups.com>:

Yes, but that was year later, the first IBM PC used the 8088, the AT used
the 286 and there was already an existing OS and user software on X86
that was not going to run on a 68X anything.

I\'m from then, I remember. But that\'s a far cry from the Flying Dutchman\'s claim that there was nothing better at the time.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

LOL FLying Dutchman ;-)
Anyways, \'better\' also involves things like available OS and software portability.
Complete systems, running MS Windows.
As far as the company concerned 68000 did not even exist.
I remember we did discuss switching to Unix back then, but did not happen.
Much of the x86 code written there was programmed in asm.
It was not until I started doing embedded projects in what was it 8051? asm
that boss ordered everybody to learn C.

 

[Cydrome Leader]

Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

 

[Cydrome Leader]

Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:

Am 29.07.20 um 17:58 schrieb Whoey Louie:
On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 4:01:48 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 7/28/2020 9:43 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 20:13:54 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 7/28/2020 7:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
trader4@optonline.net> wrote:


https://theprint.in/world/intel-corps-plan-to-outsource-manufacturing-is-the-end-of-an-era-in-us-tech/467936/


Intel\'s other problem is that x86 is ancient and buggy, and biggies
like Apple and Google can roll their own Arm-based chips and come out
ahead on price and performance.



They tried making an x86 low-power derivative to compete with the ARM
market segment at one point, it was called Atom and it kinda sucked

Intel\'s value has always been superb lithography cranking out bad
architectures, and now they don\'t have the lithography.




I think a solid argument could be made that x86 has been a kludgy dog
since about 1988. Or at least since the last major opportunity they had
to not double down on it, on the Pentium.

It did leave a lot of competing architectures in the dust
performance-wise but it\'s not inherently elegant like the Shinkansen
bullet-train or anything, it\'s like that Budd RDC they mounted jet
engines to, as an engineering analogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saG-QQSiG4I

So it left a lot of competing architectures in the dust performance wise,
it maintained code compatibility with the huge X86 base, it was enormously
successful, but it was a \"kludgy dog\" because it was not inherently elegant. Wow. And IDK how you make something inherently elegant, whatever that even
means, when you have to maintain the existing X86 architecture.

The 8086 was not even really ugly once you had grogged that the
segment registers were no registers but the MMU. It was a one-address
machine that was easy to maintain and was just twice the number of
transistors of the Z80 (16000 vs 8000). The 68K had 4 times the number
of transistors of the 8086, and they had a shitty yield. It was on the
border of impossible. At that time, Intel\'s slogan was \"Intel delivers\"
an that got them the IBM design win. IBM took what existed _really_.

Moto kept adding features in the style \"double memory indirect +
scale + bla\" that nobody needed and finally it was easy to write an
instruction that might never end, with segmentation violations,
page faults and other exceptions all in a single instruction and
maybe with multiple memory accesses. That was the time when they
knew they could no longer support this.

Intel never succumbed to this featurism. They removed the
real drawback, and that was the small memory space and
concentrated on computation power.

Oh-so-wonderful-and-so-much-better Intel roadkills:
68K
Fairchild Clipper
MicroVAX

How was a scaled down and overly wimpy minicomputer better than anything
from intel? I call bullshit on this as even competing with intel for
anything but turning electricity into heat.

> DEC Alpha

Alphas were terrible. The only thing slow enough and power hungry enough
to replace an Alpha was Itanium. I definitely laughed out loud when I saw
racks of Itanium servers rolling into a datacenter for an \"upgrade\" of old
Alpha servers.

NS 16032 / 32032
Western 32k (?)
z8000/ z80000 (made AMD leave & then crawl back)
HP Snakes
sparc
MIPS ( I liked that one, maybe still Zombie state)

Last I looked you can still license MIPS for embedded systems, not sure if
anybody does though. I think the chinese tried something with MIPS a the
basis for one of their processors, but you know they would have skipped
the license part.

TI99K
Transputer (I had quite a T800 cluster then)
Intel 432 (wonderful machine, just too slow to implement
with the cache technology of the day)
Intel 860 (really HP\'s idea when the snakes ran out of steam)

It seems, Intel\'s X86 decisions were better than average.

Today, X86 is just a multiple RISC with hundreds of renaming registers
and a 860 style instruction bundle decoder that smells like X86.
You won\'t find an EAX in it.

