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Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

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Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#91

Post by Pet_Ant »

neilv wrote: post #82
ggm wrote: post #30

Had the dubious joy of managing Domain/OS Unix children inside the Apollo virtualisation method of the day. Along with Nixdorf, these systems were all through Civil Engineering and NMR facilities at the university campus. And, just like Nixdorf they came with multiple open CVE (didn't exist as a term of art at the time, but lets ignore the anachronism) such as the games user, well known passwords, root sendmail, you-…

> Not a very nice Unix experience, analogous to HP-UX it was complex, and a bugger to configure C code on if you came from BSD land (Ultrix, SunOS/Solaris) Apollo DomainOS (Aegis) was technically better than Unix. At some point (before my time), marketing must've decided they needed to be more Unix-compatible, and they did some clever things to also give it multiple Unix personalities (both SysV and BSD), while still…

I've seen the term in passing, but what are "Unix personalities"?

Is it just different optional command line arguments to the common utilities? TAR vs Gnu TAR?

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#92

Post by stevenwoo »

Aardwolf wrote: post #70
stevenwoo wrote: post #4

I think every engineer had these in my 80186 clone group when I cooped at AMD, but I still had to submit SPICE timing simulation runs to the VAX mainframe. The CRT monitors were nice but huge.

What does cooping at AMD mean, does it mean a contract job? What is a 80186 clone group (a division at AMD designing 80186 clone CPUs, or a hobby group of 80186 PC enthusiasts?) But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?

Co-op is a term used by some universities for alternating a work semester at a company with school semester in class in the USA for 2nd/3rd/4th year students. We were paid something like 10-15 an hour which was much better than most non professional work jobs. The group I was in was making money off of refinements and continual production of AMD 80186 chips for drop in replacements for Intel 80186 at a lower cost. The group adjacent to mine was working on reverse engineering 386 clone design from a black box approach (using only public info like the Intel handbook on 386 which I remember they were all reading like it was the bible) and was at a pretty early stage, every one on that team was very senior and IIRC most had PhDs in Electrical Engineering so I was of course very underqualified for that.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#94

Post by fch42 »

flemhans wrote: post #50
billforsternz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm triggered every time I see things like "$663,937.02 today". I just can't help it. There should be a word for [mindlessly] reporting the results of a calculation to arbitrary precision when only one significant digit of precision is warranted. There probably is such a word in German.

Überpräzisionsberichterstattung

As a German, I won't say "doesn't exist" because it's possible of course. At best, people would think it some term from legalese.

The opposite thing though, "really roughly approximately (and couldn't care less how precise)" (you get what I mean) is often colloquially used in German, under the term "Pi times Thumb" (Pi mal Daumen).

So yes you can say "250tsd anno 1988 sind pi mal daumen 600tsd heutzutage".

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#95

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #91
neilv wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a very nice Unix experience, analogous to HP-UX it was complex, and a bugger to configure C code on if you came from BSD land (Ultrix, SunOS/Solaris) Apollo DomainOS (Aegis) was technically better than Unix. At some point (before my time), marketing must've decided they needed to be more Unix-compatible, and they did some clever things to also give it multiple Unix personalities (both SysV and BSD), while still…

I've seen the term in passing, but what are "Unix personalities"? Is it just different optional command line arguments to the common utilities? TAR vs Gnu TAR?

It's a bunch of small things: command line flags, whether a command line tool is even present at all, compiler built-ins / differences in behavior, headers possibly being in different places, compiler support for various language standards and more.

Even to this day, it's not uncommon to find libraries that won't compile with one of GCC, clang, etc. or even the same compiler but Linux vs MacOS.

It was even worse in ye olde times before package managers, I'm assuming.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that System V and BSD are two of the major families.

Both influenced Unix-like OSes far and wide, such as SysV style init scripts in certain Linux distros, MacOS being derived partly from BSD, Solaris being a continuation of SysV IIRC, and more.

There was a rough standardization in where certain things could be found, command line flags, etc.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#96

Post by pedrocr »

Self-Perfection wrote: post #69

Please update title to MiB or MB. Mb looks more like megabits.

Mb is unambiguously megabits but it's a lost battle at this point. This thread includes so far MiB, MB, Mb, mb all to mean megabyte.

It's often easy to find what's meant from context but sometimes we're discussing network stuff and it becomes hard to figure out what people mean by "gb" or "mb" or other frankenunits because the context refers both to data in transit and at rest. It's almost certainly not gram bit and milli bit which helps narrow it down...

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#97

Post by masfuerte »

kstrauser wrote: post #46
billforsternz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm triggered every time I see things like "$663,937.02 today". I just can't help it. There should be a word for [mindlessly] reporting the results of a calculation to arbitrary precision when only one significant digit of precision is warranted. There probably is such a word in German.

You and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.

My favourite is "average July temperatures have increased by 2°C (35.6°F)".

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#98

Post by rasz »

K0balt wrote: post #81
garciasn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought one in 1998 or 1999 with dual 366s OCd to 700 each; anything over 700 was too unstable for my setup. I kept that thing running until 2008 or 2009. Great machine.

Dual 450s running at 900 was the price/power sweet spot for a while :)

Tell me more about 450MHz socked 370 PPGA CPU that could be overclocked to 900MHz.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#99

Post by rasz »

system2 wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.

Pentium 2 was released in 1997 and was released with maximum speed of 450 MHZ which could be overclocked much higher.

No Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.

Re: Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]

#100

Post by cf100clunk »

Anybody else remember the Apollo/Domain clock bug that made us reset the time and date:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370897

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34029638

Just to clarify, the DN10000 PRISM processor was apparently not subject to it.

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