From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: I'm overwhelmed Date: 9 Jan 2000 01:31:31 GMT Organization: Net Access BBS Lines: 10 Message-ID: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bbs.cpcn.com Originator: root@bbs.cpcn.com Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news-fra1.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!feeder.qis.net!yellow.newsread.com!netaxs.com!newsread.com!netaxs.newsread.com!bbs.cpcn.com!root Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47762 I just got my new S/390 ESA reference "card". I can't believe how much they've expanded the machine instruction set since S/360 days. Long binary, long hex, whatever those mean. They even got new instruction formats RRE, QST. They've got "vector registers". What is a CUTFU (Convert UTF-8 to Unicode)? And they got rid of punched card codes in the EBCDIC chart, putting in PC codes instead. Is nothing sacred? I can't deal with this. I'm gonna curl up with my Autocoder manual instead. Anyone want to discuss the -d character? ###### From: "Jack Peacock" Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 19:55:05 -0800 Organization: Simco Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!newsfeed.icl.net!newspeer.clara.net!news.clara.net!remarQ-uK!rQdQ!supernews.com!remarQ.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47748 Lisa or Jeff wrote in message news:858odj$a66@netaxs.com... > I just got my new S/390 ESA reference "card". I can't believe how much > they've expanded the machine instruction set since S/360 days. Long binary, > long hex, whatever those mean. They even got new instruction formats RRE, > QST. They've got "vector registers". What is a CUTFU (Convert UTF-8 to > Unicode)? And they got rid of punched card codes in the EBCDIC chart, > putting in PC codes instead. Is nothing sacred? > By coincidence I came across my old S/360 ref card last night while cleaning out some old computer docs. Dates from 1973, first assembler class I took was BAL, never used a 370 after that (wound up on CDC 6000s programming in COMPASS assembler for the next 5 years). Compared to x86 the S/360 instruction set looks positively RISC these days. I wonder how many gates it would take to reproduce a basic 360 CPU instruction set, something simple in the 360/20 range. I bet a 360 emulator running on a K7 at 1Ghz would compare favorably to a 370/125 at least, maybe even a 168. And imagine how fast Autocoder would run on a 1401 emulator! Sometimes I feel deprived. My high school had a 1441 with a shortstack disk but I never got to use it, I was lured away by the "big iron", a Univac 1106 with two FASTRANDs. Little did I know hidden in a corner behind the IBM was a real Bendix G-15, never did see that one running. I was too starry-eyed learning Algol to care about old machines then, I let history slip through keypunching fingers. Jack Peacock ###### From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed Date: 9 Jan 2000 04:31:50 GMT Organization: Net Access BBS Lines: 24 Message-ID: <8592vm$3gh@netaxs.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bbs.cpcn.com Originator: root@bbs.cpcn.com Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!isdnet!howland.erols.net!news-xfer.netaxs.com.MISMATCH!news-xfer.newsread.com!netaxs.com!newsread.com!netaxs.newsread.com!bbs.cpcn.com!root Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47764 > programming in COMPASS assembler for the next 5 years). Compared to x86 > the S/360 instruction set looks positively RISC these days. I wonder > how many gates it would take to reproduce a basic 360 CPU instruction > set, something simple in the 360/20 range. I bet a 360 emulator running > on a K7 at 1Ghz would compare favorably to a 370/125 at least, maybe > even a 168. And imagine how fast Autocoder would run on a 1401 > emulator! I understand the S/360 model 20 was really only good for use as an RJE terminal as it was too limited a subset to do real work. What is a K7? I wouldn't be so sure of improved S/360 speeds on a PC today. Sure, certain parts are a lot faster, but the S/360 excelled on its channel I/O and excellent multi-tasking, stuff that PC hardware and software remain weak. Our S/360-40 easily handled a batch partition and multi- terminal online partition. All the high volume I/O (high speed printer, equal to 2,200 characters per second; high speed card reader), plus tape and disk and the terminals might overwhelm a PC's bus channel. Let's see: a card reader handled 1,000 cards a minute, or 1,333 characters per second. That would take 17 minutes to read 1.4 meg of data, the size of floppy disk. Sounds like a 3" floppy today would beat out a card reader. ###### Sender: lynn@LYNNPC Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> Reply-To: Anne & Lynn Wheeler From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler Message-ID: Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 17 User-Agent: Gnus/5.070099 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.99) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 05:00:14 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.28.138 X-Complaints-To: support@adcomsys.net X-Trace: news-west.eli.net 947394014 209.63.28.138 (Sat, 08 Jan 2000 22:00:14 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 22:00:14 MST Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!isdnet!newsfeed.tli.de!newsfeed2.news.nl.uu.net!sun4nl!uunet!ams.uu.net!ffx.uu.net!news-west.eli.net!