Comment by spacedcowboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacedcowboy | Hacker News Reader

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I was using Linux before things like Slackware came about, when it was just a boot and a root floppy disk. We had DECstation 3100/5000 machines costing small fortunes, that couldn’t reliably write a CD. The small 386 in the corner running “that newfangled thing” was far better at this :)

In my lifetime, I’ve gone through:

- building (as in: soldering chips to a motherboard) my own computer at home at age 11*

- buying an 8-bit Atari and learning about Antic and the 6502

- eventually getting a “disk drive” which stored an entire 128k

- moving onto a 32-bit cpu with the Atari ST

- blowing my student budget for the term on a hard disk, 20MB

- finally getting connected, at the blazing speed of 2048 baud

- lather, upgrade, rinse, repeat

- to where I have a 1gbit internet connection, a 10gbit home network, 100TB of storage locally, and a server rack in the garage with more than 100 “cores” available.

Things have changed so much, so quickly, relatively speaking.

[This is the ‘*’ from above. I couldn’t get ‘edit’ to accept it as an update, it just kept on putting the original text back, so...]

My parents bought me a black-and-white TV and a computer kit (they couldn’t afford both the TV and the already-assembled version) for Xmas at age 11. The big gift here was the TV, as far as I was concerned, we only had the one downstairs before that, and I got one in my bedroom! I even convinced myself I could watch snooker on a black & white TV, even if you did have to tune it by turning a dial until the picture appeared :)

About a month later, they were getting at me to put the computer together, which was the main present in their eyes - the TV was second-hand. Grumbling, I did so, and got it working. Once I’d told them, the whole family wanted to see this new technological marvel, so I took it downstairs, plugged it into the main TV, and everyone gathered around.

I typed in what the manual had told me to do, to test things out

  PRINT 2+2=4

To which it displayed “1”. And I turned round to the family expecting all the validation an 11 year old desired. My dad looked at me, looked at the screen, and just said “I knew it, you’ve buggered it” and walked out the room.

It took me a few days to convince him that “1” was the right answer. To this day, I think his mistrust in computers stems from that episode. He was a docker in a Northern city, and all he’d say for years afterwards was “you can’t trust those bloody things” in ... more colourful... language.

This was a beautiful little story! I had a big smile. Thanks for sharing.

I remember we had an older Compaq tower server that had a Pentium 60MHz chip AND a SCSI card. It was the the perfect device to burn a CD with and even it messed up on occasion. I can't imagine doing them on a 386. It wasn't until the Pentium II days when we could reliably burn a CD and still use the computer for normal tasks without having a buffer underrun.

Oh it was pretty much a dedicated machine when it was burning a CD. This was a postgrad office, there were 4 of us (three called Simon...) and we had a Unix workstation each.

Generally the PC sat in the corner and wasn’t really used. It had a SCSI card too, and when it was burning CDs it was left alone.

I remember one day a colleague of mine burnt 50 CDs so he could give them out after a -resentation, it was pretty damn reliable. I also used it as a mastering machine for a CD that I had professionally duplicated to sell, full of Atari ST shareware/public domain s/w.

These were very early days of Linux. I actually had already released the “Mint distribution kit” which let my beloved Atari ST work like the Unix machine I had at college, and this was before any sort of distribution for Linux (at the time, Slackware had yet to be released) was available. The MDK was quite popular, mainly amongst students I think, but of course paled into insignificance compared to what Linux/Slackware/all-the-rest would evolve into :)

> there were 4 of us (three called Simon...)

I see your WWII-era parents got what I call the Alastair Memo, which stated that at least 50% of the boys born around 1955-1970 were required to be named Simon, Alastair, or Nigel.

Funnily enough, my brother is called Nigel... I think you might be onto something!

I’m shocked

That's nice but it's hard to beat - typewriter as a gift in ones teens to flying in metal cages, to going to the moon, to VR headsets.

I remember reading opinion polls from people who saw this rapid rate of progress in the 60s 70s 80s and they all assumed the 2000's would be this "flying cars everywhere" magical land.

What are you doing with 100 cores in your garage?

Generally FPGA place and route, and more recently the same for ASICs. I don't recommend making your own ASIC as a hobby. It's damn expensive.

You're doing your own ASIC? Very nice. I'd love to talk that over if you'd care to be in touch. (Contact details in profile).

I'm ridiculously busy right now, and I don't have the time - sorry. What I will do is point you to the resources I've been using:

http://opencircuitdesign.com is the primary resource, which gives you layout, design, proofing, and setlist generation.

I'm not aiming for anything even remotely state-of-the-art, I'm looking at a 180nm design and even that might be pushing the hobby funds. You can get "shuttle service" at various places to share a wafer, or you can use efabless (link on the magic page above) to do a lot of the work for you, at additional cost.

The guy who for years wrote and maintained Magic (the layout tool) now works for efabless, and he's a great guy - especially if you submit patches to him :)

It's a lot of hard work, you have to worry about all sorts of things you can take for granted in an FPGA (clock routing, i/o bonding and pad designs, oscillators for clock multiplication etc. etc. and yes etc. again). But there's not many people who can say they taught themselves how to make an ASIC :)

Thanks. Those are great pointers!

And yes, many kudos for teaching yourself how to make an ASIC, that is very cool :-)

I have a long way to go to get there.

I've been out of the open source silicon field for a while but want to get back in. My side project is building a small-scale factory for custom ASICs, rather than getting them made in another factory. It's a very interesting problem, and quite different from ASIC design issues since a lot of it is physics, and obviously there are many factors that are different on a small scale.

The goal is an open source silicon service to the extent of making it relatively affordable for others to iterate and reuse designs, in the hope of developing a thriving scene much like happened with open source software, GNU/Linux etc. But it is proving hard to find the time these days. And as you say, it's expensive, no matter how you go about it, even though affordability is a goal of the final service.

Thanks again, and good luck.

I have more than twice that in my garage for image/video/3D rendering.

2048, or 2400?

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