Technological Change (in my life)

edit: 2024-10-25 (a stream-of-consciousness thing)

Epiphany 0: how I slid backwards for a short time

Fork 1 (employment pays the rent)

Our switching center in Kitchener (Ontario, Canada) hosted 70,000 lines

Fork 2 (keeping skills fresh)

Within a few months I worried that my electronics skills were going to fade so I landed a part-time job as a repair technician at Mother's Music in Waterloo owned by David Boehm. Work included:

The handwriting was on the wall for analog technology so in 1976 I returned to evening classes at Conestoga College to catch up on the continuing semiconductor revolution which included TTL and CMOS in their two Digital Electronics courses. I also learned to program in BASIC and COBOL on their HP-3000 minicomputer.

Forks Merge

Bell Canada became began shifting to digital in 1978 when they replaced "paper tape based" long distance billing recorders with minicomputers (Interdata Model 70) and industrial controllers ("TeleSciences SRS-1200 Data Recorder") which employed on HP-7970E 9-track tape decks. Bell Canada was looking for someone who wanted to maintain this stuff. Since I was attending night classes in digital electronics at Conestoga College, I was offered the job.

Also in 1978, Bell Canada introduced a minicomputer system named TELCON (TELetype CONcentrator) which was based upon the PDP-11/04. This beast replaced a room full of 32 paper terminals (ASR-35 teletypes and LA120 printers) which were connected to remote SL-1 and SP-1 switches. This led to other projects based upon: PDP-11/23 , PDP-11/44 , PDP-11/73 and PDP-11/84)

 link: dips-n-certs (involved a huge amount of corporate training provided by: DEC, HP, etc.)

Personal Computers

In 1978 I was contacted by Fred Hoffman of Bits-n-Bytes (a retail computer store in Waterloo, Ontario) to repair a HeathKit-H8 computer along with a HeathKit-H9 terminal with a horrible key-bounce problem. Fred asked for a quote so I offered to fix it for free provided I could keep both units for a month. That event allowed me to learn Benton Harbor BASIC and Benton Harbor DOS.

Later that same year, I purchased a 48k Apple2 with a 16k Language Card and two 5.25-in floppy drives. I learned to program: UCSD Pascal, FORTRAN 77, 6502 Assembly and Sweet16

Epiphany 1: Digital Entertainment Evolves (Part 1/2)

The PS3 game console architecture consisted of one 3.2 GHz Cell Broadband Engine with one PPE and six SPE chips. This gaming console was so powerful that they could be used to aid in scientific research (see my folding-at-home page). Some universities would string together 50 together to produce a PS3-based super computer.

So in 2008 I purchased a PS3 (with a folding-at-home screen saver) from Future Shop which came bundled with Grand Theft Auto IV. This game was a technological epiphany because you can drive around Liberty City for hundreds of hours, in various cars, listening to 18 radio stations, while experiencing different weather conditions. At certain points you can exit your vehicle to 'buy a hotdog' or 'board any number of subways'. A self-contained digital world on a single Blu-ray costing $59.

Jump ahead to 2012 when I was borrowed a copy of Batman: Arkham City from my nephew. This self-contained digital world is more of an interactive comic book where you play the title role. While many games only entertain for 6-10 hours, both Batman: Arkham City and Grand Theft Auto IV can require more than 100 hours if you do all the side missions. So at the original price of $59 dollars this entertainment will cost you 59 cents per hour. Way more cost effective than renting a movie.

Flashback to 1970

I was in Sam the Record Man (Kitchener) when I first heard Switched-On Bach by Walter Carlos. At the time I was misled into believing this was music produced by a programmed computer ("computerized" was the colloquial phrase). It turned out that this 1968 recording was painstakingly assembled, note-by-note, on a Moog synthesizer employing a keyboard and sequencers to operate voltage-controlled oscillators and filters. Electronic "YES" but computerized "NO". On top of that, this was an analog recording of a instrument with an analog audio output. None of the instruments you hear were real, yet the associated harmonics could (when cranked up) blow the output transistors of most solid state audio amplifiers.

A similar experience occurred a few years later when I heard the 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing by Isao Tomita featuring the composition of Claude Debussy

Summary

In 40 years (1970-2010) humanity has gone from "really good fake musical instruments which a only few hundred could play" to today's "video gaming industry which employs tens of thousands while raking in $25 billion annually". The total number of XBOX-360 and PS3 machines sold by 2012 exceeds 145 million and this number doesn't include other gaming consoles or the number of people playing games on high end PCs.

  • In 2012, video game development employed ~18,000 Canadians and added ~2 billion to Canada's economy. Impressive since Canada is only the number three country in game development behind Japan and USA. Also remember that video game technology spills over into special effects for the movie industry.
  • In 2012, Call of Duty: Black Ops II was released which resulted in sales of $500 million (yep half a billion) in the first 24 hours. A second half billion was pulled in over the next 17 days. It must be pointed out that we never hear numbers like these movie box-office sales. Many parents associated today's 'video games' with yesterday's BOOB TUBE) but everyone must admit that video game development employs a lot of people

Now I could have also mentioned lots of other technological changes including:

Epiphany 2: The Dominance of C/C++ (Part 1/3)

