More on Pi based net/internet radio music player

Different era - I was using the Elliott in 1967/68

Same again - the 1903S was released in 1971 and was a medium scale machine - and ours was a fairly small example.

memory

Sure, but you couldn't physically fit that much RAM into an IBM PC-AT or PC-XT

Around 1980 I was working at the BBC, this time on ICL 2966 systems. The production system was normally running 11 or 12 different online systems that together supported around 400 green-screen 24x80 terminals. This mainframe had 16MB of RAM. The development system also served as backup for the live system and had even less RAM - 8MB - I never knew how many developers it supported, but we were all using it interactively, writing interactive systems in COBOL the used IDMSX databases.

Not that any of the above is relevant to my point - which is that before multi-colour graphical displays became the norm, personal computers and mainframes running typical back-office systems could and did routinely use what now look like laughably small amounts of memory.

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Martin    | martin at 
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Martin Gregorie
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"Quote: No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody." Date: 1981

Bill Gates has faithfully denied he never said this, but the quote has taken on a life of its own and become synonymous with the Microsoft founder. Supposedly, he was quoted at a computer trade show in support of the IBM PC's 640KB RAM limit, which he'd been heavily promoting that year. Chances are he might have been misquoted, having originally said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody" at the time. A feature on the Huntsville Times website notes Gates response to the remark: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." The majority agress he said something along the lines of 640KB of RAM sufficing for PC users. Take the L and move forward."

- that's about the best I can find, but note that IBM PCs in that era did have a physical limit of 640KB on the ram that could be installed.

I do now wonder, though, if their display cards back then were memory- mapped and if so, how much of the unusable 360 KB of memory space they occupied.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Yup. A Pi would definitely outrun a PDP/11 And probably a VAX too.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Yes, they were.

IIRC there was addressing for 1MB of RAM, and the Bios sat at the very top, and DOS addressed the fisrt 640k opnly, with video being above that along with other perpiheral cards.

I/O of course in Intel is not memory mapped.

Later on the extra mameory could be mapped in.. before 32 bits came along and the whole sorry mess was consigned to the dustbin of history

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I run an emulated VAX and VMS on a Pi using SimH

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for a software archaeology project. I get about 7 VUPs (VAX Units of Performance) on a Pi 3B (not a 3B+ which would

will outperform sevenfold a VAX11-780 costing several hundred thousand pounds in today?s money, even with the software overheads of emulating the VAX computer architecture on a very different hardware.

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Paul at the paulhardy.net domain
Reply to
Paul Hardy

Wonderful! best use for a Pi yet! Does it run actual VMS?

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The Natural Philosopher

Yes, I run VMS 7.3 which is still available under a hobbyist licence from HPE, along with downloads of install media, and docs. The emulation of SimH is bit perfect - I took a bit by bit copy of a complete 25 year old VAX disk into a single file on the Pi, point SIMH at it and say Boot, and I have a running VMS system. Or you can build your own VAX from scratch using the install media.

What?s more, I can run this as boot node of a VMScluster, and boot other Pis as diskless satellites across a modern Ethernet network, sharing a common filesystem with cluster-wide file locking etc. SIMH will even emulate the graphics of a VAXstation, running X and Motif window system.

An amazing piece of software created by Bob Supnik and enhanced by others as open source.

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Paul at the paulhardy.net domain
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Paul Hardy

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 16:43:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher declaimed the following:

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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
Reply to
Dennis Lee Bieber

That is very pleasing somehow.

Somewhere there is or was a nuclear power station that relies on IIRC a PDP/11

Pi should be able to emulate that falling off a log.

Bet it could run DOS faster than an AT too. With intel 8088 emulation.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Try with dosbox or qemu like this guy

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I've not run dosbox on a pi, but on a minimac ppc, and played pinball fantasies on it around 2005. I guess the cpu is comparable (ppc g4, 1.25 GHz + 512 RAM) to a new raspberry.

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Reply to
Björn Lundin

IIRC a

That may be so, but I wouldn't want to trust an SD card for that application.

---druck

Reply to
druck

well boot from USB then!

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The Natural Philosopher

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