Slashback: 640K, Pioneer, Payback 465
Kudos to the guys behind Pioneer 10! Soft writes: "As a follow-up to yesterday's story, Pioneer 10 was successfully contacted for its 30th birthday, as announced in sci.space.news. The commands that were sent yesterday have been executed by the spacecraft, and more data has been collected by the Geiger Tube Telescope." lostchicken adds a link to Associated Press wire story on Yahoo!', writing "Not bad for a 30 year-old spacecraft. Perhaps those making time capsules could learn something from this?" Several readers also pointed out the SpaceDaily version of the goings on.
What, in the middle of Canadian winter?! schon writes: "An update to this /. story - The Canadian Copyright Board has announced the details of the public hearings on Canadian Digital Copyrights, at http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp00838e.html. Interested parties should register before attending (details available on the page.)"
Sent to you in compliance with the current Federal legislation An Anonymous Coward writes: "Back in June of 2000 Slashdot.org reported a story called ' Taking On A Spammer' about a spammer being hacked by a pissed sys-admin. The Behind Enemy Lines web page talked about a pump-and-dump spam done by Premier Services and Mark Rice."
(See this page for more information on that scam.)
"Well on February 25, 2002 the SEC filed charges against Mark Rice!"
Death of a legend? Jean-Luc writes "The New York Review of Books has published an article that contains an e-mail from Bill Gates denying he ever said the infamous "640K should be enough for anyone" quote. He foists the blame on IBM and claims he tried to convince them to include more address space from the get go. Very technical and fairly convincing, showing that for all his might Bill is still basically a geek's geek."
They hadn't even gotten to the bowlderizing chip yet ... Dan Gilmor pointed out Intel's strong statement Thursday on copy protection front, "much stronger than the letter sent yesterday. Surprising given their history..." Maybe Intel believes they can do a better job of what deciding what goes into Silicon than a committee of bureaucrats steered by the entertainment moguls can.
Progress Quest (Score:0, Informative)
The future of MPORPGs is here.
Progress Quest [progressquest.com]
-ElvisGrbac
640k problem - segments weren't the problem (Score:5, Informative)
i.e. Only 16 bytes *didn't* overlap in 2 consecutive segments -- meaning there was 65535 different ways to address the *same* memory location. (Ok, 64K wrap-around in a segment sucked too.)
Why the heck couldn't Intel just have "zero" memory for when the CPU accessed segmented memory that didn't exist.
i.e.
segment:memory
0000:0000
0009:0000
000A:000
: all zero when read
B7FF:0000
B800:0000 frame buffer (mono or cga, I forgot)
A000:0000 VGA frame buffer
At least "real mode" is dead (finally
Re:Go Intel! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Shame on Slashdot! (Score:2, Informative)
Pioneer Tech Specs (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, this is a very good read. I found this bit especially interesting:
The processor is completely redundant with the exception of the interface circuits. Upon command from the spacecraft, the signal processor can be switched from the main logic system to a standby redundant logic system. The function of the processor is to sequentially accumulate data on a frame basis from the seven detectors. Data are accumulated in a 24 bit register and then compressed quasi-logarithmically to 12 bits for transmission.
As the other artices say, that baby is getting quite cold. There's a year by year printout of it's tmperature on that page too.
Anyway, I just thougt I'd point this out for those interested in a little more "dry" facts on the thing other than the hoopla of it talking back (which is a feat, don't get me wrong).
Re:will voyager 10 still be usefull (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. It's keeping the dish pointed at Earth (which moves, of course). This allows it to send and receive data.
Re:Bill's history lessons (Score:4, Informative)
Read the email, Bill says that he had more input into the design of the Sirius than the PC. It is pretty obvious that Chuck Peddle would consult Bill over the design of the Sirius at an early stage as Microsoft Basic was the killer app of the PC world.
From all accounts the IBM PC was essentially designed and manufactured in just over a year. Microsoft was brought in at least a year before the launch because writing the code would take time, so yes Microsoft was in a position to make comments about the PC design at an early stage. As Bill himself states, they were not listened to.
It is also pretty obvious that someone in Bill's position would be pushing for the 68K since everyone arround at the time knew that the 68K was the better chip. IBM actually went for the Intel chip because they could reuse work from a previous failed wordprocessor project.
Those of us who had used PDP and VAX knew that a 32 bit address space was the most desirable improvement in going to the 16 bit processors. Even if you did not anticipate being able to have that much RAM any time soon VAX had demonstrated that virtual memory could work.
Re:Gates, and revisionist history. (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to date myself like this, but here it goes:
Gates gave a little 'get to know you' talk the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1988 or 1989. It was basically a recruiting effort, from what I could see. Anyway, I distinctly remember him making a self-deprecating joke about that 640k 'ought to be enough for anyone' business.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't think so.
Re:Revisionist history (Score:3, Informative)
According to the Delamater history of IBM's anti-trust years Microsoft thought the 286 to be to broken to build an O/S that supported protected memory. IBM insisted that they had to ship OS/2 to support the IBM PC AT as they had promised it would support the new O/S.
This was the main issue that led to IBM and Microsoft parting ways, IBM insisted on supporting the 286, Microsoft wanted to skip it and move straight to the 386.
Re:640k problem - segments weren't the problem (Score:3, Informative)
You'll get plenty of feedback when/if you post it to kerneldev. Slashdot feedback isn't quite along the same lines. Seriously - send it in... it will either get accepted, or you'll learn some obscure reason as to why Linux initalizes the CPU like that.
