4 ms·

As for the alleged Bill Gates quote, I read somewhere (Deep C Secrets by Peer van der Linden, I think, but I am too lazy to look it up), that "640k ought to be

by krylon 9y ago

As for the alleged Bill Gates quote, I read somewhere (Deep C Secrets by Peer van der Linden, I think, but I am too lazy to look it up), that "640k ought to be enough for anyone" did not mean that it was enough for anyone for all times. I am not a fan of Bill Gates, but he is not stupid. And at the time he - allegedly - said it, 640k of RAM was (for a single user!) was indeed a lot! Compare that to the 64k of the C64. It is idiotic to think that he meant that 640k would be sufficient 30 years in the future. That being said, I actually did install MS-DOS 6.22 on three computers over the last couple of years, because the company I work at does - among other things - industrial automation, and (at least) one of our customers has a plant built with automation technology that can apparently only be programmed and configured with a program running on DOS. And it must do some rather funky things, because the software will reliably fail to talk to the PLC if it is running in a virtual machine or on FreeDOS. And of course the company that has written this software has gone out of business a long time ago, so there won't be any updates, either. ;-) If I didn't have more important things to do, figuring out why it does not work on FreeDOS could have been a lot of fun, but just installing MS DOS was the faster solution. Still, installing DOS these days is an interesting experience. The whole system comes on three floppy disks, the installation procedure takes about 15 minutes, and the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Admittedly, you cannot do very much with it without additional software. Three floppy disks - that is about 4.5 Megabyte, Ladies and Gentlemen. Today's high end CPUs have as much L2 cache, or more. And primitive as it is, there are situations where DOS is a reasonable choice. I'm still glad, though, that I never had to deal with segmented memory. That sounds horrible.

katastic 9y ago
> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast? My DOS system used to boot that fast. A C64 is almost instant. And my old ~2013 Chromebook boots in ~7 seconds into Linux with an eMMC drive (slower than an SSD but still fairly fast). It's only got 2 GB of RAM so when it hits swap it'll bog to a standstill so it's often faster just to hit the reset key than try and recover.
- isostatic 9y ago
  I don't understand modern swap. Ok you can page out a few MB you don't use on a regular basis, but any swapping kills the machine. I'd far rather OOMkiller killed off non active tabs (there's almost always a web browser using the memory on a desktop), or run away apache processses, than try to swap. For that reason I never configure swap on any of my machines.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    The regular old swap is slightly technologically behind today's needs. It is supposed to be replaced by things like zram and zswap, that don't kill the machine.
  - greenleafjacob 9y ago
    Swap can be useful for batch jobs that need lots of memory to run but the working set is small. Then you can keep the physical memory for the working set and the disk swap for the (larger) whole set of memory.
  - Avamander 9y ago
    My experience has been that if the usage grows slowly and the system is instructed to actually load stuff to swap I can safely go to the limits of my swap and physical ram space without any freezes and nothing dying (although ofc taking more time, but the alternative is not using the software at all).
  - barrkel 9y ago
    It doesn't make sense on a server, but on a desktop, unless it's actively thrashing, swapping is normally fine. It's not cool to kill off the user's possibly unsaved work with a few random process terminations. There are other, more cooperative ways of doing it. For example, always save enough state to restore after a kill when becoming a background task. But it's also more work.
- sebcat 9y ago
  The boot time bottleneck (if it can be called that) on my old ABC80 was waiting for the CRT to warm up. The prompt was already there and fading into view a couple of seconds after power-up. Booting from ROM is one thing. Loading something from tape, that's another story.
ikeboy 9y ago
What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?
- jdblair 9y ago
  People who run industrial processes tend to make careful, conservative choices. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the golden rule, since any downtime can cost serious money. This means staying on old, proven systems is favored over upgrading for the sake of upgrading, even if there are possible improvements. Context: I used to work on solar power management and control, and developed manufacturing processes to build our hardware.
- mintplant 9y ago
  I wouldn't count on that. Battle-testedness can be a feature, and a new software package means new training for those tasked with maintaining the system. The old one is a known quantity.
- icegreentea2 9y ago
  Well, there's two parts to your question, if there is a demand, why isn't there a supply, and is there really a demand? For the first part, if the original company has gone out of business, and enough records and knowledge lost and scattered, then it'd actually potentially be very difficult for a new group to identify what the original customers were, much less identify what the potential size of market is today. That's quite a lot of risk to take on (in my mind anyways). Industrial automation is one of those things that people don't openly disclose in a way that makes it easy to canvas the market cheaply.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  This isn't software that you can just install and use. This type of software is tightly integrated with the hardware in the factory or distribution center. So, even if there were free software which did the same thing, it would cost a lot of time and money to replace the old, already-working system. Moreover, for software that was put in place 20 years ago, it's likely that some of the functionality is unknown, i.e. the whole system works together, but exactly what is being done by each piece of software isn't fully understood by anyone still at the company. So it would require a bunch of work to even spec a replacement. So it's totally rational to keep the existing, working system, even if you need a dedicated PC to administer it. (Source: I was in a similar situation ~20 years ago.)
throwaway2016a 9y ago
Not to throw in anecdote after anecdote, especially since it is slightly off topic, but I have to share. I worked at a textile company 17 years ago and the bought brand new "state of the art" embroidery machines from Germany and they ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At the time I was just "the web and IT guy" so it was my job to set up a token ring network with coaxial cables to network these machines together so the control computer could send embroidery designs remotely. This was cutting edge stuff, prior to that we had 3.5" floppies and a sneaker net. But even at the time Windows 3.11 was 8 years old. To this day it is the only time I have seen token ring. I have "fond" memories of walking through hundreds of feet of coax checking each connection to find out which one came loose and took the entire network down.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  Damn I remember doing that same thing around 1994-1996, using coaxial cables and checking all the connections / terminators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 Even back then when we wanted to add a new host to the network we had to hunt in the "junk bin" in the local store to get a networking card, then pray that it was supported under Linux. I can say that I've never used token-ring though.

