Sad day for Intel and America

My buddy had a 286-class desktop around 1990. 1 meg of ram at 12 MHz clock if I recall. I think it cost him about 500 bucks, used, for the whole system - a fortune for a teenager.

It was a real slug even by 1990 standards

and by the end of the 90's everyone at uni was using their own PC because that were much faster than sharing an expensive Sun UltraSparc servers

Probably 70% of the students at the college I went to had their own PC in their dorm room in '96 or '97. It was a liberal arts school all people do is write papers at all hours of the day and night.

I worked in the IT department such as it was my first couple years, what kind of personal compute hardware people brought though was all over the map there at that time, though. You'd go to set up someone's dorm computer to the in-room Ethernet port for the newfangled Internet and never quite know what to expect. Anything from the latest Pentium PCs and high-end Macs to a Mac II from 1987, 286es, laptops, desktops, those pizza-box Macs from the early 90s, Amiga, even saw a Commodore 64 one time.

Most of them you could at least get to run an email client with a bit of work.

In Soviet America police execute you and charge you for the bullet:

JL is speaking the truth. x86 is crappy and always has been. You don't see the monthly bug updates? It was so successful because it closely partnered with Microsoft, who also , managed to screw up their own core business with the equivalent application of their approach to competitors (embrace, extend, extinguish). Anyone remember windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8? A lot of people got sick of replacing working hardware because Microsoft said so. Many people switched to tablets and smart phones because that did everything they wanted. Now of course their is the race to get the latest phone for fashion, but the old ones still work.

probably a bit of both plus no patience to grow a market.

Also, I know a lot of the maker movement was unwilling to use intel as their chips were difficult to use, there was little support, and a general lack of trust that intel would stay around if it managed to kill off the opposition.

Really? Did you intend for any of that to be other than for entertainment purposes only?

Bill is right, it wasn't ranting. It was just a bunch of silliness. No insult intended. Just the facts, mam.

On a sunny day (Thu, 30 Jul 2020 06:14:25 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

LOL FLying Dutchman ;-) Anyways, 'better' also involves things like available OS and software portability. Complete systems, running MS Windows. As far as the company concerned 68000 did not even exist. I remember we did discuss switching to Unix back then, but did not happen. Much of the x86 code written there was programmed in asm. It was not until I started doing embedded projects in what was it 8051? asm that boss ordered everybody to learn C.

On a sunny day (Thu, 30 Jul 2020 21:42:34 -0400) it happened bitrex wrote in :

Yes, no freedom of press either:

On a sunny day (Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:23:01 -0000 (UTC)) it happened John Doe wrote in :

On the contrary, trumpman works for (is played) by the war industry. He wants war and pestering China is a way to get it. So he (US) can sell more weapons and get rid of the jobless by drafting them as cannon feed. SEE what is coming.

History repeats itself..

And from that: No Empire Yet Persisted

tick tick tick time

Oh no, will we have to spend fortunes and lives to stop yet another Western European war? And pay to clean up the rubble?

That gets tiresome.

Doe

them as cannon feed.

With Trump in charge, you would be even less interested in getting involved than you were in 1917 and 1941.

And while the Marshall Plan might have helped paying for the cleaning up of the rubble, it was definitely designed to make it less likely that the Ru ssians would take over. It might be being peddled as a charitable exercise by James Arthur and similar proponents of the idea that US is entirely alt ruistic, but more honest reporters wouldn't bother

Not as tiresome as John Larkin's point of view about European Wars. Listeni ng to him, you'd never realise that the US had it own Civil War from 1861 t o 1865, and fought the Spanish-American War in 1898 to expand its borders.

The Soviets were monsters and the Nazi Germans were...well they were more like fallen angels if you think about it....

Wow, I bet all seven programs for the amiga ran so far. Did you also enjoy your low performance, overpriced peripherals, in addition to lack of expandability, before the entire joke died?

the courthouse they're spending a mil a day on a goon squad to defend is a crumbling 100 y/o dump that needed 200 million in seismic retrofits and was probably going to be demolished anyway, but why spend $200 million when you can spend $300 mil for a new one.

The gravy train rolls on

How was a scaled down and overly wimpy minicomputer better than anything from intel? I call bullshit on this as even competing with intel for anything but turning electricity into heat.

Alphas were terrible. The only thing slow enough and power hungry enough to replace an Alpha was Itanium. I definitely laughed out loud when I saw racks of Itanium servers rolling into a datacenter for an "upgrade" of old Alpha servers.

Last I looked you can still license MIPS for embedded systems, not sure if anybody does though. I think the chinese tried something with MIPS a the basis for one of their processors, but you know they would have skipped the license part.

True dat. I've started Helen MacInnes _While Still We Live_, once or twice, but couldn't finish it. The partition of Poland was just TOO sad.

Scariest, was that the author wrote it before revelations about the Katyn massacre... the book was watered-down from the reality.

Comparatively, Hiroshima (John Hersey) was upbeat.

Very funny. Clearly you never knew much about Amigas. We're talking about early '90s technology here and sure, the Amiga died from poor management. But did you know that milestone CGIs for films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were created on an Amiga? That many server operators preferred them to PCs because they didn't crash? That NASA used them for telemetry up to the end of the last millenium? That PowerPC Amigas were faster than contemporary PCs? That you could run various programs at different screen resolutions at the same time? That they came with 4-channel stereo and 24-bit graphics when all a PC could do was bleep? That it had the largest collection of free software?

And games. I didn't play games much myself but PC gamers were green with envy. Plug and Play was built-in right from the start and never had to go through a 'Plug and Pray' period.

Once, while writing an article for a national computer magazine, I tested the Amiga's multitasking capabilities by running TEN different programs, all *actively* processing some task. All of them ran smoothly without a hiccup - on 6MB of memory *without* any form of virtual memory. Peak usage was 5.5MB. This was at a time when a PC struggled with two programs.

A friend of mine was more than puzzled when he noted that the speed of his disk driver varied from really fast to unusable when he shifted the location of the program a few bytes, and differently depending on the machine. It turned out that they had simply lasered away the defective cache lines. =8()

The point was that nothing turned out to be really better. But I must admit that it was fun to do chip designs all alone in your room on it. Everything was in its place.

The last MIPS 4000 I have personally seen / used was the measurement processor in a Verigy 93000 wafer tester data aquisition chip. I think MIPS is open source now, but could be wrong. Probably RISCV eats its lunch.

Cheers, Gerhard

A Google search says they were on the order of $20,000 USD. That wouldn't fly.