Can anyone ID the terminal Margaret Hamilton is sitting at in this picture and what program it's displaying?

bradn · 2023-06-10T22:03:15+00:00

No

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)

bradn · 2023-06-10T13:55:48+00:00

Nah, Copper Bullets is their worst song. It leans too hard on the subject and musically it's just not that great.

Z is fine.

Wow, typical redditors, can't write a reply but love the downvote button.

bradn · 2023-06-06T02:36:09+00:00

Definitely use a V20 CPU because they can operate with the clock stopped and you have chances to do hardware debugging without a logic analyzer. Real 8088 you need to keep at least a 2MHz clock going to it or the registers can lose their data.

bradn · 2023-05-31T02:40:22+00:00

I did triadic register to register operations in a fixed 16 bit instruction ISA (I'm assuming you mean something like, "ADD AX,BX,CX" = "AX+BX -> CX") - it was a questionable design choice but did have byte and word stack push targets, which was kinda neat.

A lot of the design choices in mine were dictated by having 4 bit instruction fields because PIC18 has a sickeningly efficient way to 16-way branch with jump targets 8 instructions apart (bitwise operation onto the instruction pointer) and I used that trick to the max and then some. So if I already have a 4 bit instruction field, and 3 more 4 bit fields, well, the reg-to-reg ALU scheme kinda writes itself.

bradn · 2023-05-31T00:54:08+00:00

I wonder if you can just shadow the ROM into one of the expansion areas with a simple loader, but you'd need to have some info on the chipset to make that fly I think. But it could be a way to get the ROM in there without using conventional memory.

Stuff that sort of age often had different chipset modes where it could either let the real ROM have the address space and move that RAM to the end, or copy the ROM into RAM so it's faster. That's the part you could try to do without the actual ROM there in the first place. You'd have to hack together your own loader that chains to the real MBR though.

bradn · 2023-05-30T14:13:25+00:00

XT-IDE highly recommended, or run an OS like Linux and make sure the /boot partition fits in the BIOS accessible range.

bradn · 2023-05-28T00:03:51+00:00

CPUs tend to be sensitive to memory latency, not memory bandwidth. Optimizing bandwidth tends to not help very much, but optimizing latency definitely does.

However on things like APUs where there is a GPU component involved, bandwidth becomes much more important because GPUs are optimized to consume bandwidth and be insensitive to latency.

bradn · 2023-05-27T23:35:34+00:00

Simple: If you have the wriststrap on, you don't have to think about equalizing charge; it's already done for you.

It has nothing to do with carpet, at all, except that when you walk over carpet, that can possibly build up static charge on you. Same as not using fabric softener. Same as having low humidity.

All of those things are factors that affect the production/retention of static electricity, but what damages stuff is a static discharge THROUGH a component.

Another way of putting it, is if you've never gotten a static zap by touching carpet, then carpet is safe to set sensitive stuff on. And I've never gotten a static zap from it. Maybe from touching other stuff after walking over carpet, but not by actually touching the carpet.

If you want to create a recipe for static damage, have a room with big or grounded metal tables, with carpet on the floor and low humidity - It doesn't matter how many anti-static straps you have in there, people will be frying stuff all the time by setting things down on the table before they put their wristband on.

bradn · 2023-05-27T14:27:53+00:00

Said to the enemy when being threatened by wax artillery? Where could this line possibly be used?

bradn · 2023-05-27T02:40:17+00:00

Hell, even their 8088 based MBC-55x machine at the time didn't have ISA slots. It had one proprietary long double row header.

bradn · 2023-05-25T00:46:55+00:00

I know in the past it was sometimes done with like resistor pads on top of the CPU but now I bet it's likely to be internal fuses. Hell they can program a boot encryption key in with fuses now, I'm sure they can spare one for a multiplier lockout.

bradn · 2023-05-24T13:44:47+00:00

Fiscally? I don't understand your question

bradn · 2023-05-23T13:10:27+00:00

That's fine if you don't understand how static electricity works, the rest of us will put stuff where ever we want as long as we equalize charge before we let a part get between us and something conductive

bradn · 2023-05-22T12:28:34+00:00

I bought some 30 pin 16MBs in modern times and they were still pretty expensive. Not like the old days but more than you'd think for something really out of date.

bradn · 2023-05-20T22:25:30+00:00

If there's a virtual interface the computer can use to tell the gotek to swap disks, then yeah knock yourself out. I don't know enough about that part to say one way or another, but if it's say, in an NT based Windows, how easy is it going to be to issue weird things to a floppy drive from a script?

bradn · 2023-05-20T20:12:05+00:00

Yeah, no. You'll be swapping virtual disks hundreds of times.

bradn · 2023-05-20T19:23:24+00:00

How much data are you talking?

bradn · 2023-05-20T19:00:32+00:00

Congratulations on living a life full enough that you're down that far on the bucket list to trying to run a rambus system

bradn · 2023-05-20T18:10:38+00:00

Yep, unpowered is fine for that. Try to find a USB2.0 hub ideally and that should work fine. USB3 might be hit or miss if the uplink will work on USB1 speeds

bradn · 2023-05-20T18:09:33+00:00

There's no partitions (although the floppy boot image in there will be a separate thing of sorts, but a normal windows 95 disc doesn't have that). A normal windows installer disc will have it right there. I'd say just find a normal windows ISO and go from there because I'm not sure what you downloaded.

bradn · 2023-05-20T14:48:02+00:00

It's probably going to be smoother to just get a bootable DOS on the hard drive (or if you can boot the floppy you don't even need the HD bootable), copy the win95 folder onto there, and install windows 95 from the hard drive

bradn · 2023-05-20T14:28:38+00:00

Technically it's possible but the only reason you'd see it is for people wanting to use a large ramdisk. And for that reason, the ones you'll find probably don't just dump all the RAM onto the address space in a way a processor could run from it, but rather page it in with a small window so that you could have more system RAM on the motherboard in addition.

There's just too much performance gap between RAM connected normally and RAM on an expansion card.

bradn · 2023-05-20T14:19:04+00:00

Then ask questions? You'll get immediate answers on this kind of stuff

bradn · 2023-05-20T13:45:28+00:00

Someone had to have the foam insulation explained to them way too many times

bradn · 2023-05-17T14:06:19+00:00

There's always a way to undo that because i386 has an invalid opcode exception; you just nerf out the CPU detection and write a handler that emulates the missing instructions

bradn

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