Some of what follows came from here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part6/ see: Section 6.2) A very brief look at Unix history Author: Pierre (P.) Lewis <lew@bnr.ca>
note: bnr.ca was the domain for Bell-Northern Research - the Canadian version of Bell Labs co-owned by Bell Canada and Northern Electric (later re-branded as Nortel Networks). Hardware nerds can learn more about PDP computers starting here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/ Others might wish to download a PDF copy of The Art Of Unix Programming (available anywhere)

Most C programming language stories begin with the creation of UNIX by employees at Bell Labs in 1969. The original OS was written in macro assembler and was buggy. To make matters worse, Bell Labs was already working with multiple computers including with the 18-bit PDP-7 but were planning to migrate to a 16-bit PDP-11 (ordered but not yet delivered so they were in planning mode)
1) They solved the buggy problem by creating the "B" language (which was based upon BCPL). This evolved into the "C" language which would allow UNIX to be rewritten using "a computer language" rather than a macro assembler.
2) They solved the migration problem by using a CPU-specific code generator tied the back-end. Now both UNIX and "C" were portable.
comment: processor architecture is defined by the macro assembler programmer's view of the CPU. For example, the PDP-11 was called 16-bit because it employed eight 16-bit general purpose registers (GPR) even though this machine could address larger amounts of memory dependent upon the attached bus (Unibus programmable mapping resulted in: 18-bit, 22-bit and 24-bit memory address spaces)

comments: perhaps Bell Labs only intended to work with different PDP computers from DEC but here, "portable" means the source code can be moved relatively easily to any computer built by any manufacturer. And this got me thinking (the epiphany) that no computer manufacturer would have ever published similar software since it provides customers with an exit strategy (this might be why Ken Olsen and DEC always expressed a dislike for UNIX and C). While many companies including DEC produced ANSI-standard languages, these offerings also included vendor-specific extensions which made moving to another platform difficult, if not impossible. On a related note, third-party software vendors working in "C" can more easily move to other machines thus supporting a larger base of customers. This is also true for the UNIX operating system which is usually the first OS to be ported to new computer architectures (or was until the advent of Linux). "I am now convinced" that portable languages and portable operating systems facilitated the explosive development in computer technology seen since 1970.

Boot-Up of a Portable Software Paradigm

	    +---------------------------+
Phase 1 +-->| PDP Assembler -> UNIX     +-->+
	    +---------------------------+   |
					    |
	    +---------------------------+   |
Phase 2 +<--+ UNIX and PDP Assembler    +<--+
        |   + yields B which yields C   |
	|   +---------------------------+
	|
	v   +---------------------------+
Phase 3 +-->| UNIX and C -> better UNIX +-->+
	^   +---------------------------+   |
	|     Phases 5a + 5b ------>--------+
	|   +---------------------------+   |	
Phase 4 +<--| UNIX and C -> better C    +<--+
	    +---------------------------+
Notes:
  1. After phase-3, the assembler is only used in the code generator (not shown)
  2. Platform specific information (I/O addresses etc.) are found in platform header files
  3. Phase 3 and Phase 4 are totally portable with pure "C" (no embedded assembler instructions)
  4. Phase 5a :: Bell Labs publishes the Make utility in 1987
  5. Phase 5b :: The GNU Project publishes Autoconf in 1991

According to The Linux Programing Interface by Michael Kerrisk, the first UNIX ports beyond PDP-11 happened in 1977 (Denis Richie and Steve Johnson working on the Interdata 8/32; Richard Miller on the Interdata 7/32 at the University of Wollongong) and 1978 (John Reiser and Tom London on the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX at University of California at Berkeley).
Note: Interdata was a New Jersey company that manufactured minicomputers based upon a clone of the IBM 360 instruction set.

Most people already know the story of how ARPA (now DARPA) funded the development of a self-healing digital communication network meant to survive a nuclear war. ARPANET began in 1969 but development accelerated in the early 1970s when Bell Labs began licensing UNIX to educational institutions for an incredibly low price (under monopoly rules, Bell Labs was "not allowed to be a software vendor" -or- "make any money vending software") which meant that the majority of ARPA-funded work slowly moved from assembler to C on UNIX. This also meant that anyone working on the ARPA project in C on UNIX could easily share their work with peers at other universities. By about 1980 it appeared that all these universities were producing network incompatibilities which would soon break everything so DARPA wanted...

At this point the story shifts to a gifted programmer at Stanford by the name of Bill Joy who was working with "C" on a DEC platform known as VAX-11. By 1982, Joy had developed all the software necessary to implement what we now refer to as TCP/IP running on IPv4.
comment: click article-with-diagrams and noticed the large number of PDP and VAX machines at that time

By the early 1980s, many universities had modified UNIX sufficiently that they were able to re-brand/re-publish/re-license it to others. The University of California at Berkeley was one such group to do this by offering BSD UNIX to other universities for free or corporations for $1000 (IIRC) which was incredibly low compared to commercial OS products. BSD also introduced Berkley Sockets which allows a programmer to read/write an internet connection in the same way programmers read/write file systems. Bell Labs copied this idea then produced the STREAMs libraries (IIRC) for the AT&T flavor of UNIX.

