2003 Newsgroup postings (05/20 - 06/07) Lynn Wheeler

2003 Newsgroup Postings (05/20 - 06/07)

employee motivation & executive compensation
Two-factor authentication with SSH?
Two-factor authentication with SSH?
A Dark Day
A Dark Day
Name for this early transistor package?
A Dark Day
A Dark Day
A Dark Day
IBM system 370
IBM system 370
Columbia U Computing History - New stuff
Which monitor for Fujitsu Micro 16s?
A Dark Day
instant messaging
two pi, four phase, 370 clone
instant messaging
Spam Bomb
MVS 3.8
smp 2.4.20-13.9 ext3fs problems?
IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
Spam Bomb
tankers and computers
TGV in the USA?
AT&T versus Treating customers right
TGV in the USA?
AT&T versus Treating customers right
instant messaging
Offshore IT
electronic-ID and key-generation
A Dark Day
Offshore IT
A Dark Day
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
electronic-ID and key-generation
electronic-ID and key-generation
Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
A Dark Day
Calculations involing very large decimals
graceful recovery when runs out of paging?
TGV in the USA?
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
A Dark Day
graceful recovery when runs out of paging?
Offshore IT
TGV in the USA?
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
A Dark Day
Oldest running software
HSM Functionality for Microsoft, using the Mainframe as the
A Dark Day
Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned
Offshore IT
TGV in the USA?
TGV in the USA?
assembler performance superiority: a given
grey-haired assembler programmers (Ritchie's C)
TGV in the USA?
TGV in the USA?
Wireless security
where to find X9.26 document?
TGV in the USA?
TGV in the USA?
TGV in the USA?
Offshore IT
TGV in the USA?
IBM system 370
A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
Offshore IT
A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
Computer resources, past, present, and future
How to increase the Swap drive size
TGV in the USA?
Columbia U Computing History - New stuff
TGV in the USA?
TGV in the USA?
IBM 5100
Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
Offshore IT
IBM 5100
A Dark Day
IBM 5100
Offshore IT
Virtual Machines for Security

employee motivation & executive compensation

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: employee motivation & executive compensation
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 18:25:30 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
I want to track down a list of the people, corporate or military, who would be considered one of his acolytes.

a reasonable starting point is:
http://www.belisarius.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20010722050327/http://www.belisarius.com/
a couple others:
http://www.defense-and-society.org/
http://www.cdi.org/mrp/

The various bios & refs ... basically refer to boyd having overall strategy for the last desert storm and John Warden having air campaign strategy for desert storm. I think it was MSNBC that had John Warden on as one of the advisers this go around. In the past there have been various URLs around the web comparing Boyd's OODA-loops and some of John Warden's work (some search engines may have any current availability).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Two-factor authentication with SSH?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Two-factor authentication with SSH?
Newsgroups: comp.security.ssh
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 18:57:11 GMT

Søren Roug writes:
As a system administrator I am responsible for the security and the weakest link is user behaviour...

I have the following problem. Assume the users login from untrusted loaned computers at conferences, hotels, Internet cafes etc.

If I let users log in over SSH with password authentication then basically anyone on the Internet can try to guess passwords, or someone could have watched as my colleague typed his password and then try from another host. Not very comforting.

An other possibility is to use client certificates. Looks good with a passphrase, but I have no way of knowing if the user has removed the passphrase from his certificate. If such an unprotected certificate is stolen (because my colleague forgot to remove it from the PC) it can be copied to everywhere and the cracker can login at will.

What I would like to do is to require a client certificate AND password authentication on the server side (two factors). But I don't see how to configure SSHD to require two concurrent authentication approaches unless something like SecurID is used.

client certificate isn't a factor. client certificate is some organization (possibly 3rd party) attesting to the validity of the binding between a public key and some other information (like name or email address, etc). It was originally invented as something of an analog to the letters of credit from the sailing ship days .... that relying parties had no direct way of verifying information ... so had to rely on some hard copy that the person carried with them and could pass around.

In the modern world with online environment and/or prior reliationship between the entity being authenticated and the relying party .... certificates are mostly redundant and superfluous.

3-factor authentication
• something you have (frequently hardware token)
• something you know (pin or password)
• something you are (biometrics)

2-factor authentication can be hardware token and a pin/password that is used to activate the hardware token. The hardware token can implement digital signature technology using public/private key pair where the key pair is generated on the token and the private key is never allowed to leave the token. The PIN is then used to activate the token aka just stealing the token isn't sufficient to compromise the system, and/or just using something like social engineering to obtain the PIN doesn't directly accomplish anything w/o also stealing the hardware token.

The issue with regard to non-hardware tokens (aka software envelopes) for private key containers is that vulnerabilities and threats assesements tend to gravitate to independent failure/exploit; the issue with software containers is that they may be easier to steal than pin/passwords ... and so there isn't true independent 2-factor authentication. The difference is especially true when the software container can be copied with no knowledge of the owner ... via-a-vis knowing that a hardware token is missing and will generate lost/stolen report.

There has to be some process that registers the public key ... so that digital signature authentication can be performed. In the case of a CA infrastructure with certificates ... they basically have an RA (or registgration authority) function that performs the public key registration ... and then generates a certificate that can be used to indicate/representation to others that a valid registration has been performed by somebody for some purpose.

However, it is possible for valid businesses to directly perform the public key registration and not be dependent on other parties to perform the function (along with the complexity of what does a certificate really mean). This registration of a public key can use the same business process that registers a password in a shared-secret paradigm.

What is important for 2-factor authentication is totally orthongonal to the existance of a redundant and superfluous certificate ... it is does the registration process actually validate that the public key being registered originates from an hardware token with acceptable integrity characteristics. It is totally independent of whether or not anybody actually bothered to generate a (redundant and superfluous) certificate in response to the registration process .... but did the registration process use the appropriate due diligence with regard to the public key being registered.

disclaimer ... there is now an instantiation of the aads chip strawman that i originally postulated several years ago:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

the comfort level for appropriate 2-factor authentication may be whether due diligence has been taken in validating that the public key being registered (whether it is in an SSH table, or a RADIUS account table, or a Kerberos table, or some other kind of table) actually originated with a hardware token of the appropriate integrity characteristic (regardless of what some certificate might say about the public key).

misc. discussion about relying-party-only certificates and being redundant and superfluous
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#rpo

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Two-factor authentication with SSH?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Two-factor authentication with SSH?
Newsgroups: comp.security.ssh
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 21:15:42 GMT

Søren Roug writes:
OK, I wasn't being completely clear here. When speaking about certificates I meant the kind of public key pair generated by ssh-keygen.

It takes the place of a hardware token in conventional two-factor authentification. Unlike real hardware tokens it can be copied/stolen without the user noticing, but it does add the level of security that only persons with access to copy the private keyfile will be able to try to log into the server over ssh.

And unlike real hardware tokens it costs nothing.

rather than 2-factor authentication ... then it is more of an issue of shared-secret authentication vis-a-vis non-shared-secret authentication.

the registration of the public key at the relying-party ... aka at the site accepting the SSH connection ... rather than a password ... implies that even given knowledge of the public key ... it is not possible to impersonate the entity ... while knowing a shared-secret allows impersonation.

hardware tokens tend to use non-shared-secret paradigms because they tend to offer more protection than shared-secret paradigms. note that there is some additional confusion with the terms password/pin. A password/pin that is registered at a remote site ... is a shared-secret ... a password/pin that is known only to an individual and their privately owned hardware token is not a shared-secret.

there are specific exploits/vulnerabilities with regard to shared-secret and non-shared-secret paradigms. these are somewhat independent of exploits/vulnerabilities with regard to 2/3-factor authentication. They overlap in the sense that a something you know factor can be implemented as either shared-secret ... registered with other parties ... or non-shared-secret (like in hardware tokens where it is not known to other parties).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 02:24:51 GMT

"Glen Herrmannsfeldt" writes:
When IBM designed S/360, the first "architecture", they were hoping for a long life, but I don't think anyone believed it would still be going after 40 years.

ibm was planning on doing something completely different in the early '70s called future system (FS) ... which eventually got canceled. However, there is some contention that Amdahl left to do his own 360/370 plug compatible because it seemed like IBM was going to walk away from the 360. In Amdahl's talk at MIT auditorium in the early '70s ... sort of giving his business case justification ... was that there was a $100b in software already written for the 360, and even if IBM totally walked away from 360, the legacy software (at that time) should provide him with viable market until the end of the century (nearly 30 years). random fs refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:13:17 GMT

Peter Flass writes:
Han't lots of FS surfaced in the AS/400 etc., and some of it in the innards of AIX?

the lore is that some number of the people from the canceled FS project migrated to rochester and created the s/38. as/400 is follow-on to s/38.

FS was heavily object as part of the machine instruction level ... as well as one level store. I'm not sure how much of AIX could be considered FS. The as/400 maintained a fairly high-level abstraction and was able to port from a CISC hardware to power/pc RISC hardware with little impact to customers.

in addition to lore that Amdahl left to do 360 pcm, in part because it appeared that the company would be walking away from 360 with the FS strategy:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

there is also some lore that 801/risc in the early to mid 70s was a re-action to FS ... to go as far as possible to the opposite extreme by putting as little as possible in the hardware (as opposed to putting as much as possible in the hardware). Higher level abstraction could be be provided by software thru the CPr operating system and the PL.8 programming language ... running on top of minimalist hardware.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801

then in some sense, as/400 running on power/pc is a convergence of the FS extremes with high level abstraction ... and risc with minimalist hardware.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Name for this early transistor package?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Name for this early transistor package?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 15:32:31 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
That sounds wrong.

I know a 4381 is no speed daemon in processor speed, but I remember doing compiles on one in college, and big COBOL programs took seconds most of the time. The longest I ever saw was for some job which took about 3 minutes, but we had 10 users locally, and I don't know how many from other schools.

The 4381 was in Richmond, VA, and was shared by several community colleges.

there were some really big/slow ada compilers. somewhat aside, i remember may eldest sending me email 20+ years ago from a college student machine and commenting during the day that trivial response to edit input was on the order of minutes (bsd running on a vax).

4381 was faster follow-on to 4341. 4361 was follow-on to 4331 ... much slower processor. however, all four were as fast or much faster than 360/67 on which we use to have sub-second trivial response with 75-80 users. some of the change is software bloat (even tho many of these online university 43xx machines were running vm/370, a derivative of cp/67) and some was that they tended to be configured with less disk thruput capcity (aka the argument that relative disk system thruput declined by a factor of ten times between the late 60s and the early 80s, disk thruput improvement was much less than cpu & memory thruput).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 20:20:58 GMT

John Ahlstrom writes:
I was not present at the creation of the Amdahl corp or machines, but my understanding is that Amdahl wanted to build a non-360, Cray killer inside IBM, but IBM said it had to be a 360. Amdahl left, decided that there were 100 billion little green reasons to build a 360 and did so. This is not really contradictory to your story, but is a little bit different.

there was acs-1 .. and then acs360 for gene:
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs.html

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 00:00:38 GMT

oh, and some slight drift
http://www.youtube.com/p/F918E728A443518F?hl=en_US
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051390174167&p=1012571727288
Computing's dying breed
By Tom Foremski
Published: May 20 2003 18:30 | Last Updated: May 20 2003 18:30

Once, pundits predicted that the mainframe computer was a dinosaur heading for extinction. These huge classics of the corporate computing world were reaching the end of the line and would give way to the new generation of server-based systems.

