[Sussex] bork bork bork
Trevor Marshall
trevorm at rusham.demon.co.uk
Wed Feb 19 22:02:01 UTC 2003
On Monday 17 Feb 2003 23:16, Geoff Teale wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 21:51, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > Nik
> >
> > On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 08:53:29PM +0000, Nik Butler wrote:
> > > I therefore wonder is we could draw matrix of languages and platforms
> > > and so which of us did what and where and with which.
> >
> > That could get to be a long, long list - so here goes:
>
> <snip>
> Hmm, the only value in this is to produce some reference document so we
> don't have to give our backgrounds every time someone new asks... as
> far as the "best language / platform for foo, bar or gurgle" is
> concerned, well it's fairly subjective and it does depend on the
> specifics of the situation, and for every technical arguement there is
> always a financial and political arguement to match.
>
> Anyhow, just because I'm as interested in talking about myself as the
> next man.. I shall follow Steve's format
Hey, I can do this too....
Timeframe Platform(s) Languages Project
--------- ----------- --------- -------
1977-78 ICL 1900 ? FORTRAN Part of an Elec. Eng.
Degree course - hand in a
stack of cards, get the error
back three days later....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1979-82 SEL 32/77 SEL Assembler Simulation of navigation system
for flight sims.
ZX81 BASIC playing round - what can it do?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1983-84 SEL 32/77 FORTRAN More simulation code...
SEL Assembler Some code to interface
to Inertial Nav. systems hardware
BBC B BASIC General stuff
6502 Assembler More stuff, ending up with a
printer driver
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1985-1987 SEL 32/77 Assembler Involvement in writing an OS!
This was called SciCLONE/32 and
was a real-time, multi-user,
multi-processor system for flight
simulation. I did some trap
handlers, bits of a scheduler,
odds & ends.
(You'll have noticed a lot of references to SEL 32/77 in the above, this
was a "high performance" (early 1980's) mini-computer range produced by
Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. At
various times the kit has been byuilt by SEL, Systems, Gould and most
recently Encore. The hardware was based on a 32-bit processor and a fast
bus to interface to memory and peripheral interfaces. The company still
exists, see http://www.encore.com
<holy war>
The processor, was of course, big-endian, like all *real* processors (IBM
370, 68K, 88K, PPC, SPARC, &c) not like the toys (x86 ...)
</holy war>
The SEL 32 instruction set was a bit like the 68K, so home systems became
Sinclair QL BASIC Teach-yourself-68k-
68K Assembler programming-for-fun-
but-not-profit
But I couldn't stand the Microdrive system (tape loops of *very* narrow tape
in a cassette about the size of a CF card, which misread, jammed, and
generally didn't work) which was a pity. I tried a QL with floppies and it
was very good indeed, but it had to go, replaced by
ATARI ST BASIC
68K Assembler Keep trying to do something
useful.... but ultimately
didn't
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1987-1991 SEL 32/77 Admin Building and installing
Flight Simulators.
Acorn Archimedes A new toy! no serious
BBC BASIC projects but a lot of speed
ARM Assembler for the money and a lot of
good bundled apps.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1991-1998 Sun, various C, FORTRAN, A new generation of simulation
Motorola SBCs Korn shell hardware, more bits of code to
(88K and PPC write, systems to administer
based), SGI and/or install.
boxes More network-related stuff.
SunOS, Solaris, I managed to write a cron
SVr3 SVr4, IRIX job that (effectively) did
find / -exec rm {} \;
at 02:00 - ooops, it stopped
when it rm'd /bin/rm ...
Wrote a compiler for Pascal
(well, a Pascal-like lang.)
that spat out C for a real
compiler to finish.
Acorn Archimedes More C coding for fun
Risc PC teach yourself C++
RiscPC + NetBSD/ARM32 My first home-based 'UNIX'
system! (no ARM port of Linux
at the time)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1998-2003 Windows boxes C, C++, Java Yet another generation of
NT4/2000/XP simulators. Hosted on a Windows
box this time, with a specialist
co-processor for the real-time
system, with its own scheduler,
but basically the same set of
problems,
Home-build PC C, Java, Perl Bring work home :-(
Linux (RH5.2/ HTML, PHP experiment with a web server
RH 6.x / SuSE Write some Java apps, try
6.4 / SuSE 7.3) some technologies, build a
firewall, etc.,
"hacking for fun" as Geoff
put it.
Sun IPX C, bash Handy extra box on the
Debian Woody network. cost GBP25 in
an office clearout.
iBook C, Java, PHP Well, I needed a laptop and
MacOS X and didn't need Windows, running
SuSE 7.3 (!) Linux is just for fun (but it
is pretty seamless)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
So that's it. I like Java, don't like C++, write old-fashioned C ('cos I've
been doing it for a while) and I know what printf() returns. I can just
about remember how to write FORTRAN, I've written assembler on a variety of
platforms (but *only once* on an x86, and that was to interface with the PCI
BIOS subsystem...).
Future plans are to re-vamp the PC, move all the Linux platforms to Debian
(and maybe install Linux on the RiscPC as well). If I can find a suitable
NIC for the IPX I'll turn that into a firewall (designed to be left powered
on, you see) Failing that it'll have to be the wife's old P166.
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