Some people in the IT industry today are still very critical of "C" (or UNIX/Linux) while they simultaneously promote their favorite language (or OS) but "I think" they are fighting a losing battle. Why? When universities became financially squeezed in the early 1970s, many were forced to be more frugal so only considered inexpensive or free alternatives which meant C and UNIX. Students now had access to all the source code of both, which meant they could improve the product, which had the unintended consequence of creating a "critical mass" of human talent. In this environment it didn't matter which language was better because a choice had already been made; then students entering the workplace then stuck with the software they already knew.
Question: Is "C" a high level language or a low level language?
Answer: Both. It is a low level language (think portable assembler) which becomes a high level language as soon as your program references external libraries via the #include directive.

1988

Example 1:

I knew of many Nortel projects where conversion to "C" and UNIX increased stability while reducing costs (CALRS was once example which ran on BSD Unix). Nortel's flagship product at the time was DMS which was written in a Pascal variant called Protel (Procedure Oriented Type Enforcing Language). In the early days of DMS, Nortel was spending a lot of money each year training freshly minted university grads how to program in Protel. Since many of these people already knew how to program in "C", Nortel embarked upon an internal project to convert DMS from Protel to C. They did a fairly good job except that the changeover was done "flash style" rather than "gradually". Bugs and delays meant that Nortel's cash cow delivered virtually no revenue for 18 months. Oops!

Example 2:

We now know that 1988 was the year Dave Cutler left Digital Equipment Corporation for Microsoft. Cutler was responsible for the development of Windows-NT (New Technology) which was meant to (and did for a time) run on multiple architectures including: IA-32, MIPS, and Alpha, with plans for PowerPC, Itanium, AMD64 and ARM. Because this new OS was meant to run on multiple computer platforms, "C" was chosen because it was portable. Bill Gates (no idiot) was not convinced that 32-bit Windows-NT would be successful -or- would replace 16-bit Windows anytime soon. So unlike the Nortel FUBAR described above, Gates funded both projects then ran them in parallel (DECies vs. Microsofties). Perhaps this is where having a technologist at the helm of a company is better than a bean counter.

Excerpt from: http://www.stroustrup.com/applications.html
Quote: Literally everything at Microsoft is built using recent flavors of Visual C++ including major products like:
  • Windows XP, Vista, System 7
  • Windows NT (NT4 and 2000)
  • Windows 9x (95, 98, Me)
  • Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook)
  • Internet Explorer (including Outlook Express)
  • Visual Studio (Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro). Some parts of Visual Studio, like the Base Class Libraries that ship with the .NET Framework, were written using C# but the C# compiler itself is written in C++.
  • Exchange
  • SQL
Note: The yellow paragraph mentions C++ which many people consider a better way to use "C". If you don't use streams or objects in your C++ programs then your code will almost look like "C" and will certainly be read by any modern "C" compiler.

Example 3:

I didn't learn "C" programming until the summer of 1988. I was using Lightspeed C on a Macintosh and I remember thinking "this has got to be someone's idea of job protection". But it always produced small binaries so I thought it might have some advantages. Also, the concept of reusing your own code, or code written by others (free or purchased), via the #include mechanism seemed an obvious advantage. In subsequent years I noticed professional programmers getting really impressive results using "C" on IBM compatible PCs so I attended up the following evening classes at Conestoga College:

1993-1996 (from Assembler to "C")

6811 assembler

In 1993 I did some contract work for a local (Kitchener/Waterloo) company described here. I designed the control board which employed a Motorola MC68HC11F1. All the software was written using a plain-text editor in 6811 Macro Assembler Notation on an Apple Macintosh. The binaries were generated using the uAsm 6811 cross-assembler from Micro Dialects. This approach worked well until the code exceeded 8K in size which introduced other problems (you always wanted to use branches for improved size and speed; but often needed to switch to jumps when the target destination was too distant).

Whitesmiths C

In 1995, I rewrote the whole thing for the Whitesmiths 68HC11 C Compiler/Assembler on an IBM-PC running on an Intel 80386. Although I loved programming in 6811 Macro, Whitesmiths "C" was a much more productive tool. Implementing startup and interrupt vectors was child's play with this package. Descendants of this compiler are still available from COSMIC Software ( http://www.cosmic-software.com ) but you can find cross-compilers and cross-assemblers available for every CPU chip still in production. Here are two of many:

Desktop Systems get TCP/IP

Anyone who remembers working on desktop platforms (PCs as well as Macs) in the early 1990s also remembers not getting TCP/IP stacks from either Microsoft or Apple. For example, Windows 95 was released in August 1995 without a TCP/IP stack so if you wanted one (because you wanted to TELNET, FTP, or surf via Netscape Navigator) then you needed to get a copy of Winsock from a third party. Windows-95a and Windows-NT4 were both released in 1996 with TCP/IP stacks so 1995-1996 might be considered a major inflection point in the history of computer technology.

But I need to point out that many of these companies were able to directly port the TCP/IP stacks from university sources because the government-funded research was not allowed (by law) to be patented or copyrighted -AND- because the software was written in the C language.

C++

tree

C++ introduces object oriented concepts to C which can only result in greater productivity with fewer bugs. For example:

Modern client software, like browsers (especially tabbed browsers) from all vendors would be impossible without C++. In fact, I suspect the whole client-server paradigm has been taken further with C++ than was possible with C or any other language. Be sure to think about object-oriented technology whenever you see something (JPEG, GIF, Java Plugin, WAV player) sitting in the middle of your web page.

