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Time to take a system image methinks and try Win 11 - wish me luck
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Good luck!
(You probably won't need it.)
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Suggest that you bury a dead chicken in the yard to keep evil spirits away.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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All hope abandon, ye who enter here!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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luck
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Good call. Wishing someone luck is the best way to go because if they end up with good or bad luck...you were right and called it, or warned them ahead of time.
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So my 5 year old Dell XPS 13 laptop died over the weekend. It's out of support. My new XPS 15 laptop should be here this week and I'm going to bite the bullet and install Windows 11 on it. I ordered it with a Windows 11 Professional license.
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Should work just fine with Windows 10.0.22000 - at least it does on my 1 year old XPS.
I would do a clean install of Windows - doesn't take long on a new machine and then the Dell bloatware is gone.
I am running DELL SupportAssist on mine as I needed some driver updates some time ago and they where faster than Windows getting them out... and I did not have to download and install drivers manually as a peasant  . But I would not install it today unless there is something not fully working or detecting. Windows Updates will even push optional firmware updates to you.
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I plan to do a clean install.
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go to linux? hahahaha
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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In 1956 magnetic core memory was patented. Anyone else around here remember working on systems with "donuts" for memory?
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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theoldfool wrote: Anyone else around here remember working on systems with "donuts" for memory?
On this dinosaur pasture? Of course!  I bet you'll even find people who worked on drum memories.
My first encounter with core memories dates back to high-school when an intrepid teacher took us to see a factory of core memories. I remember being amazed at the speed and precision of those ladies (they were all or mostly ladies working there) who weaved those memory frames.
Mircea
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: you'll even find people who worked on drum memories.
Yes, I did. But the first system I worked on had only mag tape, no rotating storage. And then we had the 1004 which used a backplane plugboard for its programs, and 1024 bytes of memory.
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Our University had a 'museum corner' with GIER computer. One notable feature was the wooden teak side panels, another that one side wall was an array of large ferrite cores, with a mesh of lines either going through or bypassing the cores. That was the microcode of the machine: You could rewire the side wall to give the computer a modified instruction set!
If my memory is right, the GIER had 1024 words of 42 bits - an integer 32 bit part plus a 10 bit scaling factor. It also had a complete ALGOL60 compiler, split into 14 passes, using the drum for to transfer intermediate results from one pass to the next. The function of the last pass was to reorganize the blocks on the drum for more efficient execution of the program.
This machine was operational at the time I started my studies, but it was considered 'retired'; it was run only as part of 'history tours'.
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From what year was that machine?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I had to look that up: Norwegian Wikipedia[^] has a page about the GIER, telling that the machine to NTH (now named NTNU), the Norwegian Technical University, was delivered in 1962. I saw it 16 years later as retired; I do not know when it was retired.
The Wikipedia article also tells that it had no interrupt system at all. Its drum had 320 "channels" (tracks), each of 40 words of 42 bits. It had sort of a "software virtual memory" - system provided functions for sending blocks from the core primary memory to the drum to make room for another one retrieved from the drum. The paper tape reader was optical, reading 3000 chars/sec (!). Linpack speed: 0.66 Kflops  Weight: 2600 kg.
56 machines were built, and the machine is named from the first customer: Geodætisk Instituts Elektroniske Regnemaskine (Geodetic Institute's Electronic Calculator)
"Fun fact": The memory was built with 42 core boards, each of 1024 bits - each board providing one bit to the word. I guess that made it rather difficult to extend the architecture to a larger (or restrict it to a smaller) memory size.
An open source software GIER simulator is available for Linux/X11 and Windows. Expect most information to be in Danish. Assembler mnemonics was based on Danish terms, and in the Wikipedia assembler code sample, comments are in Danish as well. The Algol compiler was modified to accept æ and ø in identifiers.
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trønderen wrote: another that one side wall was an array of large ferrite cores, with a mesh of lines either going through or bypassing the cores.
That was called a Core rope memory[^] most famously used on the Apollo Guidance Computer. In the case of AGC, the advantage of core rope memory was its immunity to cosmic radiation.
Mircea
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A PDP-10 was our main system when I was at university. It had magnetic core memory, and I seem to recall that it used a drum for swap space.
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Yup. I keep wondering if those were the "good old days". Worked on an old accounting machine, 7 words of memory, BCD, and people actually did payroll with it. Typewriter or punch card output, electronics were vacuum tubes (I have one on my desk).
Much later, did VAX at the University via 300 baud dial up.
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I spent 1975-76 at a US high school, learning my first BASIC. But the school couldn't afford a "high speed" modem - that is a 300 bps one - so we had to make due with a 110 bps one. That also implied that our terminal was an extremely noisy, military style 10 cps Teletype, located in a huge all-concrete basement bomb shelter with no sound dampening whatsoever. (The high speed 300 bps modems usually came with a a more modern, lightweight and quieter terminal.)
You bring back memories of the 'baud' term! I belong to that generation considering 'baud' a synonym for 'bits per second', long after we got (truly) high speed modems where this certainly does not hold.
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theoldfool wrote: I keep wondering if those were the "good old days".
No, the good days are now. We are just nostalgic for the days when we were young, strong and enthusiastic.
Back in the day I had incredible eyesight and monitors had 160 by 100 resolution. Now I need glasses for almost anything and my laptop comes standard with 1920 by 1024 resolution. Sometimes it feels like the world is thumbing the nose at me
Mircea
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In the days when people still remembered drums, I picked up a Hacker's Dictionary explaining 'Fastrand' (a much used drum device from Sperry-Rand) as 'A device for storing angular momentum'.
When I started my computer studies, the University had just retired its Fastrand drum, but it was still sitting in the machine hall (along with two huge Univac 1100 series mainframes), so we got a chance to see it. The service engineers told us that it would be recycled as a steam roller
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Colour me a drummer!
Looked like the artificial brain in a Pertwee-Era Dr Who AFAIR.[^]
So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8
modified 1-Mar-22 3:44am.
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My high school had an HP system that had 4K of donut RAM. Also had a display (single line of LED characters, 40 max), optical card reader, thermal paper printer and a plotter.
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