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[#] Thu Apr 25 2024 22:12:05 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I'm using MOCA here in my house, it's been a game changer. Beats wifi

If all you've got is coaxial cable and you really can't change it (such as if you're renting ... and your name isn't Cameron Gray) then MoCA gets the job done. I used it for a few months at this house when we first moved in, just to get the home office plugged in until I could pull ethernet. Wifi was pretty unusable as a daily driver.

[#] Sat Apr 27 2024 16:06:41 EDT from test2

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MOCA works extremely well. especially if you already have coax in all your bedrooms (old houses).



[#] Sun Apr 28 2024 14:56:01 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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It does, and as I mentioned earlier I think the people who make the hardware missed an opportunity by not making MoCA adapters that attach directly to the computer without Ethernet in between. Now that wireless has taken over everything and home Ethernet is pretty much the domain of the hardcore, that opportunity has probably come and gone.

[#] Sun Apr 28 2024 15:42:40 EDT from Nurb432

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They did.  But never saw them outside of a few targeted markets.

We used them at Ford in the plants.

Sun Apr 28 2024 14:56:01 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
It does, and as I mentioned earlier I think the people who make the hardware missed an opportunity by not making MoCA adapters that attach directly to the computer without Ethernet in between. Now that wireless has taken over everything and home Ethernet is pretty much the domain of the hardcore, that opportunity has probably come and gone.

 



[#] Tue Apr 30 2024 08:00:44 EDT from Nurb432

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Speaking of moca i have it running from my computer room to my "closet"  ( mentioned it before. Last year upgraded speeds. I cant use a WiFi bridge reliably due to interference, plus i cant get 1G wifi.. ).

This morning, noticed both changed IP addresses..   how odd.   Even during power outages they have never done that.



[#] Fri May 03 2024 14:41:49 EDT from Nurb432

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Cool. Now that Zilog is killing off the Z80 after a couple of centuries ( ok, exaggerating, slightly )  there is a project to release an open source version, on silicon. A 1:1 pin compatible replacement.  Using a 'seed studio' like place, except they do chips, not boards.  

Long live the Z80!



[#] Thu May 23 2024 22:59:09 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Cool. Has this project been blessed by Zilog or are they going to sueball it out of existence?

I sure do wish I had known just a little more about Z80 assembly when I was mucking about with my S-100 system back in the mid 1980s.

[#] Fri May 24 2024 07:20:26 EDT from Nurb432

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Not been blessed.  But, they have not sued any other z80 FPGA or emulation project..  I doubt they will this.    Besides patents run out after a couple of decades, so that angle is over anyway.  They could force a name change.. but that wont kill the project. "we renamed to Zeta80"

Assembly is where i started. With blinking lights and slide switches.  ( slide as they were cheaper than toggle.. i was a kid.. )

Thu May 23 2024 22:59:09 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Cool. Has this project been blessed by Zilog or are they going to sueball it out of existence?

I sure do wish I had known just a little more about Z80 assembly when I was mucking about with my S-100 system back in the mid 1980s.

 



[#] Sat May 25 2024 13:31:06 EDT from Nurb432

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And speaking of old architectures, i loved the 8031 series.   It separated program space from data memory, in hardware.  Just made sense to me.

I still have the last board i built with it on there, well never finished it but was mostly done.   useless in the bigger picture but it still means something to me. 

Back when i was still into that sort of thing, i was designing CPU architectures.  Would use the boards to 'emulate' the processor, and the pin layout of a real thing so it was 'like it was real'. Never expected to be able to build it, but liked designing that stuff, and was hoping someday perhaps id get to work in that field when i grew up.    Did a few in discrete logic. then realized i could use EEprom's to reduce the parts count *dramatically*. Most logic is just a 'Karnaugh map' anyway, so its easily reproducible in a ROM..  Perhaps not as fast as real gates, but the tradeoff was more than acceptable. Reduced chip count AND easy to fix, or change.    Sort of an early FPGA, in a way. But then after that "why not do it in code and use the i/o ports like they were the real thing.... "

And since its 'pix or it didnt happen', the last board, 1987 ish..:

Mostly wired, ( other 1/2 is on the back side of the board ) but is missing the serial port driver chip.  And yes, i stacked those 2 chips ( 32k ). Another short cut. Id find chips with the same pin out, piggyback them other than the chip select. Tho often times id use a socket on top, so could easily remove the EEProm and reprogram it )  Which one was active is driven off those 2 smaller TTL gates, based on address decoding. Didn't do piggyback if i was doing an official PCB to put out in the plant or something.  This was just for dev work.

 

 

Fun times.  Different world today.

8031s ( and their siblings ) were hugely popular embedded chips and all over the place back then. Much like the ESP32 is today. 

 



[#] Sat May 25 2024 13:32:49 EDT from Nurb432

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Grr make that Eprom not EEprom.  typo.

I dont think EEproms existed yet. We still had to use ultraviolet light to erase them.    ( i might even have my eraser around in a box somewhere..   donno )



[#] Thu Jun 13 2024 19:52:53 EDT from Nurb432

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Well, mainframe at the office will out live my career.