 

2002-2013 (my partial changeover to C/C++)

Up until 2002, I was able to do all my application programming using HP-BASIC-1.7 Alpha for OpenVMS.
In 2002 I was tasked with building an interface into IBM's national ticketing facility in Lexington, Kentucky where the technology of choice was IBM's MQseries

In 2010 I ran into a couple of situations where I had to directly interface with open-source software written in "C". One application involved interfacing an HP-BASIC application to OpenSSL. The second involved interfacing an HP-BASIC application to gSOAP. With most so-called "DEC languages", a developer can supply the compiler with command-line switches to control how variables are written to the symbol table which is used during linking. The appropriate "case control" switch doesn't exist with HP-BASIC-1.7 which means all symbols are up-cased. This means that a programmer needs to write a wrapper in order to facilitate linking. While this is possible, it might be more trouble than it is worth. Add to this the fact that HP-BASIC doesn't have all the data-types available to C/C++ (for example, there are no unsigned variables in HP-BASIC).

For me, it was easier to write the apps in "C" (HP C V7.3-009 on OpenVMS Alpha V8.4) then call the open-source software directly.

The two C programs I wrote (one client, one server) are fairly ugly because I used pointers to reference the XML structure buried within the SOAP packet. I found a few spare hours in 2013 to go back to gSOAP in order to play with suggestions for a table-walker which can only be done well in C++ (pointer-to-pointer work in C is possible but looks really ugly; I have also seen table-walkers in C# and Java but those languages are out of scope on this project). Anyway, this time I used HP C++ V7.3-009 for OpenVMS Alpha V8.4 and discovered the resulting source code was smaller and beautiful. Not sure if I will ever be granted time to rewrite the "working" C-based gSOAP apps into C++

This thought continues below: Epiphany-5

Epiphany 3: The Dominance of Linux

Not much to say here except this: where ever you find C/C++ you will also find UNIX® (the trademarked name), Unix (the name of this technology), and Linux

UNIX/Unix

As mentioned above, Bell Labs created the "C" programming language with the intent of squeezing the bugs out of Unix. In case you haven't been paying attention, Unix is now only written in "C" which may leave you with a chicken-or-egg thoughts

After the US government finished (1983-1984) the breakup of Bell system, AT&T (no longer a monopoly) inherited Bell Labs then then attempted to turn UNIX into a marketable commercial product

comments:
  1. after 1956, Bell Labs had been forbidden from working outside the telephone industry
  2. 1956 law makers had no idea computers would be found in every industry including telephony (see Nortel above)).

MIT lifer, Richard Stallman, tried to get around the commercialization of Unix by creating the GNU Project (Gnu Not Unix) which was a total Unix rewrite. Since writing OS applications is a whole lot easier than writing a kernel, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that GNU wasn't entirely free of Unix until 1992.

Engineering Students

Engineering students, specializing in both hardware and software, had studied Bell Labs Unix kernel "source code" for years and were now worrying about the legality of this practice. Many universities began to look for alternatives and I remember the MINIX kernel (from the "Free University" in Amsterdam, Netherlands) being a popular contender. I might even have a hardcover manual stashed away someplace in my home office.

I sometimes wonder what is in the Scandinavian water supply because:

  1. the next big thing in kernels is Linux which was written by Linus Torvolds at the University of Helsinki, Finland. It was the Linux Kernel which was used to get the GNU Project entirely free of UNIX.
  2. The C language is morphed into C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup who hails from Denmark

Linux

Today, the merger of the Linux kernel with GNU programs is simply referred to as Linux although some prefer the alternative GNU/Linux (see: GNU/Linux naming controversy)

There are already huge volumes of web information available about Linus Torvolds so let me include one quote from his bio found here:

In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
Wow, that is a lot of corporate support (critical mass?).
According to www.archive.org the site www.osdl.org in 2003 mentions these partners (alphabetical order): Alcatel, Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Ericsson, Force Computers, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Linuxcare, Miracle Linux Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, MontaVista Software, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Red Hat, SuSE, TimeSys, Toshiba, Transmeta Corporation and VA Software.
OSDL is now shut down and everything is referred here: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/ but their corporate member list is still impressive.

Smart Phones

Back in 2005, Google wanted to put their Google Talk app on Apple's iPhone (via the iTunes store) but Steve Jobs refused because the app would allow people to make free long distance calls via the internet (Jobs was certain this app would cause problems with one of the iPhone's main financial backers, "Cingular Wireless", which was a division of AT&T.)

In 2006, Google made an ultimatum to Apple: either allow Google Talk to be placed on the iPhone or we (Google) will produce a competing product called the gPhone.

Apple refused which caused Google to purchase California Linux vendor Android Inc. Google then created the Open Handset Alliance where member companies would be given the Android OS Software for free provided the manufacturer preset customer modifiable preferences to do searching at Google (where Google makes most of their money).

Tablets and Notebooks

There isn't much difference between gPhones and tablets (other than the screen size) so it should be no surprise that most tablet manufacturers would power their devices with Android. (er, Linux). Other emerging operating systems, like Chrome OS (which is currently only found in Google's Chromebook) and Firefox OS are also just different Linux variants so you can see that Linux is everywhere.

