Did we actually accomplish anything on computers with less than gigabytes of memory and terabytes of storage?
As a supplier of servers and computer systems for both industrial and military applications, Chassis Plans provides both Windows and Linux based systems. The system shown below is a 2U industrial system with an Intel Core i7 processor, about 83,000 MIPS (2.93GHz) and 32GB of DRAM and 2 TB of rotating or solid state storage media. With a 600w redundant power supply the unit is using much less than 1KW of power.
This 2U system provides an amazing amount of processing power but it also can be supplied with single or dual Intel Xeon processors for more performance. It is a powerful system and, utilizing Linux as an operating system, makes a good server or workstation.
Sometimes we forget how far the computer industry has come in the past 30 years. There certainly have been major strides in performance, storage capacity and memory capacity for computer systems. So what did a computer system of 1984 look like in comparison?
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX 11/780
A good example of the type of system available in 1984 is the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX 11/780. From the picture below it is apparent that the 2U form factor is out the window. The basic configuration of the VAX 11/780 was a computer cabinet (5ft X 4ft X 2.5ft) with a three phase power supply and drawing a total of 7 kilowatts. Weight was about 2,000 lbs plus peripherals. All this for a processor with 1Mips (5 MHz) performance and 128K to 8MB of memory. Yes, that is megabytes, not Gigabytes! Environmental specs were 50-85 Deg F and 10-40% R.H.
Disc drives were extra and were typically 50-150 Mb in size.
In 1984 Linux was not available but for a small fee of around $30,000 to Bell labs a version of UNIX and a site license was available. For another fee of $500 a version of BSD 4.1 UNIX that actually worked was available from the University of California at Berkeley. The end result was a multi-user computer system with 4MB of memory that was running UNIX and could be used to support a department of software, hardware and support staff. A pretty big step forward in user computer access at the time.
The development of BSD UNIX never stopped and today versions are available under the name of NetBSD (www.netbsd.org) and FreeBSD (www.freebsd.org) as well as others. Linux, of course, is available from several sources as freeware or supported versions from several companies such as Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) or RedHat (www.redhat.com).
It is interesting to note that significant computer development work was performed using a computer system with 4MB of memory and accessed only by a CRT terminal. In a quote from a 1970’s Bell Lab research paper about the porting of UNIX to the VAX 11/780 – “Work on the C compiler began in mid-December 1977. The hardware arrived on March 3. We held a party on May 19 to celebrate successful multi-user operation of the system” (A UNIX Operating System for the DEC VAX-11/780 Computer, Thomas B. London and John F. Reiser).
The operating system, compiler and all applications for the UNIX system were ported in less than six months utilizing a computer system that by today’s standards would not be useful for reading emails.
If there is interest in experiencing what it was like to utilize a VAX 11/780 there is a simulator for workstations such as those available from Chassis Plans that emulates most of the minicomputers of the late seventies and early eighties. SIMH (simh.trailing-edge.com) is a freeware program that emulates DEC minicomputers and peripherals using a variety of operating systems. Based on the performance of 2U system shown above, multiple copies of SIMH could be used to emulate several VAX computers on the same machine. The only difference from true VAX 11/780 hardware is that the emulated version runs faster.
Linux Servers vs BSD UNIX Systems From the Past
No comments:
Post a Comment