Live data from Hacker News

Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

archive.org

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#41
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Complaining about the ads in Byte would have been like complaining about the ads in the yellow pages. Byte almost was reverse Playboy: you almost didn’t read it for the articles.

Really! the articles where the main point - just whish I had had the nerve to use the $25 diy modem Steve Garcia for one project instead of paying £300 for an answer and £600 for an answer originate.

¿Steve Ciarcia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ciarcia

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#42
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Complaining about the ads in Byte would have been like complaining about the ads in the yellow pages. Byte almost was reverse Playboy: you almost didn’t read it for the articles.

Really! the articles where the main point - just whish I had had the nerve to use the $25 diy modem Steve Garcia for one project instead of paying £300 for an answer and £600 for an answer originate.

>Steve Garcia

Steve Ciarcia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ciarcia

His BYTE electronics DIY project articles in his Circuit Cellar column were so well-written that I used to enjoy browsing them even though I'm not an electronics guy, gleaning what I could about the topic. He even did one about a 32-bit computer, when 8 and 16 bits were still the standard! The Definicon motherboard/CPU, I think it was about.

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#45

In the 6a. shell benchmark, what's the modern equivalent of the "+" option in sort from the below line? od sort.$$ | sort -n + 1 > od.$$

-k POS

From the FreeBSD 2.1 man page [1]

  +POS1 [-POS2]
       Specify  a field within each line to use as a sort­
       ing key. The field consists of the portion of  the
       line starting at POS1 and up to (but not including)
       POS2 (or to the end of the  line if  POS2  is  not
       given). The  fields  and  character positions are
       numbered starting with 0.
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sort&apropos=0&sek...

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#46
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC also had no MMU or OS overhead.

The 68K had no MMU or even segment registers, so the 68K machines that can run UNIX had, at the very least, some kind of external memory offset adder. I did not know the Apple Lisa had this- it's interesting because Macs didn't have it and could not run UNIX.

The Motorola 68020 has a MMU coprocessor, and the 68030, 68040 have an on-chip MMU. The Macintosh II, SE/30, Quadra, and Centris series were able to run A/UX [1] since 1988. A/UX was a SystemV with X and Finder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#47
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Revenge of the Jedi" - you mean "Return of the Jedi" right? :D Although "Revenge of the Jedi" would be awesome!

The original title was actually Revenge of the Jedi and there are still old posters and ads around for it, eg https://entertainment.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/20...

A later (earlier) chapter became "Revenge of the Sith."

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#48
post #38
post #9

Laying out code in variable width font like a boss :). I love reading these BYTE scans from archive.org, they are from such a different computing world. Yet UNIX is the same.

> Yet UNIX is the same. Use V7 Unix in an emulator and say that. Unix didn't have networking, mmap(), or job control shells back then, and that's about the level some of the benchmarked Unix variants were at.

Fair point. My notion was mainly stemming from the looks of the shell scripts in the article.
Post reply on HN