by krylon 9y ago

katastic 9y ago

> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast? My DOS system used to boot that fast. A C64 is almost instant. And my old ~2013 Chromebook boots in ~7 seconds into Linux with an eMMC drive (slower than an SSD but still fairly fast). It's only got 2 GB of RAM so when it hits swap it'll bog to a standstill so it's often faster just to hit the reset key than try and recover.

isostatic 9y ago
I don't understand modern swap. Ok you can page out a few MB you don't use on a regular basis, but any swapping kills the machine. I'd far rather OOMkiller killed off non active tabs (there's almost always a web browser using the memory on a desktop), or run away apache processses, than try to swap. For that reason I never configure swap on any of my machines.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  The regular old swap is slightly technologically behind today's needs. It is supposed to be replaced by things like zram and zswap, that don't kill the machine.
- greenleafjacob 9y ago
  Swap can be useful for batch jobs that need lots of memory to run but the working set is small. Then you can keep the physical memory for the working set and the disk swap for the (larger) whole set of memory.
- Avamander 9y ago
  My experience has been that if the usage grows slowly and the system is instructed to actually load stuff to swap I can safely go to the limits of my swap and physical ram space without any freezes and nothing dying (although ofc taking more time, but the alternative is not using the software at all).
- barrkel 9y ago
  It doesn't make sense on a server, but on a desktop, unless it's actively thrashing, swapping is normally fine. It's not cool to kill off the user's possibly unsaved work with a few random process terminations. There are other, more cooperative ways of doing it. For example, always save enough state to restore after a kill when becoming a background task. But it's also more work.
sebcat 9y ago
The boot time bottleneck (if it can be called that) on my old ABC80 was waiting for the CRT to warm up. The prompt was already there and fading into view a couple of seconds after power-up. Booting from ROM is one thing. Loading something from tape, that's another story.

ikeboy 9y ago

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

jdblair 9y ago
People who run industrial processes tend to make careful, conservative choices. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the golden rule, since any downtime can cost serious money. This means staying on old, proven systems is favored over upgrading for the sake of upgrading, even if there are possible improvements. Context: I used to work on solar power management and control, and developed manufacturing processes to build our hardware.
mintplant 9y ago
I wouldn't count on that. Battle-testedness can be a feature, and a new software package means new training for those tasked with maintaining the system. The old one is a known quantity.
icegreentea2 9y ago
Well, there's two parts to your question, if there is a demand, why isn't there a supply, and is there really a demand? For the first part, if the original company has gone out of business, and enough records and knowledge lost and scattered, then it'd actually potentially be very difficult for a new group to identify what the original customers were, much less identify what the potential size of market is today. That's quite a lot of risk to take on (in my mind anyways). Industrial automation is one of those things that people don't openly disclose in a way that makes it easy to canvas the market cheaply.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
This isn't software that you can just install and use. This type of software is tightly integrated with the hardware in the factory or distribution center. So, even if there were free software which did the same thing, it would cost a lot of time and money to replace the old, already-working system. Moreover, for software that was put in place 20 years ago, it's likely that some of the functionality is unknown, i.e. the whole system works together, but exactly what is being done by each piece of software isn't fully understood by anyone still at the company. So it would require a bunch of work to even spec a replacement. So it's totally rational to keep the existing, working system, even if you need a dedicated PC to administer it. (Source: I was in a similar situation ~20 years ago.)

throwaway2016a 9y ago

Not to throw in anecdote after anecdote, especially since it is slightly off topic, but I have to share. I worked at a textile company 17 years ago and the bought brand new "state of the art" embroidery machines from Germany and they ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At the time I was just "the web and IT guy" so it was my job to set up a token ring network with coaxial cables to network these machines together so the control computer could send embroidery designs remotely. This was cutting edge stuff, prior to that we had 3.5" floppies and a sneaker net. But even at the time Windows 3.11 was 8 years old. To this day it is the only time I have seen token ring. I have "fond" memories of walking through hundreds of feet of coax checking each connection to find out which one came loose and took the entire network down.

stevekemp 9y ago
Damn I remember doing that same thing around 1994-1996, using coaxial cables and checking all the connections / terminators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2 Even back then when we wanted to add a new host to the network we had to hunt in the "junk bin" in the local store to get a networking card, then pray that it was supported under Linux. I can say that I've never used token-ring though.