And this legion of ARMs are mostly simplistic CPUs. The few
tries with speculative execution had their share of problems
too.

Gerhard

 

[Pimpom]

On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:

Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for
films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because
they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than
contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came
with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do
was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

 

[Gerhard Hoffmann]

Am 01.08.20 um 08:40 schrieb Cydrome Leader:

Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:

Fairchild Clipper

A friend of mine was more than puzzled when he noted that
the speed of his disk driver varied from really fast to
unusable when he shifted the location of the program a few bytes,
and differently depending on the machine. It turned out
that they had simply lasered away the defective cache lines. =8()

MicroVAX

How was a scaled down and overly wimpy minicomputer better than anything
from intel? I call bullshit on this as even competing with intel for
anything but turning electricity into heat.

The point was that nothing turned out to be really better.
But I must admit that it was fun to do chip designs all alone
in your room on it. Everything was in its place.

MIPS ( I liked that one, maybe still Zombie state)

Last I looked you can still license MIPS for embedded systems, not sure if
anybody does though. I think the chinese tried something with MIPS a the
basis for one of their processors, but you know they would have skipped
the license part.

The last MIPS 4000 I have personally seen / used was the measurement
processor in a Verigy 93000 wafer tester data aquisition chip.
I think MIPS is open source now, but could be wrong.
Probably RISCV eats its lunch.

Cheers, Gerhard

 

[Les Cargill]

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:14:25 -0700 (PDT), pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, but that was year later, the first IBM PC used the 8088, the AT used
the 286 and there was already an existing OS and user software on X86
that was not going to run on a 68X anything.

I\'m from then, I remember. But that\'s a far cry from the Flying Dutchman\'s claim that there was nothing better at the time.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I had an LSI-11 based timeshare system, well into the PC-XT era. It
would timeshare eight users, ran multiple languages including
assembly, actually ran multiple OSs, had absolute memory management
and protection, had a bulletproof file system, and ran solid for
months between ac power failures.

We used the Macro-11 assembler as the assembler for other micros, just
with defining macros. The guy who wrote Macro-11 said \"it\'s not an
assembler, it\'s a language processor.\"

There was nothing a user could do to crash it.

A Google search says they were on the order of $20,000 USD. That
wouldn\'t fly.

--
Les Cargill

 

[Les Cargill]

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 08:58:26 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
trader4@optonline.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 4:01:48 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 7/28/2020 9:43 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 20:13:54 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net
wrote:

On 7/28/2020 7:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
trader4@optonline.net> wrote:


https://theprint.in/world/intel-corps-plan-to-outsource-manufacturing-is-the-end-of-an-era-in-us-tech/467936/

\"Intel Corp’s plan to outsource manufacturing is the end of an era in US
tech

When most other US chip companies shut or sold domestic
plants years ago, Intel held out, a strategy that is now
in tatters, with the company’s factories struggling to
keep up.\"

CEO Bob Swan made the stunning announcement on Friday,
during an earnings call. It sent Intel down 16%, AMD up
16%. Bottom line, Intel first screwed 10nm, they are
only now recovering and catching up on that. Meanwhile
Swan announced that 7nm is all screwed up, yields are
terrible, it has slipped another 6 months on top of at
least six months earlier. Intel won\'t be in production
until 2022/23. MEanwhile AMC is producing 7nm via TSMC
right now. By the time Intel is on 7nm, TSMC will be on
3 nm. In short, Intel has gone from being a node ahead to
a node behind. And Swan says the answer is Intel is
considering outsourcing production to other companies!

I remember discussing this here a couple years ago,
warning that this is what happens when you let
accountants take over high tech companies. I remember the
usual suspects here arguing it was no big deal, it\'s
just \"managing\". Well, the idiot bean counter from Ebay
that somehow would up running Intel sure has screwed this
up really badly. It\'s unlikely Intel will ever recover.
And it validates AMD being apparently right and early to
get out of fabs years ago and Apple choosing to ditch
Intel. It\'s a sad day for the future of high tech in
America.



Intel screwed up the transition to EUV somehow. I think the
problem was mostly technical.

That said, Intel\'s management seems to be very rigid.

Intel\'s other problem is that x86 is ancient and buggy, and
biggies like Apple and Google can roll their own Arm-based
chips and come out ahead on price and performance.