..snip..
But IT workers with mainframe experience are getting older. A study by the Meta Group last year found that 55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills.

..snip..

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 11:58:57 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
If you are interested, how do you get into it?

i took a 2hr introductory to fortran ... then got a student job over the summer writing 1401 MPIO for 360/30, then got a job being responsible for the os/360 system at the university. random refs about 1410 MPIO (tape<->UR front end for 709) ... and re-implementing on 360/30 ... i think it was one of those somewhat make-work/learning since the 360/30 could be run in 1401 compatible & the 709 would be replaced before too long:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#15 unit record & other controllers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#17 unit record & other controllers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#23 MTS & LLMPS?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#53 How Do the Old Mainframes
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#4 1401 overlap instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#21 IBM 1401's claim to fame
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#9 Old Vintage Operating Systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#15 S/360 operating systems geneaology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#59 Living legends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#130 early hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#79 Mainframe operating systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000c.html#11 IBM 1460
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#34 Assembly language formatting on IBM systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#11 IBM 1142 reader/punch (Re: First video terminal?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#22 HELP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#27 HELP
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#31 Is anybody out there still writting BAL 370.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#13 Infiniband's impact was Re: Intel's 64-bit strategy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#15 Infiniband's impact was Re: Intel's 64-bit strategy
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#47 How Long have you worked with MF's ? (poll)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#48 How Long have you worked with MF's ? (poll)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#3 The problem with installable operating systems
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#19 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mainframe
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#29 Collating on the S/360-2540 card reader?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#30 Hardware support of "new" instructions

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM system 370

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM system 370
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 12:18:04 GMT

"Dean Kent" writes:
So, the real question is: What point are you trying to make, or what is your real question? Code written in 1970 will run on a zSeries machine today. There are many applications running that were coded 10 or 20 (or more) years ago. There are many of those older programs that will also run on a PC under the Hercules emulator, running MVS 3.8. There are still quite a few large corporations that use mainframe systems, and still a number of companies writing/maintaining applications for those corporations (CA, BMC, Compuware, and others). There are a lot of folks who spent their entire careers writing code for S/360, S/370, S/370XA, S/390 and/or zArch systems, and there are still people working (like myself) who continue to write code for them.

and as i'm found of pointing out ... most of the 360s and the low-end and mid-range 370s were all "micro-coded" machines ... aka the implementations were not all that different from the current crop of "mainframe" emulators (like hercules) running on intel platforms.

late 70s/early 80s there was a project to switch the large number of different micro-code engines to 801/risc ... including the low-end and mid-range 370 (aka like for the follow-on to the 4341) .. which eventually got killed (although there are a number of 801/risc chips as support processors in various places today). there has been a related mainframe thread playing out in comp.arch & a.f.c.:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#3 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#4 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#6 A Dark Day
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#7 A Dark Day

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM system 370

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM system 370
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 15:29:04 GMT

"Rupert Pigott" writes:
You mean they still have actual 801's or direct descendants still in production ? By this I mean NOT POWER or PowerPC.

romp and power w/o cache consistency. a big issue in original 801 was never having cache consistency supporting shared memory multiprocessor model.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Columbia U Computing History - New stuff

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Columbia U Computing History - New stuff
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 15:32:59 GMT

"Douglas H. Quebbeman" writes:
IIRC, the term had not been coined and in usage prior to its application to the CDC 6600, generally ackowledged as the first supercomputer...

Granted, it may well have been faster in relation to the other hardware of the day to deserve the moniker, but it still seems somewhat revisionist to apply the term to a machine that early...

while cray has been referred to as father of supercomputer, GAM has been referred to as the grandfather. minor ref:
http://www.llnl.gov/vcm/interviews/norman_hardy_1.html which is posted to from the acs page:
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs.html

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Which monitor for Fujitsu Micro 16s?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Which monitor for  Fujitsu Micro 16s?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 15:59:03 GMT

shoppa@trailing-edge.com (Tim Shoppa) writes:
My favorite monitor was TOPS-10, but I don't know how you'd run it on a Fujitsu.

my first monitor was the MPIO that I got to re-implement on 360/30 ... minor recent ref in another thread:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#8 A dark day

all I had was a short description and the actual running binary from the 1401 ... but no actual code. I got to design the complete monitor from scratch, all the feature/function, device drivers, storage management, tasking, i/o interface, etc. and write all the code. The requirement was that it produce the same tape from cards that the 1401 version would produce ... out from tape to punch/printer the same as the 1401 version.

the next was cp/67 (control program 67) and cms (cambridge monitor system) from the people at 4th floor, 545 tech sq ... in part because they shipped all the complete source ... and I could rewrite any piece of it. misc 545 refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

os/360 was a little more difficult since you didn't have the capability for rebuilding the whole system from the original source ... although component like HASP ... had the complete source and allowed some amount of latitude.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 12:20:31 GMT

bbreynolds@aol.comedxedl (Bruce B. Reynolds) writes:
Have original decks of first programs written for 1620, Fall 1963: thirty-nine years and counting. Have maybe 90% percent of all source code which I have written/supported since then, backed up three different ways in machine-readable form, plus lots of hardcopy of technical support material.

a bunch of stuff that I had from 60s & 70s backed up on three different tapes ... unfortunately all three tapes were in the same tape library. there apparently was some glitch in the tape library and some operator managed to mount all three tapes as scratch tapes ... and poof all gone.

random past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#76 Disks size growing while disk count shrinking = bad performance
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#57 Whom Do Programmers Admire Now???
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#66 History of project maintenance tools -- what and when?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

instant messaging

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: instant messaging
Newsgroups: alt.os.multics
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 12:29:43 GMT

Tom Van Vleck writes:
I don't remember such facilities in the initial versions of CP/CMS or TSO in the early 70s.

i don't know about tso ... but cp/67 had it in all the versions i used (from jan. 1968). note that this was done at csc, on 4th floor, 545 tech. sq, by some people that had also worked on ctss.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

when ed (at csc) did internal network support, vnet/rscs, the support was added to propagate the instant message command thru the network ... so instead of
msg userid abcd....

it became
msg vnet msg nodeid userid abcd.....

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

two pi, four phase, 370 clone

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: two pi, four phase, 370 clone
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 20:44:09 GMT

two pi was a 370 clone manufactur ... a subsidiary of phillips. In the spring of 1980 there were 120 relogoed two pi systems installed as NCSS 3200 and 100 two pi systems. NCSS was a cp/67 time-sharing service bureau that had been formed in the summer of 1968 by some people from cambridge science center and others.

doing some search engine of two pi ....

brief mention of two pi in a bio:
http://www.tracecenter.org/docs/fccadv/report990430.txt
http://wireless.oldcolo.com/course/dewayne.txt

two-pi acquired by four-phase, feb. 1981:
http://www.four-phase.org/pictures/EricFernandez/scratch%20pack%202-81.pdf

the above mentions bill ferguson having ten year anniversary with four-phase

I still have to check to see if it is the same bill ferguson who i ran into at RSA conference 3-4 years ago, marketing keykos

general four phase alumni site:
http://www.four-phase.org/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

instant messaging

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: instant messaging
Newsgroups: alt.os.multics
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 20:42:05 GMT

Tom Van Vleck writes:
One of the things that some inter-user messaging tools had to deal with was how to prevent messages from arriving when you were printing out a document. The Multics and CTSS versions had the property that your runoff output could be splattered by a friendly hello from someone, unless you remembered to defer communication before loading the good paper. Did CP/CMS messages only print out at the command prompt?

you could "set msg off" ... when you were doing script copies of stuff on the 2741 that you didn't want mangled; however it wasn't queued ... sender got a response that message was off.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Spam Bomb

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Spam Bomb
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 12:08:36 GMT

i would claim that the internet is common infrastructure, somewhat akin to the highway system (and some of the past information superhighway analogies). huge numbers of people contribute to the financing of the common infrastructure ... and it is possible for individuals to abuse their share of the infrastructure ... akin to 18-wheelers abusing the highway network.

In part, this is because that actual use is hardly metered, and therefor it is possible to design strategies (like spam) where actual use is one hundred times or more larger than the direct financial contribution to their share of the internet (aka fully loaded cost of huge spamming is more than 100 times larger than the price charged the spammers). One might make the analogy to people growing rice in a desert ecology because the price they pay for water is less than one cent on the dollar of the cost of providing the water.

Somebody claiming to have spewed out over 200 million spams per day (120 million spams per 12 hrs) is analogous (but multiplied by factor of 100 or more) to "overloaded" trucks on the nations highways ... threatening the infrastructure integrity because of the excessive payloads.

some discussion of highway costs being directly proportional to 18-wheeler loading (even tho cost of building and supporting highways is amortized across all vehicles ... and not strictly levied only on 18-wheelers)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#41 Transportation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#42 Transportation

so there is strictly ingres loading restrictions .... with enormous fines and loss of driving privileges for threatening the integrity of the internet infrastructure (and some analogy for compliance like truck weighing stations).

other discussions of spam and/or the internet "wild west"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#13 A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#14 blackhole spam => mail unreliability (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#15 blackhole spam => mail unreliability (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#17 Payments as an answer to spam (addenda)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#18 Payments as an answer to spam (addenda)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#19 Payments as an answer to spam (addenda)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm14.htm#20 Payments as an answer to spam (addenda)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay11.htm#33 Spam's Being Used For Identity Theft And Blackmail, Symantec Says
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#27 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#28 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#29 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#30 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#31 Internet like city w/o traffic rules, traffic signs, traffic lights and traffic enforcement

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia, 20th anniv: https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

MVS 3.8

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: MVS 3.8...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 12:41:44 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
In my continuing experiments in sleep deprivation, I have run across a simple but completely stupifying puzzle with an IBM mainframe.

