Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category

Computer Systems Performance Modeling

Tuesday, August 25th, 2020

“Long ago, far away
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays, do they?”
(1962) “Long Ago, Far Away” – Bob Dylan

Computer Systems Performance Modeling, which Professor K.M. Chandy and I wrote in 1978-9, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. is now out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license.

(more…)

Remembering RESQ

Tuesday, August 25th, 2020

    T-Shirt Martin Reiser made for me

Ed MacNair and I published two books based on The Research Queueing Package, RESQ. Those books, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. are now out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license, at Simulation of Computer Communication Systems and Elements of Practical Performance Modeling. Though we have written two prior articles about RESQ history1,2, those did not cover subsequent development, so another recap seems appropriate now.

Pre-History

In the early 1970s, when computing capabilities were tiny, tiny, tiny compared to even a cell phone today, and those resources were typically time-shared across multiple users, queueing network models became a primary tool to analyze and improve system performance. Queueing models had been studied for years before regarding communication systems and other systems, but networks of queues seemed especially apropos for understanding time-sharing systems. Several of my fellow graduate students and I, students of Professors J.C. Browne and K.M. Chandy, decided we needed a queueing network simulation environment to accompany models solved by numerical and approximate methods. We defined and implemented QSIM3 for this purpose, including abstractions such as “passive servers”.

(more…)

[tbt] childhood amateur radio projects

Thursday, November 21st, 2019

6M converter

As part of redecorating our house and trying to organize my chaotic archives, I stumbled across a paper copy of The Radio Handbook (William Orr, Editor) 17th Edition. While in junior high school I built several projects out of The Handbook, probably the 16th Edition. [This paper copy is dated 1967, so too recent. The Radio Handbook (William Orr, Editor) 15th Edition 1959 doesn’t seem to have my projects, but I haven’t obtained 16th edition PDF.] (more…)

[koko] (welcome to …) eight Jurassic O.S. on 1992 Dell 486D/50

Thursday, September 26th, 2019

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

.

.

tl;dr multibooting a 1992 Dell 486D/50
   WFW3.11+Win95+Win2K+DellSVR4+NEXTSTEP+RedHat5.2+OS/2 3.0+OpenBSD2.5

(Maybe it should be tl;dw — didn’t watch — the video is long.) This post is intended to both be more accessible summary and provide details that are not in the video.

As part of prolonging JAWS, I bought a 1992 Dell 486D/50 on eBay for $99.99. Though lacking the JAWS graphics memory, EISA and some custom Dell VLSI, that machine is otherwise similar to the JAWS machine, sharing chassis, power supply, SmartVU, probably other items I’m forgetting. The seller didn’t think the 486D/50 was working but I thought I could at least use it for the chassis, etc.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve made the 486D/50 into a robust machine, capable of multi-booting all of the 1990s operating systems listed above — three major Windows versions, OS/2, two competing Unix versions, NEXTSTEP, and Linux. The video demonstrates using a Web browser in all eight environments. I could probably have used the Mosaic browser on all eight, did use Mosaic on most, but (of course) used Tim Berners-Lee original browser on NEXTSTEP, and chose to use Netscape 3 on BSD Unix and Linux.

(more…)

koko: reviving timbl’s WorldWideWeb browser

Monday, July 1st, 2019

on NEXTSTEP 486 on JAWS

December 25, 2021: Happy 31st birthday WorldWideWeb – the first browser!
July 1, 2021: Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0
June 15, 2021: Web inventor Berners-Lee to auction original code as NFT

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

With working NEXTSTEP 3.2 in hand, I wondered if I could find sources for the original browser that Tim Berners-Lee wrote when he invented the World Wide Web at CERN, and if I could, could I get that browser working. Success!

Tim Berners-Lee WorldWideWeb on NEXTSTEP 3.3 on JAWS

Tim Berners-Lee WorldWideWeb on NEXTSTEP 3.3 on JAWS

(more…)