Now I know that there is already plenty of old-fart nostalgia on this blog — a lot of people have interpreted Whatever happened to programming? as a yearning for the days when you had to do everything from first principles, which wasn’t really what I meant. But I do, I really do, miss the days when it was possible to understand the whole computer.

I’m not claiming that I ever had the level of mastery that people like West and Butterfield had. I was never really a big machine-code programmer, for one thing — I wrote routines to be called from BASIC, but no complete programs in 6502/6510. And I’ve never been a hardware hacker at more than the most trivial swap-the-video-cards level. But I did have a huge amount of Commodore 64 lore internalised. I knew which memory location always held the scan-code of the key that was pressed at that time; and where the screen memory-map began; and which locations to POKE to play different pitches on the various channels of sound, or to change the screen or border colours. I knew hundreds or thousands of those little bits of information, as well as being completely familiar with the horrible BASIC dialect that was in one of the ROMs. In short, I knew the machine in a way that I don’t even begin to hope to know any of my computers today; in a way that, I am guessing, no-one anywhere in the world knows their machines.

I miss that.

I know exactly what he means.

Long, nostalgic ramble after the break. Consider yourself warned.

I’m not sure whether there was one single point of inflection, but I think the real change happened quite quickly in the first half of the 1990s, too. Up through somewhere around 1993, you could pretty much gain that level of understanding (at the systems level, at least) of the ISA PC architecture, from registers and bus-level IO ports[*] up through pretty much how all of DOS worked, and even get a pretty good handle on what each of the core DLLs and drivers in Windows 3.x did. Sure, there was some wacky high-end stuff like Microchannel and EISA, but that was for the most part outside the consumer/home computer space, and to the extent that it broke compatibility even at the port level, people would complain about “not really being IBM compatible.”

One might place the breaking point earlier (MicroChannel in 1986? the 80386SL introducing SMM in 1990?), but I’d suggest 1993-95 as the point to really look at: the combination of the new hardware standards (PCI and USB), MUCH more rapid turnover in the motherboard chipset space, the increasing ubiquity of things like networking and power management, and a much more rapid turnover in CPU generations… and on the the introduction of two much more complicated OSes (NT 3.1 in 1993 and Windows 95) which finally gave PCs a real driver model and broke through the old requirement for being at least mostly backwards compatible with the wonderful old IBM PC/XT/AT family. Games seemed to be the last thing to leave and direct hardware mangling, and that transition was pretty fast (to my recollection at least) after Win95 came out.

I wonder, though, if part of it isn’t just age on my end, and realizing there is a much bigger world in computing. In 1993 when I was a senior in high school, knew the PC as intimately as I ever have, and was trying to use that to write a toy OS, I had a LOT of free time and energy. I don’t today, to anywhere near that same degree, and a lot of the stuff I do know today would have been rather like knowing Vaxen then – big, complicated business-y stuff (exactly like the EISA and MicroChannel stuff then, or like the Novell stuff I was actively in the process of learning.

Further, if we go back to when I was a kid rather than a teen, when you looked across 8-bit micros as a whole, there was a lot of fragmentation. C-64 vs 128? (let alone VIC20, Pet, C16/C+4, etc) Several generations of Apple II? Atari 8-bit? That’s all different sets of knowledge just on the 6502/6510/8510 family. Add in the various forms of 6800/68000, 8080/8085/Z80 and a few outright oddballs like the TI-99 series, and well… did anyone really know more than a slice out of that space all that closely?

Which really makes me wonder what I’d be learning if I was 17-18 today. It strikes me that, given my inclinations, the whole open source device based on an ARM SOC and a stripped down Linux (ie GP32X, Pandora, maybe even hacked Android phones) would be tremendously exciting. Given the availability of information on the internet (vs dead trees) plus open source OSes and drivers, it strikes me that these might be enough easier to learn and hack on to more than balance their greater complexity. Even at 34, if I were to suddenly become independently wealthy, learning these at the level of detail I used to know for the PC would be highly tempting.

[* I wonder - how many of my readers still remember that the x86 architecture has a separate address space for IO ports and for memory? ]

Anyway, I ran into it today and re-read it, and this particular point stood out:

So now we’ve got exactly one log off button left. Call it “b’bye”. When you click b’bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn’t already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer.

…as the culmination of his whole argument. To me, in context, it just reads as a “reductio ad absurdum” against the very showing why Microsoft did the RIGHT thing in making a flexible UI.

Then again, I am at least a sigma, and maybe two, into the “control, customizability and flexibility freak” side of things when it comes to computers. I run Gentoo Linux on my server, and if I pitched Windows on my day to day machines, it would be for Gentoo (or some other very customizable Linux distro) and not for something more out of the box like Fedora or SuSE (let alone the MacOS!)

The REALLY interesting question, to my mind, is how do you design an interface that scales in depth – to be accessible enough for someone newly sitting down at a system to be able to use it while at the same time allowing an experienced user to optimize his or her own processes – for one trivial example, I don’t want to have to pull the battery in order to get a “real” shutdown or hibernate of my laptop before a flight or a long day away from it: how long it’s going to be before I need it again is something that the software isn’t going to know, but I’ll usually have a pretty good guess of when I shut down.