It seems there aren't any Usenet groups for IBM mainframes (why not?) unless I just don't have them on my server.

ibm had its own internal network ... based on vnet/rscs ... that was larger than the internet until about mid '85. ibm also subsidized this bitnet and earn .... university networks using similar technology ... although bitnet & earn tended to use the jes drivers with vnet/rscs rather than the native ones. misc. bitnet/earn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

the internal network started doing computer conference in the early '80s using mailing list technology (i've been blamed in the past for being responsible for some of it) ... which evolved into listserv on bitnet/earn and now have similar things on other platforms (listserv, majordomo, etc). in the early to mid-80s something called toolsrun evolved on the internal network that shared many of the characteristics of usenet ... with the ibmpc conference getting large amounts of traffic. minor toolsrun refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#5 what makes a cpu fast
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#33 LISTSERV(r) on mainframes

bitnet mailing lists are where many of the mainframe oriented conferencing started. many of them are now gatewayed to usenet in the bit.listserv. hierarchy, although there are misc. other usenet groups like comp.lang.asm370 and comp.os.tpf. bit.listserv.ibm-main is quite active.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

smp 2.4.20-13.9 ext3fs problems?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: smp 2.4.20-13.9 ext3fs problems?
Newsgroups: redhat.kernel.general
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 13:43:39 GMT

i just tried smp 2.4.20-13.9 and almost immediately after boot & login ... started getting a whole bunch of ext3fs error messages on a scsi (hardware) disk array. I rebooted to 20.4.20-9 ... and it cleaned stuff up and seems to have recovered w/o any problem.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
 monopoly
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 14:34:12 GMT

William Hamblen writes:
Slightly different derivation, though, a bottom being the flood plain near a watercourse. Bottom land is fertile because of deposition of silt during the winter floods and is desirable for agriculture if it stays dry during the growing season. Soggy bottoms are, well, too wet to plow.

also slew/slough ... many i've seen referred to are former river beds where the river has changed course. there are also a number of other definitions for slew ... along with alternate spellings.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Spam Bomb

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Spam Bomb
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 19:11:21 GMT

ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#17 Spam Bomb
so doing a similar analysis to that of fuel tax & road costs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#41 Transportation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#42 Transportation

aka ... effectively the cost of building and maintaining roads is based on use/loading by heavy trucks. a majority of that cost is underwritten by fuel tax against everybody. However, if the costs were really born by the entities responsible for the cost ... then the fuel tax would be removed from all but heavy trucking ... and the tax for heavy trucking possibly increased to $20/gal (in order to accurately reflect direct cause and effect between the reasons for the costs and the payment of the costs).

Now, things that are heavily transportation related, like food distribution, could see significant price increases. However, again, this is akin to zero sum budgeting ... everything that directly incurs costs are directly charged proportional to the cost incurred. aka ... the current amortizing of road costs across all vehicles heavily subsidizes heavy trucking as well as products heavily dependent on heavy trucking.

so doing similar analysis with regard to spamming. Lets say the current infrastructure has 60 million accounts paying $20/month plus another $5/month amortized consumer computer related purchases .. for a total of $25/month or maybe $1.5b/month.

Hypothetically, lets say that spammers are consumming on the order of 25 percent of that infrastructure ... or roughtly equivalent to $375m/month ... mostly attributable to the top ten spammers. Using direct prorated charging ... those ten spammers should be each charged $37.5m/month (along with a corresponding reduction in the end-user monthly cost).

For argument sake, lets say that the spammers are actually being charged on the order of $5k/month (or less) rather than $37.5m/month and possibly are earning maybe $50k/month. In effect, to clear possibly $40k/nmonth or less, they are taking advantage of other peoples' resources to the tune of nearly $40m/month .... aka they are in effect burning $1000 of other people's money for every dollar they are realizing. This is an horrendously, enormous inefficiency ... and has no plausable economic benefit to the overall industry.

In effect, they are doing it because they can.

In the heavy trucking industry ... they may only be subsidized to the tune of 10:1 .... aka other entities are paying $20 (to build roads that are heavy truck capable) for every $1 earned in the trucking industry. Now even with such heavy subsidy, there are still instances where entities try and take further advantage of the infrastructure, like heavily overloaded trucks that create real threats to the integrity of the infrastructure. This gives rise to at least the weigh stations to try and curb the worst abuse.

The issue in the ISP industry is that the cost of the weigh-station equivalent probably can't be born by the spamming industry. While they may be creating the economic burden on the infrastructure to the tune of $375m/month ... they possibly are only bringing in $500k/month (this is the horrible, nearly 1000 to one, mismatch between the burden that they are placing on the infrastructure vis-a-vis the limited economic benefit realized from such activities).

In the heavy trucking world ... a subsidy of ten-to-one is possibly deamed tolerable because it achieves indirect subsidies of other (possibly desirable) objectives (that happen to be transportion related), like cheap(er) food. However, it is hard to understand a subsidy infrastructure of something like thousand-to-one with no observable general benefit.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

tankers and computers

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: tankers and computers
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 20:52:09 GMT

Morten Reistad writes:
The Norwegian tanker and container fleets covers literally all of the globe. I participated in making a data network for one of the major bulk carriers; and they had large offices in all the "evil axis" countries except North Korea. It made it very difficult to get a fast,secure line to their ships; for cryptographic equipment would be embargoed; and would probably be stolen within a month of arrival; and ship-based satellite was too slow and cumbersome.

i recently ran across an old reference from the late '70s wondering whether there were more tankers than there were 370/168s. This was someone supposedly looking at data processing systems on tankers in conjunction with using them to improve collision avoidance ... the claim was that something like 10 percent of the inventory was lost each year to collisions ... oh, and supposedly there were something like five times as many tankers world wide as there were 370/168s.

i recently ran across somewhat cryptic domain name in my web log ... looking it up, it turned out to be from a norwegian company that builds deep sea oil drilling rigs.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 19:37:59 GMT

bob smith writes:
Hey Lars, You are exactly correct, we have a dire need of such a capability here on the right coast too. Between boston and ny, between NY and phillie, between phillie and washington DC, maybe as far south as Norfolk but that could go as far south as Charleston.

West of DC area, or Philly area or NY area, same deal, we have people commuting from WVa to DC area for work. They could use TGV mass transit.

We have folks commuting from Western MD into baltimore. Same as on the left coast, we need better trans.

i thot there was a thread about one of the auto/bus manufactures buying up various rail systems and shutting them down ... circa 20s ... but i can't seem to find the reference.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

AT&T versus Treating customers right

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: AT&T versus Treating customers right
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 05:26:59 GMT

CBFalconer writes:


I can easily derive it:

Stamp                         0.37
10 mins data entry @ 10/hr    1.66
Office boy 2 mins @ 6/hr       .20
====
2.23
Overhead at 500%             11.15
=====
Cost of billing              13.38

and I kid you not on the overhead figure.  The gazillions for the
CEO and other thieves are only a small portion of that.

since pre-paid was mentioned ... it is possible that they were also including the part of processing the payment and the whole data processing infrastructure to match a remittance against a billed account (aka billing implies processing a payment). There is also the infrastructure that is tracking what needs to be billed ... which also can go away with pre-paid cards.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:15:40 GMT

jmfbahciv writes:
I was thinking about building a new rail system where one didn't exist. Have you driven along these highways through any commercial center? There isn't much expansion room except up. And around here, bridges seem to be so expensive that even maintenance is beyond our public pocketbooks (but that's yet another political issue).

Forget about underground; the northeast is at the end of a boondoggle called the Big Dig.

then there are all the public lobbying groups. when they widen 101 from four lanes to six (and sometimes eight) and put in the new section south of el camino (south san jose, about where the ibm, oops, hitachi plant site is), publlc lobbying insisted that the ten mile coyote valley section from about bernal to cochran be only four lanes.

this created huge traffic jams in the morning going north at cochran where it narrowed from six to four lanes and in the evening going south at bernal where it narrowed. for several years this added something like 15 minutes to the morning and evening compute for possibly tens of thousands of people ... say 30minutes/day, 20k people, 10khours/day @ $10/hr, something like $100k/day people costs, $2.3m/month, $28m/year (much higher if use $100/hr). There was some suggestion that the state send a bill for the additional people costs to the public lobbying group each month.

last week there was big celibration that the coyote valley section was retrofitted with the two additional lanes at enormous additional cost (compared to it having been built at six lanes to begin with).

san jose's light rail is another issue. the original specs called for break-even use volumes based on elapsed commute times being dependent on light rail having off-grade crossings .... aka light rail didn't have to share intersections with automobiles. however, somewhere along the way, there was a decision to save on construction costs by not implementing off-grade crossings at numerous places. This resulted in significant increase in transit time (people in south valley commuting to computer businesses like intel, amd, etc) ... making it much less attractive as a commuting method (which adds more cars to the intersections, slowing things down even more).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

AT&T versus Treating customers right

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: AT&T versus Treating customers right
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:21:53 GMT

jmfbahciv writes:
Why do they need to track? From what I understand the pre-paid cards do, the tracking is a real time usage subtracted from a number. That is accessed at the beginning of a call to tell the customer the remaining minutes and then the number is decremented (I presume) each minute of on-line use.

Why isn't that done with regular accounts? These long distance plans are so f**king complicated, the companies have to keep track of a gazillion variables added five different ways.

but that is real time ... not long term ... there is no necessity in keeping line-item billing that you might have with stuff like long distance. and of course, if you have line-item billing ... then you also need to have enough operators in the customer call center to handle people who want to dispute specific line-items. all goes away with pre-paid.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

instant messaging

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: instant messaging
Newsgroups: alt.os.multics
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:47:56 GMT

cstacy@dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
It was:

SE{ND} 'text' [USER userid ... | OPERATOR {integer}] [NOW | LOGON]

CP/67 (and then vm/370) as previously mentioned was just "msg userid".

a facility was then created where a program could specify the capture of instant messages (actually all messages). This was used by vnet/rscs on the internal network to capture:

msg vnet msg nodeid userid ...

and provide instant messaging across the network.

It was also used to implement the early automated operator programs in the 70s (capturing all messages and automating various operator functions) ... well before the hllapi stuff on PCs capturing 3270 data sreams.

the author of rex(x) also used the facility to implement a multi-user space war game. basically, the program drove the 3270 screen, enabled programmed message interception and communicated with others via the instant messaging mechanism. It included the (internal) syntax for both local users ... via "msg userid" and remote users via "msg vnet msg nodeid userid".

misc. past space war refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#10 5-player Spacewar?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#26 Help needed on conversion from VM to OS390

the author of CMS pipelines also used it in the "toy program" ... see description towards the end of following post:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#4a John Hartmann's Birthday Party

it was also possible to "spool" all messages, effectively capture all incoming and outgoing keystrokes in a file. In the early '80s, for nine months, I had all of email and instant messages captured as part of a study on computer mediated communication ... which turned into a stanford phd thesis comparing my different communication patterns (telephone, face-to-face, email, and instant messaging). misc. refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc

the 20th anniversity of adding the 1000th node to the internal network is comming up june 10th (aka the internal network was larger than the arpa/inter net until about mid-85):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#22 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 14:25:25 GMT

doug@BKASSOCIATES.NET (Doug Fuerst) writes:
Obviously Bruce, John is an American as am I. And I agree with him. At some point American companies should stop thinking "globally" and think about what is best for their country. It is not a good idea for America to export all these jobs offshore, no matter what you or anyone thinks about "thinking globally." Just my $0.02.........Sorry....

in the early '70s, i think it was the boston globe had a long article about scandanavian economic policy. this was during a period when a number of new england shoe & garment factories were being shutdown and the work moving offshore.

basically, the govs. examined the work/value proposition and made a specific policy decision to discourage all industries where the value of the work was less than the target standard of living (not what the workers were paid, but what the value of their work was) and concentrate on encouraging industries where the work value could sustain the target standard of living ... modulo industries deamed strategic (which effectively would have to be subsidized).

in the early '90s ... at the leading edge of the internet revolution, there was some report published that half of the advanced degree technical area graduates from US universities were non-US ... and there were a number of areas where it might be 80-90 percent non-US. related studies from census and others in the early '90s made claims like entry level college text books had been dumbed down three times between the 60s and the early 90s ... and that half of the (us) 18 year olds were functionally illiterate.

