Subject: Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah)
Android editors

In article <vul0r0$jn41$2@dont-email.me>,
Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
....

Chill out, man.

People often use terminology in idiosyncratic ways.

.... which CAN lead to mis-understandings!!

Most (if not all) of the so-called "misunderstandings" are intentional.

I.e., intentional strawmanning.

--
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claims that only ugly women want
abortions, which they will never need since no one will impregnate them.

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Subject: Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

I used similar machines ((16-bit instead of 12-bit) HP2116 and later)
and toggling the precursor to the BBL (Basic Binary Loader) in the late
60s, early 70s.

In 1982, I was already using 32-bit (HP) Unix machines which had
firmware bootloaders and also the earlier/same_time 16-bit HP RTE (Real
Time Executive) machines had firmware bootloaders many years before
that.

(No doubt seasoned operators had this memorized.) It was handy that
this could be preserved across power cycles, assuming it didn?t get overwritten by some wayward buggy program.

Then there were applications that ran without an OS as such. For
example, on the PDP-8, you could load a BASIC interpreter. This would
take about 20 minutes to load off paper tape. So the fact that a
power cycle did not wipe memory was helpful if you had a lot of BASIC programs to run.

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Subject: Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 14/05/2025 10:54 pm, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage
bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

For computing, yes, that might seem rather late ... but for its purpose (Training us in how an Aust Army Direction Finding system worked) it was quite reasonable. I don't know what the actual DF system used.

I see! Yes. Defense Force systems have a very long lifecycle. In
aerospace even longer, for obvious reasons.

They used HP 21MX (16-bit) mini-computers in some missiles. At the
time, it felt rather strange, letting an expensive computer
self-destruct. Sadly enough, these days it's no longer strange at all!
:-(

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