I think Samsung is going to drop $1e10 or something amazing
on a new EUV-based fab too.


They tried making an x86 low-power derivative to compete with
the ARM market segment at one point, it was called Atom and
it kinda sucked

Intel\'s value has always been superb lithography cranking out
bad architectures, and now they don\'t have the lithography.




I think a solid argument could be made that x86 has been a kludgy
dog since about 1988. Or at least since the last major
opportunity they had to not double down on it, on the Pentium.

It did leave a lot of competing architectures in the dust
performance-wise but it\'s not inherently elegant like the
Shinkansen bullet-train or anything, it\'s like that Budd RDC they
mounted jet engines to, as an engineering analogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saG-QQSiG4I

So it left a lot of competing architectures in the dust performance
wise, it maintained code compatibility with the huge X86 base, it
was enormously successful, but it was a \"kludgy dog\" because it was
not inherently elegant. Wow. And IDK how you make something
inherently elegant, whatever that even means, when you have to
maintain the existing X86 architecture.

The biggest markets for CPUs are cell phones and embedded gadgets,
and they don\'t use X86. Intel blew it in both. The big market for
crunching is in server farms, and they are drifting away from x86.

I only saw approximately-Intel instruction set stuff in embedded for
a very short time in the 1990s. Ignoring the 8051, of course. They
vanishingly close to never had a foothold. The trouble with Intel
was power consumption and size more than cost.

Even the Intel ISA stuff was not for an Intel chip. Mainly NEC V25,
which had bank switching. But it was all a whole lot cheaper and smaller
than the 68K we moved from.

Computing is just too cheap nowadays to support Intel\'s
premium-price business model.

I built a big ole desktop this year for far less than I\'d have paid
for an iPhone. This being said, right about the time I built it,
AMD started making real inroads.

Intel bought Altera to defend its server market, to add hardware
boost to the clumsy x86. I wonder how that is working out.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313208-weve-never-seen-intel-struggle-like-this

Sounds complex.

Intel may well have already served its purpose. I have no idea how
they\'ll manage the logistics of offshore fab. Massive risk.



--
Les Cargill

 

[server]

On Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 10:15:47 AM UTC-7, Les Cargill wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 08:58:26 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
trader4@optonline.net> wrote:

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 4:01:48 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:
On 7/28/2020 9:43 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 20:13:54 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net
wrote:

On 7/28/2020 7:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
trader4@optonline.net> wrote:


https://theprint.in/world/intel-corps-plan-to-outsource-manufacturing-is-the-end-of-an-era-in-us-tech/467936/




\"Intel Corp’s plan to outsource manufacturing is the end of an era in US
tech
When most other US chip companies shut or sold domestic
plants years ago, Intel held out, a strategy that is now
in tatters, with the company’s factories struggling to
keep up.\"

CEO Bob Swan made the stunning announcement on Friday,
during an earnings call. It sent Intel down 16%, AMD up
16%. Bottom line, Intel first screwed 10nm, they are
only now recovering and catching up on that. Meanwhile
Swan announced that 7nm is all screwed up, yields are
terrible, it has slipped another 6 months on top of at
least six months earlier. Intel won\'t be in production
until 2022/23. MEanwhile AMC is producing 7nm via TSMC
right now. By the time Intel is on 7nm, TSMC will be on
3 nm. In short, Intel has gone from being a node ahead to
a node behind. And Swan says the answer is Intel is
considering outsourcing production to other companies!

I remember discussing this here a couple years ago,
warning that this is what happens when you let
accountants take over high tech companies. I remember the
usual suspects here arguing it was no big deal, it\'s
just \"managing\". Well, the idiot bean counter from Ebay
that somehow would up running Intel sure has screwed this
up really badly. It\'s unlikely Intel will ever recover.
And it validates AMD being apparently right and early to
get out of fabs years ago and Apple choosing to ditch
Intel. It\'s a sad day for the future of high tech in
America.



Intel screwed up the transition to EUV somehow. I think the
problem was mostly technical.

That said, Intel\'s management seems to be very rigid.

Intel\'s other problem is that x86 is ancient and buggy, and
biggies like Apple and Google can roll their own Arm-based
chips and come out ahead on price and performance.

I think Samsung is going to drop $1e10 or something amazing
on a new EUV-based fab too.