Some of the problems were temporarily masked during the 90s where high school kids could get high paying computer jobs and could skip getting advanced education. However, as things contracted it starts to become much more of an issue of are there enuf people that are skilled enuf to do the jobs. It is not just a pay issue ... but also a skill issue.

there were some jokes about the whole US high-tech industry was being proped up by foreign workers and that the US k12 education system was starting to take on some characteristics of 3rd world country. If the high-tech industry was being proped up by foreign workers, working in the US, then it wasn't all that far of a stretch to start looking at foreign workers working in foreign countries.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

electronic-ID and key-generation

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: electronic-ID and key-generation
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 14:48:06 GMT

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
It's pretty common to do the key generation in the factory when the card is first personalized, but it can also be done by the user.

a number of cards have key generated at personalization (after the chip is in the 7816 carrier and embedded in plastic). This is frequently because the chip lacks the "power" to perform adequate random number generation as part of generating the key pair. In these situations, the key is generated in an external source and injected into the card.

One could postulate that a number of these cards/chips also implement RSA digital signatures as opposed to DSA or ECDSA for the same reason, RSA infrastructure use of random numbers can be defined as noches as part of messages from an external source. DSA/ECDSA require random number as part of the actual signing process (as well as part of key generation).

the aads chip strawman specified a ECDSA key-pair that was generated in the chip:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

and the private key never leaves the chip and is never divulged. The implication is that the key generation and the signing process requires a fairly robust random number generation implementation in the chip.

This is part of a certificate-less, non-PKI public key infrastructure.

where the key-pair is generated during power-on/test in the chip fab (before the wafer is even sliced & diced). The objective is to bind the integrity characteristics of the chip to the public key ... aka
can you say with any degree of certainty the real integrity characteristics of any chip inside a 7616 carrier embedded in a piece of plastic?

... I may have no idea who has the card ... but given that a specific public key authenticates a digital signature produced by the card ... some assumption can be made about the integrity level of the environment that produced that digital signature.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 01:24:01 GMT

Peter Flass writes:
I think this ha just come up here. Some 3174's could be token ring or ethernet attached, but that's the control unit. The terminal still required a control unit. Actually, I mentioned the 3278 a while ago --technically it was a terminal and control unit in one box, but still logically two devices.

3278 was sort of the 3277 replacement. original 3272 controller had lots of the electronics in the 3277 keyboard and head. for the 3278, a lot of the electronics were moved out of the individual (3278) terminals and into the shared 3274 controller (making each terminal somewhat less expensive to manufactur).

how 'bout 3275 terminal ... slightly related:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#57 Why did they make FORTRAN so hard to parse?

misc. 3272/3274 references ...
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#83 Z/90, S/390, 370/ESA (slightly off topic)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#17 3270 protocol
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#19 3270 protocol
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#6 IBM 327x terminals and controllers (was Re: Itanium2 power

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 01:28:11 GMT

Peter Flass writes:
Unfortunately there's not much of an "infrastructure" to software development. Certainly almost none compared to hardware. You don't have huge investments in factories, transportation systems, supporting industries, etc. All you need is some trained people and some now inexpensive computers and you can do the work anywhere.

one of the characteristics of knowledge work is that it is relatively distance insensitive ... not a lot of transportation expenses &/or delays.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:50:51 GMT

Brian Inglis writes:
MVS (or rather JES) flushes the job if there is anything wrong with the input or output dataset allocations, to avoid wasting thruput: no way anyone is going to waste time changing or fixing anything without editing the deck, or changing the actual names and allocations, and resubmitting. There is some amount of error recovery if things go not too badly wrong during job execution, but that is very dependent on the hardware configuration, and relies on there being another path available on which to redrive the I/O.

and the jes-based nje networking flushes network stuff if the origination and destination nodes both weren't in the local table. this started out having nodes defined in what was left over in the 255-entry psuedo device table (nominally maybe 160-200 entries available). this is one of the reasons that a real mvs/nje node could be trusted as an intermediate node on the internal network.

somewhat after the time the internal network exceeded 1000 nodes, the mvs jes limitation was raised to 999 nodes. the 20th aniv. of the 1000th node on the internal network is coming up. 10jun2003 ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#22 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

the other reason that real mvs jes nje could be trusted as an intermediate node (or even barely any kind of node) was that nje header jumbled bunch of networking and non-networking together ... which led to imcompatibilities between different releases of mvs jes ... and system crashes.

the base internal networking that started it all was vnet/rscs which had its own native drivers ... but because of the way it layered things, it could also run multiple different kinds of nje drivers. this was leveraged to have lots of jes nje release specific drivers that did canonical nje header rewrites ... aka ... when vnet had a direct connection to a real mvs jes system ... the appropriate nje driver in vnet was started to try and minimize mvs crashes due to incompatible headers.

by the time bitnet started ... it appeared that the only drivers shipping to vnet customers where standard nje drivers. this possibly minimizedq the negative comparison of native nje compared to native vnet ... and of course it couldn't work the other way around ... jes ever running vnet drivers ... this was a really novel concept to vnet from the beginning ... and didn't even show up in arpanet until 1/1/83 cut-over to ip protocol. misc. bitnet/earn
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

as to disk error recover ... when i started playing in the disk engineering lab ... mvs had a 15 minute mtbf if brought up in environmnet with engineering "test cell". It was a year or so rewriting input/output supervisor to be absolutely bullet proof ... nothing a engineering device could do resulted in system crash.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:13:25 GMT

"Rupert Pigott" writes:
The last PC I saturated (CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth) for extended periods was a Pentium Pro 200 with 256Mb of RAM, FOUR Ultra SCSI buses, TWO 100BaseT ethernet cards and TWO film/plate setter i/fs. IIRC the 32b/33 PCI infrastructure appeared to run out of gas at around 70 Mbyte/sec (hey this was early 1997 !). How does that compare with the bandwidth a 4381 was able to offer it's peripherals ?

the multi-user, 4381 was frequently somewhat closer to traditional transaction activity ... something like how many independent 4k disk operations can be handled per second. this was the point of my old claimed that disk technology had a ten times relative system thruput decline in roughly a 15 year period between late 60s and early 80s.

the disk transfer rate has gone up significantly ... but the increase in 4k accesses per second hasn't increased that much. can two current 20gbyte disks do more 4k operations per second than 16 3380 disks.

in part, the programming and use patterns over the last 20 or so years have had to change to accommodate the change in the relationship of relative thruput of different parts of system (lot more attention to caching and large contiguous block transfer).

3380 had avg. access of 16mills (arm+rotational delay) ... you might have current drives at 1/2 to 1/4th that ... so two current drives would have 4-8 times thruput of a single 3380 ... but possibly only 1/8th the aggregate thruput of 16 3380 drives.

some 4381 processor speed numbers (i.e. faster/later 4381 about the same as 370/168-3):
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#12 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#27 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#58 IBM S/370-168, 195, and 3033

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 14:30:53 GMT

Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com> writes:
What's the problem with them being obsolete? Would it be better to use new, state-of-the-art computers, with the software all rewritten and unproven? If I was going to fly on a shuttle, I'd want the same old computers they've been using for years. Those computers have been quite reliable, and I haven't seen any claims that they've contributed to serious mission problems.

there were some past references to it possible taking several years to get new components rated for use in conjunction with flights were there are people on board.

reference to an old post from 1984 in a computer conference (century forum) discussing date issues coming up in 2000 ... specifically with respect to fixing a "date" problem in the MTU box on the shuttle
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#24 BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K)

obsolete is normally not just that it is old ... but whether or not it can do the job ... and/or whether it can be done cheaper/better some other way. replacing with something bright, shiny, new is somewhat akin to disposible generation and needing a new automobile every year.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

electronic-ID and key-generation

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: electronic-ID and key-generation
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 15:07:01 GMT

"Peter Gullberg" writes:
I'm my work, I often come across PKI-idealists, who argue that key-material must be generated inside the smartcard to achieve "true" non-repudiation etc., I agree on this for PKI-only applications.

But for a electronic ID project, where a goverment or other institution want their primary goal is to provide electronic identification of end-users, and to guarantee the identify of this person. If a customer produces their own

actually asuretee ... certificate-less and non-PKI is generating the key at the factory to be able to bind the integrity characteristics of the chip to the public key.

lots of govs. and financial instutions have chips under armed guards until after personalization ... and sometimes even up until delivery of the card to the end-entity. conjecture that this is at least possibly because of possible exploits involving substituting couterfeit chips for the real ones (even before chips are embedded in the 7816 carrier ... it is somewhat problematical that eyeball examination of a chip can tell real ones from counterfeit).

all the trouble with the armed guards .... making sure that a counterfeit chip can't be substituted for a real one ... and then they let a person carry it around in their wallet ... or leave it on their desk. the govs and other institutions want to know that there is some level of integrity and trust with using the method of electronic authentication. that involves some aspect about the trust and integrity of the individual components. as a result they tend to specify things like EAL5-high certifications.

some manufactur may claim that they have gotten an EAL5-high certification for a specific chip .... but that typically involves only a dozen chips. Then some claim is made that the thing that you might be carrying around in your wallet is in any way similar to the dozen or so chips that were actually evaluated. they tend to specify extremely tamper-resistant components .... lots of attention that the readers at security checkpoints haven't been compromised ... or that ATM cash machines are armored and under surveillance. That still leaves something of a gaping hole about whether the card in your hand contains a real chip or a copy chip.

There are very significant issues with regard to non-repudiation ... whether or not the key-pair was generated on-chip, is possibly one of the least significant.

In general for electronic id .... they want to know that the process has some high level of integrity and trust .... aka high-security biometric readers under constant surveillance and some degree of confidence that you can't duplicate the biometric readings. The whole issue isn't whether or not you can't (re)generate a new biometric reading (rather than the one you got at the factory) ... but whether the reading is consistently reliable. copy/counterfeit chips are somewhat similar to fake fingers or fake eyeballs or readers that have been compromised and give wrong readings.

