User talk:MarkMLl

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 * 1)    Degrees in electronics, ex-B, ex-LUT, ex-GM.
 * 2)    Not married, no children, does not live in East Sussex.
 * 1)    See User page tab (above) for more info.

Core on Burroughs large systems
I had a 5700 and a 6800 at one time the 5700 had actual core memory, i.e. ferrite cores, but the 6800 was semiconductor. Didn't look at your changes but those are the facts. The 5000 series generally preceeded VLSI. Lycurgus 07:17, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

XDBus
Hi, I saw your changes to Cray CS6400 etc. claiming it was derived from the Xerox Dragon. While the XDBus was, of course, derived from the Dragon's inter-processor bus, there is more to a computer architecture than the inter-processor bus. Hence, I think it is a bit of an exageration to say that the SPARCcenter 2000 was essentially the same as a Dragon (which was, after all, based on a proprietary processor architecture and not SPARC-based) and that the CS6400 was therefore primarily a derivative of the Dragon also. Letdorf 11:43, 16 July 2007 (UTC).


 * I have a preprint of "SPARCcenter 2000: Multiprocessing for the 90’s!" which I believe was presented at
 * COMPCON SPRING ’93, San Francisco, Feb. 1993. This is co-authored by teams of engineers from Xerox and
 * Sun, and describes the SC 2000 in detail- rather more detail, in fact, than I've found elsewhere.
 * I believe that the Dragon, unlike other Xerox machines, was SPARC-based- if you have authoritative
 * information to the contrary I'd be happy to be corrected. Furthermore I believe that a common- or at
 * least very similar- chipset was used for the SPARCcenter, SPARCserver, and CS6400, this was either
 * identical to or a close derivative of the chips designed at Xerox by Neil Gunther. --MarkMLl 13:33, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
 * identical to or a close derivative of the chips designed at Xerox by Neil Gunther. --MarkMLl 13:33, 16 July 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, I've got confirmation that the Dragon was based on custom logic rather than SPARC and amended
 * the article appropriately. Obviously any more light that you can throw on this would be appreciated.
 * --MarkMLl 18:01, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

NSLU2 - Discontinued
Why's Linksys marking it as such then if it isnt?

The fact that you can still buy them new doesnt mean its not discontinued

—  Ree dy  19:22, 10 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Please refer to Linksys's site at http://www.linksys.co.uk/cgi-bin/sh000000.pl?REFPAGE=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2elinksys%2eco%2euk%2facatalog%2fshop%2ehtml&WD=nslu2&SHOP=%20&PN=NAS_Basic_Systems%2ehtml%23aNSLU2#aNSLU2 which does NOT show it as discontinued. I agree that its availability from retailers is not necessarily a reliable indication I'd suggest that when Linksys themselves uniformly refer to it as discontinued it will be fair to mark it as such in Wp, but not before.

Proposed deletion of Pseudo intelligence


The article Pseudo intelligence has been proposed for deletion&#32; because of the following concern:
 * Term from a science fiction novel. No reliable sources given that this term has taken off in the real world. Likely neologism.

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October 2009
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VIOS Technologies
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 * Tag was spurious since I created and saved the VIOS Technologies page before deleting the paragraph from ViOS. MarkMLl (talk) 13:26, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Andrews & Arnold
I created a stub for this company and whilst looking for content I found that (a) you have a page in development, and (b) Andrews and Arnold was speedily deleted on creation due to notability concerns. I believe the company is notable and mentioned a customer service award in the stub in an attempt to demonstrate this. Assuming the new stub survives, would you care to move your content into the new article? RichardOSmith (talk) 18:41, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

