[RayTheRat]

Originally Posted by Kal-EL

This was sensationalized by Richard Priors character in Superman where he did the exact same thing to get rich

Hmmm. I'm not a movie guy, but I find it interesting, yet it did actually happen. One instance was at a bank in El Paso, TX.

That's why the Burroughs Medium System was developed. At one time, those systems ran at least half of the banks in the country. Since they were based on a BCD storage and processing system, there were no remainders that would occur in a floating point system. Poof! Problem solved. Everything was in even cents. Rounding took place at the OS level and there was no 9 bazillion numbers to the right of the decimal point...just 2. Made using percentages a little interesting, but they had a special data type for that.

Long time ago.

I figger my Dreadnought's gonna be many times more powerful than the largest of the discrete component Medium System, the B-4900. Sucker cost about $2.5 million in the 80s...and if ya wanted to connect terminals to it, ya had to buy a separate datacom (what we used to call networking, but it was all 2-wire direct connect...up to 9600 bps or modem connect at 1800 baud asynchronous or 4800 baud 4-wire full duplex synchronous.) processor to handle the all of the different datacom devices and keep the load off the main processor. I used to customize the protocols used to "speak" with non-standard devices. It was called NDL or Network Development Language.

Long time ago. Real long.

[Kal-EL]

The stroll thru history lane is very interesting Ray, lotsa stuff thats beyond my years in the other direction.

You wouldnt happen to have bee a teacher at some point would you?

[Buckeye]

Hey Ray, just saw your thread, Welcome !!

Nice interesting story on computers. Back in the 80's I was at Livermore Lab, we still used punch cards and mag tape reels back then. Even the big 7600's had all kinds of crazy stuff connected to them.

That was the Nuke days and just before SDI, they had started to convert the nuclear weapons & test divisons I worked over to CAD CAM, instead of on teh drawing boards that I used to work on.

I have moved to Military Applications at that time when MX Missile and just after the Neutron bombs. SDI brought a whole lot of other crazy devices to the table.

But yes even for Nuke research we still lhad punch cards and mag tape reels back then.

Love your photo collection of WWII Air Birds
I have a few interesting pic's from back then I need to scan.

[RayTheRat]

Originally Posted by Kal-EL

The stroll thru history lane is very interesting Ray, lotsa stuff thats beyond my years in the other direction.

You wouldn't happen to have been a teacher at some point would you?

I sometimes taught computer concepts, dBase III and conducted classes on the software I wrote for different companies, but I was never a "school system" teacher. I shudder to think about it.

My oldest son tried teaching music at the community college level, but absolutely hated it. Now my youngest son is doing substitute teaching while looking for a gig as an operatic tenor. He's not crazy about the substitute thing, but since he has a wife and baby to care for...well, ya do what ya gotta do.

[RayTheRat]

Originally Posted by Buckeye

Hey Ray, just saw your thread, Welcome !!

Nice interesting story on computers. Back in the 80's I was at Livermore Lab, we still used punch cards and mag tape reels back then. Even the big 7600's had all kinds of crazy stuff connected to them.

That was the Nuke days and just before SDI, they had started to convert the nuclear weapons & test divisons I worked over to CAD CAM, instead of on teh drawing boards that I used to work on.

I have moved to Military Applications at that time when MX Missile and just after the Neutron bombs. SDI brought a whole lot of other crazy devices to the table.

But yes even for Nuke research we still lhad punch cards and mag tape reels back then.

Love your photo collection of WWII Air Birds
I have a few interesting pic's from back then I need to scan.

I worked on nukes when I was in the army (66-71) I was a fire control (radar/analog computer) tech on Nike-Hercules sites, but spent some time in the launching area
as we decommissioned one of the sites.

One of my recent projects has been to go back over all of my photos from that era and organize 'em with some commentary. Same thing with the photo albums my first wife and I had. If I don't do it, all this history will probably be pitched overboard or maybe kept but not understood.

The army days as well as my time in Europe and North Africa (I was wonna them Marrakech hippies for a while) are on my web server here:
http://www.chevyasylum.com/earlydaze/Welcome.html When I get the whole mess done, I'll burn DVDs for my sons and their wives and I'll even be nice and give a set to my ex-wife. What a nice guy I am, huh?

Ok. I gotta call Tyan about the mobo issues. I wonder how that's gonna go.

I should have an update on the Dreadnought later today.

Edit: I forgot to mention the punched card thing. I can't think of any other class of hardware that I hated more than 80-column cars. Instruments of the ol' Debbil hisself. That Livermore labs thing sounds like a kool place to work. My experience with weaponry ended when I left the army and I ended up in the private sector...I went back to college and got me some diplomas and stayed in the financial area of computing for most of my career.

Now I do what I love. Build hot rods (when I can...I got some serious heart trouble that keeps me from workin as hard as I used to,) hang out with racers (having media credentials as a photographer really helps me get into the middle of things at sports car races and on the salt flats) and play the blues. I'm livin a dream...although I've confirmed what I had suspected for quite a while. There just aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. So I decided to give up sleeping...well, for the last week or so...and no, I don't use stimulants to keep me awake, I just keep on goin and goin...maybe when I get this Dreadnought going I can take a coupla daze off. (sure, sure.)

[DrNip]

Guess I'm young. All I was doing in the 80's was atari, ibm pc jr 128 and nintendo. Oh a little Michael Jackson and skateboarding later on! HAHA

[Kal-EL]

Hmmmm, lets see:

1- Level Headed
2- Experienced
3- loves performance
4- has abondoned sleeop

Looks like all the character traits of a future overclockaholic pc performance junky to me

[Chuchnit]

Ray all I could think about when seeing your build log was wprime Looks like you got a nice setup when its done.

[RayTheRat]

Well..some issues have been resolved. Ain't nuttin fixed yet, but some resolution. I finally gave in and did the last thing possible. I called Tyan. They cleared up several issues. I now know where to connect the wires from the front panel, I know how to use the on-board GDU as well as the Radeon, and finally, I found out why the box wouldn't POST.

This one hurts. The 16 gig of OCZ memory I got is non-registered RAM. The Tyan mobo requires "ECC registred" dimms. I had to go investigate that. Other folks may know this, but it was new to me, so I'll post it here just in case.

It would have been one whole hell of a lot easier if they'd called it "buffered memory" because that's exactly what it is. The dimms have a buffer (or register) between the storage and the memory controller. I'll just post the link rather than typing it all out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory

Here's a short snippet:
"They place less electrical load on the memory controller and allow single systems to remain stable with more memory modules than they would have otherwise."

Just frikkin wunnerful. I just put another $500 on my Visa card. I now have another 16 gb of ram coming. I'll try to get a refund on the memory I bought initially, but it's set me back about 3 days.

I guess I could catch up on sleep or something. Besides...the 24 hours of Daytona starts tomorrow...I can't miss that.

Another thing I can do is route all the wiring harnesses all neat and tidy.

Some days are like that.

I downloaded wprime (that was new to me) and I'll run it on the current box to see where I stand. Then when I get the 2x4 box running we'll see what we get. I'll report both of 'em.

Stay tuned. I'll update the Build Diary with the new info asap...well, after a nap.

[Kal-EL]

And so the saga begins........................................