The real issue isn't whether or not you generated your own key .... it includes whether or not the card you are presenting does really contain a chip with the acceptable integrity characteristics ... and can be trusted.

previous post
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#29 electronicc-ID and key-generation

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

electronic-ID and key-generation

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: electronic-ID and key-generation
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 17:30:59 GMT

"Peter Gullberg" writes:
must be generated inside the smartcard to achieve "true" non-repudiation etc., I agree on this for PKI-only applications.

basically forget all the witch doctor mumbo-jumbo you may have heard associated with PKIs and certificates.

basically electronic-ID is authentication. authentication boils down to one or more of:
• something you have (tokens)
• something you know (secrets)
• something you are (biometrics)

chips supposedly are used in tokens to allow verification of the token to be done electronically ... and plausibly also to make it harder to counterfeit the token. The reason that gov. and financial institutions specify things like EAL5-high certification is that they really want it to be difficult to counterfeit tokens (also why they frequently have armed guards during transport from chip fabrication to personalization center).

the issue is, given the overall infrastructure, to what degree of certainty can the institution really believe its you? this not only involves things like exploits counterfeiting one or more of the three authentication methods .... but also the whole infrastructure that takes part in verifying the authentication information.

for instance, x9.84 standard for biometrics .... has issues with biometrics values .... when they effectively are used in shared-secret mode (aka central registrty, remote matching, etc) that they have the highest level of security. evesdropping a biometric value and later being able to electronically reproduce the biometric signal (as in shared-secret) opens the infrastructure up to impersonation (aka it is much easier to change a compromized PIN that it is to change a compromized thumb print).

so a real issue with buying off-the-shelf card and doing your own key generation ... has little or nothing to do with key gen ... it has to do with how can the institution trust a user presented token as part of something you have authentication (aka as in the key is suppose to be a unique representation of the token ... as opposed to the key having some unique intrinsic magical value of its own). This is in the context of institutions that nominally require armed guards as part of addressing exploits associated with copy/counterfeit chips being injected into the environment.

past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#29 electronic-ID and key-generation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#35 electronic-ID and key-generation

misc armed guards &/or counterfeit/copy chips
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm3.htm#cstech12 cardtech/securetech & CA PKI
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm3.htm#kiss9 KISS for PKIX .... password/digital signature
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#x959risk4 Risk Management in AA / draft X9.59
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#54 Does "Strong Security" Mean Anything?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 19:45:03 GMT

Joe Morris writes:
Mainframe systems haven't "gone the way of the buggy whip" yet. They may no longer provide casual-user interactive service (especially in an academic environment) because the personal computer does a much better job, but they're still around doing the undramatic gruntwork for which they are best suited. They just aren't quite as obvious as they once were, both because they're physically smaller and aren't getting the publicity they once did.

also, a lot of the industrial strength web & other online things tend to be mainframes and/or very mainframe like.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 20:59:14 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
I thought you were the one who said MVS had the ability to recover from bad filenames, missing files, etc, without stopping the programs.

a lot of it has been heuristically derived over extended period of time ... there has been some amount of additional changes between the 70s and now.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Calculations involing very large decimals

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Calculations involing very large decimals
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:40:57 GMT

"David Wade" writes:
They sure could backspace, but the mechanism did not like it. I rememver a program that spaced across the full width of the carrage and then backspaced all the way back. The poor 2741 was not a happy bunny and jumped about (physically that is, it always backspaced properly) much to the disguist of the Ops Staff in the next room. Perhaps it disturbed their afternoon nap???

note that formated documents for underscores and some highlighting (overprinting) would use backspaces on the 2741.

somewhere in the back of my mind was the stuff leading up to change in the password mask used by cp/67 on 2741 ... basically which three characters to print for the mask and whether more than three was needed ... but i'm having a hard time drudging the discussion up from memory.

i just checked an old cp/67 manual and there is no mention there of the mask.

so quick check of vmshare archive ...
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

there is related discussion with regard to "password blotting" on glass ttys
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse.cgi?fn=ASCIPSWD&ft=PROB&args=password+mask#hit

mask with apl:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse.cgi?fn=CNY010DK&ft=NOTE&args=password+mask#hit

misc. other discussions from vmshare archive:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/browse.cgi?fn=NOECHO&ft=PROB&args=password+mask#hit

there are misc. other discussions related to password masking in the vmshare archives.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

graceful recovery when runs out of paging?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: graceful recovery when runs out of paging?
Newsgroups: redhat.kernel.general
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 22:14:50 GMT

i'm running rh9 on dual 1ghz with gig of memory and gig of paging defined. typically there is 400-500mbyte memory and couple k of paging. mozilla (at least 1.4b) seems to have some sort of memory leak ... i was pushing mozilla pretty hard and things were getting slower and slower ... looked at the monitor and everything was full (1gig of memory and 1gig of paging) ... and not too long later everything locked up/stopped and i eventually had to force hardware reset and reboot.

I would have preferred it giving me some opportunity to kill mozilla.

i've since doubled page space (which just means that it would take a little longer for mozilla to fill it up) ... and have taken to periodically killing/restarting mozilla when it seems to getting too stressed.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 02:53:08 GMT

CBFalconer writes:
Well, I will put it post WWII at least. I can still remember seeing trains arive snow-covered in the middle of winter, sometimes as much as 4 to 6 hours late, after a 3000 mile run from Vancouver to Montreal. In Amtraks defence they are running so few trains that failing to wait for a connector could involve several days delay for the passengers.

I use to commute to north station on the B&M. some of the old timers remembered taking it in the 50s when speed would hit 80mph. by the mid '70s with no track maintenance ... there were ties you could stick you finger into ... the speed limit was 15mph in sections. there was one section out near acton that was known as the fraight car bone yard because of so many derailments ... even with 5mph speed limit ... due to horrible track conditions and no maintenance.

there were stories about east coast railroads that highlighted that during the 50s & 60s there were significant executive bonuses and stock dividends at the same time there was something like 20 years worth of deferred (aka no) track maintenance.

couple past posts on the subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#75 Apology to Cloakware (open letter)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#7 Big Brother -- Re: National IDs

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

Refed: **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 03:03:47 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
I've been lamenting the loss of low-capacity drives for awhile now.

I used to take a stack of 2GB drives and get far better performance than I can get these days, because management will only buy a single 20GB drive (or larger) instead of 8 9GB or 18GB drives.

there were some at SHARE and elsewhere that attempted to get ibm to produce a "fast" 3380. basically it was a microcode load that only allowed access to something like 25 percent of the surface area ... resulting in better avg. arm access. The trouble appeared to be that they found that it was really only attractive to the bean counters at their corporations if it actually was priced more than a regular 3380.

The economics were somewhat ... take a $5million dollar computing installation; if you spent an extra $100k on regular disks ... and only kept each disk partially full, you could get an extra 20 percent thruput. Saving the $100k on the extra disks ... translated effectively into 20 percent overall loss (lower total system thruput) of the $5million dollar investment ... or approx. $1m.

To make it work, it had to be an official product that was marketed as a fast 3380 for more money than a regular 3380 (even tho it only had 25 percent the capacity).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

Refed: **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 13:33:18 GMT

"John R. Strohm" writes:
Back in 1970, when my Dad was doing refresher work at UT Austin, we would periodically walk through the old Computation Center, and look through the glass wall at the CDC 6600.

A few years later, when I started at UT Austin, they had a 6600 and a 6400 in there. Several years later, they got a pair of Cyber 170s, but it was still recognizably a CDC installation.

A few years ago, I walked through there, and suddenly noticed that there weren't any Cybers in there any more. Now it was a couple of racks of something that looked NOTHING like what I remembered, and no consoles at all.

I was shocked.

I mean, I grew up with those icons, those dual tubes. Somehow, I had the idea that there should ALWAYS be CDC-style dual tubes on the other side of that glass wall, and a wall of tape drives. But they were GONE.

when we were doing hsdt
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt

we managed to collect a lot of HYPERchannel gear from one source or another. Some of the stuff that nominally were adatpers for DEC or Crays just went into the warehouse.

In the late 80s we were spending some amount of time talking to (ut austin) balcones research (out on burnet past research) that had a cray (and some number of vaxes) and managed to convince some bean counters that we could donate a bunch of the stuff from the warehouse to balcones.

this is also about the time I did the rfc 1044 support
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcidx3.htm#1044

for the mainframe tcp/ip product and was doing some tuning at cray research.

last time i was back at UT austin ... was for my youngest graduation.

Several months ago I had a tour of the SLAC machine room ... which used to be filled to overflowing with mainframe gear. Now it is about half empty. There are several rows of racks .... each rack having a whole slew of linux boxes, each row is labeled with its grid cluster name.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

graceful recovery when runs out of paging?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: graceful recovery when runs out of paging?
Newsgroups: redhat.kernel.general
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 13:49:02 GMT

Sundial Services writes:
As far as I know Linux does have "last ditch" strategies for keeping itself alive although GUIs and such might still "lock up." [Tricks like Ctrl+Alt+Bksp to restart XWindows might help.]

Still, if you've identified a major-leak in a single app, like Mozilla, step-number-one should be to upgrade or replace that app.

As, of course, you well know. :-/

i really pounded on ctrl+alt+bksp before finally giving up and hitting reset.

i've reported about mozilla issue before ... it was also in (at least 1.3) ... it involves possibly 80-100 different windows in tabs ... it also periodically locks up some of the tabs (tab can't be killed or go away w/o killing mozilla). Each window is at least well under a mbyte (if not 100k) ... but easily gets going and mozilla hits 400-500 meg and then things start slowing down (whatever it is doing takes a lot of cpu also).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 15:37:56 GMT

"Howard Brazee" writes:
You mean by allowing rich people to pay their way in? This is something new? Heck, people used to buy their way into the Officer Corps.

Or do you referring to a new topic - that good grades appear to be easier to get? It seems that you are asking about a relationship between attracting foreign students, and accommidating US students. But I really can't answer your question until you tell me what this relationship is.

At any rate - the supply expansion for private colleges was to make money, with a side effect that more people were educated. The supply expansion for public colleges was to educate students, with a side effect that foreigners (who don't get resident discounts) made them more money.

two somewhat unrelated subjects ... one was about us k12 education system .... census report '94 or so, claim half the (us) 18 year olds were functionally illiterate ... and different info source pointing out that between 60s and early '90s, textbooks for entering freshman classes went thru three different dumbing downs.

the other was that half of the advanced degree graduates in technical areas were non-us.

the combination was observations that non-us workers were significantly proping up the high-tech industry expansion during the '90s (because us workers didn't have sufficient numbers with the necessary skills).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:41:13 GMT

genew@mail.ocis.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:
You are invited to take a look at the geography of British Columbia. Look away from the Vancouver area. You may need a topo map to understand. There is a reason why the Canadian Pacific Railway's Last Spike was in B.C.!

there is this lift ... in vancouver ... not quite sea level ... that takes you up to the ski slopes (in the winter). range is not quite so close by the time you get down to seattle ... where it is something like 60 miles to the ski slopes. last time i was there was when i gave paper at (held at simon fraser)
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/1999/isw-june/third-announcement.html

there were a couple summers when I was much younger that we hiked from stehekin (opposite end of lake chelan) to the canadian border and back (this was before the north cascades highway went in).
http://www.lakechelan.com/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:52:30 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
Crazy.

aka ... an installation could achieve the same results just by judicious allocation on a normal 3380 ... but then there would be all sorts of people thinking that space was being wasted ... and not recognizing that the wasted space was much cheaper than alternative of wasted thruput.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:03:49 GMT

"David Wade" writes:
Don't do it. Whilst RAID 5 offers a good ratio of available data to drives the write performance suffers as a result. With the current price of small drives, I don't think any one should be using it....

raid5 is norminally considered really good for read mostly. individual records can be read independently off of individual drives ... but writes requires two additional reads and an additional write

the data record (that is to be written/replaced) is first read and the corresponding parity record for that stripe is read, the original data record is "subtracted" from the parity record, the parity record is then updated with the new value to be written ... then both the data record and the parity record are written back out.

