| Well, let's see. Lotus Notes is available on NT Alpha, don't know
about Domino...
Oh look!
"Special thanks to:
Ned Batchelder, Lotus Development Corporation..."
hmmm, name seems familiar. :-)
Mark
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| >observations on the brand identity issue
Well it is cheeky of International Business Machines to do this, but it
won't affect our Alpha cos people will want the real thing, which is 64
bit, which I. B . M. don't have. Same applies to Alta Vista Search...
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| I predicted back in '92 that IBM would market 64-bit computing
when they finally got around to inventing it...
I can see the followon ad...
Back in 55 and IBM research engineer was developing a 64-bit computer
architecture...
We shelved it because it just wasn't what people needed quite yet...
But now since game computers are using it.. We will give you the
original IBM labs 64-bit systems -- The Original 64-Bit Computer
solution...From IBM
Small Solutions for Small Minds, in a Small world...
We're the folks who brought you clusters, network computing, the
internet, the PCs, and every other computer technology since punched
cards... A claim our lawyers will back up...
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|
Just a couple of nits...
What this has to do with discussion of
an original web site devoted to Java agent applications I have no idea.
It just serves to highlight how a-retentive we have gradually become
about the worlds of hardware and software over the years...
Firstly, the AS/400 ad mentioned is much more accurate than you seem to
understand. All AS/400 applications have been 64bit, always have been
(as were ALL System/38 applications). The architecture of OS/400 is
very different from NT or VMS or UNIX for that matter.
Its one of the few situations where the operating system has had more
bits than the hardware, up till the recent release of OS/400 on the
PowerPC based AS/400s.So, the only that had to be done when the new
machines came in was to recompile the apps (actually, its even simpler
than that but more later), without code changes.
Because Digital people seem incapable of believing that anything that
wasnt invented around route 128 can possibly work I offer some
information from a 1984 Digital Press book, the excellent "Capability-Based
Computer Systems" by Henry M. Levy (I bought my copy from a book fair
for $2, it has proved invaluable when arguing with people from both IBM
and DEC.):
"The IBM System/38 architecture supports a flat, single-level, 64-bit
virtual address space. To the user at the high-level interface (either
the operating system or application programmer), all addressable
objects and segments are in directly addressible memory; there is no
concept of secondary storage. The System/38 microcode is responsible
for moving segments between primary and secondary storage to create
this virtual memory environment."
So for the System/38 and AS/400 (pre-recent powerPC) its 48 bit
hardware with basically a hash table. But the apps were written to 64
bits. With the latest machines, they get full 64 bit hardware. From
Levy again:
"Because of the large size of a System/38 virtual address, standard
address translation schemes involving indexing of segment/page tables
with the segment/page number address field cannot be used. Instead, the
System/38 hardware uses hashing with linked list collision resolution
to find the primary memory address for a specified virtual address."
So, folks, no worries about rewrites to handle 32 bit pointers etc.
There is also a little more fun to be had with how we see the world.
Even in 1984, software was shipped in an intermediate form. Again from
Levy:
"the System/38 source language is really an intermediate language
produced by compilers. The effect of the CREATE PROGRAM instruction is
to compile this intermediate language source into microcode that can be
executed on the next lowest "level" of the machine"....."Thus, the
System/38 high level architecture is never directly executed"..."The
format of the encapsulated program in the micro language cannot be
examined and can be different on different System/38 implementations".
So the gig is this, take the distribution for AS400 you were running on
an old machine, do create program (I'm not sure if it knows to
automatically do this if it sees one form or another). So, conceivably
you could have a situation where there is NO user intervention to take
an application from one AS/400 or System/38 to another.
Hope this allows us to argue a bit more realistically about our
true advantages...
- John
NSIS, Canberra Australia
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