What can be done with a PC today, that could not be done 25 years ago?

Have we got a spice for freebsd? I guess it's primarily a computing server O/S. All the EDA tools used to run on windows, I expect they still do. I used to use amd palasm and we had the xilinx stuff when it first came out which was a software-programable gate array, of course they are still very much in business. Sadly I got seduced into software for work, by the lure of filthy lucre, but I miss doing digital and the low-level software to drive it, that was my speciality for a while, hardware design and the accompanying software. It's harder making pc-cards now I think, pci-e isn't so user-friendly for designing boards, ISA bus used to be great to making all kinds of add-in boards for low-speed peripherals. I guess everyone uses usb and arduinos or pi's nowadays.
 
blackbird9 said:
It used to be a joke that "the first rule of computing is that printers never work".
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Ah, it would started when printer manufacturers start makin printers to be "send me full pixmap images of the page using Windows GDI" or "we accept our proprietary, non-disclosed PDL only, via our proprietary and non-disclosed protocol". In early PDLs, documents could be purchased for LIPS (by CANON) and PostScript (by Adobe), and maybe Prescribe (by KYOCERA), HP-PCL (by HP) and ESC/Page (by Epson), too.

And don't forget, the oldest terminal that had full ASCII keyboard should've been Teletype, which didn't have video display (even of character-based) but printing to papers instead. (Much before 25 years, though, and I've never used by myself). Still remaining name tty stands for TeleTYpe. 😅
 
I used a design tool with the Xilinx CoolRunner XPLA3 family of CPLD when it was from Philips. But I don't remember the name of this tool which was from another company. A very good tool which travel through companies like Philips, Xilinx, AMD.
 
Found a list here https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/cad-for-electronics.98876/ My main problem is finding the time, as always 😪

PCIE documentation here https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-design-and-pinout-pcie-edge-cards and a thread here discussing pcie card design https://linustechtips.com/topic/981577-pcie-card-design/
It looks like some people might be making custom pcie cards, but I think it would be quite specialised. Interesting though. Still, I mustn't hijack the thread, talking about this stuff.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
T-Aoki Well of course but he said you couldn't do that with Windows PCs and I'm showing that's not true.
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That (IS NOT) what I wrote.

What I (DID WRITE) was that you could not do that with a "Windows Only" PC - or a PC that was built with Windows proprietary network and graphic cards where you could only get software drivers for those cards from the vendor and for Windows operating systems only.
 
T-Aoki said:
So my strategy was to confirm chips supported by {OS/2|FreeBSD|anything non-Windows I want to try} and find common ones, then, looks for the cards that states using the chip. Yes, it IS a kind of gamble.
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Ya - that's what I did as well. And if I couldn't get a good hardware specification from the vendor on something that I wanted to purchase, I would skip the purchase.
 
CShell said:
That (IS NOT) what I wrote.

What I (DID WRITE) was that you could not do that with a "Windows Only" PC - or a PC that was built with Windows proprietary network and graphic cards where you could only get software drivers for those cards from the vendor and for Windows operating systems only.
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Were there such things? I don't recall. Gateway made the desktop PC I mentioned for Windows and, as I said, I installed FreeBSD on it without issue. Same for the Dell laptops I have but those are much newer than the Gateway which is from some time way before 2004.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Gateway made the desktop PC I mentioned for Windows and, as I said, I installed FreeBSD on it without issue.
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As far as I can recall, almost all ready-made computers sold in Japan unavoidablly pre-installed any of Windows starting from Win95 era, including Gateway. BTO computers sold by some specific shops "sometimes" allow ordering without Windows, but it's not absolutely "ready-made computers".
Even "Linux pre-installed" models are too hard to find at least for regular consumers in Japan. So as "FreeBSD pre-installed" models. Sigh.

And "Windows pre-installed" models are usually (without some exceptions, possibly) tested with Windows only. So I always take risks on purchasing computers.
 
Back in the day when we had a 25MHz 68030, we did software development, use LaTeX, play games, have paint programs, video editing, text management, run emulators, run *BSD, ... And everything was a little slower, smaller and simpler. I miss those times. Things like Chrome and Electron would not exist back then, simply because no one would spend weeks to compile them. You would sit down and come up with a more clever idea of doing the same with less resources.
 
blackbird9 said:
And I have to mention this classic book by Mr Lewis Eggebrecht (we used to call it the 'eggy bread' book; 'eggy bread' is Yorkshire slang for bread soaked in eggs and fried here). Of course you needed all the datasheets etc but this was the really good book for making PC interface cards. Of course it's all changed now. I think the author was one of the original lead designers of the PC at IBM.
archive.org

Interfacing to the IBM Personal Computer : Eggebrecht, Lewis C : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Bibliography: p. 237
archive.org
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For me the best and only source of information was a friend with modem who was hoarding BBS posts.
TXT manuals on how to make ASM calls in Pascal to draw a pixel. DYI DOOM graphics. etc.
Earlier, I had manual to my Commodore with strange incantations, I later learned was an opcode, but it was in German. So I was stuck at retyping BASIC examples, modifying it and later making my own little programms.

