[KoshNaranek]

Appreciate it, Tom. I intend to make cables for my Schiit stack in the rack that bcowen gifted me with. It will give me something to do at the bench, as I just got home from the ER at the hospital. I should get some sort of frequent flyer miles at that place.

Hope you doing OK

 

[AstronomerXI]

BSD was not open source in any legal sense, at least not until all of multiple lawsuits were resolved. The story is the following:

1. Bell Labs made PDP-11 Unix source code available to universities and nonprofit research labs from the mid 70s, under some somewhat ambiguous terms
2. The University of California, Berkeley (UCB) started redistributing PDP-11 Unix with a bunch of improvements, around 1979, as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) 2.x
3. Soon after, UCB created a fork for the newly released 32-bit Digital VAX-11; the first version that traveled significantly was 4.1 BSD, although the better known one was 4.2 BSD, with the internet sockets API (4.1 BSD had some other rather obnoxious networking stack that I had to help make work in graduate school).
4. Details here
5. Eventually, BSD 4.X became widespread, commercial licensing started, but not before a huge tangle of rights was created between AT&T, UCB, and others, which led eventually to very long and wasteful litigation.
6. I was very involved in using and hacking Bell Labs Unix V7, BSD 2.x for PDP-11s, BSD 4.x on VAX and then its variant on Sun workstations, 1980-1987. Good times!

I installed BSD on one of my 2 ~2017 vintage laptops recently just for something new. It works fine, all devices work properly, though the video is a little laggy when scrolling a webpage. Not a big deal.

As for operating systems, I still have fond memories of NeXTSTEP from the 1990s. I had access to one of their Cubes in our lab. We also had the biggest and most expensive hard drive on campus at the time, a whopping 2Gb external SCSI drive! The Engineering department was very covetous of it as I recall.

 

[StimpyWan]

I installed BSD on one of my 2 ~2017 vintage laptops recently just for something new. It works fine, all devices work properly, though the video is a little laggy when scrolling a webpage. Not a big deal.

As for operating systems, I still have fond memories of NeXTSTEP from the 1990s. I had access to one of their Cubes in our lab. We also had the biggest and most expensive hard drive on campus at the time, a whopping 2Gb external SCSI drive! The Engineering department was very covetous of it as I recall.

That reminds me when we added a network server to our cutting lathes at Nimbus. Twenty 50Gb SCSI drives, in a rack server 2'x4'x4', for a total of 1 terabyte of storage! We thought we were something! Showed it off to every tour that came through...!

 

[Balthazar B]

BSD was not open source in any legal sense, at least not until all of multiple lawsuits were resolved. The story is the following:

1. Bell Labs made PDP-11 Unix source code available to universities and nonprofit research labs from the mid 70s, under some somewhat ambiguous terms
2. The University of California, Berkeley (UCB) started redistributing PDP-11 Unix with a bunch of improvements, around 1979, as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) 2.x
3. Soon after, UCB created a fork for the newly released 32-bit Digital VAX-11; the first version that traveled significantly was 4.1 BSD, although the better known one was 4.2 BSD, with the internet sockets API (4.1 BSD had some other rather obnoxious networking stack that I had to help make work in graduate school).
4. Details here
5. Eventually, BSD 4.X became widespread, commercial licensing started, but not before a huge tangle of rights was created between AT&T, UCB, and others, which led eventually to very long and wasteful litigation.
6. I was very involved in using and hacking Bell Labs Unix V7, BSD 2.x for PDP-11s, BSD 4.x on VAX and then its variant on Sun workstations, 1980-1987. Good times!

Ah, so you were an Evans Hall inhabitant!

 

[Paladin79]

Current listen is West Coast Jazz, The Cool Years on Qobuz. Nice background music as I finish some work.

 

[Moondog55]

That reminds me when we added a network server to our cutting lathes at Nimbus. Twenty 50Gb SCSI drives, in a rack server 2"x4"x4", for a total of 1 terabyte of storage! We thought we were something! Showed it off to every tour that came through...!

Oh, the good old days. Way back when, I remember paying $1000 for a meg of RAM.

 

[bcowen]

Scored on some Westinghouse 12AU7's , 337 code, Grey Dots...will try in the Vali 3 and Vali 2 +.
6626 date code..just a year before I graduated from high school in 1967!
Will compare to the 12AU7s from Tom.....


https://tubemaze.info/westinghouse-12au7-carbon-plates/

Alex

Staggered flat ladder plates with top D-getters. Those are the clues to look for in the great sounding Westinghouse 6SN7 -- hopefully those traits carry over into the 12AU7!

 

[bcowen]

Oh, the good old days. Way back when, I remember paying $1000 for a meg of RAM.

Lol! Remember those days too. The first hard drive I bought was IBM branded (made by Seagate I think). A whopping 10 MB (yes, as in M) and was $800 in 1983 dollars. No more swapping in 5.25" discs to boot the system every time.

 

[sam6550a]

Hope you're OK Sam? I guess being back "home from the ER" is always a good sign, but still.

Thanks! I will try to stay out of that place----it's full of sick folks.

 

[cricket]

Oh, the good old days. Way back when, I remember paying $1000 for a meg of RAM.

The place I started working for in the early 80's used, and sold with the systems we made, PDP-11 computers. Boards for it were about 15 inches square, some wire-wrapped. The hard drives had 80MB capacity on a removable 15 inch platter. To change a disc, you'd start spinning it down and wait at least five minutes to prevent a head crash.

 

[golfbravobravo]

Lol! Remember those days too. The first hard drive I bought was IBM branded (made by Seagate I think). A whopping 10 MB (yes, as in M) and was $800 in 1983 dollars. No more swapping in 5.25" discs to boot the system every time.

I worked for Tandy (Radio Shack) in the UK in the early 80s. We got the first 5MB winchester drives for the Model II TRS-80 and it was (IIRC) £9,999. I sold a lot of them!

 

[sam6550a]

Hope you doing OK

Thanks much! It will take a lot to put me down.

 

[AstronomerXI]

That reminds me when we added a network server to our cutting lathes at Nimbus. Twenty 50Gb SCSI drives, in a rack server 2"x4"x4", for a total of 1 terabyte of storage! We thought we were something! Showed it off to every tour that came through...!

I currently have a paltry 20Tb in my 8-bay Synology NAS. I should bump it up to 200+ Tb

 

[Ableza]

I remember in 1974 the big event at the bank where I worked was replacing three of the large tape drives with a 10Mb hard disk array. The thing was about a meter square and required its own cooling duct in our mainframe room. Ah, the days of large Burroughs mainframes (the B7700 series with actual semiconductor memory!) punch card input and programming and driving chain-impact printers with continuous perf-paper... no interest in going back.

 

[Ripper2860]

Staggered flat ladder plates with top D-getters. Those are the clues to look for in the great sounding Westinghouse 6SN7 -- hopefully those traits carry over into the 12AU7!

@adydula -- I have a pair and have never listened to them, so let us (me) know what you think.