Bit of computing nostalgia here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12703674
I went from an Acorn Atom to a Spectrum so actually missed out on the ZX81, but it's a good read.
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We had a ZX81 briefly before getting a spectrum. We soon got a 16Kb RAM pack but not the official one to avoid the wobble problem. This fitted flush along the back and had velcro!
learned to programme on the ZX81. In fact learned to programme the ZX81 before we got it and wrote first program within 24 hours of getting it.
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Still got my Sinclair QL. Not using ot at the moment though!
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I`ve still got mine "somewhere" under tens of thousands of cobwebs in the loft! along with one of the very first Atari`s that played that tennis game with the white dot, and also one of the first Apple comps with the rubber keyboard that used the "Snafu" cartridges with games like Snake on!
Like the article said: "many happy hours lying on the floor, typing in reams of code from a magazine" ;-) only to find it didn`t work! yay! those were the days!
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Still have the Speccy up in the loft with all the old favourite games - Horace and the Spiders, Manic Miner, Jet Pac. And it still works - used it last autumn!
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Still got the Oric (second version with a proper keyboard as the first one packed up and was replaced).
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I wonder how many have gone out and got a Spectrum emulator and games after seeing the news article? Is there a ZX81 emulator??
I recall having the ZX81 for a little longer than I initially remembered. Got it for Xmas and got a Flight Simulator (from Psion) on my birthday in the October.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvY4roVg7YQ
The graphics were not up to much! Hence instrument landings which were tricky.
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I had the ZX80, that I built from a kit.
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I started out on a C64 circa 1990. We did have one before (1984) but it blew up and I was only a todler at the time.
64K was bad enough I would dread to think how bad a 1k system is.
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The memory thing is a whole nother discussion. Somebody persuaded me to download a thing called Intel App Up and a game the other day - 60MB later...on our 500kbps connection I had plenty of time to reflect that the first work PC I had on my desk had a 20MB hard drive. In fact I also used a Macintosh with a 5MB HDD - that cost about £2000 IIRC.
I decided the other day that I 'needed' a pocket computer again. I have a job for it. In the 80s I arranged asset finance and leasing, and I used a BASIC programmable Casio to handle all the calculations while my colleagues were using paper tables. Now I want to do something similar and nothing really exists. I suppose I need to learn Java and write an 'app' for an i-something-or-other.
The original (might have had 16k RAM) is in the loft somewhere but I can't find it.
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>>
>> I decided the other day that I 'needed' a pocket computer again. I have a
>> job for it. In the 80s I arranged asset finance and leasing, and I used
>> a BASIC programmable Casio to handle all the calculations while my colleagues were using paper
>> tables. Now I want to do something similar and nothing really exists. I suppose I
>> need to learn Java and write an 'app' for an i-something-or-other.
>>
HP still make proper programmable calculators IIRC, maybe this would do the job:-
www.amazon.co.uk/Hewlett-Packard-HP12C-Financial-Calculator/dp/B00000JBLH/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299878029&sr=8-1
This looks pretty fancy as well:-
www.amazon.co.uk/Casio-FX-9860GII-SD-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B0023UYQNW
Last edited by: spamcan61 on Fri 11 Mar 11 at 21:18
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>> HP still make proper programmable calculators IIRC, maybe this would do the job:-
>>
>> www.amazon.co.uk/Hewlett-Packard-HP12C-Financial-Calculator/dp/B00000JBLH/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299878029&sr=8-1
>>
>> This looks pretty fancy as well:-
>>
>> www.amazon.co.uk/Casio-FX-9860GII-SD-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B0023UYQNW
>>
My 'everyday' calculator is an HP12C, so I can see why you might recommend one for somebody babbling about financial calculations. Did you know they've been around for nearly 30 years and they are so good they still sell them? I retired my 1980s one a couple of years ago and bought the 25th anniversary edition which runs a bit faster!
The 12C's a marvellous machine, and I'd never want any other pocket calculator, but the programming is essentially sequencing calculation steps - handy, but I wanted to mess about with something for 'lay' users that could use text instructions and output, do necessary validation, and hold some table data.
