We also had a Cromemco Z2D at TAFE. When I went to GD in the USA, I found that they also used them, especially for supporting the F-16. I was told that the USAF used the Cromemco’s to support various aircraft, but mostly the F-15 & F-16. We also had an ICL PERQ (which had been donated, as had the VAX-11/750 “Comet”. DEC got a lot of it’s workforce from that TAFE school, the DEC Aus HQ was about a 15 min walk from the campus. It caused a bit of commotion, as that school became the first educational institution in Aus to get a VAX. Melb Uni was trying to get funding for an 11/780, and the lowly TAFE got it’s smaller brother for *free*. 😆 Melb Uni eventually got one of the first VAX-11/782 “atlas” systems in the World (for the cost of the single CPU 780), and later one of the rare quad 11/784 “VAXimus” systems. 🙂

OK… g’night all! 😉 😀

I’ve always wanted to know *how things work*. I blame my Grandfather. 🙂 I watched him take a radio apart to fix it when I was very young. And then I (successfully) took our radio apart… and discovered that reassembling things (so they will actually work) is harder! 😆 So, I kinda became his *apprentice* when anything needed fixing or building (I suspect my Mom – his daughter – had wards after the radio incident). 😉 I actually began an Automotive Mechanics apprenticeship when I was 15 (the earliest age it could be done back then) with Shell. The ONLY good part about that was the 2 days a week I spent at TAFE (Technical And Further Education – our equivalent of a Technical College) when I actually got to work on a car! All I did at Shell was change tires and replace batteries! But that was a springboard for me. The teacher at TAFE said I was wasting my talents and should consider some form of Engineering. I had no idea what I was really interested in at that stage, so the teacher had me meet the Principal, and we discussed options. They had a new course that intrigued me, called Certificate of Technology (CoT). It was an advanced diploma course of 4 years which was a path to a University Engineering or Science degree (for 1 year). It was a combination of several studies, and unlike University it was split 60% practical, 40% theory (Uni is the other way around). It was made up of physics, mathematics, metallurgy, electrical trades, electronics, mechanical, machine shop (using all kinds of tools, drill press, band saws, lathes, presses, benders, grinders, oxy & arc welders, *normal* tools and a small 3-axis milling machine). The first year, we had to make a center punch (and it wasn’t as easy as it looks! It had to be perfect, the hatching for the hand grip had to be exactly 45^o 2mm parallel lines, the tip had to be 60^o, and was made from hardened tool steel! 🙂 Each year was made up of 32 *modules* of 2 to 4 weeks each, 2 or 3 times a week (with 3 different modules per day). They forgot to mention until I stated that the pass mark for each module was a minimum of 75%, and if we didn’t avg much better than that, we would be forced to consider alternatives at the end of the year. It was a very tough course! We started with 4 classes of 16 students, and lost 23 by the end of the first year! And that was the easy year! 😆 By the end of the 3rd year, there were 17 left. 🙂 As well as all the great tools, we had computer’s! A PDP-11, and a VAX 11-750 (and a bunch of micro’s, Northstar Horizon, TRS-80’s, Apple II’s, and others) At the end of the third year, those who passed were presented with a set of Heathkit H8 computer kit plans and some hardware (with the Z80 CPU board, 2 4KB RAM boards, and an I/O board), there was a gotcha (or two actually)! First, it had to be fully assembled and working by the start of year 4, AND we had to make our own PCB’s, and we had to get all the parts ourselves from the school inventory (with all appropriate paperwork). We had a lab for making PCB’s, but we had to use a bare copper board and make up the photographic solution, set up the equipment, set up the etch bath (which was toxic and had to be exactly the right temp or the copper would dissolve unevenly etc), drill the holes and add via’s. 🙂 Luckily, I’d spent much time in there, and it was easy for me. I even helped several other students. 🙂 Anyway, I built it without too much drama. I even added 2 more RAM boards so I could add the floppy drive system, that required 16 KB RAM. 🙂 I passed with a distinction avg (and missed the coveted high distinction by a lousy 2%, and it was all because I was sick as a dog for a couple months!) One upside to doing this particular course at this school (unbeknownst to me until later) was that as this was then the toughest course in Aus, if you made it past the 3rd year, you were guaranteed a job! At the start of y4, head hunters would turn up and we’d listen to their spiels and choose 2 or 3 for interviews. We then had the choice of going t0 Uni for a year to get a degree, or starting work after y4 ended (assuming we passed, of course). 🙂 I decided to take a job with Tandem to work on their new NonStop II systems after going to their new office (which was small at that time, half of one floor of a tall building in (what was known as *Computer Land* because almost all IT companies had their offices in this area of the city, the exceptions were IBM, DEC, HP & CDC). I saw these awesome black smoked-glass fronted cabinet’s and was shown what was inside, and fell in love! 😆 They showed the CPU cabinet which had 4 rows of CPU cards, all had a row of LED’s at the front edge to show each CPU’s work load, and the snr engineer said “watch this” , went to the CRT terminal, and started a db dump and text went rushing up the display, and the LED’s on several cards went to max, then he walked over to the rack, unlocked a fully lit card, and pulled it out! And another card that had been idling, went to max, and the display of data kept going without a pause! And that was my intro to *Fault Tolerance!* Yeah… I wanted to work there real bad! 😆 Even today, I almost never see the level of redundancy that that system had in the early 80’s! Then, a couple things went bad for me, I left. A year later, I was recruited and began my Mil/Int *career* *shrug*.