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47751 "Jack Peacock" writes: > set, something simple in the 360/20 range. I bet a 360 emulator running > on a K7 at 1Ghz would compare favorably to a 370/125 at least, maybe > even a 168. And imagine how fast Autocoder would run on a 1401 > emulator! see http://www.funsoft.com/ for os/390 running on intel processor. -- -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@adcomsys.net, lynn@garlic.com http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/ ###### From: Mike Swaim Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers References: <8592vm$3gh@netaxs.com> User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-19990413 ("Endemoniada") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/3.2-RELEASE (i386)) Lines: 16 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.91.187.171 X-Trace: tw11.nn.bcandid.com 947394395 207.91.187.171 (Sat, 08 Jan 2000 22:06:35 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 22:06:35 MST Organization: bCandid - Powering the world's discussions - http://bCandid.com Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 05:06:36 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!enews.sgi.com!nntp.msen.com!206.132.58.120.MISMATCH!gw22.nn.bcandid.com!hub12.nn.bcandid.com!tw11.nn.bcandid.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47752 Lisa or Jeff wrote: > What is a K7? It's AMD's answer to the Pentium III. > I wouldn't be so sure of improved S/360 speeds on a PC today. Sure, > certain parts are a lot faster, but the S/360 excelled on its channel > I/O and excellent multi-tasking, stuff that PC hardware and software > remain weak. PC hardware and software are all over map. For disk and network services, there are a number of good hw/sw combinations. -- Mike Swaim, Avatar of Chaos: Disclaimer:I sometimes lie. Home: swaim at nol * net Quote: "Boingie"^4 Y,W&D ###### From: Tracy Nelson Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 09:10:47 -0500 Organization: Ralph Spoilsport Motors Lines: 9 Message-ID: <387896E7.8266FE8A@fast.net> References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!newsfeed.icl.net!diablo.theplanet.net!remarQ-uK!rQdQ!supernews.com!remarQ.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47765 Jack Peacock wrote: > And imagine how fast Autocoder would run on a 1401 > emulator! Would that be a 1401 emulator running on the simulated 370-168 on the Athlon? -- Just junk food for thought... ###### Sender: lynn@LYNNPC Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> Reply-To: Anne & Lynn Wheeler From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler Message-ID: Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 33 User-Agent: Gnus/5.070099 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.99) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 18:27:36 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.28.138 X-Complaints-To: support@adcomsys.net X-Trace: news-west.eli.net 947442456 209.63.28.138 (Sun, 09 Jan 2000 11:27:36 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 11:27:36 MST Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newspeer.monmouth.com!uunet!ffx.uu.net!news-west.eli.net!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47745 "Jack Peacock" writes: > set, something simple in the 360/20 range. I bet a 360 emulator running > on a K7 at 1Ghz would compare favorably to a 370/125 at least, maybe > even a 168. And imagine how fast Autocoder would run on a 1401 > emulator! oh yes ... the 370/125 was about 100kips 370 microcoded machine ... microcode that ran about 10:1 (i.e. 10 "native" machine instructions per every 370 instruction, i.e. about 1 mip native instruction machine, the other IOP in the 115/125 was only about a 800kip native machine ... and so the 115 was only about 80 kip 370 machine)). aslo, for ecps assist on the 138/148 machines ... we got about a 10:1 performance improvement dropping straight-line 370 kernel code into native microcode. assuming 370 simulation code that comes anywhere close to the efficiency of the microcode of the low-end 370 processors (115, 125, 135, 145) ... then a 1Ghz K7 would provide significantly more 370 MIPs than a 168. misc. references: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#21 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#27 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#3 -- -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@adcomsys.net, lynn@garlic.com http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/ ###### Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!not-for-mail From: Neil Franklin Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed Date: 09 Jan 2000 23:43:23 +0100 Organization: My own Private Self Lines: 50 Message-ID: <6uu2km27ec.fsf@chonsp.franklin.ch> References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: chonsp.franklin.ch X-Trace: chonsp.franklin.ch 947457803 574 10.0.3.2 (9 Jan 2000 22:43:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@chonsp.franklin.ch NNTP-Posting-Date: 9 Jan 2000 22:43:23 GMT X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.4 Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47768 hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) writes: > What is a CUTFU (Convert UTF-8 to > Unicode)? Unicode is a 16bit character set. Think of ISO-8859-1 (8-bit) extended by 8 zero-bits to 16 bit. With then 65536-256 additional codes added to it (of which about 20% are undefined as reserved). IIRC there are 4096 Latin/Arabic/Hebrew/Greek/Kyrilic/... 