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[#] Fri Oct 07 2022 13:20:27 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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I spent many, many years on a TRS-80 Model III quite happily. Z80 is a

great platform to learn assembly language. I was already a wiz at

That's true. I learned on Z80 and 6502, and then in 11th grade I took an assembly class for the easy A, and they were teaching it on 8086, complete with its awful segmented addressing. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for people who weren't computer nerds trying to make it through that.

[#] Fri Oct 07 2022 21:36:05 UTC from Nurb432

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i started on an 8080, it was the shiny object at the time.

Later in middle school, i designed my own CPU ... ( cobbled together using discrete gates and eProms once i realized that you could save TONS of gates by using logic tables inside a ROM..  ).  it didnt do much, but it did function...

Fri Oct 07 2022 09:20:27 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
That's true. I learned on Z80 and 6502, and then in 11th grade I took an assembly class for the easy A, and they were teaching it on 8086, complete with its awful segmented addressing. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for people who weren't computer nerds trying to make it through that.

 



[#] Sat Oct 08 2022 04:40:18 UTC from test2

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6502 assembly. scratchin on bare metal. fav



[#] Tue Dec 27 2022 15:23:05 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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For some reason, something old and nostalgic is on my mind this morning.

When I started using unix some 40 years ago, it only ran on computers with serial consoles. And when you completed a shutdown of the operating system, the last thing you would see on the console was:

*** Normal system shutdown ***

And I'm wondering when was the last time I saw that message. It has to have been decades, now that everything has moved to framebuffer consoles, and when the OS completes shutting down it simply turns the power off.

[#] Tue Dec 27 2022 15:58:51 UTC from Nurb432

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I've seen something simlar recently. i think on a Linux machine. But i forget why or the details.  I normally do power off not shut down. unsure if i just did a typo or what. It was a vm. 

I thought i did a restart but it was not alive. went into the console and it was sitting there in a 'down' state instead. "system halted" i think was the message.



[#] Tue Dec 27 2022 18:06:20 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Well yes, Linux does display "System halted" instead of "*** Normal system shutdown ***" because it's using the Linux kernel, not the original Unix kernel, but the point is that you seldom if ever see it because the very next thing that happens is the computer turns off.

Here's the relevant kernel code:

0 void kernel_halt(void)
161 {
162 kernel_shutdown_prepare(SYSTEM_HALT);
163 migrate_to_reboot_cpu();
164 syscore_shutdown();
165 pr_emerg("System halted\n");
166 kmsg_dump(KMSG_DUMP_HALT);
167 machine_halt();
168 }

Anyone care to tell us what FreeBSD does?

[#] Tue Dec 27 2022 18:07:12 UTC from LadySerenaKitty

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I first used FreeBSD on a machine that didn't have ACPI so it didn't have soft-power.  At the end of shutdown, the kernel would say "System halted." and that was the cue to kill the power.  Fun fact: the FreeBSD kernel still prints this message immediately before attempting the ACPI power-off, so if your ACPI is wonky or the hardware doesn't have soft-power capability, the message is still there.



[#] Wed Dec 28 2022 03:49:31 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Cool. The kernel code posted above seems to suggest that Linux would do the same. And I imagine that if you're using FreeBSD or Linux on a machine with a serial console you'd see it as well, but I also seem to recall that I've seen more than a few machines complete shutting down before the console's serial buffer was fully flushed, so it would never make it to the final shutdown message.

Now that I think about it, the variant "*** Normal System Shutdown ***" might have been a Xenix thing, because that's what was running on the Altos machines on which I cut my unix teeth some 40 years ago.

Which reminds me...

< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED

[#] Wed Dec 28 2022 05:12:14 UTC from LadySerenaKitty

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IRIX Release 6.5 does not output anything at the end of shutdown.  This is because IRIX was made by SGI for SGI machines.  100% of the SGI purroducts that are supported by IRIX 6.5 have soft-power capabilities.  There are a couple of caveats - during a reboot it says "Rebooting..." and when exiting the OS (to go back to the firmware) it just says "Kernel Exit".