They tried making an x86 low-power derivative to compete with
the ARM market segment at one point, it was called Atom and
it kinda sucked

Intel\'s value has always been superb lithography cranking out
bad architectures, and now they don\'t have the lithography.




I think a solid argument could be made that x86 has been a kludgy
dog since about 1988. Or at least since the last major
opportunity they had to not double down on it, on the Pentium.

It did leave a lot of competing architectures in the dust
performance-wise but it\'s not inherently elegant like the
Shinkansen bullet-train or anything, it\'s like that Budd RDC they
mounted jet engines to, as an engineering analogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saG-QQSiG4I

So it left a lot of competing architectures in the dust performance
wise, it maintained code compatibility with the huge X86 base, it
was enormously successful, but it was a \"kludgy dog\" because it was
not inherently elegant. Wow. And IDK how you make something
inherently elegant, whatever that even means, when you have to
maintain the existing X86 architecture.

The biggest markets for CPUs are cell phones and embedded gadgets,
and they don\'t use X86. Intel blew it in both. The big market for
crunching is in server farms, and they are drifting away from x86.


I only saw approximately-Intel instruction set stuff in embedded for
a very short time in the 1990s. Ignoring the 8051, of course. They
vanishingly close to never had a foothold. The trouble with Intel
was power consumption and size more than cost.

Even the Intel ISA stuff was not for an Intel chip. Mainly NEC V25,
which had bank switching. But it was all a whole lot cheaper and smaller
than the 68K we moved from.

Computing is just too cheap nowadays to support Intel\'s
premium-price business model.


I built a big ole desktop this year for far less than I\'d have paid
for an iPhone. This being said, right about the time I built it,
AMD started making real inroads.

Intel bought Altera to defend its server market, to add hardware
boost to the clumsy x86. I wonder how that is working out.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313208-weve-never-seen-intel-struggle-like-this

Sounds complex.




Intel may well have already served its purpose. I have no idea how
they\'ll manage the logistics of offshore fab. Massive risk.

Intel will likely order chips from TSMC in AZ,USA. Offshore fab for TSMC, less risk for Intel.

 

[server]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2020 12:05:10 -0500, Les Cargill <lcargil99@gmail.com>
wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:14:25 -0700 (PDT), pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, but that was year later, the first IBM PC used the 8088, the AT used
the 286 and there was already an existing OS and user software on X86
that was not going to run on a 68X anything.

I\'m from then, I remember. But that\'s a far cry from the Flying Dutchman\'s claim that there was nothing better at the time.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I had an LSI-11 based timeshare system, well into the PC-XT era. It
would timeshare eight users, ran multiple languages including
assembly, actually ran multiple OSs, had absolute memory management
and protection, had a bulletproof file system, and ran solid for
months between ac power failures.

We used the Macro-11 assembler as the assembler for other micros, just
with defining macros. The guy who wrote Macro-11 said \"it\'s not an
assembler, it\'s a language processor.\"

There was nothing a user could do to crash it.





A Google search says they were on the order of $20,000 USD. That
wouldn\'t fly.

Fly?

I bought the system used from Scripps in San Diego, and drove it up
the coast on US1, in a u-haul truck. Beautiful drive.

I think it cost me $8K, which was cheaper than eight toy PCs.

My point was that there were really good, reliable, crash-free,
bug-free multitasking OSs around, but we got Microsoft and Intel
garbage, and it has cost us big.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[server]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2020 12:05:10 -0500, Les Cargill <lcargil99@gmail.com>
wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:14:25 -0700 (PDT), pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, but that was year later, the first IBM PC used the 8088, the AT used
the 286 and there was already an existing OS and user software on X86
that was not going to run on a 68X anything.

I\'m from then, I remember. But that\'s a far cry from the Flying Dutchman\'s claim that there was nothing better at the time.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

I had an LSI-11 based timeshare system, well into the PC-XT era. It
would timeshare eight users, ran multiple languages including
assembly, actually ran multiple OSs, had absolute memory management
and protection, had a bulletproof file system, and ran solid for
months between ac power failures.

Sounds like a PDP-11/23 with 256 or 512 KiB of memory, two RL02 disk
drives (2x10 MB), dual floppy, 2 x 4 line serial card etc.

