sneighke (1)
Number of visits to this profile: 618
BAM! user since: October 2 2007
Birthday: February 3
Country: United States
Sex: Male
Detailed stats: here
Forum posts: 3


My personal background
Gee, where to begin. Well, I am a former member of the "now" (in)famous Grid.org.

See, the funny thing is, they "ran out of work" and completely shut down. The forums were up last I checked, but the data servers are all offline. But then, after a brief dabble with BOINC a year or so ago, pressured by a Win/Linux buddy, I thought "cool, SETI looks nice but do I really want to try to find aliens?...". Then I realized that IBM is using BOINC to run the HPF data, THE SAME THING GRID.ORG WAS RUNNING!!!! So, without any investigation, I assume Grid funding dried up and the BOINC platform which uses the SAME client and actually the same one Grid.org HAD on the back burner, but refused to upgrade the grid to the newer client.

Anyway, with Grid gone, I had no choice but to switch over to (the much better) BOINC platform. And, since it manages multiple projects, I thought "hey, what the heck, let's add SETI@home for the nice eye candy.".

So That's how I came here. I'm also on a team for the "same" HPF project but have had difficulty in getting WU's. Thus SETI is getting the CPU time.

My buddy, mentioned above, got so pissed off about the seemingly continual Grid.org server shutdowns, he said "F it, I'm using BIONC and I suggest you do too". Well in the end, BOINC wins! heh.

[/rambling]

I'm an EE, currently in Chicago, IL but grew up in the Boston, MA area (Westford, a small colonial town now crazily a major technology area!) in an old farm house built in 1736! Yep, it had the ruins of big underground silos, and the actual grassy ramp up to other ruins of an original huge barn. As kids, my two brother's and I would play down there, but NEVER in the silos! Those things still had concrete shells, with openings for "windows", no top just walls, and nothing else. There were trees growing in them and while we'd still go up to them, the drop into them was like 20-30 feet or so. So as little kids (I was 9 or so and the oldest) we were scared $hitless doing anything other than looking into them. I don't recall there being any way out! Except perhaps climbing up the mid sized trees in there.... Sad thing is, looking at the property now, from Google Earth, shows all the woods in the back GONE, a driveway through what used to be our backyard and huge garden (!!), and land next door, a wild apple tree field with stone walls (anyone from NE knows about those!) all gone and being developed... Very sad to see your childhood yard (4 acres) all cut up by driveways and streets!

So enough about my history...

My "official" hoobies are fast cars, fast computers, and the slow touch of another human... ;-)

I was first introduced to computers back when I was 13, in 1975. Home computers did not exist for the most part, but I had an avid appetite for anything electronic and had been "taking things apart" since age 8 or 9. This was in Lexington, OH, where I first got to see a "real main frame". They were past the point of the old reel-to-rell tape drives, but were still sorta "rickety" and certainly bulky. CRTs? Heck no! All user I/O was via the "line printer" and typically you'd have to run a small punched paper tape to load the bootstrapper... And of course, the state of the art was 256kB of RAM, and huge 10MB HDD cartridges, each having a "carrying" handle and a single, yet double sided disc platter.

When I was 16, my father leased a Data General Nova 3/12. Yeah, it was a main frame, prolly 7 feet high, with TWO HDDs, and one a third internal one. The User's two where on large drawers. The Frame had several subsystems. The PS, CPU, HDD, well that's all I recall. The CPU had the "real toggle switches, lights, load and instruction buttons" but in general, were never used as the system could boot itself from the HDD. I do remember though, that to format a "disc pack" (HDD), you ran the system formatter which instructed you to "set switches 1, 4, 7 to up, all others down...". Do this day, I have no idea why that had to be done. Also, the CPU rack (again, this was a rack frame), had a cool keylock with a few positions like "lock", "run", etc. And, thinking back, must have been advanced as the CPU (which was NOT a chip but several PCBs!) also had a battery backup. You could kill the power (a huge twin breaker on the back) and the the system would all shut down except the CPU which would still have the lights on and you could hear the whine of the (now understood, but not then) UPS built into the rack. I never saw the innards, nor what type of batteries used. It could remain in what is now called "suspend mode" for like an hour before the batteries died.

I first learned computer programming using RDOS BASIC (RDOS == Real Time DOS) on that Nova. What sucked though is that although it was multi user, the "main" terminal was a "typewriter/dot-matrix printer". It was weird typing everything on green line 11" paper! When you'd type, the print head would move out of the way in a second so you could see what you were typing.

The software the system used (for a medical billing company) was all custom COBOL and used the CRT terminals. But for some reason, one which I didn't have the knowledge or skills to figure out, the RDOS-BASIC only used the printer terminal which sucked as everything was on paper, and well, I could go through a ream per night and would reinsert the paper on the reverse side to conserve it! I must have burned up a few ribbons! Also, I could only use the system (this was in our basement) in the evenings, and NEVER when the clothes dryer was on as in Mansfield (after moving from Lexington), the household meter was a demand meter and well, let's just say that DG Nova sucked enough power where any other large loads would throw us into the higher demand rates and though my Dad was always generous in letting me fugg with the his mainframe, you never even flipped the breaker on if the dryer was on as the kWh meter would record the demand and well, then there was hell to pay when the electric bill came! heheh.

Well, that's my basic Bio. I'm currently an EE and PC expert using analog, digital, and systems design. Some of my best systems designs were back in DOS 3.1 (yeah, GAG COUGH GAG), using a top end x286 with expanded RAM cards, and using Micro$oft's PDS (Professional Development System) which was (yikes) compiled BASIC and as was typical, had a maximum shared memory area of a whopping 64kB. The system I was programming used BASIC to directly access RAM in which a TSR in DOS would make timing measurements on incomming pulses to a HW I/O card for a telemetry system, write the pulse period timings into RAM, and then "up above" in BASIC, I'd PEEK the values of of RAM which to the main BASIC app, just "magically appeared" as beck in DOS, you could do dumb things like write directly to RAM, or the I/O ports etc. It sucked because I was up against the 64k barrier and also spent hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support to get around bugs and limitations in the PDS system. But it was also really cool how I had a TSR monitoring the I/O ports, and also found a way to reprogram the single system timer that controlled the clock, and crank up it's resolution from the standard DOS tick rate of about 16Hz, waay up into the uS range. But it was tricky, because the system still needed the timer for the RTC, I had to program in a "wedge" that intercepted the now huge tick rates, and divide them back down to the normal DOS rate. The telemetry system was dependent on the system RTC so this was no easy feat! But to go from 16 or whatever Hz, into the sub ms timing, which we needed to time incoming telemetry pulses to needed accuracy was classic. And I owe a lot to some dude who wrote an article about the system timer. It was fun to mess with it from within the BASIC interpereter (GBASIC?) and see the RTC running super fast... Fun to see, useless in general!

Well sorry for the long diatribe... I'm on a roll!

Regards,

-=David=-
(aka. Sneighke)