Kids these days can not understand what thirst for information is.
Quite the opposite most likely.

In the 2000s we used to raid Technical University library and buy relatively cheap textbooks (cheap paperbacks). Sometimes on a few pages there was something tangential to the problem you were trying to solve or learn about. I had one slightly more expensive but very slim one for UNIX User manual and very expensive one for graphics programming.
 
DanielBowman said:
For me the best and only source of information was a friend with modem who was hoarding BBS posts.
TXT manuals on how to make ASM calls in Pascal to draw a pixel. DYI DOOM graphics. etc.
Earlier, I had manual to my Commodore with strange incantations, I later learned was an opcode, but it was in German. So I was stuck at retyping BASIC examples, modifying it and later making my own little programms.

Kids these days can not understand what thirst for information is.
Quite the opposite most likely.
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Well, some other essential books were the ibm pc-at technical refernce, the intel 386 instuction set manual, and peter norton's famous programming book... :-) Yes there was lots of other stuff around. Actually that's one thing that's changed.. I hardly ever look at hardcopy books now; everything is online...
 
blackbird9 said:
Well, some other essential books were the ibm pc-at technical refernce, the intel 386 instuction set manual, and peter norton's famous programming book... :-) Yes there was lots of other stuff around. Actually that's one thing that's changed.. I hardly ever look at hardcopy books now; everything is online...
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These books were tad expensive in original and even more expensive translated. In 90s the disparity of income between East and West was still great and these costs were prohibitive.
And another problem - I never heard about these books before university.
Knowledge is power. Most people kept the good info for themselves. Gate keeping was the standard. Of course you had few good teachers who not only told you, but gave you excerpts xeroxed etc.
It was even worse in here I guess. In a great irony, communism (mandated, on paper sharing...resulting in a lot of parasitism) makes people adversarial towards each other to the max.
 
Crivens said:
Back in the day when we had a 25MHz 68030, we did software development, use LaTeX, play games, have paint programs, video editing, text management, run emulators, run *BSD, ... And everything was a little slower, smaller and simpler. I miss those times. Things like Chrome and Electron would not exist back then, simply because no one would spend weeks to compile them. You would sit down and come up with a more clever idea of doing the same with less resources.
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There was Arachne Web browser but most of the Web was static and not encrypted.
 
T-Aoki said:
As far as I can recall, almost all ready-made computers sold in Japan unavoidablly pre-installed any of Windows starting from Win95 era, including Gateway.
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Hitachi sold the FLORA Prius 330J with BeOS R4J and Windows 98 pre-installed.
e7c39b4de8134ad7.gif
 
Crivens said:
Back in the day when we had a 25MHz 68030, we did software development, use LaTeX, play games, have paint programs, video editing, text management, run emulators, run *BSD, ... And everything was a little slower, smaller and simpler. I miss those times. Things like Chrome and Electron would not exist back then, simply because no one would spend weeks to compile them. You would sit down and come up with a more clever idea of doing the same with less resources.
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Good times. In some countries, not everyone was able to own a PC. And even if you owned it, if you were not fluent in dos, that machine was useless waste of money. We had no internet back then either. So it was all hunting disks and praying to god they have no bad sectors. A lot of my childhood was spent learning absolutely everything by myself. Typing a dos command followed by -? and then experimenting with all the command line switches was endless adventure for me. It helped me understand how everything works. It was both simple and very complex and i loved it very much. And then came internet and windows, and golden age of computing came to an end. Everything is shit today and everyone sucks.
 
MrBSD said:
Good times. In some countries, not everyone was able to own a PC. And even if you owned it, if you were not fluent in dos, that machine was useless waste of money. We had no internet back then either. So it was all hunting disks and praying to god they have no bad sectors. A lot of my childhood was spent learning absolutely everything by myself. Typing a dos command followed by -? and then experimenting with all the command line switches was endless adventure for me. It helped me understand how everything works. It was both simple and very complex and i loved it very much. And then came internet and windows, and golden age of computing came to an end. Everything is shit today and everyone sucks.
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You can continue to use DOS, it will work until 2099. You just have to run it on a PC without EFI boot only. I own two 14 year old motherboards which works well under DOS. One with an Intel G2020 and another with an AMD Athlon II X2 270.
 
Many years ago I spoke at a chamber of commerce event about malware.

A heckler asked me why Apple only had 5% of the malware. I relied because Apple had 5% of the market.

Windows has the huge majority of the market so the vendors write for windows. Apps and drivers.

I avoid using UEFI on machines that have it because I have no need for it at all.
 
bgavin said:
I avoid using UEFI on machines that have it because I have no need for it at all.
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Now you are going to be crucified by the "experts" on why you should never EVER use anything other than uefi. And they are going to school you on how you are actually using uefi, but you are just emulating legacy bios mode through csm.
 
blackbird9 said:
It used to be a joke that "the first rule of computing is that printers never work". They do seem to mostly work now, surprisingly enough.
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I forgot how much I used scanners and printers in the past: photos, CAD draws, documents, diplomas/certificates. What you produced on a PC didn't exist unless you printed it; today, if you do not publish it online, it is lost.
 
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