We used the Macro-11 assembler as the assembler for other micros, just
with defining macros. The guy who wrote Macro-11 said \"it\'s not an
assembler, it\'s a language processor.\"

There was nothing a user could do to crash it.





A Google search says they were on the order of $20,000 USD. That
wouldn\'t fly.

Which configuration and which year ?

If the system supported 8 users that is $2500 / user.

Many OEM companies (such as Plessey) made their computer systems using
DEC KDF-11 (PDP-11/23) or later KDJ-11 (PDP-11/73) CPU cards with own
memory cards and disk drives for much less,

 

[Cydrome Leader]

Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs.
Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the dailies
on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all power
amiga.

they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than

NASA isn\'t what people look upto for computing done right.

contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple resolutions at
once crap. It\'s gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn\'t a solution
to a real problem.

> with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad decoder too?

> was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

Sure, how big was that collection?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you could
connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can\'t let go of the 47 minutes
amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody ever
needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move
on. Not sure why they\'re all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their heyday
was.

amigas were shitty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that
foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project. The
NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn\'t dead-ended
trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple\'s
osx. I\'m not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious
than an amiga.

 

[Cydrome Leader]

Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:

Am 01.08.20 um 08:40 schrieb Cydrome Leader:
Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:

Fairchild Clipper

A friend of mine was more than puzzled when he noted that
the speed of his disk driver varied from really fast to
unusable when he shifted the location of the program a few bytes,
and differently depending on the machine. It turned out
that they had simply lasered away the defective cache lines. =8()

MicroVAX

How was a scaled down and overly wimpy minicomputer better than anything
from intel? I call bullshit on this as even competing with intel for
anything but turning electricity into heat.

The point was that nothing turned out to be really better.
But I must admit that it was fun to do chip designs all alone
in your room on it. Everything was in its place.

It\'s still a weird comparison. Intel doens\'t make computers, and the uVAX
isn\'t an attempt at a new general purpose CPU.

MIPS ( I liked that one, maybe still Zombie state)

Last I looked you can still license MIPS for embedded systems, not sure if
anybody does though. I think the chinese tried something with MIPS a the
basis for one of their processors, but you know they would have skipped
the license part.

The last MIPS 4000 I have personally seen / used was the measurement
processor in a Verigy 93000 wafer tester data aquisition chip.
I think MIPS is open source now, but could be wrong.
Probably RISCV eats its lunch.

Cheers, Gerhard

I think I touched a R4400 CPU once, but again, they stopped with making
giant CPUs and it\'s all licensing for embedded systems these days. There
was the weird period of time when Windows NT 4 could run on Intel, MIPS
RISC, Dec Alpha and even IBM\'s PowerPC of all things. Even Alpha servers
with unix had some weird Microsoft code in them that came up at boot time.
Not sure what the love between DEC and Microsoft was.

I still wonder how \"support\" on a NT 4.0 running on a Groupe Bull badged
RS/6000 server would have worked out for a customer.

 

[Pimpom]

On 8/2/2020 3:01 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:

Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs.
Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the dailies
on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all power
amiga.

they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than

NASA isn\'t what people look upto for computing done right.

contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple resolutions at
once crap. It\'s gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn\'t a solution
to a real problem.

with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad decoder too?

was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

Sure, how big was that collection?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you could
connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can\'t let go of the 47 minutes
amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody ever
needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move
on. Not sure why they\'re all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their heyday
was.

amigas were shitty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that
foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project. The
NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn\'t dead-ended
trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple\'s
osx. I\'m not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious
than an amiga.

As I said, you\'re funny.
Did I say that I\'m using an Amiga now? Did I say that a
30-year-old Amiga is better in every way than a modern computer?

Useless features? Then why did Wintels struggle for so long to
keep up with other more efficient systems that came built-in with
those features? Why does it have to use brute force to do what
other systems could do with a quarter of the hardware resources?

Let me guess: You chose the Wintel system early on and realised
that it\'s a bloated inefficient one but refused to admit it. Is
that why you\'re so antagonistic towards Amigas?

I\'m using Windows now, as do the vast majority of PC users
worldwide. The difference between you and other, more discerning
users is that most techno-savvy users know what a pile of bloat
it is.