This is avoided if you are going to write all records in the stripe, then the new parity record value can be directly calculated and everything written at one time.

with cheap drives, for transaction stuff ... it is possible to just have two-way mirror ... can give twice the read thruput ... and with both drives written in parallel, is no worse than non-mirror on writes (modulo some additional bus bandwidth).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:45:07 GMT

jchausler writes:
Instead of picking up part time money working in the school's food service business, one could get "better access" by getting a job as a part time worker at the "computer center". I did for several years as an operator in the late 60's. Working "graveyard" I would frequently get "the machine" (whichever I was operating that night and actually once mine went idle I could wander over to one of the others and use that if I wanted) to myself for several hours.

where i was they shutdown at 8am sat. ... they would let me have the whole data center to myself from 8am sat until 8am monday (try going to a 10am class after not having slept for over two days).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:49:17 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
Someone posted a rather long message about how in MVS you wrote programs without checking your open() and write() equivalents, because the OS garanteed they would succeed, or the failure was only after an operator determined there was no alternative. At least, I think so. I'm fairly certain of it.

you need hsm (aka hierarchical storage manager, i think it is now called sms, system managed storage) .... it automagically pulls things back from tapes/libraries and attempts to get room by pushing stuff to tapes (or other storage devices).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Oldest running software

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Oldest running software.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 18:52:36 GMT

hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Jeff nor Lisa) writes:
IIRC, the IBM 7090, announced c. 1959, was upwardly compatible with the IBM 709. If they were using a 709 and wanted to replace it, my guess is that they would've gone to a 7090, not a 1401, especially as a military installation. I don't think the 1401 had enough horsepower or memory to emulate another computer, nor ever had "emulator" hardware. (The IBM "emualtor", as installed on S/360, was a combination of both software and hardware. Using software alone was a _simulator_ and very slow.)

I'm pretty sure the S/360 could emulate a 709, and that the early S/370s had emulators too, so S/360 emulation wasn't necessary.

360/30s and 360/40s had ROS for both 360 architecture and 1401 architecture i.e. if you set a switch on the front panel to 1401 and put a 1401 self loading card deck into the 2540 (like MPIO) and hit the load button, the card deck would read and run.

350/50s & 360/65s had ROS for 360 architecture and 7090 architecture.

somebody has previously posted table or some 360 ROS features here within the past year or two (but can't find the reference at the moment)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

HSM Functionality for Microsoft, using the Mainframe as the

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: HSM Functionality for Microsoft, using the Mainframe as the repository
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 19:58:17 GMT

jalvarez@CASYC.ES (Chema Alvarez) writes:
Tivoli Storage Manager

before that it was named ADSM (adstar storage manager) and before that it was workstation datasave facility (WSDF) and before that it was couple releases of CMSBACK used at internal datacenters

misc. past refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#66 Holy Satanism! Re: Hyper-Threading Technology - Intel information.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#3 IBM's "old" boss speaks (was "new")
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#10 Deleting files and emails at Arthur Andersen and Enron
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#29 Computers in Science Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#25 Beyond 8+3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#43 VMFPLC2 tape format
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#9 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM

backup/archive posts
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#backup

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 23:50:57 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
I recently saw a Sun presentation on their HSM stuff, supposedly geared to deliver the same thing.

yes, well. I remember 4-5 years ago ... listening to somebody from sun marketing give a pitch on their high availability product ... that was almost a word-for-word script that i hard written circa 1989.

HSM on mvs originated circa mid-70s. following historical reference says 1978
http://www.papyrusweb.ch/Syspinner/IBMHistoryOfFirsts.asp

there were a couple of MVS-based HSMs during the 80s that provided support for other platforms (like crays, etc). One was out of LANL (mvs managed the moving of data back & forth) that General Atomics marketing as DataTree.
http://www.computer.org/conferences/mss95/wood/wood.htm
some number of things are referenced under IEEE MSS

Another was out of NCAR/UCAR that they attempted to productize as Mesa Archival. for some reason one of the few references search engine found:
http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/ExternalTanks/entrepreneurs/space_phoenix.htm

NASA Ames had something that they did Amdahl Unix.

LLNL had one on cray and we (out of the skunkworks that my wife and I were doing that also produced HA/CMP) help fund productizing as Unitree (it was take-off on the "datatree" ... but implying unix-based):
http://www.sdsc.edu/projects/Systems_soft/UniTree/enhancements.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCD/Hardware/UniTree/

then there is reference to TSM that i recently cross-posted:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#52 HSM Functionality for Microsoft, using the Mainframe as the

where TSM was originally called ADSM ... which previously had been WSDF ... which evolved from an internal CMSBACK file backup/archive system that I had written in the late '70s and had been deployed at a number of internal datacenters

random past posts:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#21 Disk caching and file systems. Disk history...people forget
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#22 Disk caching and file systems. Disk history...people forget
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001f.html#66 commodity storage servers
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#66 Holy Satanism! Re: Hyper-Threading Technology - Intel information.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#3 IBM's "old" boss speaks (was "new")
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#4 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#46 What goes into a 3090?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#61 GE 625/635 Reference + Smart Hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#29 Computers in Science Fiction
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#8 Avoiding JCL Space Abends
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#31 general networking is: DEC eNet: was Vnet : Unbelievable
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#25 Beyond 8+3
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#29 360/370 disk drives
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#31 360/370 disk drives
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003d.html#9 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#6 IBM says AMD dead in 5yrs ... -- Microsoft Monopoly vs. IBM

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Fix the shuttle or fly it unmanned ...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 19:46:44 GMT

Charles Shannon Hendrix writes:
I think your formula is wrong.

I've done RAID5 and gained write performance by adding drives. Your math shows the opposite.

Are you sure you don't mean T/R n instead?

(where, R is raid overhead)

Even that's too simple to be true, but it has the right implication.

raid5 write performance is four i/os compared to one i/o for non-raid(5).

you can have raid4 with all parity records on (the same) single drive ... which resultes in bottleneck on the parity drive ... basically constant performance regardless of the number of data drives. raid5 will rotate the drive with the parity record .... so aggregate performance doesn't tend to bottleneck on a single drive ... but is spread across all drives; however it is still approx. 1/4th the thruput of non-raid given distribution across the same number of drives (each write requires two reads and two writes).

possibly try search engine for raid5, raid6, raid10, etc; result with pictures/diagrams:
http://www.1u-raid5.net/Differences/
http://www.lascon.co.uk/d008005.htm
a verbal description:
http://ftp.cs.umt.edu/u/wright/487/lect_html/7_1/7_1_5.html

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 20:25:56 GMT

Scott Jones writes:
Robert Heinlein, "Friday". The Republic of California decides that it is obviously undemocratic for those who hold a Bachelor's degree to earn more than those who don't, therefore all citizens are automatically granted Bachelor's degrees.

besides the report ten years ago about half the 18 year olds being functionally illiterate ... there was another report about the same time (may have been in the same report) that half the industrial jobs in the US were effectively subsidized (aka the actual value of the work produced by the individual was less than the fully-loaded benefits going to the person; aka salary, health, retirement, etc).

there were some implications ...

one) that the avg. size of the subsidies and the percentage needing subsidy were increasing over time and

two) to have a subsidy implied that the money needed to come from somewhere (the value of somebody else's work needed to be much larger than what their benefits were) and possibly

three) some small nation state might attempt to attract all the high procedures (especially in the distance-insensitive knowledge work domain)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 23:13:37 GMT

CBFalconer writes:
Even here (New Haven, CT, USA) I used to commute about 5 m (8 km) by bicycle, and could almost always beat any automobile time, at least in the morning (slightly downhill in the main). The other end had a lockable bicycle storage compound, and I was considerably younger, thinner, and fitter. However mudguards are an essential requirements to avoid that streak up the back and crotch. It pays to have a healthy distrust of drivers.

in the trasnfer from CSC to SJR, i got a place just off Cottle about a mile from bldg. 28. Most of the distance had sidewalk and bike lane except for where highway 85 currently is ... which use to be open field with dirt shoulders on both sides of cottle. I had a poncho for bad weather and experimented with heavy washers tied to the corners.

slightly related:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#39 Why Use - ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#36 So I tried this //vm.marist.edu stuff on a slow Sat. night,

the periodic days spent in bldg 90 was little more of a challenge with strong head wind going both directions:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001b.html#68 weather biasing where engineers live (was Re: Disk power numbers)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#11 YKYGOW...
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#11 Home mainframes

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 23:19:58 GMT

Brian Boutel writes:
Perhaps because it may be cheaper for the Government to subsidise loss-making rail than to upgrade the road network to cope with the extra traffic that would result if the rail service went away?

it is possible that the gov. subsidezes both rail network and road network as in the national interest. as per previous posts that road network expenses are pretty directly proportional to heavy truck loading ... but costs are amortized across all users:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#41 Transportation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#21 Spam Bomb

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

assembler performance superiority: a given

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: assembler performance superiority: a given
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 03:39:41 GMT

noone@nowhere.com (Steve Myers) writes:
One obvious thing for this type of search is a very simple binary search. Don't need Assembler for that!

slightly faster can be radix .... although much better for larger populations ... was used for the original internal phone book system.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#33 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#45 hyperblock drift, was filesystem structure (long warning)

we had pls, assembler, and rexx implementations (and i did a C version for port to aix).

numerous times there is so much time in assembler dealing with the minutia that vision of the forest is lost. long ago and far away, i was able to demonstrate ten times more function and ten times performance by recoding one of the (assembler implemented) dump reader products in interpreted rexx.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dumprx

also note that luther finally got his radix tree stuff into the hardware
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#19 S/360 operating systems geneaology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#73 Most complex instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#18 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#10 radix sort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#80 "Super-Cheap" Supercomputing

from pop ...
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9AR004/A.7
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/DZ9ZR000/A.7?DT=20010102160855

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

grey-haired assembler programmers (Ritchie's C)

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: grey-haired assembler programmers (Ritchie's C)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 03:46:48 GMT

john_w_gilmore@MSN.COM (john gilmore) writes:
Others have not: the conception of a character string as an array of single characters is fatally flawed, radically unsuitable not just to mainframe but even to RISC architectures, and the workarounds, e.g., the nul-terminated string, are poor things. Or again, the notion that one library routine to convert upper case to lower case and yet another one to convert lower case to upper case (instead of a single parametric TRANSLATE builtin, as in PL/I) are desirable is downright silly.

furthermore the implicit length previously accounted for 90 percent of all system & application exploits, vulnerabilities, and failures .... (now it is split with automatic scripting in network products).

question came up about this recently someplace else so repeat the posting ref (air force evaluation):

https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#42 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#43 another 30 year thing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#44 Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation

... aka multics system implementation in pli supposedly never had a buffer overflow problem

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 14:36:03 GMT

Trog Woolley writes:
It's well known that you need a 4x4 to get to the local Tesco and to take the kids to school, just in case the road suddenly becomes inpassable. Did you hear Boris Johnson talking about this on The News Quiz? It seems one of the Lib Dems wants to ban 4x4s from urban areas. Boris was most indignant saying that it wasn't the place of government to determine what you drive. He said he will fight for your right to be a prat.

recently there was a bogus comdey advertisement about if a H2 (consumer'ized military hummer) isn't sufficient for your family, then you should get a family bradley fighting vehicle. great for taking the children to the mall and it does great things for demonstrating organizational cooperation to the children since it requires three people to operate.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 14:50:24 GMT

jmfbahciv writes:
Perhaps. I believe the practice (manufacturing) failures had more to do with their economic models. From what little I know, they had each widget manufactured in the far four corners of the Union. Then the widgets would be tranported to Moscow and then tranported to the fifth corner of the Union for assembly. Manufacturing and assembly were not allowed to be done on the same site. Not only does that make thing more expensive, it also makes the wall clock time span of manufacturing each piece extremely long. What would take us a day to make, from raw material to finished product, would take the Russians a month or longer.