I owned a string of computers from the late 70’s (except when I was in the Mil). I started with the EDUC-8 (which was pronounced “educate”, I built myself from plans in an electronics mag in ’75, and which is primarily why the H8 kit at TAFE later was no problem for me 😉 When I started the course, I had an Apple II). I got a TRS-80, and wasn’t impressed really. fter my stint in the military, I decided to get back into my hobby. I decided to get a BBC Master Turbo. It was really an amazing and flexible system. It had so much s/w (and great games for the time). 😆 I added the Z80 & 32016 co-processors (it came with a 4 MHz 65C102), added 8 extra ROM sockets (for 16 in total), the TI speech synthesis system, and the whole kit and kaboodle! 😀 I began teaching myself to program again, and discovered that almost every language known at that time was available on the Beeb (I still have them all and all the books). I got: BCPL, Forth (I really liked that), Prolog, Lisp, Fortran-77, ISO-Pascal, and Extended BASIC. Later on, I found PL/1 (micro-PL/1 actually) and played with that for awhile. 🙂 The engineer in me like Forth and Lisp (I played with neural net’s), Prolog was very strict and finicky, and BCPL was quite powerful and flexible.

I wanted to get an IBM PC, but didn’t like it. I discovered a PC *clone* (only better) called a ACT Sirius 1 (Victor 9000 in the USA, ACT later became Apricot Computers). It’s spec’s were so much better than an IBM XT, and it was faster, had more storage (2 1.2MB DS FDD’s), and cheaper! I still have the manuals and some s/w for it. 🙂 Did a lot of coding and hacking on that thing. My next serious PC, was an Apricot (UK) XEN HD (80286 CPU, 8087 math & 8089 I/O co-processors, 3.5″ FDD & 20MB HD, with a 2nd optional – and Windows 1) I also got an Acorn (BBC) Archimedes with the 32-bit ARM RISC CPU, 4MB RAM, HDD, and a swag of dev tools.

I eventually went back to Uni for my degree in Electronics Engineering / Industrial Design / Robotic Automation. I got a job as R&D Manager and created semi-automated (only needed a single operator) machines. I looked at Ada for the initial project, but found it too big and restrictive. I settled in the Inmos Transputer’s and the Motorola 68030 for several reasons, including that both had VMEbus based development boards. 🙂 We used the Occam language, and a C-to-Occam translator (that actually worked pretty well, amazingly). 🙂 Occam supported concurrency and channel-based inter-process or inter-processor communication as a fundamental part of the language, and security was also a consideration.

(A lot of other stuff happened in between my getting the CoT and the degree in EE. It was a very busy decade. 😉 🙂 I was partner in a Modem /control systems biz in Canberra. One of my partners was also MD of GD (Aus), he was also my boss when we *worked for the Gov*. We had very high sec clearance, and I got to travel a lot! 😀

Maybe I will write that book… one day! 😉 😆

Ah yes, the first computer I ever used. It was a TRS-80 Model 1 with the Advanced BASIC. 16K of memory, and a cassette deck for saving/loading programs. What I remember most about that system was the manual that came with it for learning BASIC. I have never read a “how-to-program” guide since that was even 1/10th as good as that, it was entertaining, well illustrated, and took you step by step over everything you needed to know to start writing BASIC programs on the TRS-80. When later I was tasked with teaching BASIC programming to a classroom of bored high school students, I was decidedly wishing I still had access to that old TRS-80 BASIC programming tutorial, it was far more entertaining than boring me.