2048 Symbol/Dingbats/Icons/... 32678 common Chinese/Korean/Japanese (unified Han) 8192 additional to the above, for each 512 local system implementor scratch space and possibly some more stuff ISO-10646 ist then Unicode expanded by further 16 zero-bits to 32bit. UTF-8 is a method of packageing ISO-10646 into streams of octets. It is coded as follows (courtesy of man utf-8 on this Linux system): 0x00000000 - 0x0000007F: 0xxxxxxx 0x00000080 - 0x000007FF: 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx 0x00000800 - 0x0000FFFF: 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 0x00010000 - 0x001FFFFF: 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 0x00200000 - 0x03FFFFFF: 111110xx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 0x04000000 - 0x7FFFFFFF: 1111110x 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx Linux natively (that is the linux console) understands UTF-8 but only the first three lines of above are supported. So the S/390 does the 32bit<->UTF-8 conversion on microcode/hardware? Cool. -- Neil Franklin, neil@franklin.ch.remove http://neil.franklin.ch/ ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed References: <858odj$a66@netaxs.com> Organization: None X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test72 (19 April 1999) From: kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) Lines: 42 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.238.206.3 X-Trace: tw11.nn.bcandid.com 947457288 207.238.206.3 (Sun, 09 Jan 2000 15:34:48 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 15:34:48 MST Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 22:34:49 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!enews.sgi.com!nntp.flash.net!gw22.nn.bcandid.com!hub12.nn.bcandid.com!tw11.nn.bcandid.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47808 In article <858odj$a66@netaxs.com>, Lisa or Jeff wrote: >What is a CUTFU (Convert UTF-8 to Unicode)? Unicode is a character encoding, 16 bytes per char. Naturally that means that when you put it into a bytestream, it (a) contains null bytes, which messes with the C people's heads, and (b) is endian-dependent. Unicode includes encodings most of the world's scripts, plus APL. (Actually, Unicode also has another 2^20 characters in the surrogate region that are unused at present.) UTF-8 is a way of storing a sequence of integers (16-bit or even bigger) so that bigger integers take up more room. It also has the following nice features: - integers under 128 (i.e. ASCII) are represented by single bytes containing that integer. - integers over 128 are represented by strings of bytes containing no bytes under 128. - no integer is represented by a prefix or suffix of some other integer's representation, or by a suffix of one integer concatenated with a prefix of another. - the stream of bytes is modeless. There are never two valid interpretations of a particular chunk of bytes which must be resolved by context. These properties mean that, for many purposes --- like file-naming, string-searching, hashing, etc. --- you can treat a UTF-8 string as an ASCII string with some high-bit-set characters you don't understand. You won't have null bytes or '/' or '.' showing up in the middle of the representation of some Korean or Arabic character. >And they got rid of punched card codes in the EBCDIC chart, >putting in PC codes instead. Is nothing sacred? I imagine EBCDIC looks a little random without punched-card codes. What are "PC codes"? -- Kragen Sitaker The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08. Hurrah! The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either. :) ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed References: <8592vm$3gh@netaxs.com> Organization: None X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test72 (19 April 1999) From: kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) Lines: 44 Message-ID: <6d8e4.14492$7L.623754@tw11.nn.bcandid.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.238.206.3 X-Trace: tw11.nn.bcandid.com 947457986 207.238.206.3 (Sun, 09 Jan 2000 15:46:26 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 15:46:26 MST Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 22:46:27 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.direct.ca!nntp.flash.net!gw22.nn.bcandid.com!hub12.nn.bcandid.com!tw11.nn.bcandid.