the us automobile industry had an analogous problem taking avg. of seven years from inception until car was rolling off the line. some of the problems were that after early overall design .... some of the pieces (like batteries, shocks, etc) might change size/shape and no longer fit in the original design. focus of C4 that I attended circa 1990.

other issue was that foreign competition had reduced the cycle to 3 years (aka it was possible for foreign competition to react almost two and half times faster to changing consumer habits than domestic manufactures).
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#41 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#43 Economic Factors on Automation

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Wireless security

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Wireless security
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 21:37:47 GMT

"Andrew Swallow" writes:
The military encrypt the trunk links something civilian organisations frequently fail to. The military can trust the operators since they employ them.

in part possibly because of legation issues regarding trade-secrets (judge saying something about security/protection had to be proportional to the claimed value) ... the internal network (which was larger than the arpanet/internet until mid '85 or so) had encryptors on all links leaving corporate bldgs. at one time, I was told that over half the link encryptors in the world were in use on the internal network. also had custom encrypting 2400 baud modems built for things like reading email when traveling (analysis for reading email off-site indicating that one of the biggest vulnerabilities were hotel PBXs). these modems did random key generation and key exchange for every session.

random prev. ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#27 Tysons Corner, Virginia
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#11 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

where to find X9.26 document?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: where to find X9.26 document?
Newsgroups: comp.security.misc
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 03:39:21 GMT

1053655692@noid.net (1053655692@noid.net) writes:
I'm looking for a document entitled:

"Draft American national standard for financial institution sign-on authentication for wholesale financial systems: Secure transmission of personal authenticating information and node authentication"

It's the ANSI X9.26 specification.

most x9 available in pdf (but not x9.26) .... ansi
http://www.ansi.org/

electronic standards store:
http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/

and do search on x9

notice x9.26 withdrawal ...
Withdrawal of x9.26

Recommended Action:

In its July, 1999 meeting, Working Group X9F3 responsible for the maintenance of ANS X9.26, Financial Institution Sign-On Authentication for Wholesale Financial Transactions, by unanimous vote recommends that ANS X9.26 be withdrawn. This is a continuation of the action taken by X9F in its last meeting when it recommended the withdrawal of ANS X9.9 and ANS X9.23. ANS X9.26 is dependent on ANS X9.9 and X9.23 and is therefore an inappropriate standard to be used in the wholesale financial environment based on the high average dollar value of transactions.

Procedural Basis:

At its April meeting in 1999, the X9F subcommittee voted unanimously (except for an abstention of one new member) to withdraw ANS X9.9 and ANS X9.23. Subsequent to that meeting, the X9 Secretariat advised ANSI to cease all sales (paper and ESS versions) of ANS X9.9 and ANS X9.23. X9F3 also recommends the withdrawal of ANS X9.26 for the reasons stated below.

Rational for this action:

Based on recent attacks on 56 bit symmetric encryption algorithms such as the Data Encryption Algorithm (DEA), X9F at its April, 1999 meeting decided to cease support for X9.9 and X9.23. ANSI has been advised to stop selling these standards.

ANS X9.26 is also recommended for withdrawal based on the following:

1) ANS X9.26 is dependent on ANS X9.9 (MAC) for message authentication and X9.23 for data encryption..

2) There is a well known attack on MACs used by ANS X9.26 based on the availability of brute force equipment, such as the "DES cracker". This attack is published in TG-24-1999, which is available in draft form and will be made freely available on the X9 bookstore web site.

3) Given the existence of the above equipment, in the wholesale environment with average transactions of millions of dollars, the use of 56-bit keys is no longer a prudent business practice to be continued. Financial Institutions need to plan to migrate away from the use of any 56 bit symmetric encryption algorithm in the wholesale business environment.

--
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Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 13:31:24 GMT

Lars Poulsen writes:
Money is not plentiful for everyone (says the currently unemployed[1] engineer. For proof of concept, I offer you the operations manager at my PoE[2], a nice guy of blue-collar background, who commutes 40 miles in order to live where a 3-bedroom house costs half of what it does locally: He is convinced that within the next 5 years the gas prices will adjust, "and then you won't be able to get rid of that gas-guzzler that is then too expensive for commuting".

view point of some outside the US ...
is that the policy of cheap gas allowed certain extremely wasteful life styles to develop ... that possibly are only a short-term (tens of years), momentary aberration. society (and individuals) once adapted to such life styles, will likely undergo some (possibly severe) disruption in any transition to to much less wasteful life style. policies, forces, and personal decisions that resulted in the aberrant freeway lifestyle to develop in the first place are at the root ... not the subsequent adjustments. the issue isn't the total amount of money distributed to the total number of people (since money can fluctuate), it is the actual resources.

...

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

Refed: **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 14:00:15 GMT

jmfbahciv writes:
I didn't know it was that long. This was pre-Henry Ford's production line?

c4 meeting in detroit circa 1989-1990. 7 years was from conception to rolling off the line. to get new body (as opposed to style changes) out every 3-4 years ... they had to run overlapping efforts. most extreme example given was corvette which the people doing the "skin" design (aka outside shape & style) left no tolerance for change underneath the skin. foreign competition had introduced process a couple years earlier that had elapsed time to 3 years or less.

previous ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#43 Reason Japanese cars are assembled in the US (was Re: American bigotry)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

Refed: **, - **, - **, - **, - **, - **

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 15:49:02 GMT

hawk@slytherin.ds.psu.edu (Dr. Richard E. Hawkins) writes:
One of the talks we received during my naval misadventure was from an F-4 jock. They had been concerned by a new MiG that was significantly faster than them--Mach 2.5 or 3.

Then they learned how to deal with these on their 6. It's easy. You just turn. They pass right through your targeting system as they fail to turn that tight, which I think he said was a heat issue with their alloys . . .

forty-second boyd ... search for forty-second
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1997/articles/jul_97/july2a_97.html
also "40 seconds"
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/59/pilot.html
and "40-second"
http://www.hamptonroads.com/pilotonline/military/ml1209boy.html

lots of other boyd references (scroll down for some that aren't even mine:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:21:24 GMT

Charles Richmond writes:
The Japanese have a saying: "The nail that sticks out...gets hammered down." But Japan traditionally has wanted to re-enforce conformity.

To "go with the flow" may be easier, but it is a lot less useful. Remember that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man (woman)." And "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for men (women) of good will to do nothing." Cicero may have know what he was talking about there...

The biggest profit you may get from doing the right thing... is knowing that you have done the right thing, damn it!!!

couple of other lines ... somewhat paraphrased
you can tell the people out in front by the arrows in their back

you can choose to be a do'er ... or you can choose to take responsibility for what somebody else does (very few of the former and all too many of the latter)

and obligatory boyd references:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:15:26 GMT

hawk@slytherin.ds.psu.edu (Dr. Richard E. Hawkins) writes:
Bad weather? In San Jose?

hawk, who used to think that some days in the west were bad . . .

just rain during winter and early spring .... made the hills green in march & april.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM system 370

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM system 370
Newsgroups: comp.lang.asm370
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 18:51:44 GMT

"Bill Turner, WB4ALM" writes:
...snip...

or the PL/I version of adventure.

one of the guys in stl took a little heat for doing the first port of adventure to PL/I ... within a couple months after its inception, i got 370 fortran source round about from stanford to tymshare cupertino, to tymshare in the uk, to ibm in the uk to ibm sjr in san jose. i would then make the source available to people that had achieved 300.

random adventure refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#52 Enter fonts (was Re: Unix case-sensitivity: how did it originate?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#83 "Adventure" (early '80s) who wrote it?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#169 Crowther (pre-Woods) "Colossal Cave"
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#72 Microsoft boss warns breakup could worsen virus problem
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#33 Adventure Games (Was: Navy orders supercomputer)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#14 adventure ... nearly 20 years
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#44 Call for folklore - was Re: So it's cyclical.
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#12 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003f.html#46 Any DEC 340 Display System Doco ?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 19:38:23 GMT

"Stephen Fuld" writes:
I certainly can't speak for Oracle, but I do note that IBM provides the "coupling facility", which is a special OS, running on a S/390 type proessor (one of those on the MCM set) and provides relativly low latency locking between OS images. Also, the descendants of the Univac/Sperry/Unisys systems offer a piece of special function hardware that provides low latency inter system locking precisely for this purpose. It's use is integrated into their database software.

The fact that these vendors go to all that trouble seems to support your contention that, for the workloads they want to support, main memory caching is not sufficient, although for systems that can fit in one tightly coupled complex, tehy do, of course, use main memory for the database caches.

when i did the original parallel lock manager for ha/cmp .... random ref:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

i worked out the semantics that allowed a cached record to follow the lock. some number of people are/were apprehensive because the recovery/commit logs are node specific ... and recovery in fast commit scenario can be complicated i.e. local log record(s) has been written/commuted, but the record home location hasn't been rewritten ... and the working copy is floating around different node caches.

effectively with the fast interconnects ... the I/O & processor overhead moving the lock between nodes and moving the lock plus record between nodes was nearly identical. with the record accompanying the lock, then the complex starts to look much more like aggregate large distributed memory.

the alternative is that in the case of fast commits, the record home location has to be written before the lock is moved between nodes (and the destination node reads the record off disk). An intermediate step (addressing some of the recovery complexities) is to allow forcing the write of the record home location before the lock moves between nodes ... but transmits the record along with the lock ... at least saving the destination node having to reread the record off disk.

some of this originated when my wife did her stint in pok responsible for (mainframe) loosely coupled (i.e. cluster) architecture. Her Peer-Coupled Shared Data included low latency locking protocol ... but ran afoul policy that inter-machine communication was suppose to be SNA based (she fought and lost battle that trotter should be less like emulated ctca and more like real interprocessor communication).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 21:17:09 GMT

Charles Richmond writes:
The way I heard it:

"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs."

two others slightly related that we got:
the best you can hope for is to not be fired and be allowed to do it again

they would have forgiven you for being wrong, but they'll never forgive you for being right

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A few Z990 Gee-Wiz stats
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 14:57:42 GMT

pg_nh@sabi.Clara.co.UK (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
Note: the UNIX _block_ buffer cache can also be useless or a damn nuisance because in almost all cases UNIX applications access files sequentially, and the replacement policy for most such block buffer caches is LIFO/LRU like, which is exactly the worst possible choice for that (IIRC very few UNIX implementations actually implement 'POSIX_FADVISE_RANDOM' or similar).

An LRU block buffer cache actually works well when files are one or a few blocks long, even if block access patterns are FIFO, because then in effect it becomes a file buffer cache, and while as a rule block access within a file under UNIX is FIFO, access to files is often LIFO. When sequential access to a few large files happens, then the UNIX buffer cache as commonly implemented, especially as under Linux, is a damn nuisance.

i had something of this issue with the sheriff/3880-13 full track cache people 20 years ago. they were claiming 90 percent hit rate in the cache. however they were measuring an application having dataset formated 10 4k blocks per track and reading sequentially. the first record touched on a track would fetch the whole track and then the next nine reads would be "hits". my claim was that the application could achieve slightly better thruput by changing the parameters on the DD statement (so the system did 10 record reads in single I/O operation) and the sheriff/3880-13 hit rate would drop to zero.

slightly related:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#7 Disk drives as commodities.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Computer resources, past, present, and future

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Computer resources, past, present, and future.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 18:02:09 GMT

bdc@world.std.com (Brian 'Jarai' Chase) writes:
Still, fifty years from today, that's a long time. If you compare the world of computing today from that of 1953, things have changed quite a bit. However, if I consider the past twenty or even thirty years, things haven't changed all that much--at least not in terms of operating systems or user interfaces to those operating systems.

