x86 architecture concepts

On 2005-02-24, Nicholas O. Lindan <see@sig.com> wrote:

>> I'm not buying that arguement.  From what I knew, most CP/M
>> applications were just re-written by hand.  I never met
>> anybody who had used the mythical 8080 -> 8086 assembly
>> language translator.

Did Intel ever actually ship a translator or was that all just
handwaving and hype?

> I've done a bit of '85->'86 translation.  No, I didn't have a
> 'tool' to do it.  I did 90% of it with Brief key-stroke
> macros. The result was like German->English using only a
> dictionary and not changing the grammar, but it did work and
> was a fast, accurate and easy job -- something that doesn't
> come along very often.

I'll concede that it would take longer to convert to 68K
assembly.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Hmmm... A hash-singer
                                  at               and a cross-eyed guy were
                               visi.com            SLEEPING on a deserted
                                                   island, when...

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:38:57 +0100, Mouarf wrote:

> Regarding the power consumption, Intel faces every day with power 
> dissipation (90W over few square centimeters), they certainly tend to reduce 
> the power consumption by reducing the number of transistors (at least) and 

Do you have any reference for this ?
AFAICT the number of transistors in (Intel) CPUs is ever _increasing_.

Rob Windgassen

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 02:34:22 GMT, Kelly Hall <khall@acm.org> wrote:

>"CBFalconer" <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote
>>>Without that decision [nominal 8080 compatability] 
>>>we wouldn't have the Microsoft/Gates monopoly
>>>sucking at us today.
>
>It only sucks at you if you let it.  Alternatives exist for just about 
>any Microsoft product.  Many of the alternatives are pretty good.  Many 
>suck worse than the Windows version.
>
> >>It was a horrible decision for which the personal
> >>computer industry has suffered immeasurably
> >>for the past 20 years.
>
>"Labored", perhaps, but "suffered"?  You want to talk suffering, 
>consider the minicomputer and mainframe computer folks over the last 20 
>years.
>
>Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
>> The tragedy of the PC is that IBM didn't take Intel's
>> iRMX operating system and PLM/86 and instead went to 
>> a scheming little college drop-out who took them blind
>> and saddled them with kinder spiel technology.
>
>Seems to me that IBM and Microsoft both did quite well based on that 
>business decision.  Could they have made better (more elegant) technical 
>decisions?  Certainly.  But it's not clear that they would have made 
>more money with more elegant technology.

I think the question should be. Would they have made any less money if
they had implemented a better technical solution ?. Would the systems
available today be more advanced if less money was spent on getting
the existing non-elegent solution to be faster and still stay
compatible. ? Many corporations seem to manufacture less than optimal
solutions, and then just quadruple the advertising budget and use less
than savoury tactics to get rid of the better solutions. 


>Alternatives have always existed, since IBM offered CPM-86 and UCSD 
>P-System in the catalog along with PC/MS-DOS.  UCSD was non-starter for 
>business folks, and DRI priced themselves out of the market.  MS-DOS was 
>good enough for Visicalc and WordStar, and the rest is history.
>
>Technical elegance and good business intersect too rarely.

That is a signicant cultural problem in the western world today. Often
a much better product can be provided while the same amount of money
is made. It seems that in todays corporate culture the idea is to make
as much money as possible while providing the worst possible product. 
The client is "THE ENEMY". One can unserstand that compnaies have to
make money, but in the end of the day the actual services and products
that the companies provide should be the important thing. The actual
value of money is very little. One cannot eat it, it does not provide
transport and all the thousands of other things people need or want.

Regards
   Anton Erasmus

Anton Erasmus wrote:
> I think the question should be. Would they have made any less money if
> they had implemented a better technical solution?

I think the answer is yes, given that technical elegance will generally 
cost more in development or time to market.  But the problem isn't what 
a given company chooses to bring to market, it's what the marketplace 
decides to buy.  "Technical elegance" is usually pretty far down the 
list of customer requirements.

> It seems that in todays corporate culture the idea is to make
> as much money as possible while providing the worst possible product. 

I wouldn't say "worst", but "cheapest".  The client wants the most 
features at the lowest price.  The business wants to maximize profit, 
the difference between price and costs.  As long as clients are cheap, 
there will be pressure to build things cheaply, and that often precludes 
technically elegant solutions.  Microsoft uber alles.  WalMart uber 
alles.  RIP beauty.

