Posted on 04/25/2005 7:47:12 AM PDT by 1FASTGLOCK45
must be my bad then cause i thought that was what the MicroVAX's had as a chipset... what were they using then???
That would be the, uh, MicroVAX chipset.
The MicroVAX I was a board (or perhaps two; I've never actually seen one) full of chips. I think this first showed up in '83; I recall seeing sales literature for it around that time.
The MicroVAX II boiled this into two chips, one for the main instruction set and a floating-point coprocessor. The MicroVAX II showed up shortly after the MicroVAX I. I don't recall when I first saw a MicroVAX II, but I think the MicroVAX 2000 (a small desktop VAX using the MicroVAX II chipset) first showed up around '87.
The CVAX got it all down to a single chip.
From there, things wentnuts. There were Rigel, Mariah, SOC, NVAX, and a bunch of others ending with the NV5 and NV5+. NV5+ was a version of the NV5 that was mostly pin-compatible with the first Alpha.
The Alpha first showed up in '91 as the EV4, which was used in the DEC 3000/400 (Sandpiper) and /500 (Flamingo) as well as a bunch of others. The machine I have at home is a Sandpiper, based on the EV4. The machines I use at work are based on the EV56. The current Alpha is the EV7z.
thankxlot for the update... i never took the field service course for them, i just programed them, so i and never paid any attention to the chip set back then. It's amazing how many otherwise savvy people don't know about resizing image files befor emailing or posting on the web. Photoshop has the ImageReady utility (which used to be a separate program). This is about the coolest utility I know of, but why isn't there more buzz about this process?
Digital cameras are now producing 5 megabyte jpegs. Someone needs to produce a free or cheap utility that will convert directories full of big image files into email sized files. (Copying them into another folder, of course.)
i went straight from that to migrating everything to all pc based applications in 1990 and lost touch with most things DEC after that except linking the pc's to VAX clusters.
I've actually come at the DEC world backwards. My first encounter with DEC was the 11/780 owned by the university I went to. From there, I picked up some PDP-11 and PDP-8 experience. Then I got a job doing VMS kernel work, and am still doing that sort of stuff 20 years later. The transition from VAX to Alpha was a marvelous thing; I was still able to look things up in my trusty old VAX microfiche to figure out what the Alpha kernel was doing, since most of the kernel was translated by running it through a compiler that VAX assembly into Alpha code.
These days, most of the kernel is in C and the device drivers I write are in C. I was skeptical at first, but they've put a lot of work into making C work and I don't miss the assembly language. Much.
For a while, I was afraid I would be sucked into the PC and Mac world, but that particular company imploded and I was able to find myself some more VMS work.
Now I'm looking at what it takes to move my stuff to Itanium, since that's where VMS is headed since the Alphacide. I think I have it figured out, but won't know for sure until I manage to get my hands on a machine.
I believe you're talking about Windows NT 4 on DEC/Alpha. Some machines it ran on were clearly workstation models that would fit on a desk. :) NT4 Alpha also supported SMP and ran on 12 and 14-way DEC servers with multi-gigabyte RAM configurations.
decaf,
deep breath and relax.
You are going to pop a blood vessel.
LOL - I forgot all about that one. I was thinking of the 64-bit XP that MS produced for the Itanium/I2.
I've seen batch conversion utilities for Windows before, but the problem I've always run into is that those are the sorts of things that someone popped out in an afternoon of coding, and then think they're going to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I'm too lazy to write my own, and too lazy to open my wallet, so I guess I'll hit Sourceforge and see what they've got ;)
As long as Windows is adding bloat, they could add a right click choice for image files that would rotate the image or "save for web". I still get megabyte sized jpegs in emails.
I can already hear those shareware guys screeching about abuse of monopoly power....
I believe Macs already have an image rotate built into the file browser. Perhaps a file size reducer could be built into the email client, or added as a plugin. This kind of simple software ought to come with digital cameras.
sometimes i miss the simple complexity of having walls of A to A, and A to D and D to D and D to A Input/Output cards all being fed to banks of DYS-50's in turn controlled by the PDP-11's that were linked to the VAX clusters... on second thought, maybe i don't 8^)
I didn't mention Alpha (running 64bit Linux since 1998 or so and Tru64 since about 1994 I think) , neither did I mention SGI's IRIX, running 64bit since about 1994 or 95.
Well, at least I know how to spell "ass".
I've got one I can sell you for $29.95.
Besides, he's wrong.
(surprised look)
I didn't mention Alpha (running 64bit Linux since 1998 or so and Tru64 since about 1994 I think)
Tru64 is only the most recent name for OSF/1, which has been running on Alphas since their release.
NetBSD and FreeBSD also run on Alpha. I don't know about their "bittedness". Although I have, on occasion, run NetBSD/Alpha, I didn't investigate how much 64-bit stuff it allowed me to do.
All modern day computers and compilers are built around relocatable code, they have base registers and offset registers.
The code is written, all (or most) 32 bit code should run fine on a 64 bit processor.. if the hardware engineers know what the hey they're doing.
And judging from the things I take apart and put back together, comon sense is not so common in engineers..
Big Blue has been working on this type of stuff for what?, like three decades?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.