35 years ago, i had 2741 going into cms. a little less than 30 years ago, i got 3270 (24x80 char) going into cms. 25 years ago, i had two 3270s next to each other on the desk with coaxs going to different system ... then added coax switch box so i could manually switch between 4 systems for each 3270 ... then added parasite, story, and pvm ....
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#35 Newbie TOPS-10 7.03 question

so each terminal connection could have multiple different logical sessions to different systems.

about 20 years ago, got a pc with 3270 terminal emulator which could have multiple logical sessions and could switch between local window on the pc (say borland's tinycalc) and various 3270 sessions.

for past couple years, i've had two 21in screen, two keyboards, and two mouse ... side for side ... one going to an NT system and one going to linux system. about a month ago ... i got a switcher cable that supports single screen, keyboard, and mouse ... and uses scroll lock to toggle between the linux and nt systems.

I can have two windows per screen each window with 2-3 times as many lines as the 3270 screen ... and i have graphics background when i've minimized a window. i run close to the same environment on both linux & nt .... same browser, similar email, same usenet interface, both internet connected, etc.

the keyboard interface has had almost no changes in 35 years.

the gml i used over 30 years ago supported the embedding of other gml files (have common start, end, top, bottom, and whatever other common things i wanted across a collection of files). html i use today doesn't support embedding other html files. for instance, in the rfc index:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

the current 3500-some RFC summaries are partitioned in html files #0-#11 ... i repeat the header and trailer in each file ... while 30 years ago ... I could just imbed them.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

How to increase the Swap drive size

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: How to increase the Swap drive size
Newsgroups: linux.redhat.misc
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 03:26:39 GMT

"Dave Griffiths" writes:
So just for my information, what is the max swap size that can be used on the system, I notice that Disk druid only allows 2Gb for swap, what is the recommended size of swap or is the 2Gb limit a high choice.

i have one gig memory and had two 512m swap areas on different drives. Normally memory would run 512m-768m and swap around 2m-10m. I had problem with mozilla 1.4rc1 (same under 1.3) being particularly stressed ... and running away with memory. previous post on subject:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#40 graceful recovery when runs out of paging?

since one of the swap partitions had nothing behind it ... i decided to increase it from 512m to 1.5g (resulting in 2gig total).

... start
/sbin/sfdisk -l

/sbin/swapoff /dev/sda5 /sbin/swapon -s

/sbin/parted /dev/sda print rm 5 mkpartfs logical linux-swap <start> <end> print quit

/sbin/mkswap /dev/sda5 /sbin/swapon /dev/sda5 /sbin/swapon -s

/sbin/sfdisk -l

... end

check man pages for sfdisk, swapoff, swapon, and parted. parted especially warns about being very careful of what you type. basically "<start>" was original start for the original partition and "<end>" was enuf added cylinders to be 1.5gig instead of .5gig.

since i recreated the same swap partition only larger ... /etc/fstab didn't have to change.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:04:51 GMT

"J. Clarke" writes:
Not sure moving military vehicles was the intent. For a long time Germany was famous for having these incredibly good roads that were full of holes and rough surfaces from having transported far too many military vehicles. Considering how good the Germans are at engineering, if the roads didn't stand up to transporting military vehicles then they probably weren't designed for the purpose. Remember, the Volkswagen also came out of that era--the Nazis really did try to deliver on some of their promises. In fact we're kind of fortunate that Hitler had no patience. If he had waited until his social programs and technological initiatives had borne fruit then we would all be in for it.

there was a large plant outside of stuttgart (boeblingen) that I started visiting in the early '70s. somewhere between the airport and boeblingen is the mercedes plant. some number of people made reference to the small diesel mercedes being the farmer's car ... not quite the same as the people's car ... but close (i guess it just gets more expensive when imported into the US).

in the early '70s ... there weren't any american hotels in the area. use to be put up in a small traveling businessman hotel in a residential neighborhood where there was very little english.

over the years some number of other hitech companies sprouted up in the area and some number of american hotel chains appeared, although i don't seen any here:
http://www.bestlodging.com/cities/germany-boeblingen.shtml

misc. mercedes:
http://www.autointell.com/nao_companies/daimlerchrysler/mercedes/mercedes-smart-01.htm
http://www.stuttgart-tourist.de/english/stuttgart/museums/benzmuseum.html
http://www.benzworld.org/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Columbia U Computing History - New stuff

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Columbia U Computing History - New stuff
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:16:45 GMT

Joe Morris writes:
The image is a bit fuzzy; did anyone else look at the label on the box just above CU20B and initially read it as KREM VAX?

And speaking of BITNET, where are Ira Fuchs and Marty Solomon these days?

misc bitnet/earn refs:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

and somewhat aside june 10th is the 20th anniversity of the 1000th node on the internal network.

copy of the original 1000th node distribution update:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#22 OS/360 names and error codes (was: Humorous and/or Interesting Opcodes)

random other:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#12 Author seeks help - net in 1981
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#26 DEC eNet: was Vnet : Unbelievable
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#18 Multiple layers of virtual address translation
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003g.html#51 vnet 1000th node anniversary 6/10
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003h.html#16 Why did TCP become popular ?
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#27 instant messaging
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#32 A Dark Day

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 22:44:26 GMT

"Helmut P. Einfalt" writes:
Don't bother -- sooner or later someone up in this thread will come with the idea of replacing both kinds of jury with a computer, and then we'll back right to the point, with The Wheelers providing evidence that this had been tried as early as nineteenumptyandsome...

no, but i think we could dig up a proposal from 19-ot-something to replace juries with popular vote. use it for the olympics ... rather than having the actual events ... just have all the competitors show up on stage and the audience gets to vote on their favorites for gold, silver, bronze. no more problem with whether there is enuf snow for the winter olympics since you don't actually have to run the events; everything decided by popular vote.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

TGV in the USA?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: TGV in the USA?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 16:44:47 GMT

hawk@slytherin.ds.psu.edu (Dr. Richard E. Hawkins) writes:
My family had to buy a new minivan a few days before vacation once. They were pulled over several times for not having front plates, including by police who switched direction on the freeway to do it.

was in toronto several months ago on business ... and one of the locals were driving car load to diner. we got pulled over for not being able to read the plate (there was plastic cover that had gotten pretty dirty). first attempting to clean it for 5 minutes ... and then 15 minutes getting the cover removed (no screwdriver, patrol called for another cruiser that had screwdriver).

apparently new tollroad ... instead of booths has video cameras that read the plate and then people watch the tape and key in the plate, which eventually results in sending bills out at the end of the month. i guess it is suppose to be more efficient than having the people in toll booths (both for the drivers and the workers).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM 5100

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 5100
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 20:31:56 GMT

archmage@sfchat.org (Nate Edel) writes:
Was the 5100 based on a microprocessor? I have the distinct impression it wasn't, but used (moderately integrated) discreet logic. Then again, I can't remember where I read that, and they certainly weren't all that large.

the side track regarding apl on palmos was that the processor in the 5100 was called palm (for put all logic in microcode) with emulated enuf of 360 subset to offer apl\360 on the 5100. there are some URLs in the following refs giving pictures and more details

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Whatever happened to 'University Computer Centers'?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 16:03:31 GMT

"Rupert Pigott" writes:
LOL, people keep failing to realize that fans just circulate air. Ergo putting a zillion fans in a closed or nearly closed box will just cook the components more evenly... Seen that many times. My favourite was the jolly expensive "shelf" of fans that was stuck into a rack with no exterior fans (in or out) to cure the overheating problems in their first version... I did gently suggest that they should put some fans blasting cold air in at least... But no, they knew better - what would a fresh faced graduate know anyways ?

is that what the new generation of convection overs are?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 18:54:35 GMT

Robert Pluim writes:
Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I don't see employers paying wages to people incapable of doing the job => high unemployment in countries that persist in such stupidity, and all skilled work moves to countries that still teach their children properly [1]. Oh wait, isn't this what happening already?

debends on what you describe as "the job" ... there were previous references to people who's "job" is to claim credit for other peoples' work. somewhat related, there is the old saying about heads rolling up hill .... aka promote the person responsible before disaster is declared and all the other people are fired.

i've been claiming that the wedge started with very significant numbers of highly skilled foreign workers over here ... in part because US wasn't turning out enuf by itself. with the significant training and contacts made by the foreign workers ... it significanlty aided being able to migrate the work "back home".

misc older stories:
http://www.computerworld.com/news/1998/story/0,11280,34704,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/news/1998/story/0,11280,33164,00.html
http://www.computerworld.com/news/1998/story/0,11280,26785,00.html

and a more recent one:
http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,80665,00.html

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM 5100

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 5100
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 23:53:26 GMT

"Russ Holsclaw" writes:
The PT-2 was a portable built into a briefcase-size case with a 3270-like keyboard and a detached display monitor with a 64x16-character display in EBCDIC. It used a memory-mapped display technique, like that pioneered by many "hobby" microcomputers of the period.

then there was the brick (early '80s?) ... which was about the size of a brick with basically cellphone "call-home" capability. open the cover, small keyboard and several line display.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

A Dark Day

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: A Dark Day...
Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,comp.lang.asm370
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 14:22:57 GMT

ime@panix.com (Randy Hudson) writes:
Heaven forfend! No, the instructions simplify the implementation of a replacement-selection tree with minimal compare.

luther's radix stuff? ... he finally got them into hardware going on 10? years ago. past mention of luther's radix stuff:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#19 S/360 operating systems geneaology
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#20 Reviving the OS/360 thread (Questions about OS/360)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001.html#2 A new "Remember when?" period happening right now
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#73 Most complex instructions
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#14 index searching
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#18 Mainframers: Take back the light (spotlight, that is)
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002q.html#10 radix sort
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003e.html#80 "Super-Cheap" Supercomputing
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#58 assembler performance superiority: a given

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

IBM 5100

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: IBM 5100
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 15:09:11 GMT

Charles Richmond writes:
IIRC, the 5100 emulated the 1103 so it could run the 1103 version of APL...

as per
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/5100/

the precursor to 5100/palm was scamp which emulated 1130 and ran apl\1130 .... also url from above
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/merk_8_ibm_5100.html

as per previous exchange we had:
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#15

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Offshore IT

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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Offshore IT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 15:15:12 GMT

"Offshoare Outsourcing Threatens Offshore Outsourcing" thread from slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/06/1226232.shtml?tid=98&tid=99

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Virtual Machines for Security

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Virtual Machines for Security
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 15:26:07 GMT

Virtual Machines for Security thread from Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/06/156230.shtml?tid=126&tid=172

and in the thread
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66724&cid=6133870
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66724&cid=6136455

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

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