This is the sort of thing I had in about 1985 and can't find -
pocket.free.fr/html/casio/fx-740p_e.html
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>>
>> This is the sort of thing I had in about 1985 and can't find -
>>
>>
>> pocket.free.fr/html/casio/fx-740p_e.html
>>
My former boss used to keep quite a collection of old calculators on top of his filing cabinet, along with some Nokia 2110s and 1101s. The collection included a Casio like that, only longer and thinner. Darned if I can remember the type number though. Also sold with a 'Radio Shack' badge on it.
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I had the ZX81, that I built from a kit.
Followed by a Spectrum the following year.
Between the two of them they set my typing ability back by several years.... I'm not even sure if it ever recovered :)
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but it made an iphone keyboard seems superb!
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>> but it made an iphone keyboard seems superb!
>>
Probably had a better signal as well..... ;-)
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My Z80 was never happy being next to my 100 watt CB burner. It tended to corrupt any program you had loaded
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Load "" followed by a screeching noise from the cassette recorder!!
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To get around the memory limit of 1Kb on the ZX81, programs would do things like define a variable in terms of constants that were built in, e.g.
LET A=PI - PI instead of LET A=0
or
LET A=PI - PI instead of LET A=0
all to do with the tokenised version of BASIC and how numbers would be stored otherwise.
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Perhaps ZX81 should be taught in universities now. Although were taught about proper use of variables etc it was far too easy to declare things as a float instead an integer, it is this sort of sloppyness which has made modern programs eat up so much RAM.
How the hell can a printer driver for example be 118MB?
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>> Perhaps ZX81 should be taught in universities now. Although were taught about proper use of
>> variables etc it was far too easy to declare things as a float instead an
>> integer, it is this sort of sloppyness which has made modern programs eat up so
>> much RAM.
Yeah, but the reality is that PCs do have that much RAM now. The last thing you want is your developers wasting time making everything super memory efficient, when the competition are putting in features that people actually want.
Of course, there are times when efficiency is very important (perhaps graphically intensive games, embedded systems, mobile apps etc) but for most applications it isn't.
Not to say that memory management isn't important (I frequently have to close FireFox because it gobbles up more and more memory) but memory efficiency as an objective in it's own right is not something that most application developers should be worrying about.
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>> Perhaps ZX81 should be taught in universities now. Although were taught about proper use of
>> variables etc it was far too easy to declare things as a float instead an
>> integer, it is this sort of sloppyness which has made modern programs eat up so
>> much RAM.
Totally disagree. I have programmed everything from the ZX81 (back in '83 or '84, can't remember now!), to Spectrums, Amigas (in machine code, no less) to PCs with .Net today. Sure, the memory requirements are staggering now, but you also have to understand the first law of software sophistication:
-- As software capabilities increase in a linear fashion, the hardware requirements increase exponentially.
The ZX81 was truly primitive. Great at the time compared to what came before it, but most young people today would scarcely recognise it as a computer. The inevitable price of progress to far more complex software today is silly memory usage, among other things. The flipside of that is the truly incredible things that are possible today, things I could barely imagine back in the early 80s. I was impressed by a line drawn black & white maze game that had about 8 pre-defined rooms (ZX81, of course), IIRC. A joke today.
If I still had a ZX81 today I'd throw it in the bin, assuming there's no museums that would want it. I doubt my toddler would be impressed by what it could do!
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>> If I still had a ZX81 today I'd throw it in the bin, assuming there's
>> no museums that would want it. I doubt my toddler would be impressed by what
>> it could do!
Another article on the BBC website featuring an interview with the designer of classic BBC Micro game Elite (I never had a BBC). To give some idea of the complexity of modern games, he mentions that regarding his company's Kinect game, "a team of more than 100 worked on it for 16 months".
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/03/david_braben_-_an_elite_gamer.html
I was going to say that would explain the high price, £40? But I remember Spectrum games costing £10 (the big box Ultimate Sabre Wulf series) - how much is that in today's money?
