Data from Columbia 2/1/03 massacre survived... Sounds like anothergovmint covup to me!

Brian Thorn wrote:
On Sun, 18 May 2008 16:42:46 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:


the news article tried to downplay the use of the DOS operating system
as the OS for the space shuttle,
DOS was never the OS for the space shuttle. The space shuttle carried
experiments from many different agencies and some of them used DOS. That
does not mean that DOS was the OS for the space shuttle.
the article stated that DOS was used stupid. did you even take time
to read the article,

But the article does not say that DOS is the OS for the space shuttle.
That was entirely you adding 2 + 2 and getting 22, and then acting
like a 9 year old child when you were corrected about it.

As Jorge explained (uselessly to you, it appears), the recovered hard
drive was part of an experiment installed in the Spacehab laboratory
module in the Columbia's cargo bay.

The "OS" of the Space Shuttle is not DOS, it is HAL/S, a type of
Assembly Language. This is well-documented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL/S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101

OK, took me too long to catch on, triba_la_raza is a loon.

Easy to fix.

On Sun, 18 May 2008 20:50:57 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Jorge
R. Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

OK, took me too long to catch on, triba_la_raza is a loon.

That was actually easily inferable from teh screen name.

I mean, "the tribe of the race"? Come on...

On Sun, 18 May 2008 20:50:57 -0500, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

OK, took me too long to catch on, triba_la_raza is a loon.

Easy to fix.

Yup, he got plonked here after a couple of lines

Dale

the article stated that DOS was used stupid.

If it so did, it didn't know what it was talking about. DOS was an
operating system for the first S/360 systems 8-).

People often claim MS DOS was used when what they really mean is the
file system that MS DOS introduced to the PC, i.e., FAT16 or its
successor FAT32. WNT, Linux et al. will all happily read and write such
a file system, with no involvement of whatever DOS.

Jan

On May 18, 7:47*pm, wrote:
On May 10, 4:36*pm, "Jorge R. Frank" wrote:





Jorge R. Frank wrote:
Brian Thorn wrote:
On Sat, 10 May 2008 11:32:03 -0500, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

James Of Tucson wrote:
At one time, the GPCs were based on a Motorola 68000, but a special
one that was designed for the space program.
That one ran OS-9. *It was actually the second generation GPC, in
84.
No. The GPCs have always been from the IBM AP-101 family. They
started out as AP-101B and were upgraded to AP-101S starting in 1991..
The S has more memory and has the IOP integrated into the CPU, while
the B had separate CPUs and IOPs.

IIRC, 68000s did turn up in the updated Main Engine Controllers circa
1990. I had an Amiga at the time and was impressed that some part of
the Shuttle was also now using the 68000.

Hmm, right you are. Jenkins says the Block II MECs were certified in
1991 (p. 416) but does not mention that it used a 68000. That bit of
info is in /Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience/, however.

It is also probably worth pointing out that there are other "computers"
on the shuttle that are more powerful than the GPCs. The MEDS IDPs are
Intel 386-based, and the MEDS MDUs have RISC processors, for example.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

RISC processors are called that for a reason. *they are ****, and are
very risky. *yet another 'tribute' to the evil, vacuous IBM


IBM invented RISC? I thought it was DEC?

In sci.space.history Eric Chomko wrote:
RISC processors are called that for a reason. ?they are ****, and
are very risky. ?yet another 'tribute' to the evil, vacuous IBM

IBM invented RISC? I thought it was DEC?

I am reasonably confident that DEC did not invent RISC. I'm not sure
if IBM invented the concept of RISC, but they did have an early RISC
processor - the 801 IIRC. It was in the IBM "PC-RT" which those enough
"fortunate" to be at CMU ca 1984-1988 could use as an "Andrew"
workstation. They were generally third in preference among users
(well at least me, based on performance) behind Sun 3/80's and DEC
MicroVax II's.

When HP started marketing PA-RISC ca 1986 they were calling it HP-PA -
Hewlett-Packard Precision Architecture - I'm told because people
indeed considered "RISC" risky. After RISC was established, it was
then called PA-RISC for Precision Architecture RISC.

rick jones
--
The computing industry isn't as much a game of "Follow The Leader" as
it is one of "Ring Around the Rosy" or perhaps "Duck Duck Goose."
- Rick Jones
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hp.com but NOT BOTH...

Rick Jones wrote:

:In sci.space.history Eric Chomko wrote:
: RISC processors are called that for a reason. ?they are ****, and
: are very risky. ?yet another 'tribute' to the evil, vacuous IBM
:
: IBM invented RISC? I thought it was DEC?
:
:I am reasonably confident that DEC did not invent RISC. I'm not sure
:if IBM invented the concept of RISC, but they did have an early RISC
rocessor - the 801 IIRC.
:

RISC was sort of invented in two places at about the same time. One
of those places was Building 801 at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center.
The other was under a DARPA program at UC Berkeley. Both of these
occurred around 1980 or so.

