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From: Serge Burjak <sburjak@systech.com.au>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 12:31:55 +1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CADtgiZCTvMO8mYLvFv5ydA61o=z1thfOWRon1raVDeLZCJ=Ojw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210407015827.GG28660@mcvoy.com>

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Serial port performance did not scale well on early pcs, so an industry was
grown with smart serial cards. There were a few serial cards, but most
 didn't have the smarts, just shared interrupts. Best performing, in my
usage, was the Stallion brand, an Australian company. These cards had their
own processor, uarts and ram. Had used 4-32 ports. I am guessing they did
high speed transfers via the high speed bus on the PC, relieving the main
CPU from getting interrupts, doing queuing, caching etc. These cards were
supported by SCO products like Xenix and Unix, some others and ran on a PC.

Flying aircraft could be efficient for some visits that didn't have direct
city pairs served by airlines, especially the US. Plus a lot of fun, if you
do it yourself.

I used to push statistical and financial data around Australia in the 80s
via dial up using automated scripting with Zmodem, Sun hosts, PC remotes.
Was very reliable.

IBM NDAs and legals can feel overwhelming in meetings....

Serge

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 11:59, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 06:49:31PM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
> > >
> > > Another hypothesis I had ties in with this: both he and Bill Gates
> > > were speakers at Euromicro 1980 in London, from 16 to 18 September.
> > > Bill Gates was a no-show.  Would that fit in with Gary's "gone
> > > flying"?
> > >
> > > Greg
> >
> > According to Tom, no, he was visiting a somewhat local customer, I
> > think in the bay area, which is why he was flying his plane.  This
> > wasn't the modern times when CEOs owned fancy jets.
>
> Yeah, I went and looked, it was a small $5M/year (not that small)
> business and for some reason he was delivering software with his
> small plane.
>

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  reply	other threads:[~2021-04-07  2:32 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 30+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-04-06 15:35 M Douglas McIlroy
2021-04-06 17:09 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-06 17:32   ` Charles H Sauer
2021-04-06 20:11     ` Josh Good
2021-04-06 20:26       ` Jim Capp
2021-04-06 20:47         ` Charles H Sauer
2021-04-07 16:42           ` Josh Good
2021-04-07 18:04             ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-04-07  2:49         ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  6:04         ` arnold
2021-04-07 16:01           ` heinz
2021-04-06 21:06       ` Clem Cole
2021-04-07  0:58     ` heinz
2021-04-07  1:37       ` Warner Losh
2021-04-07  3:38         ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  2:30     ` Ed Bradford
2021-04-07  2:44       ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-04-06 20:20   ` Boyd Lynn Gerber
2021-04-06 22:41 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  1:10   ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-07  1:47     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2021-04-07  1:49       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-07  1:58         ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07  2:31           ` Serge Burjak [this message]
2021-04-09 21:24   ` Michael Parson
2021-04-10  3:33     ` Ed Bradford
2021-04-10 15:12       ` Clem Cole
2021-04-10 15:41         ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07  0:59 Jason Stevens
2021-04-10 18:12 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS

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