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>>
>> I was going to say that would explain the high price, £40? But I remember
>> Spectrum games costing £10 (the big box Ultimate Sabre Wulf series) - how much is
>> that in today's money?
>>
Roughly between 30 and 50 quid, depending on what mechanism you want to use for the calculation.
www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/
Last edited by: spamcan61 on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 12:52
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>> www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/03/david_braben_-_an_elite_gamer.html
...and I missed this:
"He and some friends in the Cambridge technology sector are looking at ways of reintroducing into schools the kind of basic programming skills he learned, and which seem to have disappeared in an ICT curriculum which teaches how to handle Microsoft Office and little else.
They've a cunning plan for a very cheap programmable device which could fire young imaginations today in the way the BBC Micro and Elite did 30 years ago. More on that in due course."
A home micro for the 21st century?
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>>
>> A home micro for the 21st century?
>>
Sounds like they're trying to re-invent Lego Mindstorms.
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>> "He and some friends in the Cambridge technology sector are looking at ways of reintroducing
>> into schools the kind of basic programming skills he learned, and which seem to have
>> disappeared in an ICT curriculum which teaches how to handle Microsoft Office and little else.
I respect David Braben a lot, but he rather misses the point here. Schools didn't teach programming skills back in the day, certainly not until A-level at least. If you were lucky you had Business Studies or some such rubbish that would teach you how to use a typewriter one week and the next you might get "lucky" and see the IT teacher who would attempt to show you how to move and copy files on a BBC micro (clearly showing they knew less about what was going on than the nerdy kids did), and maybe get a game of Elite on a lunchtime. The generation of programmers I come from were all largely self-taught, and without the benefit of the internet to crib from! We did all right.
Youngsters today don't know they've been born! ;)
Cheap programmable device? Try any PC you might have lying about. There's plenty of excellent IDEs to develop on, the majority free. You don't have to do the clever stuff straight away....
Last edited by: oilburner on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 13:18
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>> Cheap programmable device? Try any PC you might have lying about. There's plenty of excellent
>> IDEs to develop on, the majority free. You don't have to do the clever stuff
>> straight away....
True, and those who are sufficiently motivated will learn that way.
But those less motivated might find it relatively hard to get started, compared to (say) a Spectrum. On the latter, you got it out of the box, plugged it in, entered
10 PRINT "hello"
hit RUN and you had your first working program (IIRC!). No need to download an IDE etc. Perhaps that's more what they're aiming for?
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 14:01
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>> 10 PRINT "hello"
>>
>> hit RUN and you had your first working program (IIRC!). No need to download an
>> IDE etc. Perhaps that's more what they're aiming for?
>
and then we learned
20 GOTO 10
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ive been electronic savvy all my life
in fact i probably first elecrocuted myself when i was 5 as i plugged me mams iron into the light socket in the scullery while stood on the ironing board that folded out from the door
but i digress
i only got into computers because i had to ,i made a decision never to use the things but unless i did i couldnt do my job anymore
i remember my cousin doing programming on a very basic zx thingy making mr men shoot each other,hes still in the industry at milton keynes but i know what not what he does just like his uncle who did hush hush stuff at marconi in the 70's
anyway i remember those cassette decks doing the noises and it just completely put me of this geeky stuff completely
my old employer used to use cards with holes in like an old organ fair music machine too
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I always suggest C is a great starter language if you've done a bit of BASIC. BASIC is a great tool for the beginner but it teaches too many bad habits.
The thing I love about C is once you can learn that you know the syntax for most other important languages.
When doing A levels in IT at college we had to learn Java but programming was an optional module and it was not actually required.
I think my sister did Pascal and VB in her A levels.
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C is not a good language to learn as a beginner. Pascal is much better - teaches some good programming techniques etc. Both suffer from not having good strings handling functionality. Variants of both do but in C you're into using pointers etc. and therefore not easy for a beginner.