 

[server]

On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 09:49:15 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
<presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:

Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:
Am 01.08.20 um 08:40 schrieb Cydrome Leader:
Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de> wrote:

Fairchild Clipper

A friend of mine was more than puzzled when he noted that
the speed of his disk driver varied from really fast to
unusable when he shifted the location of the program a few bytes,
and differently depending on the machine. It turned out
that they had simply lasered away the defective cache lines. =8()

MicroVAX

How was a scaled down and overly wimpy minicomputer better than anything
from intel? I call bullshit on this as even competing with intel for
anything but turning electricity into heat.

The point was that nothing turned out to be really better.
But I must admit that it was fun to do chip designs all alone
in your room on it. Everything was in its place.

It\'s still a weird comparison. Intel doens\'t make computers, and the uVAX
isn\'t an attempt at a new general purpose CPU.

MIPS ( I liked that one, maybe still Zombie state)

Last I looked you can still license MIPS for embedded systems, not sure if
anybody does though. I think the chinese tried something with MIPS a the
basis for one of their processors, but you know they would have skipped
the license part.

The last MIPS 4000 I have personally seen / used was the measurement
processor in a Verigy 93000 wafer tester data aquisition chip.
I think MIPS is open source now, but could be wrong.
Probably RISCV eats its lunch.

Cheers, Gerhard

I think I touched a R4400 CPU once, but again, they stopped with making
giant CPUs and it\'s all licensing for embedded systems these days. There
was the weird period of time when Windows NT 4 could run on Intel, MIPS
RISC, Dec Alpha and even IBM\'s PowerPC of all things. Even Alpha servers
with unix had some weird Microsoft code in them that came up at boot time.

Sounds like some BIOS code for bootup.

Sure the FX!32 software emulator executed x86 code with Alpha
instructions after translating in place a code snippet during first
execution. Similar to Transmeta CPUs,

>Not sure what the love between DEC and Microsoft was.

Microsoft hired VAX/VMS architect Dave Cutler. The Windows NT 3 (and
NT 3.51) internals are very similar to VMS corresponding structures.
Unfortunately much of this healthy architecture was lost when Win 3
and Win95 features had to be included,

I still wonder how \"support\" on a NT 4.0 running on a Groupe Bull badged
RS/6000 server would have worked out for a customer.

 

[server]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
<trader4@optonline.net> wrote:

https://theprint.in/world/intel-corps-plan-to-outsource-manufacturing-is-the-end-of-an-era-in-us-tech/467936/


\"Intel Corp’s plan to outsource manufacturing is the end of an era in US tech
When most other US chip companies shut or sold domestic plants years ago, Intel held out, a strategy that is now in tatters, with the company’s factories struggling to keep up.\"

One of the things that has advanced civilization, especially in Europe
and moreso in the USA, is creative destruction. Giant trends and
industries get mature and are blown away by something new, probably
invented by a couple of college dropouts.

It\'s past time for the junk from Microsoft and Intel to fade into
history, with DEC and Kodak and the Bell System. We can do better.

Risc-V sounds promising. A description of a CPU should be free, and
tucking one into the corner of a chip should be almost free.

CEO Bob Swan made the stunning announcement on Friday, during an earnings
call. It sent Intel down 16%, AMD up 16%. Bottom line, Intel first screwed
10nm, they are only now recovering and catching up on that. Meanwhile
Swan announced that 7nm is all screwed up, yields are terrible, it has
slipped another 6 months on top of at least six months earlier. Intel
won\'t be in production until 2022/23. MEanwhile AMC is producing 7nm
via TSMC right now. By the time Intel is on 7nm, TSMC will be on 3 nm.
In short, Intel has gone from being a node ahead to a node behind.
And Swan says the answer is Intel is considering outsourcing production
to other companies!

I remember discussing this here a couple years ago, warning that this is
what happens when you let accountants take over high tech companies.
I remember the usual suspects here arguing it was no big deal, it\'s just
\"managing\". Well, the idiot bean counter from Ebay that somehow would
up running Intel sure has screwed this up really badly. It\'s unlikely
Intel will ever recover. And it validates AMD being apparently right
and early to get out of fabs years ago and Apple choosing to ditch Intel.
It\'s a sad day for the future of high tech in America.

Bean-counting management is a symptom that a business or an industry
is \"mature\", out of and hostile to new ideas.