> One can unserstand that compnaies have to
> make money, but in the end of the day the actual services and products
> that the companies provide should be the important thing.

You're confusing art and business.  Artists often set the commission 
price up front, and then are free to create beauty subject to the 
customers tastes and time line.  Business has to guess what the customer 
wants and is willing to pay for; if they take too long to finish the 
product, someone else ships first and captures the market.

Just out of curiosity, what are the dominant MCU architectures in the 
embedded field?  Are there more elegant alternatives?  Why aren't they 
dominant?

Kelly

"Kelly Hall" <khall@acm.org> wrote 

> "Technical elegance" is usually pretty far down the 
> list of customer requirements.

As I am afraid it should be.  Nowhere in "Technical Elegance" are
the needs of the customer considered.

-- 
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer:  Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.
To reply, remove spaces: n o lindan at ix  . netcom . com
psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 01:09:29 GMT, "Nicholas O. Lindan" <see@sig.com>
wrote:

>The tragedy of the PC is that IBM didn't take Intel's
>iRMX operating system and PLM/86 and instead went to 
>a scheming little college drop-out who took them blind
>and saddled them with kinder spiel technology.
>
>iRMX was multi-user, networked and password secure from
>the get-go.  PLM/86 and the 8086 were designed to
>go together -- like C only makes sense on a PDP-11
>(Oh, I am going to hear howls for that one).

While RMX-80 and later on RMX-86 definitely were multitasking
operating systems, did the RMX-86 originally really have multi-user
and network capability ? When did they invent the iRMX name ?

If IBM had selected the multitasking RMX-86, would there have been
enough professionals, who would have understood anything about  real
time and multitasking ? In those days, could you really get any kind
of formal training for such environments ? While working with RSX-11
since the mid 1970's, much in-house training was required even in the
mid-1980's to get most programmers in a team to become familiar with
multitasking issues.

Realistically, if IBM had chosen RMX-86, how many competent
programmers would have been available ? Trying to get the universities
to teach multitasking issues would be very hard, since most of the
professors would have been from the batch (punched card) era :-).

Paul
    

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:05:11 +0000, Nicholas O. Lindan wrote:
> As I am afraid it should be.  Nowhere in "Technical Elegance" are
> the needs of the customer considered.

With technical elegance as in "an idea or plan that is elegant is very
intelligent yet simple" (Longman dict.) it very well may be

- economical
- reliable
- easy to use

Interesting for a customer I guess.

Rob Windgassen

"Paul Keinanen" <keinanen@sci.fi> wrote

> While RMX-80 and later on RMX-86 definitely were multitasking
> operating systems, did the RMX-86 originally really have multi-user
> and network capability?

Originally?  Now that's digging - I am pretty sure those docs
got tossed a long time ago.  I know Motorola's RMS-68K was 
multi-user in '81, so chances are iRMX-86 was also.  
My memory of the ISIS-III -> iNDX and iNDX + iRMX-80 -> iRMX-86 
(or was it the other way round) progression is pretty hazy.

iRMX-86 has a history of being used in industrial PC-DOS machines, 
where it runs Windows 3.1 through Windows NT as a task/user.  It is
still being designed into systems.

> If IBM had selected the multitasking RMX-86, would there have been
> enough professionals, who would have understood anything about  real
> time and multitasking?

You don't need to know real-time.  The interface can look just like DOS.
Instead of 'stay resident' one would spawn a separate, killable,
task.  iNDX would have been a better variant, and I confess to
lumping the two together in my head as "that Intel thing in the 80's."

In the ultimate analysis _all_ operating systems are real-time, 
just with varying degrees of 'softness' (that's a measure of how 
seriously the OS treats getting something done on schedule -- 
for the non-RTOS'ers.)

> In those days, could you really get any kind of formal training for 
> such environments ?

Way more than you can get now.  Motorola and Intel both provided
series of courses on OS, hardware, languages and development systems.
I only attended the 68K one.  The course was pretty good: it convinced 
us to drop Motorola and switch to Intel right-quick.  Every
task in 68K needed it's own copy of the run-time library, some 40K - 
and 10 tasks x 40K was a _lot_ of EPROMs in '81.