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47809 In article <8592vm$3gh@netaxs.com>, Lisa or Jeff wrote: >I wouldn't be so sure of improved S/360 speeds on a PC today. Sure, >certain parts are a lot faster, but the S/360 excelled on its channel >I/O and excellent multi-tasking, stuff that PC hardware and software >remain weak. Our S/360-40 easily handled a batch partition and multi- >terminal online partition. All the high volume I/O (high speed printer, >equal to 2,200 characters per second; high speed card reader), plus >tape and disk and the terminals might overwhelm a PC's bus channel. > >Let's see: a card reader handled 1,000 cards a minute, or 1,333 characters >per second. That would take 17 minutes to read 1.4 meg of data, the size of >floppy disk. Sounds like a 3" floppy today would beat out a card reader. I think a cheap PC today could beat it. 33-MHz PCI is about 1 Gbps IIRC. People routinely get 300 megabits out of relatively-cheap PC Gigabit Ethernet cards. Suppose you had a machine that handled - 1000 interactive terminals at 9600 bps -- total 9.6 megabits - 50 tape drives at 6250 bpi and 100 feet per second -- that's 100 * 6250 * 50 = 31 250 000 bits per second, total 31.25 megabits - 20 high-speed printers at 17,600 bits per second -- 352 000 bits per second, 0.352 megabits - 20 disks at 500 kilobytes per second -- that's 10 megabytes per second, or 80 megabits Total: 121.202 megabits per second. Double that for simultaneous input and output (maybe unreasonable --- disks and tapes don't usually do that, and printers and terminals don't do input at any significant pace). Still quite a bit less than a fast Celeron can handle. But if you get into the 1970s and 1980s, I imagine you could find mainframe installations that require more I/O throughput than a cheap PC. (The above sort of begs the question of how you could connect 1000 terminals or 50 tape drives to a cheap PC. I think the answer is probably 'through Ethernet, via a terminal server, or with Fiber Channel'.) -- Kragen Sitaker The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08. Hurrah! The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either. :) ###### Sender: lynn@LYNNPC Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: I'm overwhelmed References: <8592vm$3gh@netaxs.com> <6d8e4.14492$7L.623754@tw11.nn.bcandid.com> Reply-To: Anne & Lynn Wheeler From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler Message-ID: Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 54 User-Agent: Gnus/5.070099 (Pterodactyl Gnus v0.99) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 23:25:45 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.63.28.138 X-Complaints-To: support@adcomsys.net X-Trace: news-west.eli.net 947460345 209.63.28.138 (Sun, 09 Jan 2000 16:25:45 MST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2000 16:25:45 MST Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!netnews.com!newsfeed.nyc.globix.net!uunet!nyc.uu.net!ffx.uu.net!news-west.eli.net!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:47815 kragen@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker) writes: > Suppose you had a machine that handled > - 1000 interactive terminals at 9600 bps -- total 9.6 megabits > - 50 tape drives at 6250 bpi and 100 feet per second -- that's > 100 * 6250 * 50 = 31 250 000 bits per second, total 31.25 megabits > - 20 high-speed printers at 17,600 bits per second -- 352 000 bits per > second, 0.352 megabits > - 20 disks at 500 kilobytes per second -- that's 10 megabytes per second, > or 80 megabits i believe in the past MINIs have tried to move into this space ... and some have used ethernet for terminal concentrator. old time disk/tape would pose a little of a problem since not only was it the bit rate ... but they had no intermediate buffering. memory was scarce and they all used the mainframe memory so there was a lot of direct memory access with associated latency and overrun issues. The interesting thing about various of these configurations in the 60s is they talked about E/B ratios where the numbers were in terms of MIPs and bytes ... most E/B ratios these days are in terms of MIPs and bits (i.e. bits transferred per instruction executed has dropped by at least an order of magnitude). again, emulation of 390 on intel hardware: http://www.funsoft.com/ random reference: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/93.html#31 a problem that you get when there is that much depending on a single box, failure modes become an issue. Lots of PCs today are configured with fake parity memory. I think the best PC memory is possibly 8+2 ECC. (correct 1 bit error and detect two bit). Mainframe memory may be 64+16 (correct 15bit errors, detect 16 bit errors) or better. misc. other references: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/97.html#15 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#71 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#137 some discussion of support for tens of thousands of interactive terminals http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67 -- -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@adcomsys.net, lynn@garlic.com http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn/