When I was in college the data center chose an Amdahl 470/V6 because it would fit. The IBN equivalent required a chiller and would not fit in the building. IBM went to the governor trying to stop the sale. Amdahl had the machine in a truck, not far from the school, waiting for the approval to go through.
I'm not in favor of "cloud" computing myself, both because you lose control of your data (you don't know who will have access to it under what conditions, or even if you will be able to access it in the future), and because it represents a big step backwards 40-50 years or more to the days of the old computer service bureaus. The "cloud" is just the latest marketing-speak for a very old concept.
There have already been breeches and losses of course, for example:
People are still flocking to the cloud though, running off the cliff like lemmings, because Ken Olsen was right! ;-)
I can see advantages for some businesses with the need for data to be accessed from many locations. For the typical small business or home user, simple backup to a thumb drive covers all your needs.
It's not just the "data" that you can lose control of (icky grammar) but the applications that access/process it, as well. I don't let any of my computers install updates automatically. (in fact, I've been downloading MS's updates for "offline" installation for the past few days). I don't want to "wonder" why my machines
*appear* to be behaving differently (for better or worse). I want to *know* that I am directly responsible for any changes and not "wonder" WTF someone else decided to do *to* my machine (in the name of "improving my user experience")OTOH, I genuinely *love* running X windows terminals so to cut my maintenance efforts significantly! I don't have to run around to each machine (terminal) changing configuration options, installing the latest applications/versions, etc.
But, again, *I* have control over them, not some "cloud provider" making the changes that *they* want to make on *their* servers!
I can understand the desire to get away from the sea of techs that seems essential to keep any organization's IT up and running. I spend a couple of days a week, on average, on equipment related stuff (and I'm just a one-man shop -- though with a large number and variety of machines, OS's, applications and data)
My "solution" is to just know what I *have* (good and bad) and control how often (rarely!) I make changes. Just because some OS/applicaation vendor thinks its time for a new roll-out, doesn't mean *I* want to partake of that -- even if it is "free" (the *time* to install it and learn it is NEVER free! And, the alleged benefits rarely prove to be worth the effort)
I maintain a small "computer lab" for a local non-profit (for disadvantaged kids). The updates mentioned above are intended to be deployed, there. It will take me a couple of days just to get a dozen machines "checked out", upgraded and debugged -- and I doubt any of the students will notice or *care* that they've been "upgraded". If I had to *pay* someone to perform such an (apparently) useless task for dozens/hundreds/thousands of "seats" at an organization, I'd be looking real hard for a way to NOT need that person/department! :>
Run a VPN to your own server. Ah, but that requires the same technogeeks that we're trying to get away from! :>
One has to wonder how many "sealed" orders have already been served on Amazon, MS, etc. (cloud providers)? It's just *such* a sweet honey-pot that you KNOW the spooks are drooling over a chance to go "wandering through the data"...
From the Burroughs world, IBM meant "It's Better Manually"
Burroughs had pretty monster size impressive looking MICR. It used Nixie tubes for digital display.
Many guys do lot more now like a pro photographers, old movie collectors, etc. They use NAS with very complex back up scheme. They can access their stuff in sync from anywhere where there is 'Net access. Now cloud storage is getting popular but personally I never use it. I just have a Synology 4 bay NAS with separate back up drives. I can remotely access home security cameras running 7/24, or home comfort system. Can remote start my car sitting at airport parking lot. It's like car remote start has some thing like cellphone. Call the car to start it. sytem
I tell people you get a lot more land for the money back east but it doesn't compute. In Montana you can buy a 10 acre ranchette, build your house on the centroid, and you still can't take a leak off the back porch without every neighbor within a mile observing.
I had the same problem in Indiana. I'd got out for a bicycle ride and once you got clear of the city it was all soybeans. A soybean bush isn't very high and a soybean farmer looks on anything that isn't a soybean as a deadly enemy and kills it. After N miles of soybeans you'd turn around and ride N miles back, the wind having changed 180 degrees of course, all without ever seeing a bush big enough to hide behind.
We had an System 360/30 in a purpose built building. However, years after I left the computing center was moved to a building more fitting for the task:
The old god was replaced with the new god.
I've found that ironical too. The ADM-3A terminals have been replaced with tablets, phones, and Chromebooks but we're getting back to where we started. With the same problems too. AWS has a hiccup and the world stops.
Understood. OTOH, when I visit East, I now feel disturbingly claustrophobic. Looking up into 100 ft oaks, through the canopies of all those Maples, etc. and wonder "Where the hell is the *sky*??"
Here, it's not as boring as it was in the Midwest (Chitown). We have mountains (southernmost ski resort is here -- an hour from MX!), *some* tall trees (mostly pine), valleys, etc. In Chitown, I would joke that if I stood on my roof, I'd be the highest point for hundreds of miles!
First time I drove West, I was excited to be able to see the various landscapes, etc. (previously, my "visits" had been to airports and the local client was located wrt that airport). When I got to Kansas (or was it Nebraska?), I remember saying, "Well, this is certainly different!" -- never having seen something as monotonously FLAT and "populated" with such a homogenous "ground cover" (crop).
After 30 mind-numbing minutes, I said, "OK, let's move on to the NEXT one, please!" But, alas, many HOURS of driving remained.
I joked to myself that I didn't *dare* pull over to take a piss, buy gas, get a snack, etc. as I would be fearful that someone would spin my car around and point it in the opposite direction -- and, I wouldn't discover this until I hit the (wrong!) state line!
I geocache among other things and when back in one of the Boston 'burbs for a training session I'd go hunting caches in my downtime. I had an afternoon flight out of Logan so I stopped by one of the town woods. It was an overcast day where the light is uniform and you can't tell where the sun was. I was having trouble with the GPS in the dense hardwood canopy but found a couple of caches. After finding the furthest one, the GPS gave out completely. I'd followed a number of twisty little trails that all looked the same to get there. I thought 'Great, I'm going to miss the flight and have to explain how my Dan'l Boone genes failed and I got lost in a 100 acre woodlot. Fortunately I had a real compass in my bag of tricks and could at least head south.
I still carry a compass and practice with it but it Montana unless you really screw up and get in the wrong drainage coming off a mountain it's usually pretty apparent.
When I did a NPE show in Chicago in the early '70s my wife flew out and we had dinner at the John Hancock. The Sears Tower was still under construction so I think it was technically the highest point you could get to without being a steel worker. It says a lot that after dinner for two with a couple of bottles of bubbly I left a $100 bill on the table
-- and that included a generous tip. You'd probably have to stack a couple more on top of it today.
I had a little brain spasm driving from Georgia to LA. On I30 you cross into Texas at Texarkana and I was mentally computing the miles left. The only problem was I was on I40 and was not happy when I came to the Oklahoma border instead. My mind just wanted to forget 328 miles of OkieHoma. Of course countries are formed and decay in the time it takes to cross Texas on I30-I20-I10 too.
I've alway thought if you took a map of the US and did a little orgigami fold so the Rocky Mountain front lined up with the Mississippi it would be a much nicer place. Sorry, all you people out there in extreme flyover land.
One of the dimmer of my cousins did that somehow. He was trying for the Poconos, got turned around on the Thruway somehow, and didn't catch on until he got to Buffalo. Close though. He wanted to go to Pennsylvania and finally found it. He deserved a honeymoon in Dreary Erie anyway.
In Denver, it was always easy to get your bearings: mountains are west, prairie east.
Here, we have mountains in a couple of directions so, depending on where you are, you can confuse the wrong "range" and get turned around. (also, can't always *see* both ranges so you're left wondering: which are *those*?)
Best thing to eat in chicago is pizza, hands down. Second place would probably be Russel's (roast beef sandwiches).
I used to get screwed up in Chicago whenever I'd get on a "diagonal" road. I'd diligently make note of which way I'd turned (off of a N-S or E-W road) so I could remember which way I needed to turn to return to that original N-S/E-W heading. Then, get caught up watching street signs and forget what I'd tried so hard to remember. Invariably, end up traveling at right angles to my intended direction and kick myself: "Crap! Did it AGAIN!"
[Unlike the locals, I never bothered to memorize street names and their orders/hundreds]Even here (20+ years) I bet I couldn't name the streets in my immediate neighborhood, reliably! I can probably tell you the names of everyone
*on* each of those streets, but the names of the streets themselves would largely be a mystery!
As someone said in a movie once, "A man's got to know his limitations." Would I try to run a leading edge graphics program on a clone? Probably not, but I also saw plenty of people with legit IBM's and MACs go through some serious tsuris trying to get things to work. The SW of that period had extensive "complexity" issues exacerbated by a rapidly evolving HW base.