AMD is still in the classic expensive-powerhog-CISC business too.
Doing x86 better than Intel is not the future.

One mistake these dinosaurs make is allowing someone else to kill
their old cash cow. If they had sense, they would do it themselves.






--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[server]

On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 16:16:40 +0530, Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 8/2/2020 3:01 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs.
Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the dailies
on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all power
amiga.

they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than

NASA isn\'t what people look upto for computing done right.

contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple resolutions at
once crap. It\'s gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn\'t a solution
to a real problem.

with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad decoder too?

was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

Sure, how big was that collection?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you could
connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can\'t let go of the 47 minutes
amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody ever
needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move
on. Not sure why they\'re all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their heyday
was.

amigas were shitty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that
foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project. The
NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn\'t dead-ended
trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple\'s
osx. I\'m not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious
than an amiga.

As I said, you\'re funny.
Did I say that I\'m using an Amiga now? Did I say that a
30-year-old Amiga is better in every way than a modern computer?

Useless features? Then why did Wintels struggle for so long to
keep up with other more efficient systems that came built-in with
those features? Why does it have to use brute force to do what
other systems could do with a quarter of the hardware resources?

Let me guess: You chose the Wintel system early on and realised
that it\'s a bloated inefficient one but refused to admit it. Is
that why you\'re so antagonistic towards Amigas?

I\'m using Windows now, as do the vast majority of PC users
worldwide. The difference between you and other, more discerning
users is that most techno-savvy users know what a pile of bloat
it is.

Yes, horrible, klugey, buggy, annoying, expensive bloat. But a PC,
connected to the web, running Windows and Word and Spice and email and
all that, is a fabulous productivity tool and toy. We just need to
shear off the stupid bits.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, August 2, 2020 at 11:58:34 PM UTC+10, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:40:08 -0700 (PDT), Whoey Louie
tra...@optonline.net> wrote:

<snip>

One of the things that has advanced civilization, especially in Europe
and more so in the USA, is creative destruction. Giant trends and
industries get mature and are blown away by something new, probably
invented by a couple of college dropouts.

Pity the US hasn\'t got around to destroying their existing health care system. Universal health care works for everybody else, but the people who make a lot of money out of the defects of the existing health care system have invested a lot i preserving their cash cow.

> It\'s past time for the junk from Microsoft and Intel to fade into history, with DEC and Kodak and the Bell System. We can do better.

The US doesn\'t seem to be as good as the rest of the world at doing better. This is fairly recent. It wasn\'t true when I was younger, but started to strike me in late 1970s. When Reagan came to power, and the top 1% of the US income distribution start creaming off all the growth in the US economy, it started getting more obvious.

Risc-V sounds promising. A description of a CPU should be free, and
tucking one into the corner of a chip should be almost free.

A \"description\" of a CPU is intellectual property, and if you want people to work at writing descriptions of better CPU\'s, it helps if there\'s a mechanism that lets them get paid for it.

Tucking one into one corner of a chip can be expensive if you need a bunch of mask sets to do it.The kind of programmable chip that is big enough to let you tuck a CPU in one corner isn\'t cheap either.

<snip>

Bean-counting management is a symptom that a business or an industry
is \"mature\", out of and hostile to new ideas.

Every business needs bean counters. Imaginative bean counters can work miracles. Bean counters who don\'t know what\'s going on can wreck the soundest company.

AMD is still in the classic expensive-powerhog-CISC business too.
Doing x86 better than Intel is not the future.

One mistake these dinosaurs make is allowing someone else to kill
their old cash cow. If they had sense, they would do it themselves.

Like railway executives who thought they were in \"railways\" and found out that they were in \"transport\"?

Sometimes there isn\'t an easy path into the new ways of doing things, but anybody with any sense needs to have a very clear idea of exactly what they are doing, and what it would take to let somebody else do it cheaper and better. What\'s going to replace Highland Technology? When is it going to happen?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Pimpom]

On 8/2/2020 7:33 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 16:16:40 +0530, Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 8/2/2020 3:01 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs.
Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the dailies
on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all power
amiga.

they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than

NASA isn\'t what people look upto for computing done right.

contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple resolutions at
once crap. It\'s gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn\'t a solution
to a real problem.

with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad decoder too?

was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

Sure, how big was that collection?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you could
connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can\'t let go of the 47 minutes
amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody ever
needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move
on. Not sure why they\'re all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their heyday
was.

amigas were shitty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that
foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project. The
NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn\'t dead-ended
trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple\'s
osx. I\'m not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious
than an amiga.