As these things go, I’ve found Microsoft’s “big” products (Windows and Office) to be some of the better software out there in that respect, although I haven’t needed to play around nearly as much with Office customization since I moved to Office 2007. Vista and Windows 7 were (IMO) HUGE UI improvements over 2000/XP in my view.

Specs (aka Geek porn) after the break. Photo (at Aveek’s request) to be provided in a forthcoming update.

New Hardware:
• Case: Thermaltake Element T (it was on sale)
• Power Supply: Antec Earthwatts 650W (it was on sale)
• Processor: Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83ghz; couldn’t afford a i7 920+mobo+ram, this was good enough and let me reuse RAM from the gaming desktop
• Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3R (prior good experience with it in the gaming desktop)
• Cooler: “Dark Knight” 120mm
• RAM: 8gb (4x 2gb Corsair DDR2-800, pulled from gaming desktop, which now has only 6gb)
• Hard drives: 1x Intel X25M 80gb (/, /boot, /var/spool/news on the motherboard JMicron controller),
  3x 1.5tb Seagate, 3x 1.5tb WD, in a RAID 5 (/home – this was the big impetus for the upgrade, on the ICH10R)
• Video card: PCI 32mb Geforce 2MX (hey, it’s power-efficient; if I could still find one of my 1gb Tridents, I’d use that)

The original old hardware for sfchat.gotdns.org was a SparcStation 20 with dual 60mhz SuperSparcs. It lasted a couple of weeks before I realized it was too slow to do SSH. I briefly tried some ~120ghz HyperSparcs in there, but they were not appreciably faster.

Old Hardware:
Case: Some beige 2000-2001 vintage Antec mid-tower.
Before that, an AMD socket 754 Shuttle XPC (black, Nvidia chipset).
Before that, an Intel socket 478 Shuttle XPC (silver with blue face, SIS chipset.)
Before that, some off-brand XPC-type machine with an i845 chipset I think.

Power Supply: the Antec 450W from the Sonata II my gaming desktop is in.
Before that, some 350W Antec that came with the case above.
Before that, various included XPC power supplies.

Processor: a Pentium-D 940 (3.2ghz, Pentium 4-base dual core for those not keeping track at home)
Before that, an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (2.4ghz, 512k L2)
Before that, an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0ghz, 512k L2)
Before that, a Pentium 4 2.4ghz (Northwood-B, 533FSB, no hyperthreading.)
Before that, P4-based Celeron 2ghz (400FSB, Northwood).

Motherboard: Abit IL8 (boo, 3.5gb limit, but otherwise a rather nice end-of-P4-era board)
Before that, some MSI Via-chipset Socket-754 board, a very early one. I don’t remember the model number. It was actually older than the AMD XPC, and was originally my desktop. But it was a better board than the Nvidia chipset in the XPC.
Before that, XPC-included boards.

Cooler: Scythe Shuriken
Before that, Intel stock cooler from P-D 930.
Before that, some replacement Socket 754 cooler, before that the AMD stock cooler from the 3000+.
Before that, two Shuttle integrated heat pipe coolers.
Before that, the Celeron stock cooler.

RAM: Formerly 4gb of 1x DDR2-533 Patriot. Two of these are in the gaming desktop now.
Before that, 1.5gb of PC3200 in two sticks in all the AMDs.
Before that, 1gb of PC2100 (2x 512) in P4-2.4 XPC.
Before that, 512mb of PC2100 (1 stick) in the Celeron (only one slot! doh!)

Hard drives: 2x 1.5tb Seagate (RAID1, everything but /boot and /var/spool/news) and a 120gb IDE Deskstar (I think old enough to still be IBM rather than Hitachi! for /boot and /var/spool/news)
Before that, same Deskstar for /boot and /var/spool/news and 2x 500gb Seagates (RAID1) for / and /home to which I later added 2x 750gb Seagates for /home/media
Before that one 200gb Deskstar (not sure if IBM or Hitachi) PATA + 1 250GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA, configured as a 200gb RAID1 + a spare /home/backup partition.
Before that, one 200gb Deskstar (same as above) non-RAID
Before that, one 120gb Deskstar (same as first mentioned)
Before that, one 80gb drive (no longer rememberr)

Video card: Geforce 7600GS (it was a spare, and made less fan noise than the prior one)
Before that, Geforce 6200 (too noisy fan, only in use a month or two
Before that, don’t remember. These are servers, after all, not gaming systems.

Online retailing can be a rough sport. The competition is rabid, customer loyalty is fickle, and IT expenses can go through the roof.

That’s why The Register can appreciate an e-tailer with a unique business model.

A hawk-eyed El Reg reader points out that UK online retailer Ebuyer.com appears to be cutting costs by running its site on servers dating back to the late Cretaceous period – roughly speaking. According to internet monitoring company Netcraft, the e-tailer has bypassed run-of-the-mill legacy servers for some serious heirlooms.

[...]

Next, you’ll find not one but two Commodore 64s. The Commodore debuted in 1982 with 64KB RAM, a 1.02MHz MOS Technology 6510 processor, and a 16-color, 320×200 resolution monitor. Not to mention a creamy BASIC 2.0 operating system.