I had a trip to the big smoke (Melb) today. Went to a big clearance/used book warehouse. 🙂 I got some Python and other books. $1-$10 per book is way better than $55!! (I checked the price for: “Rapid GUI programming with Python and Qt: the definitive guide to PyQt programming”). Paper is really expensive these days!

I nearly died when I checked the price of this one on Amazon! “Python and Tkinter Programming by John E. Grayson” I picked it up for $5. On Amazon, they are going (new) from $100 to $191! And used for $44 to $150! That cannot be right! Hell, the price direct from the publisher (Manning) is $50 or $30 for the PDF! People seriously are not stupid enough to buy from Amazon (well, Amazon sellers)? (Well, yeah, they are, I know… but… geez!)

Amazon: Python and Tkinter Programming (Paperback)

Well, anyway… I also picked up “Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming”, “Python Essential Reference (4th Edition)” and “XML Processing with Python”. Also got a couple Perl books (a reference & a cookbook). All up, 9 books for $39! 😆 Anyone who pays the insane retail prices for books *IS* insane (or so wealthy, they don’t care). 😛 😉

BTW, the first Mainframe I actually worked on was a Sperry Univac 1100. We had these huge AWA (ugly green) terminals with a paper tape punch attached so we could save our code! 😆 I used Fortran on that monster. 🙂 They stuck us in a room next to the Mainframe, and it was full of those big mag tape cabinet’s and washing machine sized disk drives and 2 big high-speed band printers! Was all noisy as hell. I dunno how we got any work done, but I (and a few others) quit after 4 Months! We were working on a centralized Airline booking/reservation system. It was all done mostly manually here back then (late 70’s), and was a disaster. Our job was to automate it. 🙂

Still, Multics was far more secure than any currently-popular operating system. It was no less succeptible to phishing or social attacks than current operating systems (yes, I did both too — I can say this with confidence since the statute of limitations is long since expired), but things like stack smashes simply wouldn’t work (stacks were not executable code, the data stack was in a separate segment from the program return stack, and the location of things within address spaces were effectively randomized, you literally did not know where any segment was located ahead of time without doing a system call to resolve it). But Honeywell did not value security any more than most customers do, they’d put that security in there because the Department of Defense wanted it and paid to do it, and they largely abandoned the system when they discovered it would take considerable amounts of money to keep it up to date, instead putting only the minimal resources into it needed to fix obvious bugs while spending the next five years holding meetings and pushing proposals through the Byzantine bureaucracy of the company to try to resolve the political question of whether to move forward with Multics or instead improve the older/cheaper GCOS system to modern standards. By the time this was all resolved, both Multics and GCOS were so obsolete that Honeywell ignominously dumped the reeking carcasses upon their former French subsidiary Bull, and withdrew from the computer business.

And that, alas, is the fate of computer security in the modern era. Thus why attackers continue coming up with new and novel ways to attack computer systems, while our ways of dealing with attackers are stuck in 1995.

One of the reasons I refused to work on military projects [beyond the fact that I got screwed when a project got canceled after the contracts had been signed] is that the major contractors always under-bid the job knowing they will make the money on change orders. This is why major projects always have cost overruns, they end up not being the projects that were bid. They aren’t the projects that are bid, because there isn’t enough time or money spent defining what is needed and wanted, so what is bid normally won’t do the job the military thought it would do.

The last time I was involved with a government project, it was as a subcontractor, and I only did it because some friends were involved. I still remember sitting in a meeting when I told them what it would cost to implement what was specified, and, because friends were involved, I explained why it wouldn’t do what they really needed done. No one on the government side was able to change anything, so I did what was specified. When the change order came down, the company I was subbing for stuck it to them because they had been warned it wouldn’t work.

Honeywell make pretty good industrial hardware, and I think I may have used one of their computers in the 70’s… I used Honeywell control’s in a couple projects. 🙂

