Sad day for Intel and America

a in US

ggle-like-this

Intel will likely order chips from TSMC in AZ,USA. Offshore fab for TSMC, less risk for Intel.

You think they were really "fallen angels" or were you, like, agreeing with my ironic statement.

Yeah, Germany got 50 years of Soviet boot up their ass for their adventures. That part of the situation I'm not particularly sad over, though they might have only deserved 30.

Fly?

I bought the system used from Scripps in San Diego, and drove it up the coast on US1, in a u-haul truck. Beautiful drive.

I think it cost me $8K, which was cheaper than eight toy PCs.

My point was that there were really good, reliable, crash-free, bug-free multitasking OSs around, but we got Microsoft and Intel garbage, and it has cost us big.

Sounds like a PDP-11/23 with 256 or 512 KiB of memory, two RL02 disk drives (2x10 MB), dual floppy, 2 x 4 line serial card etc.

Which configuration and which year ?

If the system supported 8 users that is $2500 / user.

Many OEM companies (such as Plessey) made their computer systems using DEC KDF-11 (PDP-11/23) or later KDJ-11 (PDP-11/73) CPU cards with own memory cards and disk drives for much less,

It was also a dead ended product. Are you posting from your A4000?

The few minutes of actual CGI in Jurassic Park were done on SGIs. Sorry. Not sure about Terminator. Maybe they added titling to the dailies on an amiga. Hard to say, since everything revolves around the all power amiga.

NASA isn't what people look upto for computing done right.

sorry, but nobody gives a hoot about that stupid multiple resolutions at once crap. It's gimmicky and completely unnecessary. It wasn't a solution to a real problem.

So 4 channel 2 channel audio? Did your amiga come with a quad decoder too?

Sure, how big was that collection?

Uh, that might have to do with the fact that there was nothing you could connect to it in the first place. So yeah, no problems there.

Amiga cultists are a weird type. They can't let go of the 47 minutes amigas were relevant computers. Every worthless feature that nobody ever needed or cared about was somehow Very Important. They all need to move on. Not sure why they're all suck in 1987 or 1992 or whatever their heyday was.

amigas were s***ty computers enjoyed by about 78 people worldwide that foamed at the mouth, oh and nasa, for some sort of obsolete project. The NeXT was way more cutting edge by any measure. It also wasn't dead-ended trash with nothing worth keeping. Huge parts of NeXT live on in apple's osx. I'm not an apple fan either, but even an old mac is less obnoxious than an amiga.

It's still a weird comparison. Intel doens't make computers, and the uVAX isn't an attempt at a new general purpose CPU.

I think I touched a R4400 CPU once, but again, they stopped with making giant CPUs and it's all licensing for embedded systems these days. There was the weird period of time when Windows NT 4 could run on Intel, MIPS RISC, Dec Alpha and even IBM's PowerPC of all things. Even Alpha servers with unix had some weird Microsoft code in them that came up at boot time. Not sure what the love between DEC and Microsoft was.

I still wonder how "support" on a NT 4.0 running on a Groupe Bull badged RS/6000 server would have worked out for a customer.

As I said, you're funny. Did I say that I'm using an Amiga now? Did I say that a

Useless features? Then why did Wintels struggle for so long to keep up with other more efficient systems that came built-in with those features? Why does it have to use brute force to do what other systems could do with a quarter of the hardware resources?

Let me guess: You chose the Wintel system early on and realised that it's a bloated inefficient one but refused to admit it. Is that why you're so antagonistic towards Amigas?

I'm using Windows now, as do the vast majority of PC users worldwide. The difference between you and other, more discerning users is that most techno-savvy users know what a pile of bloat it is.

Sounds like some BIOS code for bootup.