[#] Wed Dec 28 2022 23:00:00 UTC from darknetuser

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2022-12-27 10:23 from IGnatius T Foobar
For some reason, something old and nostalgic is on my mind this
morning.

When I started using unix some 40 years ago, it only ran on computers

with serial consoles. And when you completed a shutdown of the
operating system, the last thing you would see on the console was:

*** Normal system shutdown ***

And I'm wondering when was the last time I saw that message. It has

to have been decades, now that everything has moved to framebuffer
consoles, and when the OS completes shutting down it simply turns the

power off.



Some BSDs still do something similar. You get "System halted. Press any key for reboot."

[#] Mon Jan 09 2023 18:46:58 UTC from Nurb432

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Something you dont see every day..

 

Bubble memory from a 1980's Fuji cash register.



[#] Sat Jan 14 2023 13:14:06 UTC from Nurb432

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from a post somewhere else i watch:

"your cp/m emulator sucks!  i cant figure out how to copy files!! where is copy command!!"  ( really its not really a "cp/m emulator" and more of an "just enough hardware emulator to make cp/m run", but whatever i can see some lesser being not understanding )

 

"um, use pip, the normal copy program in cp/m since the beginning, and some research... "            Clearly that person was not around in the old days and just ran across something  ooooo, look that fancy retro-stuff i should do this and bug the old timers with newbie questions.

 

 

 

( or is this a rant instead? )



[#] Sat Jan 14 2023 17:22:03 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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PIP B:=A: *.*

Aah, CP/M ... it would have reigned for decades had it not been for Mary Gates meddling inside IBM.

PIP was pretty awesome. Like its namesake on DEC machines, it could do much more than just copy files.

[#] Sat Jan 14 2023 18:51:17 UTC from Nurb432

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Next he asked "what is a CCP file".

I guess i should not be too hard on him, at least he's trying something new ( to him ) and not acting like a jerk.



[#] Sat Jan 14 2023 23:55:42 UTC from zelgomer

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2023-01-14 18:51 from Nurb432 <nurb432@uncensored.citadel.org>
Next he asked "what is a CCP file".


Damn Chicoms, they're everywhere!

[#] Tue Jan 17 2023 18:19:06 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Heh. I thought of that too and you posted it first. Well done.

[#] Thu Mar 02 2023 16:23:10 UTC from fandarel

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I finally spent some time learning about hercules. I've got MVS 3.8j up and running now, following Jay Moseley's excellent instructions. I really liked that not only did he provide the commands to get the system built, but also included enough background to understand the steps and why things needed to be done in the order they were specified. His instructions end with creating a 'hello world' program in COBOL, and then creating a JCL script to build and run it. So far, I've failed to get the JCL job to run successfully, but my eyes were giving out last night, so I'll give it another look today. After I remember how to IPL the system.

[#] Fri Mar 03 2023 22:35:45 UTC from Nurb432

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Actually i had forgot about Hercules.  Coming from the mainframe world it was pretty neat.



[#] Mon Apr 03 2023 16:35:06 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Oh yeah! Now I can run all that JCL I wrote for the mainframe at Waldenbooks nearly 30 years ago. Time to dig up those 9-track reels. :)

[#] Wed Apr 12 2023 02:36:06 UTC from papa

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Ooh, Big Iron! The current focus of my retro-computing mania.

Other opportunities for communing with IBM mainframe and midrange computers:

IBM Z Xplore https://www.ibm.com/z/resources/zxplore (formerly "Master the Mainframe") Tutorial series on use and programming for IBM zSystems.

PUB400.COM https://pub400.com/ Public access IBM i 7.5 server (successor product of AS/400).

IBM 4361 https://wiki.livingcomputers.org/doku.php?id=vm_cms_survival_guide Host computer operated by Living Computers Museum + Labs is available on-line even though LCM+L is currently closed.

Don't get me started on DEC stuff .... ;)

 



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