8 ms·

The other day I was explaining the inner workings of a PC to my son as we were upgrading his computer. I wasn't sure what SATA stood for, so I looked it up: "Se

The other day I was explaining the inner workings of a PC to my son as we were upgrading his computer. I wasn't sure what SATA stood for, so I looked it up: "Serial ATA", a successor to "Parallel ATA". So, OK, what's ATA? "AT Attachment". Great, so what's AT? This actually took a few clicks. Sure enough, it's "Advanced Technology" and comes from the IBM PC/AT released in 1984. Maybe that's obvious, but for some reason that tickled me. Plugging in a wire to a 2TB solid state drive, named after a tech from three decades earlier? Awesome. I'm sure there's lots of terms that are direct descendents of the original PC (including x86 itself), but this one caught me. Imagine telling the guy who decided on "AT" that the term would still be used 36 years later. Anyways, as crazy as it seems to mess with a CGA computer nowadays, it's all related. One tech leads to another which leads to another, each usually somewhat compatible or based on the generation before, so that oddities/limitations and workarounds from back then have a way of trickling down through the years.

samatman 7y ago
My favourite example of this is /dev/tty, where "tty" means Teletype, a technology which predates computers entirely: four of the control characters in ASCII have existed, with their current numeric values, since 1901.
- Doxin 7y ago
  Personally my favorite has to be the "lp0 on fire" error message that stuck around until fairly recently. The origin of that message is from around the time of the early laser printers. Laser printers have a small oven built in to melt the toner onto the page called a fuser. On modern printers that only gets turned on right before use. On the early models the warm up and cool down times were much longer so the fuser would both turn on earlier and take much longer to get back to a room temperature. Those things combined ment that a paper jam could very easily turn into a fire. In fact if the jam detection was having an off-day it could turn into a conveniently paper-stoked fire. Of course there's no real way to detect if a paper jam is the fire causing kind or not remotely so any paper jam would tell you the printer is on fire, just in case it actually is. In short: Early laser printers came with a fire extinguisher included in the sale price for a good reason.
bitwize 7y ago
ATX -- the most common motherboard configuration -- also has its roots in the IBM AT.
- jecel 7y ago
  The PC motherboard form factors were: 1981: PC 1983: XT - more slots, closer together 1984: AT - 16 bit slots, taller cards 1985: Baby AT - eliminated the large non slot area 1987: PS/2 - changed most things, only keyboard/mouse and VGA connectors were adopted 1995: ATX - rotated Baby AT 90 degrees so tall components wouldn't interfere with cards 1997 and later: many ATX variations, BTX, ITX and so on
Darkphibre 7y ago
The evolution of the communication that goes over those wires is really fascinating in its own right, and worth a read! :D https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144561/in-what-sense-does-sata-talk-scsi-how-much-is-shared-between-scsi-and-ata https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144561/in-what-sens...
glandium 7y ago
The ISA bus, that came with the IBM PC/AT, is still there in modern machines, although there aren't any ISA slots left. Here it is on a brand new Threadripper machine: $ lspci | grep ISA 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge (rev 51)

samatman 7y ago

My favourite example of this is /dev/tty, where "tty" means Teletype, a technology which predates computers entirely: four of the control characters in ASCII have existed, with their current numeric values, since 1901.

Doxin 7y ago
Personally my favorite has to be the "lp0 on fire" error message that stuck around until fairly recently. The origin of that message is from around the time of the early laser printers. Laser printers have a small oven built in to melt the toner onto the page called a fuser. On modern printers that only gets turned on right before use. On the early models the warm up and cool down times were much longer so the fuser would both turn on earlier and take much longer to get back to a room temperature. Those things combined ment that a paper jam could very easily turn into a fire. In fact if the jam detection was having an off-day it could turn into a conveniently paper-stoked fire. Of course there's no real way to detect if a paper jam is the fire causing kind or not remotely so any paper jam would tell you the printer is on fire, just in case it actually is. In short: Early laser printers came with a fire extinguisher included in the sale price for a good reason.

bitwize 7y ago

ATX -- the most common motherboard configuration -- also has its roots in the IBM AT.

jecel 7y ago
The PC motherboard form factors were: 1981: PC 1983: XT - more slots, closer together 1984: AT - 16 bit slots, taller cards 1985: Baby AT - eliminated the large non slot area 1987: PS/2 - changed most things, only keyboard/mouse and VGA connectors were adopted 1995: ATX - rotated Baby AT 90 degrees so tall components wouldn't interfere with cards 1997 and later: many ATX variations, BTX, ITX and so on

Darkphibre 7y ago

The evolution of the communication that goes over those wires is really fascinating in its own right, and worth a read! :D https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144561/in-what-sense-does-sata-talk-scsi-how-much-is-shared-between-scsi-and-ata https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/144561/in-what-sens...

glandium 7y ago

The ISA bus, that came with the IBM PC/AT, is still there in modern machines, although there aren't any ISA slots left. Here it is on a brand new Threadripper machine: $ lspci | grep ISA 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge (rev 51)