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I would say it depends why you're learning the language. My problem with PASCAL is there is little practical use for it these days.
I am talking about C in its C form rather than C++ too.
What do you want to be doing is C++ and MFC, I still have nightmares about that module.
C# is my favourite language as I find it much easier than C++ but as the same flexibility.
It has been years since I have done any of it though!. I started a C# game a couple of years back but never finished it.
I suppose to teach programming in its basic form Pascal is probably the best option.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 17:49
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Pascal teaches some good habits which can be applied to other languages. Debugging other peoples' C++ programs at University (as a lab supervisor) could be a pain. Seem to recall getting the pointers wrong resulted in the Sun workstations producing a segmentation fault.
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Yeah but once you can do Pascal then PLSQL is easy and that's quite handy. Plus there's still a few places where Pascal is used. I have a Setup Compiler (to produce installer executables) that uses Pascal to write the installer logic. Works a treat too.
Pascal is nice, shame it's gone out of fashion.
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>> I always suggest C is a great starter language if you've done a bit of
>> BASIC.
As a professional C programmer, I would say that any language where
if (x = y)
and
if (x == y)
are both syntactically correct but have completely different outcomes is not an ideal language, for anyone :)
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I was thinking of writing some examples too... C is not the ideal language. :-)
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But it forces discipline, something which has been forgotten about. I admit C is not an ideal language, it has been a long time since I have done anything in it but I did really like and enjoyed programming in it.
That said it was not my first language. I started on BASIC and learnt so so many bad habbits.
C taught me about proper program structure but then Pascal would probably do the same thing.
Currently relearning PHP as I need a proper management system for my business and I figured it would be easier to start from scratch rather than spend ages trying to customise one.
Is Borland still going? I seem to remember in the 90's they had something similar to Visual Basic but was Pascal based.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 21:23
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Was it Borland Delphi? Something like that. They are still going but owned by MicroFocus now.
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>> Is Borland still going? I seem to remember in the 90's they had something similar
>> to Visual Basic but was Pascal based.
Delphi - wrote some utilities in that for work at a previous job; easy way of writing Windows apps if you didn't know how to do it using C++ and the Microsoft tools. Liked it.
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You think BASIC is bad - we use TCL quite a bit at my current job as a scripting language, and that's like BASIC, but without the more recent improvements. Everything is a string; you mis-type a variable name and the word is still valid as a string (words don't need quotes to be strings), and other stuff like that.
But it's quite easy to write 'quick and dirty' stuff, so in that respect it's quite powerful.
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Delphi that is the one :).
I really miss VB6 as a rapid development platform. I find .NET far too bloaty for writing simple applications but that said VB6 needed quite a big runtime engine too.
The one language I have never really like for some reason is Java but I instantly loved C# which is very similar.
I did write a very simple windows application once using pure C++ and I think a program called DEVC? That was very neat as you could keep file file sizes down to a minimum but I am not a software engineer or a programmer so I never really understood exactly how to make direct API calls.
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>> I did write a very simple windows application once using pure C++ and I think
>> a program called DEVC?
Still going: www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
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Yep still occasionaly use it for simple command line C stuff just to mess about, but I would never again attempt to do anything windows based on it.
It is not installed on my desktop so I can assume I have not used it since 2007.
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The need to keep programs small is no longer such an issue - unlike mentioned about the ZX81 above. Someone I know programs a bit for his work with servers with several terabytes of RAM. As a hobby he does micro-controller type stuff for robotics and has to do things with significantly less memory!
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Our multi-core CPUs have 3 types of core - the largest has 64k total code + data memory, but the smallest (and most common) has 512 bytes for code and 256 bytes for data. Somewhere between a ZX80 and a ZX81 :)
Last edited by: Focus on Wed 16 Mar 11 at 21:53
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Sounds about the same sort of memory my friend deals with with his robotics type hobby.
