Michael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network

@SteveBellovin

As far as I can tell, one of the 4ESS' must have been "The worlds largest computer" measured in I/O units, and possibly floor-area.

Which is why we have no pictures of a 4ESS, we only have pictures of bits and pieces of them.

For the details of panel and step-switches, I recommend Connection Museum's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned "adjunct processors" for phone switches without saying much about what they are or how they came about. It's an interesting history, and I think it goes back to the 2ESS. (ESS, in AT&T-speak, is "electronic switching system", a phone switch controlled by an embedded computer rather than by electromagnetic components such as relays and the like. (No, I won't give a tutorial on how step switches or cross-bar switches worked.)
Phone switches had to do a lot of things. Obviously, they had to carry existing voice calls. They also had to accept call requests, either from locally dialed numbers or from "trunks" from other switches. (I'm omitting the difference between local switches and "toll switches", which didn't have any local phone lines attached but just relayed calls between other switches. In the old AT&T network—it doesn't work that way today; it's mostly IP-based—a remarkably small number of toll switches handled the entire US.) Then there's generation of "call detail records" for billing and engineering, operator assistance, the data network connecting switches, and more. (How switches set up calls before this "out-of-band" network is another weird topic I won't discuss today.)
Anyway, the computers running the switches ran out of capacity. One solution was a "brain transplant"—replace the CPU with a faster one with more RAM. Thus, the 2ESS was supplanted by the 2A ESS. But you can only do that a very few times, before you start running into things like hardware address space limits. And you can't just use a new architecture without a *lot* of effort porting the code. Remember, too, that phone switches have to be ultra-reliable, with allowable downtime measured in minutes per year, very fast reboot, stringent performance constraints, and more. (Anyone who says "just run Linux" doesn't know what they're talking about. Ignore them. Let it suffice to say that 40-50 years ago, there was no way a standard commercial OS could do this. For several years, I worked in the Software Engineering Research Department of the phone switch development organization at Bell Labs; I saw all of this up close and personal.)
There was a need for a new feature. The CPU in the relevant switches were out of capacity and a brain transplant wasn't feasible. The solution was adjunct processors: other computers connected to the switch computer via a local area network. Call forwarding? Call out to the proper adjunct processor to see if this number is being forwarded, and if so to where. 800 numbers? Call out to translate the number and do the appropriate billing magic. Local number portability, a government-mandated feature? You guessed it. How to route phone calls to avoid busy areas? Reserving switch capacity in disaster areas to favor outbound calls? Etc. Without intending to, they had invented a new architectural principle!
The ultimate expression was a complete separation of the control functions of the switch from the so-called "switching fabric", the part of the switch that carried calls from an input port to an output port. If you had to reboot the control computer, the switching fabric wasn't touched, and ongoing calls were not affected. Instead, the control computer would read the state of the fabric to know what calls were in progress. In other words: strong separation of control and data.
One footnote: the 5ESS, the last conventional phone switch that Bell Labs developed, had a separate microprocessor per "line card"—and the switch could have, as I recall, 10s of thousands of line cards. In other words, you had a multiprocessor computer with 10s of thousands of CPUs. Enjoy designing, implementing, and testing your operating system… I wasn't in the switch development organization during those years, but there were reverberations from the effort throughout Bell Labs.

Leder I efter noget sjov og ufarlig køkkenkemi at lege med i sommersolen - så prøv med gurkemejetryk!

https://youtu.be/Y6mSAN_VifQ

Virker det også på tekstil / pap / fliser / karton / ting der allerede har en farve?
Sandsynligvis - prøv endelig, og jeg hører gerne om både successer og fiaskoer.

Det virker med sikkerhed på mennesker, herunder børn - jeg har lignet et tilfælde af akut gulsot mere end én gang. Det går af med tiden 😅

by TheyCanTalk

In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn't admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn't admit he was a repulsive human being. I'm seeing the same thing with AI: because it's unethical, one side won't acknowledge that it's useful, but because it's useful, the other side won't acknowledge that it's unethical.

Time to make another cup of tea…

Brennpunkt

#cartoon #karikatur

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. (Small Gods)

#TerryPratchett #quotes #quote #bot

the empty bowl

You heard it here first:

https://www.grumpygamer.com/twp2_announce/

I am baffled why people are going "oh no what is to be done" about openai breaking into a competitors computers, when it is incredibly obvious: Charge them under the CFAA. "Oh but their research". Sandbox it from the Internet. "Oh it's too hard to do that". Skill issue, get good.

As I said: Weird that Robert Morris got charged for all of the computers his worm broke into. After all, he didn't do it, the computer program did it, that's completely different, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is actually about me trying to find the IP address for my wife’s printer

Me: "So you remember when Half Life 2 came out..."

Coworker: "Er... hang on... 2004... no, I wasn't sentient at the time."

Me: <crumbles to dust>

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
(Lords and Ladies)

#TerryPratchett #quotes #quote #bot

You too?
(Note: I, Trillian, did not create this image. I found it on the internet. Whether or not it's AI or text copied from another social media site I neither know nor care. Take it for what it is. Or if not, just scroll on by. Thanks.)

Skal du/I med til #sommerhack i år, det er mit indtryk at det er den jyske familieferie udgave af #bornhack

Jeg regner stærkt med at deltage sammen med datteren på 14, om vi kan lokke mor med er mere tvivlsomt. Der er camping... mor var med på #chaoscamp i Berlin for 15år? siden og blev ikke ligeså begejstret som jeg.

Det er mulighed for vegetar mad i år og det vil vi benytte os af.

https://sommerhack.dk/