5 ms·

That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would pro

by tormeh 13y ago

That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.

Symmetry 13y ago
Well, there's OpenRISC[1] and I believe SPARC is too. At least there are open source implementations including Sun's first Niagara. [1]http://www.openrisc.net/ http://www.openrisc.net/
- dman 13y ago
  I miss Sun's brand of idealism before profits sometimes.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    Yea, it is sad that Jonathan Schwartz had problems too.
  - mrbill 13y ago
    I miss Sun's "use our enterprise software, only pay if you need support" licensing. Oracle deep-sixed that as soon as possible, along with the pseudo-hobbyist licensing terms for the OS, effectively killing a large portion of the hobbyist and "sysadmin with a setup at home" market. I ran (well, still do) a website dedicated to Sun/Solaris hardware and software users, was on the OpenSolaris external pre-release beta testing team/group, and heard lots of moaning about this, even from sales people within Oracle itself. Pre-Oracle Sun was gracious and gave me a loaded SunFire T1000 to run the site and mailing lists, etc, on. Post-Sun Oracle gave me the finger.
bri3d 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/729/why-did-the-esa-choose-sparc-for-leon http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/729/why-did-the-esa... The SPARC ISA is completely unencumbered as far as I know, and there are several copyleft implementations of the architecture that are synthesized into interesting products, often from overseas vendors (for example Navspark: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatible-with-gps-gnss-receiver#home https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatib... )
- tormeh 13y ago
  Yeah, but ISAs exhibit so strong network effects that anything not x86/amd64 or ARM is irrelevant, sadly.
rbanffy 13y ago
If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.
- hga 13y ago
  Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or the modern equivalent? I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer was sending you stuff.... The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    I don't think a 3270 would be very comfortable for Emacs. I once saw a 3278 hooked to a 390 running Unix (I don't think it was AIX) and seeing text scroll on a 3278 was interestingly alien. Running Emacs would be doable, but most 3270 editors I can remember (low 80's) took advantage of the local terminal smarts and worked on a form/page based concept. Emacs was designed for the VT-100 world where terminals were not particularly smart. Having said that, you can host Linux VMs under zVM. Binaries will use the zSeries ISA and the whole guest will run under the zVM environment. You can easily ssh to it. IIRC, Debian, Red Hat and SuSe support it. This would probably be the least cost-effective way to edit text. On the other hand, few terminals were able to render monospaced text so beautifully.
  - kev009 13y ago
    You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you could run real EMACS. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library/IBM+Redbooks/index.html#emacs http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library... http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.bpxa400/cle.htm http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...

by tormeh 13y ago

Symmetry 13y ago

Well, there's OpenRISC[1] and I believe SPARC is too. At least there are open source implementations including Sun's first Niagara. [1]http://www.openrisc.net/ http://www.openrisc.net/

dman 13y ago
I miss Sun's brand of idealism before profits sometimes.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Yea, it is sad that Jonathan Schwartz had problems too.
- mrbill 13y ago
  I miss Sun's "use our enterprise software, only pay if you need support" licensing. Oracle deep-sixed that as soon as possible, along with the pseudo-hobbyist licensing terms for the OS, effectively killing a large portion of the hobbyist and "sysadmin with a setup at home" market. I ran (well, still do) a website dedicated to Sun/Solaris hardware and software users, was on the OpenSolaris external pre-release beta testing team/group, and heard lots of moaning about this, even from sales people within Oracle itself. Pre-Oracle Sun was gracious and gave me a loaded SunFire T1000 to run the site and mailing lists, etc, on. Post-Sun Oracle gave me the finger.

bri3d 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/729/why-did-the-esa-choose-sparc-for-leon http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/729/why-did-the-esa... The SPARC ISA is completely unencumbered as far as I know, and there are several copyleft implementations of the architecture that are synthesized into interesting products, often from overseas vendors (for example Navspark: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatible-with-gps-gnss-receiver#home https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatib... )

tormeh 13y ago
Yeah, but ISAs exhibit so strong network effects that anything not x86/amd64 or ARM is irrelevant, sadly.

rbanffy 13y ago

If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.

hga 13y ago
Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or the modern equivalent? I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer was sending you stuff.... The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).
- rbanffy 13y ago
  I don't think a 3270 would be very comfortable for Emacs. I once saw a 3278 hooked to a 390 running Unix (I don't think it was AIX) and seeing text scroll on a 3278 was interestingly alien. Running Emacs would be doable, but most 3270 editors I can remember (low 80's) took advantage of the local terminal smarts and worked on a form/page based concept. Emacs was designed for the VT-100 world where terminals were not particularly smart. Having said that, you can host Linux VMs under zVM. Binaries will use the zSeries ISA and the whole guest will run under the zVM environment. You can easily ssh to it. IIRC, Debian, Red Hat and SuSe support it. This would probably be the least cost-effective way to edit text. On the other hand, few terminals were able to render monospaced text so beautifully.
- kev009 13y ago
  You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you could run real EMACS. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library/IBM+Redbooks/index.html#emacs http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library... http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.bpxa400/cle.htm http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...