:
:It was in the IBM "PC-RT" which those enough
:"fortunate" to be at CMU ca 1984-1988 could use as an "Andrew"
:workstation.
:

No, that was a different processor. I think that one was the RS/6000.

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

On Sat, 24 May 2008 00:05:16 +0000 (UTC), Rick Jones
wrote:

I am reasonably confident that DEC did not invent RISC. I'm not sure
if IBM invented the concept of RISC, but they did have an early RISC
processor - the 801 IIRC. It was in the IBM "PC-RT" which those enough
"fortunate" to be at CMU ca 1984-1988 could use as an "Andrew"
workstation. They were generally third in preference among users
(well at least me, based on performance) behind Sun 3/80's and DEC
MicroVax II's.

....From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc#Early_RISC :

"The first system that would today be known as RISC was not at the
time; it was the CDC 6600 supercomputer, designed in 1964 by Jim
Thornton and Seymour Cray. Thornton and Cray designed it as a
number-crunching CPU (with 74 opcodes, compared with a 8086's 400)
plus 12 simple computers called "peripheral processors" to handle I/O
and most other operating system functions. The CDC 6600 had a
load-store architecture with only two addressing modes
(register+register, and register+immediate constant). There were
eleven pipelined functional units for arithmetic and logic, plus five
load units and two store units (the memory had multiple banks so all
load-store units could operate at the same time). The basic clock
cycle/instruction issue rate was 10 times faster than the memory
access time.

Another early load-store machine was the Data General Nova
minicomputer, designed in 1968.

The earliest attempt to make a chip-based RISC CPU was a project at
IBM which started in 1975. Named after the building where the project
ran, the work led to the IBM 801 CPU family which was used widely
inside IBM hardware. The 801 was eventually produced in a single-chip
form as the ROMP in 1981, which stood for Research OPD [Office
Products Division] Mini Processor. As the name implies, this CPU was
designed for "mini" tasks, and when IBM released the IBM RT-PC based
on the design in 1986, the performance was not acceptable.
Nevertheless the 801 inspired several research projects, including new
ones at IBM that would eventually lead to their POWER system.

The most public RISC designs, however, were the results of university
research programs run with funding from the DARPA VLSI Program. The
VLSI Program, practically unknown today, led to a huge number of
advances in chip design, fabrication, and even computer graphics."

....The bit about RISC essentially originating with the "Cyber" jives
with what I was taught back in '76 when I first got indoctrinated into
what we of my High School's "Brain Trust" were getting into when we
were given accounts to access Texas University's CDC-6600. The catch
is that we were told the term "reduced instruction set", but the
acronym apparently came later. Of course, we were doing BASIC and
Minnesota Northstar Fortran IV in those days, so any reduction in our
instruction sets involved trying to code as fast as we could to keep
the dial-up costs down to a semi-minimum :-P Ironically, I wouldn't
hear the term RISC mentioned again in a computer class until 1985 in a
Pascal class, when bimbo-emeritus "Dr." Nell Dale tried to claim
top-down design would make RISC easier and Pascal the language that
would make BASIC and C obsolete. Pushing bull**** like that explains
why it wasn't until she retired from teaching that Texas U's CS degree
was finally accredited with a BS as opposed to the BA founded on pure
BS that it had been for years.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

In article ,
says...
On Sat, 24 May 2008 00:05:16 +0000 (UTC), Rick Jones
wrote:

I am reasonably confident that DEC did not invent RISC. I'm not sure
if IBM invented the concept of RISC,

RISC was one of those "in the air" concepts that several groups invented
independently. Probably the best candidate for first inventor is David
Paterson of UC/Berkeley. If nothing else, he was the guy who coined the
name RISC.

In addition to inventing the current style of CPUs, Paterson also
invented the current style of high-performance disk systems: RAID. He's
also responsible for the "smart disk" style that has made Netezza
successful.


"The first system that would today be known as RISC was not at the
time; it was the CDC 6600 supercomputer, designed in 1964 by Jim
Thornton and Seymour Cray. [...]

Another early load-store machine was the Data General Nova
minicomputer, designed in 1968.

Early, but not first. The PDP-5 predated not just the Nova but also the
CDC-6600. The -5 has an even more reduced instruction set than the CDC
-- just eight opcodes. An updated version of the -5 was the PDP-8. The
head engineer of the -8 quit DEC to found Data General where he (Edson
d'Castro) designed the Nova. So the Nova, although a RISC machine,
wasn't the first of the kind. DEC has a clear claim to early RISC
machine with the -5, although you can spend way too much time debating
the details of the definition of RISC.

There is something ironic about the fact that the two most notable RISC
machines were both the smallest, slowest, cheapest computer (PDP-5/8) of
its era, and the biggest, baddest, fastest computer of its era (CDC).

Even better: these two machines were the first two computers I ever
programmed.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Kansas City, this was Air Force One. Will you change
our call sign to SAM 27000? -- Col. Ralph Albertazzie

"Kevin Willoughby" wrote in message
. ..
Even better: these two machines were the first two computers I ever
programmed.

My electronics instructor kept copies of his favorite subroutines on the
wall- in paper tape.


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