Epiphany 4: Vector Processing

Back in the late 1980s, I found myself, once again, in the Field Services Lab (Training Center) of Digital Equipment Corpoartion at 12 Crosby Drive, Bedford, Massachusetts. We had lectures in the morning and lab assignments in the afternoon. I was assigned system W4 (Isle-W Bay-4) which happened to be a VAX-8550. While I was working on this system I noticed visitors occasionally walking through a curtained-off area in Isle: X. During our coffee break I mentioned this to my instructor who told us that the system hiding behind the curtain was a VAX-6000 which featured a new optional circuit board capable of vector processing. He further explained that vector processors were all the rage in various kinds of scientific computing like "computing particle trajectories" or "climate circulation models" because they could perform a single instruction (e.g. multiply or multiply-and-accumulate) on multiple data points. Those data points can represent anything you wish including a location in three dimensional (or higher) space. In those days, "vector processing" was available as an expensive option ($$$) but today it is built into all modern CPUs although most people are not aware of it.

comments: we were in the field lab reserved for DEC employees because a recent rain storm had flooded the customer lab. This place so large that it was impossible to see the far walls. When I mentioned this observation at coffee break the next day, one American Field Engineer said "this place is nothing compared to the NSA which hosts computer systems by the acre (that's 0.405 hectares for non-Americans)"

This side of y2k, modern "graphics cards" employ 1000-3000 streaming processors so that numerous vector/tensor operations may be executing in parallel. On top of that, If you also remember that graphics cards typically have between 1 and 4 GB of private memory then you come to the realization that graphic cards actually provide a private protected computing environment within your computer platform. Originally, cheap graphics cards only supported single precision floats while many today now also support double precision floats. In fact, some computer engineers look upon graphics cards as an array of several thousand floating point co-processors (think: several thousand 80387 co-processor chips).

Going even further, specialty companies now produce motherboards which can simultaneously host four, or more, graphics cards. Meanwhile, companies like Nvidia also manufacture graphics cards which do not have any monitor connectors because they are only used for number crunching.

Here's a brief snapshot of vector processing development:

Processor technology was traditionally defined like this:
  • Scalar (one data stream per instruction; e.g. CISC CPU)
  • Superscalar (1-6 non-blocking scalar instructions simultaneously in a pipe-line; e.g. RISC CPU)
  • See: Flynn's Taxonomy for definitions like SISD (single instruction single data) and SIMD (single instruction multiple data) but remember that Data represents "Data stream"
  • See: Duncan's taxonomy for a more modern twist
    Caveat: these lists purposely omits things like SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) and VAX Clusters

Then CISC and RISC vendors began adding vector processing instructions to their CPU chips which blurred everything:

  • Vector Processing (multiple data streams per instruction)
    • terminology from math and science:
      • vector: any measurement described by two data points.
        • example: the formal definition of "velocity" is "speed and direction" so adding two velocities with one instruction qualifies as a one simple example (30 km/hour North plus 10 km/hour West)
        • A collection of vectors is usually referred to as a matrix
      • tensor: any item involving three, or more, data points
    • vector processing is a generic name for any kind of multi data point math (vector or tensor) performed on a computer
    • technological speed up
      • while it is possible to do floating point (FP) math on integer-only CPUs, adding specialized logic to support FP and transcendental math can decrease FP processing time by one order of magnitude (x10) or more.
      • similarly, while it is possible to do vector processing (VP) on a scalar machine, adding specialized logic can decrease VP processing time by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude (x100 to x1000).

Development over the decades:

  1. Mainframe Computers
  2. Minicomputer / Workstation
    1. 1989: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) adds vector processing to their Rigel uVAX chip
    2. 1989: DEC adds optional vector processing to VAX-6000 model 400 minicomputer
    3. 1994: VIS 1 (Visual Instruction Set) was introduced into UltraSPARC processors by Sun Microsystems
      • comment: UltraSPARC was a 64-bit implementation of 32-bit SPARC
    4. 1996: MDMX (MIPS Digital Media eXtension) is released by MIPS
    5. 1997: MVI (Motion Video Extension) was implemented on the DEC Alpha 21164. MVI appears again in Alpha 21264 and Alpha 21364.
  3. Microcomputer / Desktop
    1. 1997: MMX was implemented on P55C (a.k.a. Pentium 1) from Intel
      • the first offering introduced 57 MMX-specific instructions
    2. 1998: 3DNow! was implemented on AMD K-2
    3. 1999: AltiVec (also called "VMX" by IBM and "Velocity Engine" by Apple) was implemented on PowerPC 4 from Motorola
    4. 1999: SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) was implemented on Pentium 3 "Katmai" from Intel.
      1. this technology employs 128-bit instructions on eight additional registers
      2. SSE was Intel's reply to AMD's 3DNow!
      3. SSE replaces MMX (both are SIMD but SSE uses its own floating point registers)
    5. 2001: SSE2 was implemented on Pentium 4 from Intel
    6. 2004: SSE3 was implemented on Pentium 4 Prescott on from Intel
    7. 2006: SSE4 was implemented on Intel Core and AMD K10
    8. 2008: AVX (Advanced Vector Instructions) proposed by Intel + AMD but not seen until 2011
      1. many components extended to 256-bits
    9. 2012: AVX2 (more components extended to 256-bits)
    10. 2015: AVX-512 (512-bit extensions)
  4. Add-on graphics cards
    • GPU (graphics programming units) take vector processing to a whole new level. Why? A $200.00 graphics card now equip your system with 1500-2000 streaming processors and 2-4 GB of additional high speed memory. According to the 2013 book "CUDA Programming", the author provides evidence why any modern high-powered PC equipped with one, or more (if your motherboard supports it), graphics cards can outperform any supercomputer listed 12 years ago on www.top500.org
    • Many companies manufactured graphics cards (I recall seeing them available as purchase options in the IBM-PC back in 1981) but I will only mention two companies here
      • ATI Technologies (founded in 1985)
        • introduces GPU chip-sets in the early 1990s that can do video processing without the need for a CPU
        • introduces the Radeon line in 2000 specifically targeted at DirectX 7.0 3D acceleration
        • acquired by AMD in 2006
      • Nvidia (founded in 1993)
        • introduces the GeForce line in 1999
        • introduces the Tesla line in 2007; these pure-math video cards have no video connector so cannot be connected to a monitor
        • CUDA is released in 2007
  5. The circle of life?
    • specialized mainframe computers from companies like IBM and Cray are built to host many thousands of "non-video video cards" (originally targeted for PCs and work stations). IBM's Roadrunner is one example.