Not a memory size thing but I remember on the BBC some protection on games would have a valid looking program that was rewritten on the fly at least twice before you saw the real code for the loader. Not that I was hacking I should add ;-) The part of memory with machine code was executed multiple times - each time the same memory held a different program! Not good practice to allow code to change itself but there was nothing stopping this back then.
Another simple trick for security code back then was to POKE an address on the stack and then issue a RETURN instruction. Except it didn't return to where it came from due to the sneeky POKE instruction.
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>> Not a memory size thing but I remember on the BBC some protection on games
>> would have a valid looking program that was rewritten on the fly at least twice
>> before you saw the real code for the loader. Not that I was hacking I
>> should add ;-)
Used to have to 'hack' protected Spectrum tape games so I could save them onto Microdrives.
Ah the youth of today don't know what they're missing... :)
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Yep did that too and never got on with lens lock protection on Elite so removed that. And saved games in a faster format too.
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Ah, Elite. Sigh. I was working at an Acorn dealer when Elite came out. I remember one Saturday so many people came and a bought a BBC Micro and a copy of Elite that when we closed I was astonished to find the one day's takings was my whole year's salary in cash.
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The version that shipped on cassette (cut down compared to the disk version) was amazing that it fitted in about 20Kb RAM! The programmers worked very hard to keep the size of the code small.
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Still playable with a spot of fannying about with emulators if you care. Not tried - I reckon it would fall into the category of "things better remembered".
home.clara.net/iancgbell/elite/index.htm
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Wasn't their a stripped down version of Elite for the Electron?
I always always a C64 person, much better sound and graphics although the BASIC was rather poor compared to the BBCs which used a newer version of Microsoft BASIC. The main reason the C64 had an older and stripped down version was to reduce costs they had to reduce the ROM size so they had to make it fit.
If I had known about Simons BASIC I would have probably bought that.
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Yes indeed - the page I linked has Electron and C64 versions, amongst others.
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>> The version that shipped on cassette (cut down compared to the disk version) was amazing
>> that it fitted in about 20Kb RAM! The programmers worked very hard to keep the
>> size of the code small.
That's where the Spectrum scored over the BBC IMO - the Spectrums had one graphics mode with a resolution of 256x192 and 8 colours. Actually that wasn't strictly true - you could set each of the foreground and background colours to one of 8 within each block of 8x8 pixels (corresponding to one character square), but you couldn't have more than the 2 selected colours within any one block. But game programmers could create some good looking screens within these limitations, and the beauty of it was that it only took up 7k (256*192/8 + 32*24), leaving about 40k for program code on a 48k Speccy.
However, the BBC had various graphics modes where for a given amount of memory you could trade colours against resolution. So the equivalent of 256x192 with 8 colours on a BBC (don't think there was one that matched that exactly) took up a lot more than 7k (256*192*3/8 = 18k). And because the BBC had a more powerful BASIC/OS which took up 32k of ROM compared to the Speccy's 16k, that didn't leave you much code space out of the 64k address space - 20k sounds about right.
They were both clever designs, but I particularly admire the Spectrum.
Last edited by: Focus on Thu 17 Mar 11 at 12:30
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>> They were both clever designs, but I particularly admire the Spectrum.
>>
Yeah, me too. Given the hardware limitations, some of the games produced for the Speccy were incredible. A whole lot more interesting and playable than the never ending spew of first person shooters you get these days. I must have spent half my childhood playing things like Codename Mat and Silent Service. Magic stuff, so many thousands of games. It was so accessible too, anyone could get into writing games if they had a bit of talent. Not like today where you need a budget of millions to write yet another sequel in a franchise that's the same as before, but glossier. Halcyon days!
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>The need to keep programs small is no longer such an issue..
Tight coding may not be important for you desktop jockeys but HPC is another matter. Squeezing an extra 1% out of a typical HPC installation can save you millions of dollars.
>Someone I know programs a bit for his work with servers with several terabytes of RAM.
I think you mean 'clusters' not 'servers'. The only 'system's that I can recall that had more than 1TB of RAM were database benchmark systems that used RAM as a filesystem cache.
Kevin...