--
Evan
It's "Gillmor" (Score:2, Informative)
Register Now! (Score:3, Informative)
This is the final step before Canada gets its very own DMCA.... What fun that will be.
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Government Conference Centre
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Re:Go Intel! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Revisionist history (Score:3, Informative)
For a quick summary, you can see my other comment [slashdot.org]
Blame the IBM BIOS! (Score:5, Informative)
The IBM PC BIOS was designed to abstract the hardware. These days Linux or Windows do that for us, but in those days the BIOS was what you had. Your DOS programs were never supposed to talk to the hardware, they were supposed to go through the BIOS.
The problem was that the BIOS sucked. Want to draw a character on the screen? Fine; there is a BIOS call for that. (BIOS calls were called "interrupts" because you used an interrupt to call them, but I'll just call them "BIOS calls".) Want to draw a whole string of characters on the screen? You would think there would be a BIOS call for that too, right? But there wasn't. You would have to do one interrupt per character, and poke your string onto the screen one character at a time! And interrupts were really expensive; remember that we are talking a 4.7 MHz chip with slo-o-o-o-w memory.
And suppose you wanted to read the keyboard? Not a problem; there was a BIOS call for that. Of course, it had a few limitations: it could only recognize a little more than 500 distinct keypresses. If your app wanted to recognize Alt+F1, no problem, that was one of the recognized keys. But if you wanted to recognize Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1, too bad. The obvious and correct way to read the keyboard is to return the scan code for which key was pressed, coupled with a chord of which shift keys were down (e.g. Ctrl and Alt were down, shift wasn't, or whatever). With two bytes of data, you could handle any combination of Alt+Shift+Ctrl+whatever. But the BIOS didn't do it that way.
There are other examples, but I think those two are enough. Given this broken a BIOS, the application writers all decided to go around the BIOS and talk directly to the hardware. Get the address of the keyboard controller, find out what keys the user hit, and support any combination of keys you want. Get the address of the video card's character buffer, and use MOVS to blast a string into it with zero overhead. Now your copy of Microsoft Word 1.0 runs much faster than if it used the BIOS.
Guess what address the video card was at? That's right, 640K. By the time people began seriously hurting for more address space, there was way too much software out there writing directly into the character buffer of the video card, so it was now too late to move the buffer somewhere else. The 640K limit was set in stone.
Even if everyone had used the BIOS, there would have still been a 1024K limit, since that's all you could address on an 8088. But that would have been much better, and it would have been much easier to write environments like DesqView. (You could have done something like DesqView on an 8088 if it only had to run well-behaved apps, i.e. apps that never went to the hardware but always went through the BIOS.)
P.S. Slightly offtopic, but I have fond memories of using a multitasking environment called OmniView. It did much the same thing as DesqView, except that it didn't try to do the overlapping windows thing with the apps; it ran your apps full-screen. You could use function key combos to switch your full screen among app sessions, almost exactly like using Ctrl+Alt+Fn in Linux to switch full-screen among virtual ttys. DesqView got the fame and fortune, but OmniView was a little bit more efficient and I got some real work done using it on my 33 MHz 386 system. I used to run compiles in parallel: one compile would cause the disk to load the source, and the other compiles that used the same source file would find the data already buffered. I could finish four compiles in only a little more time than a single compile took on its own; the compiles were fairly disk-bound.
steveha
Re:Bill Gates may be a business man... (Score:3, Informative)
Rubbish. When IBM started developing the IBM PC, there were oodles of microcomputers around. These could be classified into two major sets, either Apples, which ran Apple's proDOS, or CP/M systems, which ran CP/M. There were Apples which ran CP/M as well. Neither proDOS nor CP/M had anything to do with Microsoft. At that time, Microsoft was really only a Basic shop, plus a few other minor lines. When IBM were looking for an OS, they'd already been talking to Microsoft about including their Basic, and when negotigations with DR about CP/M were stalled, Bill Gates sold them QDOS, and then went out to buy the rights to QDOS.
Re:Bill Gates may be a business man... (Score:3, Informative)
Bill Gates wrote BASIC, not "DOS". At that time the equivalent of DOS was CP/M. MicroSoft purchased the beginnings of MSDOS from another company that it later sued out of business, and that was a copy of CP/M. Claiming Bill Gates had anything to do with the creation of any early version of DOS is just so totally wrong it both demeans you and him.
If it was not for Bill Gates what would we have on the PC? Well I expect we would have some other monopoly selling some other PC operating system. Maybe even IBM. And Bill Gates would be here on SlashDot complaining about the evil monopolist who is running that company and rooting for the government's anti-trust suit. Don't think that Bill Gates did anything other than be in the right place at the right time, what happened would have happened exactly the same without him!
And there would be a GUI just as sophisticated as Windows, and Office software just the same (maybe better if the monopoly had held off some more, maybe worse if the monopoly had been claimed earlier, perhaps by Lotus). And lots of programmers would have started in whatever was on this monopoly system and does that make it good?
Unbelivable that you think that without MicroSoft there would be no alternative. The problem is that with MicroSoft there is no alternative, and people like you are so brainwashed you cannot picture that MicroSoft killed it's competition and that that competition was entirely capable of doing what MicroSoft did!
I won't go into the "windows drove Mac development forward" comment. You obviously have a very warped version of history. Try reading, even Gate's book is more accurate!