XVCPI
Hi Mark. Reading the VCPI (Virtual Control Program Interface) article I stumbled upon your 2008 edit, where you wrote that an extended version of the specification named XVCPI was used by Interactive Unix and in Digital Research OSes (presumably in Concurrent or Multiuser DOS?). While I am quite familiar with the internals of the DRI operating system family, I must admit that I have not heard this particular abbreviation before. Was this something official? Can you perhaps provide some further explanation what kind of extensions were added. Do you have or know some references? Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:27, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Mark, I have removed your "XVCPI" contribution from the Virtual Control Program Interface article now. If you remember what you meant by this or where you heard about it, please don't hold back. Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:01, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
 * For the record: I know exactly what I meant, and what I meant I wrote. But I've got more important things to do with my life than go looking for 30-year-old documentation which might exist only in some company's archive to which I no longer have access. MarkMLl (talk) 11:03, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Mark. Thanks for the reply. It's a pity, that you can't dedicate some time on it, because if it's real, it would be highly interesting to document it from a history of technology's point of view - and also for me personally. Even though I removed your contribution because it was very vague and unsourced (and you didn't reply to my query in 2011), I would have liked to keep it, even if it cannot be sourced by reliable sources (per WP standards) if it would at least have contained enough information to make it possible for an expert in the field to check plausibility. Instead of hunting down old archives, can you, perhaps, just provide a bit more technical or user level information on it (in the article, here, or via mail, if it contains information you don't want to make public)? Can you name specific products (names or versions) so that I could hunt them down and inspect them myself, or give at least a brief description of the kind of extensions to VCPI this XVCPI implemented? I am fluently familiar with the implementation of EMS, XMS, VCPI, DPMI, DPMS and extenders in various operating systems from the perspective of OS design and development, so you can skip the intro and go directly into "medias res", if you like. I would just need to get a grip at this XVCPI thing, a term I never heard before, and Google does not seem to know about as well. Perhaps it was an "internal name" and is publically known under a different name? Thanks a lot for your efforts. Greetings --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:15, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Matthias, glad you spotted that. The problem is that I remember the reference from information that came my way via Digital Research in the late 1980s, I think it was a "position document" of some sort relating to Interactive Unix since either the two companies had collaborated or one had picked up work done by the other. I no longer have access to the company whose library I was browsing, and since it's changed ownership it's most unlikely that the files have survived. I might have coded a test for XVCPI's presence "just in case" but since unpublished that's hardly something that would qualify as a "reliable source". I didn't go into the details of what it implemented, but my understanding is that it was to map extended memory on a per-process basis so that DR could tack DOS-extender functionality onto CDOS. I can think of somebody to ask- watch this space. MarkMLl (talk) 13:23, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Found something in my old code, see below. MarkMLl (talk) 14:22, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

...Context.

PROCEDURE vcpiPagesFree: CARDINAL;

(* Find the number of 4K pages which may still be allocated.           *)

VAR    reg: Registers;

BEGIN reg.AX:= 0DE03H; Intr(reg, 67H); RETURN reg.DX END vcpiPagesFree;

PROCEDURE xVcpiPresent: BOOLEAN;

(* XVCPI is a parallel standard to VCPI propounded by a number of      *) (* companies including Digital Research. Check for its presence.       *)

VAR    reg: Registers;

BEGIN reg.AX:= 0DE40H; Intr(reg, 67H); RETURN reg.AH = 0                            (* Zero if implemented  *) END xVcpiPresent;

PROCEDURE xVcpiVersion: CARDINAL;

(* Return the version of XVCPI that is implemented.                    *)

VAR    reg: Registers;

BEGIN reg.AX:= 0DE40H; Intr(reg, 67H); RETURN reg.BX END xVcpiVersion;

PROCEDURE xVcpiPagesFree: CARDINAL;

(* Find the number of 4K pages which may still be allocated.           *)

VAR    reg: Registers;

BEGIN reg.AX:= 0DE43H; Intr(reg, 67H); RETURN reg.DX END xVcpiPagesFree;

PROCEDURE dpmiPresent: BOOLEAN;

(* Return the presence or otherwise of DPMI.                           *)

VAR    reg: Registers;

BEGIN reg.AX:= 1687H; Intr(reg, 2FH); RETURN reg.AX = 0 END dpmiPresent;

...

PROCEDURE xVcpiReport;

(* Ditto for the XVCPI standard supported by Viewport, Digital Research *) (* and others.                                                         *) ...

Intended to compile with JPI/TopSpeed Modula-2 1.17.

What I can't say is whether I actually had anything that implemented XVCPI "server" capabilities, or whether I wrote that against the paper spec lest somebody expected me to sort out problems on a machine that had it. Similarly, I can't say whether the idea was that DR implemented an XVCPI server for application programs to use, or whether they anticipated that CDOS would be running on a larger-scale (unix) system and would need to implement XVCPI client functionality to get memory etc. My understanding is that at least some of DR's code is now available for study (I'm not saying open source since I've not seen the licenses), but I doubt that that would include R&D projects or things they'd written in collaboration with another company. MarkMLl (talk) 14:47, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, this is great! I could meanwhile find "extended VCPI" mentioned in the DPMI 1.0 (not 0.9) specification - according to them a parallel effort to enable the full memory management and multitasking potential of the 386, and originally led by Intel. This narrows the time window to 1989 (when VCPI 1.0 was published) and 1990 (when DPMI 0.9 was published, and Intel joined the DPMI Committee). Now knowing that you actually meant Digital Research's Concurrent DOS 386 (which I assumed already, but wasn't sure about) may help me to verify the information and possibly locate reliable sources in my archives. If you find more bits about XVPCI, please don't hold back. Thanks again.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:53, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, that timescale is about right. I left Grey Matter in the end of '89, and my notes in that program indicate that I originally coded it for Logitech Modula-2 (remember Logitech pre-mice?) which I stopped using at about the same time since in general JPI/Topspeed was superior and I had ways of talking to them. Allowing that (I believe) the main idea of XVCPI and DPMI was that they attempted to allow multiple DOS extenders to work without falling over each other, there's an interesting parallel in the work of today's "historical reenactment" enthusiasts: somebody's patched IBM VM/370 running on Hercules to access >16Mb RAM, but it provides no protection for multiple users so if more than one tries to execute e.g. a big C compilation they're all screwed. MarkMLl (talk) 10:51, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