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I know what I said and it was accurate. Servers with Terabytes of RAM. Several in fact. Yes they are large systems costing a few bob. Although server might downplay what the system is I suppose.
Goodness some on here think they know better ;-) This was a single instance. Heck he had access to systems with huge amounts of RAM in 1999! It's not that much these days.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 17 Mar 11 at 00:50
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>Servers with Terabytes of RAM. Several in fact.
Can you tell us what these systems are and the workload they're running?
>Goodness some on here think they know better ;-) This was a single instance.
No offence intended. It's my job, I've worked in HPC for more than ten years.
Commercial systems supporting 'several Terabytes' (most support a max of 4TB) are very recent and quite rare. Workloads that need several Terabytes in a single instance are even rarer because it implies that they cannot be parallelized efficiently.
>Heck he had access to systems with huge amounts of RAM in 1999! It's not that much these days.
In 1999, the largest commercial systems usually maxed out at around 128GB. That's still pretty substantial even today.
Kevin...
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>Can you tell us what these systems are and the workload they're running?
I guess not :-(
Kevin...
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Several Tb RAM is common on large system is it not? Hence no reply. Anything running large databases or ERP type systems.
In response to:
>> In 1999, the largest commercial systems usually maxed out at around 128GB. That's still
>> pretty substantial even today.
He probably had two systems with that sort of RAM in 1999. He works in benchmarking so has access to the biggest sort of systems available.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 24 Mar 11 at 00:03
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Talking about Tb of RAM in a ZX81 thread doesn't seem appropriate somehow :)
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>Talking about Tb of RAM in a ZX81 thread doesn't seem appropriate somehow :)
Do I detect a slight twinge of jealousy Focus? All that lovely, lovely RAM to play with.
I don't think the Mods have noticed the thread drift. We may have got away with it this time :-)
Kevin...
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>> >Talking about Tb of RAM in a ZX81 thread doesn't seem appropriate somehow :)
>>
>> Do I detect a slight twinge of jealousy Focus? All that lovely, lovely RAM to
>> play with.
Too right - the code I'm working on at the moment runs on a device with 32k, and I've already had to practically re-write it once due to shortage of RAM.
>> I don't think the Mods have noticed the thread drift. We may have got away
>> with it this time :-)
And please carry on - I too was interested in finding out what sort of applications need that much space. I'd assumed you could generally get away with clever file manipulation, but I guess there are large performance benefits from doing it in-memory.
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>> And please carry on - I too was interested in finding out what sort of
>> applications need that much space. I'd assumed you could generally get away with clever file
>> manipulation, but I guess there are large performance benefits from doing it in-memory.
The 1.5TB in the IBM Z10 would be primarily utilised by DB2. If you want your database to be fast when used by tens of thousands of users consecutively, you need to prefetch as much to memory as possible.
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>> And please carry on - I too was interested in finding out what sort of
>> applications need that much space. I'd assumed you could generally get away with clever file
>> manipulation, but I guess there are large performance benefits from doing it in-memory.
The 1.5TB in the IBM Z10 would be primarily utilised by DB2. If you want your database to be fast when used by tens of thousands of users consecutively, you need as much memory as possible.
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>Several Tb RAM is common on large system is it not?
It's still quite rare, hence my asking.
Kevin...
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IBM Z10 E64 can be configured with 1.5TB of real memory.
Thought you were a big blue man Kevin.
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1.5TB RAM seems to imply a limit somewhere. Why not 2TB? Some systems take 4TB today.
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>> 1.5TB RAM seems to imply a limit somewhere. Why not 2TB? Some systems take 4TB
>> today.
You keep saying that, but you haven't named any.,
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Well an IBM Power 795 takes 8TB RAM. There named one. I think the HP Superdomes take around 4TB max. The Fujitsu SPARC M9000 (also sold by Oracle) takes 4TB RAM too.
So I am surprised Kevin didn't ask if it was one of these to be honest. Okay they are large expensive system but when you spend millions you get what you pay for. We all probably have 8Gb in our laptops or desktops these days at a minimum... or is that just me?