I had more problems with programs that used copy protection (like Lotus) that required key disks or that secret sectors be written to the hard disk. those programs invariably caused serious backup problems.
I believe that CopyLok or some such nonsense actually caused several of the software companies that used that or similar technologies to go under. People learned what happened to Copy-locked programs after the first system restore and shopped elsewhere. I believe Borland began eating Lotus' lunch over the copy-protection issue. There's poetic justice in a convoluted scheme to protect against software copying that ignored real-world consequences to users bringing a whole software company to its knees.
There was desk sized computers when I worked at DEC in 69. Even had terminal displays. One competitor was Honneywell.
Greg
Luckily the slant streets are residential so you don't have to deal with them unless you live there. They do force one of the main drags to go off at a 45 degree angle for a while though.
Street names don't play a big part in my navigation either. I know a few, mostly because they have bridges, so I'm pretty sure orange Street runs over the orange Street bridge. But then it does its 45 degree thing and changes its name and I start getting vague.
The worst city I've worked with is DC. A street segment can have up to 6 alternate names. You can even see that in google maps. Sometimes it's labeled Constitution Ave, sometimes US 50, sometimes US1.
We still use a third party application that uses a dongle. It's morphed from a parallel port to a USB dongle over the years but they're still there.
The old part of Denver is oriented "on a slant" (i.e., NE-SW and SE-NW grid). But, move out a bit and everything "snaps" back to a N-S, E-W grid. It's as if someone looked at a map a bit later on and said, "Wait! a rigid grid layout ONLY MAKES SENSE if aligned with the four major compass points!" (Why?)
Here, roads take 90 degree turns and keep the same name -- except instead of being North Foobar Road, it is now East Foobar Road. And, the numbers jump from say 2800 North to 7200 East -- for NEIGHBORING properties!
In other places, a 90 degree turn changes the name of the road but you don't quite realize you are now on a different road and heading in an entirely different direction!
Only visited DC. And, there, got around mainly via the bomb shelters... er, subway!
The bigger problem was the fact that the OS didn't isolate the applications from the hardware. So, you had the CP/M mentality bleeding into the PC world -- developers thinking they could freely play with aspects of the underlying hardware "at will". Until those aspects didn't exist in some variant of the machine they *expected* to encounter.
FutureNet/Data I/O had probably the nicest schematic entry (capture) system at the time (DASH/STRIDES). They had a whole suite of related EDA tools -- logic synthesis, device programming, etc.
But, were super paranoid about copy protecting EVERYTHING they sold! And, tried a bunch of different *hardware* approaches to the problem (even adding "protection" to a many thousand dollar add-in "coprocessor" card that was required for some of their tools! WTF? I have to buy this expensive board *and* another board in case I happened to acquire the expensive board "for free"???)
One scheme used small registered PAL's (programmable logic devices... precursors to FPGA's) as "keys". The thinking was that they could implement a finite state machine (FSM) *in* the PAL using the PAL's internal register to store the "current state". Then, supply new "inputs" to the PAL from software running in the application and, KNOWING how the FSM was designed, they could PREDICT the new state that the FSM would enter given its "current state" and the supplied inputs.
If you didn't know the logic governing the FSM's operation, you wouldn't be able to predict the next state for all possible input conditions (and for all possible "current states"!).
I wrote a tiny little program (two pages?) that would walk the FSM through every possible set of states, applying every possible set of inputs to each -- and recording the "next state" that the FSM progressed into for each of these cases.
[This is actually tricky because you don't know where you will end up at any given time -- yet, have to ensure you travel down every possible path. Sort of like being deposited in a city and tasked with making a map of all the roads -- without being able to *see* down any of them! "I wonder where *this* will take me?" Obviously, you don't want to keep taking the same path over and over again. Yet, need a means of "discovering" every path that you aren't even aware of, currently!]Armed with this "map", I then used the logic synthesis tool from that same paranoid vendor to convert the verbose map into a concise set of equations. The same set of equations that yet another of their tools would then *burn* into a virgin PAL device -- giving me a duplicate, counterfeit copy of the genuine "key"... all using THEIR tools to do so!
Ooops!
[Of course, I had to own a legitimate key to begin with. All I've done is come up with a way of creating a backup copy of that key!]HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.