[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Stephen D. B. Wolthusen]

Hi,

On 24-Jun-2002 Dave McGuire wrote:
>   Ack, Stephen, I just re-read my reply to your mail.  This Chris kid
> has me in a bad mood; I hadn't intended my response to your email to
> sound so adversarial.  I apologize if it came out that way.

Nah, that one didn't. And even if it did, it'd have served me right for picking
nits. It's just that the 11/780 has a very, very special place in my memory
(both running BSD and VMS)... and the fact that it was only two years ago that
I had to loan the local university physics department an RX02 for booting a
control system after their RM05 had finally quit. They had/have a weird SBI
interface built by someone *long* gone and no budget to revamp the old setup. I
guess running an accelerator (even just for training on the real thing) puts the
power bill of a Star into its proper perspective. 

>>   The 11/750 was indeed after the /780.  It also booted its microcode
>> and monitor from a separate (i.e. non-CPU) device...a TU58 tape drive.

I'm a little hazy on the smallish 700s, never really worked on them (and they
never made much engineering sense to me, product line protection a la IBM that
it was), but flipping through yesterdays posts I think someone else set this
straight. Anyway, booting from tape (and especially when using DECTapes) has
largely outlived its usefulness. Speed, if nothing else, makes that a job
better done by CD/DVD drives. Unless your CD-ROM drive happens to be an RRD 40
boat anchor - whoever designed that thing should be made to eat the #*$@ caddies
and have the drive dropped on his toes fron at least 3'. Once for reach toe, of
course.

-- 

        later,
        Stephen

Stephen Wolthusen (stephen at wolthusen.com)