To learn more:

I've been in the computer industry for decades but noticed that computers only began to get real interesting again with the releases of CUDA (2007) and OpenCL (2009)
Up until 2013, CPUs were connected to graphics cards over a private DMA bus. In late 2013 Sony released the PlayStation 4 which is based upon a APU from AMD. What's an APU? It is an Accelerated Processing Unit which consists of CPU directly integrated with a GPU rather than connecting via a bus. This APU appears as two 4-core Jaguar x86-64 CPUs and an HD-7850 graphics chip. Because the PS4 is built around GDDR5 memory which is only found in graphics cards, it appears that SONY put an 8-core CPU inside a graphics card. This flips the original view of having a PC with an add-on graphics card.

Epiphany 5: The Dominance of C/C++ (Part 2/3)

DirectX

In the early 1990s, Microsoft was smaller so was "looking for problems to solve" and "markets to expand into". Since many people were attempting to develop computer games, Microsoft informally aligned itself with SIGGRAPH to help produce tools. Next, they offered to do a free port of the game Doom (which only ran on DOS) to Doom95 (for Windows95) just to develop skills. Their first Graphics API (application programming interface) was named DirectX and appeared in 1995 for Windows-95 and 1996 for Windows-NT4.

DirectX is neat because it defines a number of hardware abstractions in software (including a reference graphics card) then replaces those software devices with hardware when compliant hardware is present. This means that game programmers do not need to worry which CPU, or GPU, is present. Just send your commands to DirectX and it will carry out your wishes.

While recently poking around a game programmer site, I noticed this caveat:
Microsoft recommends you call DirectX directly from Visual-C/C++ or indirectly from a .NET wrapper. Doing direct calls will result in the fastest code possible.

I have used Microsoft Visual Studio for a few corporate projects but am no expert. I was always under the impression that you could set the build-options of all Visual Studio languages to produce either "x86-binary for Windows" or "MSIL for the .NET framework". So is it possible that DirectX expects to be called from C/C++ for some reason? I am not certain but I do know is that COM (component object module) is the basis for other Microsoft technologies and frameworks, and that COM is written in C++

Here is the opening paragraph of the Introduction from the book "Introduction to 3D Games Programming with DirectX 11". (which I highly recommend to programmers)

quote: Direct3D 11 is a rendering library for writing high performance 3D graphics applications using modern graphics hardware on the Windows platform. (A modified version of DirectX 9 is used on the XBOX 360.) Direct3D is a low-level library in the sense that its application programming interface (API) closely models the underlying graphics hardware it controls. The predominant consumer of Direct3D is the games industry, where higher level rendering engines are built on top of Direct3D. However, other industries need high performance interactive 3D graphics as well, such as medical and scientific visualization walkthrough. In addition, with every new PC being equipped with a modern graphics card, non-3D applications are beginning to take advantage of the GPU (graphics processing unit) to offload work to the graphics card for intensive calculations; this is known as general purpose GPU computing, and Direct3D 11 provides the compute shader API for writing general purpose GPU programs. Although Direct3D is usually programmed from native C++, stable .NET wrappers exist for Direct3D so that you can access this powerful 3D graphics API from managed applications.

Vector Math (again)

DirectX is a collection of other modules. Direct3D and D3DX (Direct3D Extension) are two of many. D3DX is a math library capable of doing math in three (or more) dimensions to support 3d video games but some programmers used D3DX to do scientific work. This led Microsoft to develop XNA (unofficially: DirectX-Nextgen-Architecture) which is a better vector math library.

game vs. non-game

Early in 2013, Microsoft announced that DirectX and XNA will both be folded into Windows-8 and will only be available as a Windows Kernel Service. Oops! Scientific application developers have been told to use move to DirectCompute (but many will move to OpenCL or CUDA)

XBOX-360

Most people do not know that the first "X" in XBOX represents DirectX. Yep, the XBOX-360 run a modified version of DirectX-9 (despite what you have read on the web, nothing higher).

Many people do not know that the XBOX-360 is powered via a tri-core PowerPC chip from by IBM rather than an x86 chip from either Intel or AMD.