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 * Link temporarily removed pending more work on the article. MarkMLl (talk) 08:34, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Benedict Cumberbatch lead
Hello! I have just an immediate concern about Cumberbatch's page. Its leading paragraphs were changed and it indicated that "his parents were actors". I am just alarmed by this sentence as his parents are not dead nor are they retired from acting. There are a lot of sources to support this. I also think that the first paragraph is poorly written and the previous version is better as it lists everything from theatre to radio that made him notable and worthy of a Wikipedia page. I do think that's the purpose of the lead paragraph so that's why I am sending you this request. Thank you very much and I hope you can make changes immediately to lessen misinformation. Thank you again! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.67.82.39 (talk) 19:45, 15 February 2014 (UTC)


 * With respect to all concerned, I've neither heard of nor care about this individual and have not been responsible for any edits. In other words, it's absolutely noting to do with me. MarkMLl (talk) 14:00, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

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 * Intentional, since it was part of a paragraph discussing various types of server. MarkMLl (talk) 09:47, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

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ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:32, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

TREE-META
I see you removed the ? on Val Schorre. I have looked for something showing Schorre had anything to do with TREE-META. Do you know of any TREE-META doc giving him credit. It is obviously based on Schorre's work. Personally I consider it a Schorre meta compiler.Steamerandy (talk) 09:56, 13 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Not immediately to hand, but I've somewhere seen a comment that it was the last of the Meta series to be freely available with later ones being classified. As such, I feel it worth attributing to Schorre until something definitive comes along, certainly at the level of an article header even if it's qualified in the text.


 * Having said that, I'm not 100% confident of the "classified" story, and think that there might be confusion with other projects or workers such as Lynn Conway's VLSI design.


 * I exchanged greetings with Schorre about 15 years ago to let him know that I was still using (a derivative of) Meta-II, but I don't know whether it would be fair (or even possible) to try contacting him for clarification or whether, after all these years, he's quite simply got more pressing day-to-day issues on his mind.


 * I'm not in a position to do this right now, but I suspect that the best source of information would be at Stanford (or possibly SLAC) due to the amount of interest in Engelbart: there might be an indication of Tree Meta's provenance in his papers. What I can say in a slightly negative sense is that there's no indication that Wirth knew about any of this stuff during his time at Stanford. MarkMLl (talk) 13:18, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I have found two papers on TREE-META. TREE-META was developed at Stanford Research Institute Menlo Park Calif. The first paper from 1967 and the other 1968. D. Val Schorre was working with Erwin Book at SDC in 1967. Val Schorre was also at SDC in 1970. It doesn't appear that Schorre was directly involved in developing TREE-META. Schorre is given credit as TREE-META is based on META II. CWIC is simular to TREE-META in the way it constructs trees. However the code production language uses LISP 2 procedural actions. I would call both unparse rules. How the unparse rules of CWIC are different. They are not named by nodes. A generator function is more like an overloaded function. A generators uniquely named set of unparse_rule => actions. CWIC has variables and when used in an unparse rule are assigned the object. i.e. ADD[x,y] matches an ADD tree having two branches. The left branch to x and the right to y. x an y are local variables to the action. Another feature is that a variable used in an argument place of a generator call in a an unparse rule is instead a return value of the function. i.e. a_gen[ADD[a_gen[x],a_gen[y]]]=>...  [SUB[a_gen[x],a_gen[y]]]=>...

a_gen is a generator function. It returns success or failure statue as well as an object. Probably a register in the case anove.

I see similarities between TREE-META and Cwic. there may have been some collaboration. CWIC is far more advanced in capability. The trees in CWIC are lists whose first element is a node. The generator action can operate directly on lists. Function arguments for example. The +[ and ]+ are used to construct a list. arg_list = +[expr $(',' expr)]+; The above construct a list of a number of expr.

There is a node stack in CWIC. It''s unclear if TREE-META has an additional node stack.

So :ADD pushes an ADD node onto the node stack. ! is used in syntax rules to make a tree having the branches. expr = term $(('+':ADD/'-':SUB) term!2); I see in most TREE-META examples the above as: expr = term $('+' term:ADD[2]/'-' term:SUB[2]); Very simular to META II that had only a call stack.

