Technologists Notes

“Things Have Changed” – Bob Dylan (1999)

“Everything, still remains the same”
“(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” – Otis Redding (1967)

tl;dr embarking on quantifying meaningful indicators of small computer system performance over the last three decades

In graduate school and subsequent professional work, analyzing performance of computer systems was often my primary effort, including much of the software I wrote, and my first three books. Years ago I pontificated about Meaningful Indicators of System Performance, surveying the (mostly) synthetic benchmarks in vogue in 1990. I was also active in the formation of the Business Applications Performance Corporation. (more…)

“The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew”
(1975) “Tangled Up In Blue” – Bob Dylan

tl;dr with 86Box, obsolete hardware not needed

[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at https://technologists.com/DellUnix2.2.1/]

With prodding and help from Antoni Sawicki, and bits of help from others, I’ve been trying to get Dell Unix to be sustainable on modern hardware. I’d succeeded in building our SVR4 from the last sources on turn of the century and older hardware. VMware and VirtualBox options seemed plausible, but so far we haven’t gotten those to have minimally useful networking, only had slow SLIP.

Though it has been around for years, and used by Antoni before, I was unaware of 86Box until late last year when Antoni posted about it, particularly: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking using emulated VGA and NIC.” That post illustrates Mosaic, FrameMaker et al.

That left the question “What about using Dell SVR4 on 86Box to build SVR4 from the sources?”
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“The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew”
(1975) “Tangled Up In Blue” – Bob Dylan

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tl;dr Updated 2015 MacBook Pro to Big Sur, regretted, restored Catalina from Time Machine, will probably get M1 MacBook (Air or Pro?) soon

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Apple Event — November 10

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“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.

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    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 history^1,2, 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”.

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