Now I guess it is no surprise that DirectX is written in C/C++ and is just compiled differently to generate code for different target processors (game console or Windows PC). Doing this in a non-portable language -or- macro assembler would be too labor intensive as well as bug prone.

Parallel Programming, CUDA, etc.

A few months back (May of 2013) I was trying to learn more about parallel programming so was reading a book titled “CUDA Programming: A Developer's Guide to Parallel Computing with GPUs ” where the author gives evidence that any high-end desktop today (2013) with multiple graphics cards (if your motherboard supports them) can out FLOP anything found at the top of www.top500.org twelve years ago in 2001. Wow! Who knew? One restriction here is that the CUDA technology is only available in C/C++ as a bunch of included libraries. Sure I was aware of vector instructions in VAX and Alpha CPUs but these appeared to only provide pseudo-parallel programming capabilities. But graphics-cards from NVidia and AMD/ATI often provide several thousand streaming processors which are available for whatever you wish; this is true parallel programming on the desktop. You needed CUDA to talk to these cards when you wanted to do math but later discovered that lots of people were using the huge amount of vector math libraries created for DirectX/Direct3d as well as OpenGL. Apparently all the modern games would not be possible without these libraries. Talking about DirectX/Direct3d for a moment, I’ve visited a few of the game programmer sites where most people say “Microsoft allows direct communications with the DirectX/Direct3d API’s from Visual-C++ but for all other languages you need to go through a .NET wrapper (which reduces performance)”. Oops! Another plug for C++

Clustering and Parallel technology

I can only recall three interconnecting technologies that made a large contribution to the computing industry

I hadn't given much thought to clustering or parallel software on microcomputers until I received this recent (2013) advert from Intel for two products:

These products were designed to plug into the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment) targeted at Windows or Linux. However, after visiting the Intel site on 2013-07-20 it appears that these Windows-based tools now only generate code for Linux targets. I'm not sure if a windows flavor is around the corner or not.

This thought continues below: Epiphany-19

Epiphany 6: Digital Entertainment Evolves (Part 2/2)

Two PS3 games were released in 2013 which were head and shoulders above all others.

The Last of Us - Is a movie-quality experience about future life after a biological holocaust. In part of the game, YOU play the roll of Joel who is traveling across a post-apocalyptic United States in 2033, in order to escort the young girl, Ellie, to a research facility where it is believed that Ellie may be the key to developing a vaccine. When Joel and Ellie become separated, YOU play the roll of Ellie for a time.

Grand Theft Auto V - is played from a third-person perspective in an open world environment (translates into approximately 49 square miles or 127 square km) allowing the player to interact with the game world at their leisure. The game is set within the fictional state of San Andreas (based on Southern California) and affords the player the ability to freely roam the world's countryside and the fictional city of Los Santos (based on Los Angeles). The single-player story is told through three characters whom the gamer switches between to move the story along.

Putting aside software titles for a moment, 2013 saw the release of gen-9 consoles (The PS4 from Sony and the XBOX One from Microsoft) which included new sophisticated hardware based up an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) which combines both CPU and GPU on the same die.This was done to eliminate the delay usually imposed when a CPU sent a message to an external graphics card over a high speed bus.

Epiphany 7: The cloud has always been there (sort of)

Whenever I attended "communication technology" classes over the past decades, the instructor almost always started by drawing a picture of a cloud (usually muttering "you don't need to know what goes on up here"). It didn't matter if the topic involved PSTN, X.25 or the Internet, a picture of a cloud was usually nearby.

Early Cloud: Networked Computers before the internet

Everyone reading this will have their own examples. My first memories involve VAXclusters which consisted of multiple VAX computers running the VMS operating system. They could be tightly coupled through a common memory interface, or medium coupled through network communications. Applications were programmed in such a way that the loss of one of the computers does not cause the loss of any storage or transactional data. In fact, the recommended way of performing an OS upgrade was to roll one computer out of the cluster, do the upgrade, roll the computer back into the cluster then repeat the operation on the next VAX.

32-bit VAX evolved into 64-bit Alpha which meant that this technology was referred to by the lesser known name VMS Cluster. Improvements allowed the distance between clustered processors to increase, and such a cluster could be seen in operation during the 9/11 attacks on New York when one VMS Cluster processor was destroyed with one of the twin-trade towers while its partner in New Jersey continued transactional processing without dropping a single transaction. (not something any company with a conscience would want to advertise)

Early Cloud: Computers in the internet (web 1.0)

brief historical overview

 specialized computers

Web-1.0 vs. Web-2.0 (more marketecture because no official definition exists)

Most technical people know that protocols like telnet and ftp are connection oriented, and that connection stays up until it is terminated by the client (via user command) or server (timeout). Most people do not know that http (the protocol to support www and/or web) is connectionless. Yep, you read that correctly; Before Y2K, a browser opened a connection to a web server, retrieved a page of data then closed the connection. If there were multiple pictures on the page, a separate open-close transaction was necessary for each one.

caveat: what I am describing here is HTTP/1.0 which still works that way. A second newer protocol called HTTP/1.1 was added in 1999. The keep-alive feature of this protocol keeps the TCP/IP connection open for a short time (programmable by the server) while the client makes multiple requests of the server.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
Many people consider Web 2.0 the ability to do business over the web which would be impossible without the secure transmission of information.
Definitions for browsers:
http: non-secure web transactions (usually on port 80)
https: secure transactions usually on port 443 using (https = http with security)
Experiments in Secure Network Programming beginning in 1993 resulted with Netscape developing SSLv1 in 1994 which was never released. SSLv2 was released in 1995 with a number of security flaws which resulted in the release of SSLv3 in 1996. And now the story takes a strange twist.