> While working with RSX-11 since the mid 1970's, much in-house 
> training was required even in the mid-1980's to get most 
> programmers in a team to become familiar with multitasking issues.

Oh, I remember that.  I did some traveling tent shows getting
clients to use an RTOS.  It was like convincing a C programmer to
use Pascal.  Engineers are stubborn beasts.  Though once you can
get them to switch they latch on to the new method as tightly as
they latched on to the old.  Engineers are 'show me' types.

> Realistically, if IBM had chosen RMX-86, how many competent
> programmers would have been available?

'Competent' - probably more as the PC would have an instant
entry into factory automation.  

Now incompetent we had in spades what with Basic coming 
for free with the machine.  Competent ones took a look at 
Lifeboat C, the Phoenix linker, MS compilers and ran for 
the hills.  Remember Debug and Edlin.

> Trying to get the universities to teach multitasking issues 
> would be very hard, since most of the professors would have 
> been from the batch (punched card) era :-).

In my experience profs stayed pretty much at the leading edge,
often defining it.  It may be different at non-research
colleges.

Industrial consulting makes up a real-big chunk of an Engineering
prof's income - stick in the mud's need not apply.  There was 
a lot of research into real-time networks and distributed
processing in the early 70's.  The first 6800's (like the first
dozen) went to Universities.  At Case a grad student promptly
pushed the 40 pin cerdip in the middle to get it into the socket
and it cracked - surpassingly, it still worked.  When was
DARPA net developed?

It is after they graduate and spend some time on their first
job that engineers' minds shut tight to new ideas.  If the
technology in their first job is the same as they were imprinted
with at school then heaven help you.


-- 
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer:  Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.
To reply, remove spaces: n o lindan at ix  . netcom . com
psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

"Rob Windgassen" <rwindgas@xs-FOUR-all.nl> wrote

> > Nowhere in "Technical Elegance" are
> > the needs of the customer considered.
> 
> With technical elegance as in "an idea or plan that is elegant is very
> intelligent yet simple" (Longman dict.)

Nowhere in that definition are the words reliable, cost effective,
functional, correct, useful, safe etc, etc, etc. to be found.

'Intelligent yet simple' has _never_, TTBOMK, appeared in a product
specification.

If a chair is described as 'intelligent yet simple' one can assume
it will be hell to sit in.

> [TE] may very well may be
> 
> - economical
> - reliable
> - easy to use

Or it may not.  You can as easily say the same effects 'may' 
be had by painting it orange.

'Technical elegance' is historically a byword for poorly documented, 
unreliable and unsafe.

-- 
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer:  Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.
To reply, remove spaces: n o lindan at ix  . netcom . com
psst.. want to buy an f-stop timer? nolindan.com/da/fstop/

Dave Hansen wrote:

> On 24 Feb 2005 03:59:45 GMT, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com> wrote:
>
> >On 2005-02-23, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote:
> [...]
> >> Without that decision we wouldn't have the Microsoft/Gates
> >> monopoly sucking at us today.
> >
> >That's for sure.
>
> I'm not sure what "decision" you guys are talking about.  But I don't
> agree with "That's for sure" regardless.
>
> Remember that, for all his "reputation" as a techie, Gates is a
> _businessman_.  Had things happened differently, he might not have had
> such an initial boost, but he would have been working all along to
> gain as much market as he could.  When IBM approached Microsoft in the
> first place, they were primarily a development tool shop (Microsoft
> BASIC).  Gates wants Microsoft to be the company that writes all the
> software.  Microsoft sells the most software, not because it's the
> best, but because it is the best marketed.  And technical superiority
> is no guarantee of market success.
>
> So if IBM had gone with DR or Intel for the operating system, or with
> Moto 68k for the micro and yet someone else for the OS, Microsoft
> might not be as big as it is today, but it would certainly be big.
> Perhaps even dominant.
>
> Regards,
>
>                                -=Dave
> --
> Change is inevitable, progress is not.

Does anyone watch TV

IBM went to DR first.  They did not agree to IBMs terms
Gate bought DOS 1.0 from some guy who wrote it at home.  He did this so He
could sell BASIC with it.
X86 was chosen for time reasons.