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 24 Mar 11 at 21:11
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We all probably have 8Gb in our laptops or desktops these days
>> at a minimum... or is that just me?
Thats just you. Most people have no more than 2gb, 4 gb is not common, and 8gb is very rare.
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A lot of people now have 64-bit Windows (my new work laptop does) and the 8Gb RAM was about £60 internally. The Mac has been 64-bit for ages but prices for 2 x 4Gb DIMMs only came down recently.
4Gb was not common before 64-bit Windows 7 because people would complain when they couldn't see all 4Gb. Hence a lot of laptops with 3Gb I guess.
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A lot of people do not have 64bit windows 7. and of those fewer have 8gb.
Far more people have 32bit windows 7, 32 bit vista, and 32 bit XP
8GB in pcs is still quite rare.,
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 24 Mar 11 at 21:26
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To think my first computer the ZX-81 had only 1Kb to start with. ;-)
Games on the Spectrum were also more fun than a lot on the PC.
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Still a fair few new PCs around that only support 4GB on the mobo. anyway; I'd say new low-medium spec. consumer machines with more than 3GB are still unusual, how many apps. need that much RAM anyway?
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VMWARE for starters for work. I can get easily 8-9 machines running to simulate a real multi-LAN environment with domain controllers.
For home I use photo and video editing so again RAM very useful. Photoshop I don't use but that loves memory. It is this that would benefit many.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 24 Mar 11 at 21:46
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You are not, by a long way, a typical PC user. Therefore your configuration is far from normal.
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>So I am surprised Kevin didn't ask if it was one of these to be honest.
You wanted me to start a guessing game before I get a straight answer?
Kevin...
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>> You wanted me to start a guessing game before I get a straight answer?
Question: How many servers can run with more than 2TB RAM in a single system image....
... At a guess it is the ones I mentioned above.
Possibly add on what is now known as Cray (Tera Computer Company bought the remains from SGI... and years before Sun bought the design that became the Sunfire E10K from Cray).
Working in HPC you'd know that though. I do and I don't work in HPC. My brother does and gets to play with real systems with several TB RAM.
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>Thought you were a big blue man Kevin.
You're right Zero. I'm in big blue's HPC group.
Kevin...
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Ah, you just stick gazzilions of little systems together in a mesh.
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:-)
I'd have thought an HPC system would use a Power 7 system or two. And therefore upto 8TB RAM in a system.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 24 Mar 11 at 22:06
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The HPC division doesn't specialise in commercial systems, more to do with scientific workloads, where huge parallel number crunching is needed.
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So he plays with lots of small servers. But the end result if your work load is parallel will be fast.
Trouble is a lot of workloads still are not highly parallel. And making them so is not easy. Anyone remember Transputers and Occam or is that just me? :-)
And this a ZX-81 thread.
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Here's the machine cluster where I did a lot of my hard sums;
www.bear.bham.ac.uk/bluebear/
The work I did was in the teritory where it would tie up a single PC for a week or two, but could be left to crunch on the cluster - I've no idea how the load was shared around the machines, but, it worked well for me.
Since I've moved to another institution, that facility is one I really miss.
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Blue Bear - 1536 cores?
IBM BlueGene P has 294912 cores.
And thats only in 9th place in the worlds top 100 computers!
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>So he plays with lots of small servers.
Boy oh boy, do you not understand HPC.
>Trouble is a lot of workloads still are not highly parallel.
Not true.
Kevin...
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>It was a leg pull Kev!
It's jerking now Zed!
Seriously, my reply was to rtj who doesn't seem to understand either HPC or Enterprise systems.
Kevin...
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>I'd have thought an HPC system would use a Power 7 system or two. And therefore upto 8TB RAM in a system.
The latest nodes are built around P7 but would it surprise you if I said that most HPC nodes, of whatever flavour, have no more than 256GB and the vast majority are 64GB?
Kevin...
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ZX81 - rtj70