The Browser Wars

Microsoft was a little late in recognizing the importance of the internet so went to war with its perceived rival, Netscape.  Netscape was not able to defend themselves against the attack from Microsoft (the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust law suit against Microsoft in 1998 citing monopolistic behavior). Netscape placed a lot of their software into the public domain (open-source) in February of 1998. Netscape was acquired by AOL (America Online) in November of 1998. Even though the software was in the public domain, AOL employees tinkered with it as if it was their own product but kept released software into the public domain. And here the story gets stranger.

One programmer, or perhaps it was a team, wanted to triple encode session keys in SSLv3 and so wrote "C" routines to do so. But made a mistake in the declaration of one "C" variable making it a "long" (32-bits) rather than a "long long" (64-bits). This had the effect of reducing the resultant key space to 25% which would be easier to crack. No one knows how much of this open-source code mad it into other products.

  1. Most programmers aware of the debacle fixed the problem then moved on
  2. People at the IETF worried that any secure system communicating with an unfixed SSL3 system would be hackable so they introduced a fourth protocol as well as a new API to call it.

Enter TLS1

The IETF improved upon SSLv3.0 and might have called their new protocol SSLv3.1 or SSLv4.0 but, since they did not want people to continue to use the old libraries or even accidentally link against them, they named their new protocol TLSv1.0 (Transport Layer Security). They also modified the calling structure to prevent accidental linking to old libraries. Security improvements continued with TLSv1.1 which morphed into TLSv1.2

Conclusions

Not only has security allowed consumers to securely purchase goods from online sites using credit cards and/or PayPal, it has allowed many companies to put their corporate records into computers located in the cloud. One neat feature of cloud computers is their ability to automatically backup data to other cloud computers located around the world. Companies would only do this if it was secure.

Oracle Corporation

Almost anyone alive today will recognize that Oracle has been very successful in getting their flagship database product connected to communications networks, including the internet. The following timeline may shed some light on Oracle's view of these phrases.

Product Year Comments
Oracle 8 1997
Oracle 8i 1999 i = internet (implemented by incorporating a built in JAVA VM)
Oracle 9i 2001
Oracle 10g 2003 g = grid computing
Oracle 11g 2007
Oracle 12c 2013 c = cloud computing

Epiphany 8: A huge amount of technological change is due to video gaming

video cards

solid matter displays

3d display technology

cloud computing

AAA Games

Okay so as near as I can tell, the phrase "triple-A game" is a marketing term created by the video game industry to distinguish "big budget projects" from the indie community. Anyway, here are what some industry-watchers think are the unofficial criteria for a triple-A label in 2015:

That last item should raise a few eyebrows for several reasons:

Epiphany 9: Game consoles lead, PCs follow?

Buses

Originally, video cards were just another peripheral device sitting out on the relatively slow ISA bus (Industry Standard Architecture bus) but in order to produce higher quality "generated" video the CPU needed a faster path to the video card. The ISA bus led to the EISA bus (Extended ISA bus) which led to the PCI bus (Peripheral Component Interconnect bus) but this was still too slow for generated video so Intel created the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) which allowed the video card to sit on a high-speed bus directly connected to the CPU. Industry did not take kindly to this proprietary approach and so countered by creating PCIe (PCI express) bus with Intel being one of the partners.

{ in this discussion I have purposely ignored technology that didn't take root like PCI-X etc. }

Memory

Over the years we've seen both CPUs and RAM memory get faster. The fastest memory has always been SRAM (Static RAM) but it was too expensive so vendors relied upon slower DRAM (Dynamic RAM) which led to DDR then DDR2 then DDR3.

With video cards now being electrically closer to the CPU, it was time for video card vendors to raise the ante with their own improvements. Because video memory is accessed differently than main system memory, video card manufacturers optimized DRAM designs then prefixed their acronyms with a "G" for graphic.

Architecture

Okay so up until 2013, video cards were something you added to a computer system. In November of 2013, Sony released their PS4 (Play Station 4). All of main memory is composed of GDDR5 memory and the ATI portion of the 8-core Jaguar CPU has full-direct access to memory (as does the CPU). It is almost as if Sony put a CPU inside a video card rather than a video card inside a CPU-based computer system.

Cores

Back in 2005, Microsoft released the XBOX-360 sporting a tri-core PowerPC CPU manufactured by IBM. Around the same time, Sony released the PlayStation 3 which employed an 8-core Cell Processor (7x SP6E; 1 x PPE) manufactured by IBM. This doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize there were no multi-core CPU systems available in the retail marketplace. Yep, the fastest retail hardware was only available as a gaming console.

In 2013, Microsoft released the XBOX-One and Sony released the PlayStation 4 and both platforms are based upon an 8-core Jaguar APU manufactured by AMD. What's an APU? It is a CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) into one chip (or chip carrier). I do not need to point out that 8-core chips are not yet available in the retail market. Video consoles still lead the way

In 2016, Intel released a new core-i7 desktop processor featuring 10 cores (this extreme edition was aimed at the gaming community)