Sure the FX!32 software emulator executed x86 code with Alpha instructions after translating in place a code snippet during first execution. Similar to Transmeta CPUs,

Microsoft hired VAX/VMS architect Dave Cutler. The Windows NT 3 (and NT 3.51) internals are very similar to VMS corresponding structures. Unfortunately much of this healthy architecture was lost when Win 3 and Win95 features had to be included,

One of the things that has advanced civilization, especially in Europe and moreso in the USA, is creative destruction. Giant trends and industries get mature and are blown away by something new, probably invented by a couple of college dropouts.

It's past time for the junk from Microsoft and Intel to fade into history, with DEC and Kodak and the Bell System. We can do better.

Risc-V sounds promising. A description of a CPU should be free, and tucking one into the corner of a chip should be almost free.

Bean-counting management is a symptom that a business or an industry is "mature", out of and hostile to new ideas.

AMD is still in the classic expensive-powerhog-CISC business too. Doing x86 better than Intel is not the future.

One mistake these dinosaurs make is allowing someone else to kill their old cash cow. If they had sense, they would do it themselves.

Yes, horrible, klugey, buggy, annoying, expensive bloat. But a PC, connected to the web, running Windows and Word and Spice and email and all that, is a fabulous productivity tool and toy. We just need to shear off the stupid bits.

Pity the US hasn't got around to destroying their existing health care syst em. Universal health care works for everybody else, but the people who make a lot of money out of the defects of the existing health care system have invested a lot i preserving their cash cow.

y, with DEC and Kodak and the Bell System. We can do better.

The US doesn't seem to be as good as the rest of the world at doing better. This is fairly recent. It wasn't true when I was younger, but started to s trike me in late 1970s. When Reagan came to power, and the top 1% of the US income distribution start creaming off all the growth in the US economy, i t started getting more obvious.

A "description" of a CPU is intellectual property, and if you want people t o work at writing descriptions of better CPU's, it helps if there's a mecha nism that lets them get paid for it.

Tucking one into one corner of a chip can be expensive if you need a bunch of mask sets to do it.The kind of programmable chip that is big enough to l et you tuck a CPU in one corner isn't cheap either.

Every business needs bean counters. Imaginative bean counters can work mira cles. Bean counters who don't know what's going on can wreck the soundest c ompany.

Like railway executives who thought they were in "railways" and found out t hat they were in "transport"?

Sometimes there isn't an easy path into the new ways of doing things, but a nybody with any sense needs to have a very clear idea of exactly what they are doing, and what it would take to let somebody else do it cheaper and be tter. What's going to replace Highland Technology? When is it going to happ en?

I haven't used Windows in years.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Posting using Qubes OS on a Thinkpad)

After the 1957 Sputnik scare and during the early days of the Apollo project NASA got all the financing it wanted. It got the best computers that money could buy, which was big mainframes in the early

However, after Apollo 11, the NASA funding was cut drastically and NASA could not update their computer park. Thus they had to live with old mainframes, which were modern in early 1960's but obsolete in the

bbbut you ran 10 programs with 6 megs of ram, aaaannddd multiple resolutions at once!

There's no struggle at all. Amigas we obsolete trash from the start with the computing power of electronic coffee maker.

The only bloat is the fantasies of how this-and-that amigas were in the heads of their delusional cult followers.

Sorry dork, I don't consider myself "tecno-savvy" or whatever phoney term you grabbed from a print copy of Wired Magazine is. I get paid solve real problems with current technology. There's no nasa level of stupidity where I work or piles of amigas and other old junk laying around in use. You and your dusty amiga stories couldn't even comprehend the specifications and power of modern computers. Anyime you hear stories about how amigas were so awesome, you know you're dealing with somebody completely trapped in the past.

What was "lost"? The original NT had no backward compatibility with Windows 3.1 software. As you said, they started to add this, but I'm not aware of anything that was removed to make this happen- other than in Windows 2k you could use fat32 and skip NTFS.

I have better things to do than continue a fruitless argument that has degenerated to cherry-picking and juvenile insults. I'm off on a trip for a few days. Have good day.

That eliminates about 99% of the post in this group.

Enjoy. It's nice to hear from someone who is willing to discuss things rationally and without resorting to vitriol.