I followed a TREE-META link to a 1974 TREE-META by a different group that is quite a bit different then the 67 and 68 documents I have it in pdf form.

Anyway the simularities being so very close suggests the two groups may collaborated.

When I wrote SLIC Erwin Book was vary helpful. He gave the manuals for CWIC. When I called him a couple of times I got very good answers. They were quite open about implementation details.Steamerandy (talk) 01:05, 14 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Interesting, and congratulations on the good research. So it would seem that the best thing would be to remove Schorre from the box, particularly if you can identify who (singular or plural) actually did the work, but to cite his influence as early in the article as possible.


 * It's interesting to compare what I suppose we could call "The Stanford Approach" which provided explicit unparse rules triggered by the source syntax, with "The Livermore Approach" which according to Stallman built a tree representing the entire program in memory and only generated code at the end. MarkMLl (talk) 18:04, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

I removed Shorre from the author list. Will look at how to include him. There are obvious uses of META II elements in TREE-META. The token recognizer functions .NUMBER, .ID, and .STRING are the same in both. Steamerandy (talk) 22:36, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

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 * That was intentional, pending an article at some point on GCC. It wouldn't- IMO- be appropiate to use GNU Compiler Collection in this context, since other links in the same para specifically refer to tools that he wrote while the wider GNU Compiler Collection also includes things written by other individuals or by teams which don't include him as a member even if they acknowledge his influence. MarkMLl (talk) 16:50, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

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August 2017
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Treemeta at HP
I worked with Lynn while at HP from 1979 thru 1987 and learned of his work with Treemeta to implement a version of ALGOL. Have you tried contacting him to get a copy of his thesis?


 * Unfortunately not, at the moment my plate (and desk etc.) overfloweth :-) But it would be nice to make sure that ALGOL description was preserved.

We had discussions from time to time of his usage of Treemeta which he maintained first on HP3000 in SPL, and then in 1988 was ported to hpux in C.

A working copy of the C port of his Treemeta exists which continues to be used for various purposes on Linux in C. Seravant (talk) 16:23, 31 December 2017 (UTC)


 * One was (also?) posted to Github around a year ago. I use a derivative of Meta-2 fairly heavily and occasionally consider merging a Tree-Meta core with my custom lexer etc. MarkMLl (talk) 17:02, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

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serial computers
Dear MarkML In a recent edit to the bit-serial architecture article you seemed to say that
 * Qualify "all": Babbage's computers weren't serial, neither were analogue computers, neither was Atanassov/Berry.

which is a good point -- the previous version of the article made some overly-broad claims. I find it tricky to put in just the right amount of qualifiers. (One of my pet peeves is people who put in more qualifiers than are really needed, making something that is actually common seem like an unusual niche rarity).

I also agree that Babbage's computers weren't serial, and I hope the "built before 1951" qualification appropriately excludes them -- if I'm reading the Wikipedia Analytical Engine article correctly, the first of Babbage's computers to be completed was built in 1991.

Today I added a citation to Wikipedia's Atanasoff–Berry computer article that, if I'm reading it correctly, seems to say the ALU "operated on only one bit of each number at a time", so apparently it does use a bit-serial architecture (?).

I recently changed the bit-serial architecture article to say that


 * All digital computers built before 1951, ... used a bit-serial architecture—they were serial computers.

I would be very surprised and delighted to find a good reference to a bit-parallel architecture computer before that.

Thank you! --DavidCary (talk) 17:20, 16 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Assuming that we accept programmable mechanical calculators as falling within the scope of this discussion, I think that it's worth pointing out that they were inherently digit-parallel: they had one set of wheels etc. per decimal digit, and at least tried to do addition/subtraction in parallel (the extent to which this was messed up by carries is another matter). I'd hesitate to argue that any of these were "real" computers on account of having limited conditional and looping capability, but they were definitely capable of real work. I'm not sure but I think that the UK's Colossus was bit-parallel, and it was probably about as general-purpose as the early incarnations of Eniac. I suppose that we could add to that that Stibitz's relay adder had two inputs rather than a single input plus a storage element, and the description at https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Relays/Stibitz.html certainly sounds like a parallel machine.


 * I suspect that the Harvard Mark I was parallel, and I suspect that at least one of the later Zuse designs was as well. I think that Eniac was serial, and via Stan Frankel that inspired e.g. the LGP-30... plus a whole lot of accounting machines which weren't really superceded until the microprocessor became economically viable in the late 70s.


 * Useful reference: http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/bit-by-bit-contents/front-matter/title-pages/ Perhaps we should be asking Prof. David Brailsford's opinion :-) MarkMLl (talk) 19:51, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

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Eagleash (talk) 13:20, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Concern regarding Draft:Streak test (mineralogy)
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Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 14:01, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

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