Yeah… I’ve been involved in projects where what should have been a relatively small and simple change became very complex and expensive (one particular military project springs to mind, but that is common on Mil projects I was told by a very experience project manager.) In the early 90’s, just after we’d started assembling the first Collins class submarine, I had a call from this project manager. The sub was being assembled in Sth Aus, and he asked if I’d like to take a break for a few days, and have a look at the work (I still had high security clearance as I’d been working on a couple Mil projects elsewhere. The clearances have to be redone every 6 mth’s for contractors.) As I’d half expected, he had an ulterior motive. 😉 They had assembled just over half of the hull, it was assembled by dropping a pre-assembled cylindrical section in place and welding it to the previous section (in a nutshell) and installing whatever bulkheads etc were to be added. He asked me to have a walk through the completed sections, and see if I could spot anything… unusual. Hmmmm… So I did, and after the 3rd trip I stopped at the 2nd last section because there was something wrong and it was nagging me. I went back, looked around carefully… moved forward again and looked… and then it hit me! They’d welded one of the sections the wrong way around, and the bulkhead was all wrong! There was an armored conduit pipe running the length of the hull, and in this one section, the conduit pipe was on the wrong side! 😆 And because of the special welds etc, they couldn’t just cut it and turn it around!They had to replace two whole segments (very expensive! But cheaper than scrapping the whole boat!) Apparently, they had originally had that conduit running down the other side, but a decision had been made (for a variety of reasons, that in all honesty were pretty minor), to move it to the other side. But the blueprint for this segment had been mixed up with the old one, and nobody had spotted it, in spite of it having a different code, date, and other differences. And you know… I saved those buggers a fortune, and I got nada. Typical. *shrug*

I asked my friend how something like that could have happened on one of his projects! I was *really* surprised… he taught me most of what I know, and he was one of the best pm’s in’s the biz! He said he’d had nothing to do with it. The original pm had decided to quit, and he’d come on board after all the decisions had been made, and changed. He wouldn’t have allowed that, making a major change after a project has started is asking for a disaster (and the Collins has had a lot of problems!) Oh well. 😀

http://www.multicians.org/multo-antes.html

So this was the early 80’s, the first CMOS battery chips had become available in PC’s, and one bright engineer got the idea to put this $5 chip into the Multics console to keep time so that the operator didn’t have to manually enter the time every time the system booted. He spent the next six months trying to get approval. In the end he gave up, because the numbers were that it would cost over $50,000 per system to make this one little change, due to all the change orders, design documentation through multiple layers of management, changes to release documentation, and so on and so forth that would be required. So in the end Multics went down to its ignomious abandonment and doom without ever knowing what time it was…

By contrast, at my current job two months ago we learned we had a significant opportunity if we provided X to a major corporation. We looked at all the bits and pieces in our toolbox, rearranged them in a novel new manner, and six weeks later we had X for this major corporation. Which is the only way that a smaller company can compete — by being nimble. By contrast, at a previous startup it took them 2 1/2 years to release their first product. That startup crashed and burned, because if you’re that much smaller and newer than your competitors you have to simply execute faster — and if you don’t you’re toast. That was the startup that was led by the Silicon Valley legend who loved “C” spaghetti code and forced it upon everybody for everything because it was “faster”… but a crappy architecture is slow no matter *what* language you write it in. At my current employer we have some Perl, some PHP, some Java, some C++, and yes, some “C”… but it’s all about what works best for any particular component. If you architect your system right, it shouldn’t matter what language *any* component is written in.

In some ways, the rainbow 100 (100+ I used actually) was very advanced for the day. I remember that the two CPU’s actually worked together, and they they actually had some shared memory space where they could communicate (about 2KB I think). It was a multiboot system and as standard could boot either CPM-80, DOS, or as a VT100 Terminal. It could also boot CPM-86, MPM, VENIX (SYS-5 UNIX), and one of the really bright engineers DEC had, ported Windows-1 to it (a real task as the Rainbow had a weird proprietary graphics display system). Generally, when one of the processor’s was operating as the *CPU*, the other acted as an I/O processor. 🙂 It was one of the fastest PC ‘s around back then. 🙂

The major problem with DEC, was really Ken Olson. He was a control nut. Everything had to be done his way! He decided that they wouldn’t use the IBM defined CGA graphics system, they would create their own proprietary system, and keep it to themselves! So, whilst the hardware was wonderful, there was a severe shortage of software. It was years later that a DEC engineer produced a software dev kit for the Rainbow, but it was too late by then. Then Olsen came up with the absolutely terrible VAXmate! (Essentially an IBM AT clone). He wanted it done fast, so the Engineers were forced to cut corners, and DEC got hit hard by IBM for stealing IBM BIOS code (which had been used verbatim in the VAXmate). The VAXmate also only had a monochrome EGA support, and had no fan’s at all! It overheated easily. I heard many at DEC call olsen *short-sighted* (when they were being polite anyway!) 😉 In the end, I think they only sold about a half dozen of the things! In contrast, people were begging for the Rainbow to be continued and to release the s/w dev kit to s/w developers! But Olsen refused. *shrug*

Ahhhh… “Them good ol’ days!” 😆