As I said, you\'re funny.
Did I say that I\'m using an Amiga now? Did I say that a
30-year-old Amiga is better in every way than a modern computer?

Useless features? Then why did Wintels struggle for so long to
keep up with other more efficient systems that came built-in with
those features? Why does it have to use brute force to do what
other systems could do with a quarter of the hardware resources?

Let me guess: You chose the Wintel system early on and realised
that it\'s a bloated inefficient one but refused to admit it. Is
that why you\'re so antagonistic towards Amigas?

I\'m using Windows now, as do the vast majority of PC users
worldwide. The difference between you and other, more discerning
users is that most techno-savvy users know what a pile of bloat
it is.

Yes, horrible, klugey, buggy, annoying, expensive bloat. But a PC,
connected to the web, running Windows and Word and Spice and email and
all that, is a fabulous productivity tool and toy. We just need to
shear off the stupid bits.

All true. We use it because it\'s the de facto standard and we
need it. That doesn\'t mean that it\'s a good system and it\'s no
reason to keep bashing other, fundamentally better ones.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-08-02 12:27, Pimpom wrote:

On 8/2/2020 7:33 PM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 16:16:40 +0530, Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:

On 8/2/2020 3:01 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 8/1/2020 11:47 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
Pimpom <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 7/30/2020 5:07 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-07-30 01:53, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:27:36 -0700) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
ap83ifho07dhtee9am0jc3pdpf4kiqaok3@4ax.com>:

Not so much odd as sad. IBM picked the wrong cpu for the PC.

Not really,
I remember boss called me into his office and showed me the
first 386
we were working close with IBM.
What a speed!
At that time there was nothing better.

The 68020 came out a year or so earlier than the \'386.

My 68020 Amiga A1200 could run rings around a 386 Win95 machine.
Amiga OS 3.0 took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed and
could be run from a single 880KB floppy if needed. Win95 took up
what - 40MB?

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you
also enjoy
your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of
expandability, before the entire joke died?

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We\'re
talking about early \'90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died
from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an
Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs.
Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the
dailies
on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all
power
amiga.

they didn\'t crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the
end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than

NASA isn\'t what people look upto for computing done right.

contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at
different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple
resolutions at
once crap. It\'s gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn\'t a
solution
to a real problem.

with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad
decoder too?

was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

Sure, how big was that collection?

And games. I didn\'t play games much myself but PC gamers were
green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start
and never had to go through a \'Plug and Pray\' period.

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you
could
connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine,
I tested the Amiga\'s multitasking capabilities by running TEN
different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of
them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without*
any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a
time when a PC struggled with two programs.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can\'t let go of the 47 minutes
amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody
ever
needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move
on. Not sure why they\'re all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their
heyday
was.

amigas were shitty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that
foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project.
The
NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn\'t
dead-ended
trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple\'s
osx. I\'m not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious
than an amiga.

As I said, you\'re funny.
Did I say that I\'m using an Amiga now? Did I say that a
30-year-old Amiga is better in every way than a modern computer?

Useless features? Then why did Wintels struggle for so long to
keep up with other more efficient systems that came built-in with
those features? Why does it have to use brute force to do what
other systems could do with a quarter of the hardware resources?

Let me guess: You chose the Wintel system early on and realised
that it\'s a bloated inefficient one but refused to admit it. Is
that why you\'re so antagonistic towards Amigas?

I\'m using Windows now, as do the vast majority of PC users
worldwide. The difference between you and other, more discerning
users is that most techno-savvy users know what a pile of bloat
it is.

Yes, horrible, klugey, buggy, annoying, expensive bloat. But a PC,
connected to the web, running Windows and Word and Spice and email and
all that, is a fabulous productivity tool and toy. We just need to
shear off the stupid bits.


All true. We use it because it\'s the de facto standard and we need it.
That doesn\'t mean that it\'s a good system and it\'s no reason to keep
bashing other, fundamentally better ones.

I haven\'t used Windows in years.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Posting using Qubes OS on a Thinkpad)

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com