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From: George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2019 10:07:34 +1000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKr6gn1qGBc2qJh0Uiq=zt+dGZOtQxEkLtOW8i+wF2dzZ933mA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <0A4E13BD-C4B5-4D03-8226-3FCF2293A0A3@ronnatalie.com>

Tracy Kidder evokes different emotions around "the soul of a new
machine" -To me, the book is great because its a humanist reading of
technology choices. People matter. Careers are built on seemingly
trivial decisions like the size of the average door frame in a lift in
Tokyo. (a brief moment in the book, from memory)

I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not
Data General, because the only DG box I worked on (a Nova) was a dog.
I know one person who came from Australia (UQ) to Maynard, to track
the building of the Dec-10 destined for the campus. He had
entertaining anecdotes about parking and weather. (australians are not
naturally prepared for 2m of snow and the effect of parking in the
wrong side of the snow shadow, which explains why the parking spots
were empty for the visitor to claim) -I think the birth of the pdp-8
and pdp-11 would be fascinating. I was told the queue to sign up for
pdp-8 at the IFIP  floor show  in the 60s in Edinburgh was a mile
long: people were dog tired of walking card decks over to central
computing facilities and the offer of a deskside or even desktop (if
your desk was strong enough) compute engine for stats and maths and
process control...

Sub-floor radius limits made it hard to retrofit a Cray into the UQ
machine room because the piping radii had been done for the IBM
mainframe. We had to lift the raised floor for the flourinert piping.
400Hz voltage demanded a spinning metal regenerator to do frequency
conversion from the Australian wallplate voltage/frequency. Our
groundplane was inadequate. The Tops-10 box, the cluster of Vaxen,
were completely oblivious to most of this: they did air cooling
through floor venting, thats really all that mattered in their
machine-room.  It was the one we chose to fit the comms racks because
it was the least pain to work in, and the nearest to the hosts which
could actually use Internet protocols trivially on UTP or thinwire.
(the IBM required us to buy a $10,000 PC to fit the line card which
translated TCP/IP into IBM networking and was possibly the last piece
of "thickwire" ethernet we owned)

-G

  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-10-15  0:08 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 122+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-10-10 20:55 Warren Toomey
2019-10-10 21:11 ` SPC
2019-10-10 21:25   ` Jim Capp
2019-10-10 21:33     ` greg travis
2019-10-10 21:13 ` Michael Parson
2019-10-10 21:15 ` Matt Rudge
2019-10-10 21:31 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-10-10 21:34 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-10 23:10 ` Seth J. Morabito
2019-10-10 23:23 ` Brian L. Stuart
2019-10-10 23:28   ` George Michaelson
2019-10-10 23:35 ` Bakul Shah
2019-10-10 23:49   ` David
2019-10-11  1:44 ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-11  1:45   ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-11 10:55 ` Leah Neukirchen
2019-10-11 12:04   ` Tyler Adams
2019-10-13 19:46     ` Peter Jeremy
2019-10-14  2:13       ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-10-14  2:32         ` Rico Pajarola
2019-10-14  9:49           ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-14 18:36             ` Nemo Nusquam
2019-10-14 21:10               ` Jim Geist
2019-10-14 22:22                 ` Warren Toomey
2019-10-14 22:56                 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-14 23:44                   ` Jim Geist
2019-10-14 23:47                     ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-14 23:54                       ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15  0:03                         ` Henry Bent
2019-10-14 23:54                       ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-15  0:04                         ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15  0:06                           ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-15  0:27                             ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15  0:07                         ` George Michaelson [this message]
2019-10-15  0:10                           ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-15  0:27                           ` [TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aga moments) Ronald Natalie
2019-10-15  0:33                             ` [TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aha moments) Ronald Natalie
2019-10-14 23:52                     ` [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? Arthur Krewat
2019-10-11 12:53 ` KatolaZ
2019-10-11 16:44 ` Pete Wright
2019-10-11 17:13 ` Jim Geist
2019-10-11 17:20   ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-11 17:40   ` Jim Capp
2019-10-11 17:48 ` Larry W. Cashdollar via TUHS
2019-10-11 21:56 ` Tomasz Rola
2019-10-12  2:41 ` ricercar
2019-10-12  3:01   ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-12 14:37     ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-10-12 16:12     ` David
2019-10-12 17:59       ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-12 19:10         ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-13 21:45           ` Steve Johnson
2019-10-14  0:36             ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-14  2:08               ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-10-16 13:29             ` Pierre DAVID
2019-10-12  3:23   ` Richard Salz
2019-10-12  3:34     ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-12 21:32     ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-10-12  8:55 ` Wesley Parish
2019-10-12 10:17 ` Naveen Nathan
2019-10-12 11:54 ` markus schnalke
2019-10-12 19:33 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-12 22:38   ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-13  1:37 ` Dan Cross
2019-10-13 15:00 ` Robert Brockway
2019-10-13 15:33 ` arnold
2019-10-13 15:41   ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-13 15:47     ` David Potesta
2019-10-18  1:49 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-18 12:07   ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-21 16:16 ` Dario Niedermann
2019-10-23  5:13 ` Gilles Gravier
2019-10-23  6:19   ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-23 15:08   ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-23 15:11     ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-23 15:26       ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-10-23 15:33         ` Dan Cross
2019-10-23 16:19           ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-23 15:17     ` Richard Salz
2019-10-23 15:22       ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-10-23 16:45     ` Will Senn
2019-10-23 22:19       ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-24 17:32       ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2019-10-26  0:33     ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-25 20:58 ` John S Quarterman
2019-10-25 22:11   ` Will Senn
2019-10-26  0:57 ` William Corcoran
2019-10-12  4:42 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-12  6:12 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-12 10:05 ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-12 12:49   ` Doug McIlroy
2019-10-12 14:26     ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-12 13:55 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-12 14:51 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-13  1:57 Jon Steinhart
2019-10-13  3:45 Rudi Blom
2019-10-13 16:07 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-13 16:25 ` Richard Salz
2019-10-14 15:32 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-15  8:42 ` Thomas Paulsen
2019-10-14 16:45 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-15  0:28 Pat Barron
2019-10-15  1:19 ` Andrew Warkentin
2019-10-15  4:06   ` Warner Losh
2019-10-16 14:39 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-20 19:25 Norman Wilson
2019-10-20 20:12 ` Sean Dwyer
2019-10-21  2:31   ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
2019-10-21  2:37     ` Warren Toomey
2019-10-22  5:25       ` Peter Jeremy
2019-10-22  6:29       ` Sean Dwyer
2019-10-21  2:40     ` Bakul Shah
2019-10-21  2:45     ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-21 10:45       ` jason-tuhs
2019-10-21 11:55         ` William Corcoran
2019-10-22  5:19         ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-21 12:10 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-21 16:50 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2019-10-21 12:34 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-22 13:36 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-22 14:22 ` Abhinav Rajagopalan
2019-10-22 20:08   ` Warren Toomey

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