The project to decom it, pushed back at least 5 years. ( combination of reasons ). I wont be there in 5 years.



[#] Wed Jun 19 2024 16:42:39 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Are they using it like a "modern" mainframe (lots of virtual instances running many operating systems including Linux) or are they just carrying over ancient workloads running on Z/OS (formerly known as MVS) ?

IBM has a mainframe version called "Rockhopper" that *only* runs Linux instances.
So there must be more than a few customers running them that way. At that scale it's basically an entire cloud in a box. So if you're not running anything hard-compiled for x86 or AMD64, and you're not running any legacy operating systems like Windows Server, it could actually make sense for certain kinds of customers.

I continue to be surprised that the major clown providers don't offer IBM Z instances when they're so cheap to provision once the hardware is in place.
But they do seem dead set against it. They don't even offer Z/OS. I went to a "mainframe" session at AWS re:Invent last year expecting to find such things but it was basically just a bunch of people talking about how to integrate clown workloads with mainframe workloads. And the thing they kept saying was "don't connect to the mainframe" - preferring instead to replicate data from the mainframe to the clown and then work with it there.

And IBM is the only mainframe vendor still selling new ones. All of the others -- for example, Unisys -- are simply emulating their legacy architectures on AMD64 machines.

I wonder how old you have to be to make megabucks being the only one left who knows how to support something, but also be able to do it long enough to keep working until retirement. I'm only 53 so I have to keep learning new stuff for a while yet.

[#] Wed Jun 19 2024 16:47:04 EDT from Nurb432

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Cant say for sure as im not even allowed back in the DC now, other than we still have some sort of onsite Z-series IBM hardware that the ops team babysits. ( times have changed.. Used to have free access to everything in the old days, would even rack VMware hosts in the and even had access to our disaster site if i wanted to drive down and visit.. )



[#] Thu Jul 04 2024 08:13:52 EDT from Nurb432

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Dont see that every day.

In a box i thought was only ( electrical ) car parts, a 10MB ( i think.. might have been 20MB. not going to open the case just to see ) scsi drive, attached to a ASCSI adapter. 

Atari was ahead of their time in adding a SCSI port on the back of the ST, but it had to be slightly different, so you had to have an adapter card.    At least the MIDI port was standard.



[#] Sat Jul 06 2024 12:27:24 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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*sigh*

I remain disappointed that IDE (PATA) and then SATA came into existence at all, when that would have been the perfect opportunity to just move the whole industry from the ST-506 interface over to full SCSI and just be done with it. ATA only saved just a tiny bit of money at the very beginning. SAS and SATA are electrically identical.

But I guess it doesn't matter now that SAS and SATA are finally on their way out. In a few more years everything will just be a PCIe bus extension, which is what NVMe actually is. Even the U.2 and U.3 form factors are just 2.5" disks plugged into a backplane that extends the host's PCIe bus.

And here I am in 2024 just having built an all-SATA machine for my new server.
Duh.

[#] Tue Jul 23 2024 18:26:22 EDT from Nurb432

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oooo no, not 10mb or 20mb  its  2G.. wow. i was fancy.. i don't remember it being that big.

 

( decided to go ahead and take the disk out and destroy it before it hit the trash.. while chances of anything being on it ( or readable ) doing it just in case.

Thu Jul 04 2024 08:13:52 EDT from Nurb432

Dont see that every day.

In a box i thought was only ( electrical ) car parts, a 10MB ( i think.. might have been 20MB. not going to open the case just to see ) scsi drive, attached to a ASCSI adapter. 

Atari was ahead of their time in adding a SCSI port on the back of the ST, but it had to be slightly different, so you had to have an adapter card.    At least the MIDI port was standard.



 



[#] Thu Jul 25 2024 20:27:01 EDT from Nurb432

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Perhaps not 'ancient' but 'really damned old'

PCMCIA to scsi adapter 



[#] Sun Jul 28 2024 09:53:20 EDT from Nurb432

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oooo an entire bag of PCMCIA cards.  Everything from a 2mb flash memory to WiFi...   if i remember right the 2mb cards came out of an onsite analog pbx system that was perhaps 6'x20' in size, 3 or 4 cabinets of it. would have been running perhaps 500 phones, if not more. 

 

And a bag of laptop DDR..   averaging 512.    and a couple of really odd broadcom wifi cards.  Not sure what they went into.   Guessing 300 pin, with a single pin 'key'.    ( i know what they go into now tho, 'the trash'  lol )



[#] Sun Jul 28 2024 15:39:45 EDT from Nurb432

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and a bag of DIMMs..  looks like for old servers.  looked at a couple - 128mb.

I should have sold them when they had value instead of keeping them as spares and then forgetting i had them. i bet that bag was a few thousand bucks at one point. 



[#] Sun Jul 28 2024 16:58:37 EDT from nonservator

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Is recycling electronics for the gold, copper etc still a thing?



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