I found this browsing around looking at old PC cases, when I came across a picture of a baby AT case, and I thought I remembered what it was from, a great magazine article showing how to assemble a PC.

So thankfully over on archive.org they have a PDF of the magazine, along with the archive of Compute! magazines!  And of all places atari magazines has the full text, along with black and white pictures of the article.

For those inclined to follow it starts on page 20.

In a lot of ways the industry really hasn’t changes, and in the spirit of this, you can still assemble your own machine.  Luckily the prices have fallen like a rock compared to $1000 in 1990 dollars or about $1875 US (or $2596.31 Canadian!!)  For those prices you can build a machine that would put a 12Mhz 286 with a 20 megabyte (YES MEGABYTE) hard disk, and mono graphics.

For me, this article is what finally got me off of the Commodore 64 I had as a child.  1990 was not a good year in Canada, and getting that Amiga 500 I wanted so badly just wasn’t going to happen.  My parents would not let me get something that expensive, however I could get a component for a 286 a little bit at a time.  I was lucky to secure a 286 motherboard, used for $30 which was a great start. In around 6 months, I had finally amassed enough parts to power it on.

Another fantastic book Upgrading and Repairing Pcs by Scott Mueller was, and surprisingly the 3rd edition is also available on archive.org!  I rented this out at the library constantly, and it was a wealth of information on how the PC actually worked, what chips did what, and it went on and on about the amazing promise that was OS/2.  Keep in mind it was 1990 already, and even in May, PC Magazine was hyping the awesomeness that was going to be Microsoft OS/2 2.0.  All of that changed of course with the sales success that was Windows 3.0.  And back in Canada circa 1990 I couldn’t find anyone who had OS/2 to test, sell or anything.  It really was a MS-DOS and Windows world.  Heck even back then I couldn’t afford a real copy of MS-DOS so instead I used DR-DOS.

I got this on a trip to the United States for something insanely cheap like $5.  nobody wanted it, as it was then, or today end users don’t know or care about operating systems.

So that is what got me started, sure all my friends either had Amigas or even more powerful 386 computers, and I had an ancient Commodore 64.  It was nice upgrading up and out of the 8bit world, but my trip wasn’t the easy buy a new machine, but rather get a new component like a CGA card, then wait a month, and a floppy controller, then a diskette drive..   Although once I got a power supply, and keyboard it was pretty awesome turning it on, hearing it beep, and loading DR-DOS from diskette over CGA on a TV.

The first game I got was the Tex Murphy game, Mean streets, which features awesome PC speaker ‘music’.

Compare the ‘awesome’ CGA graphics to the VGA graphcs I’d have to wait for another 4 years before I could afford the ultra expensive VGA card + monitor.

256 colours!  Not bad for 1989 software.  Just as they were able to do audio playback over the speaker, not requiring a then expensive audio card.  Compared to the normal beeps, and low res, low color games like Kings Quest, Mean Streets really blew them away!.. Even if it was yet another point and click.

Fun times indeed.  After that I got a 20MB disk, that had issues starting so I’d pop the top off, and spin the spindle manually to get it working.  Absolutely crazy, and it worked for months until I accidentally touched the platter.  I was so crazy, I even ran stacker on it.

Needless to say, thanks to the writings of Bruce W. Haase & Scott Mueller for getting me started on the PC path.  But Id’ rather it had been Commodore with an open platform, that I could build one part at a time.

https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-plans/

At the end of January, SourceForge and Slashdot were sold to BIZX, LLC by DHI Group, Inc. As the new owners of two iconic sites, we are excited about the future and what we can do together. We’ve already started to take action, and are developing further plans for the site. We encourage your feedback to help us shape the future direction for the site.

Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit. As we move forward, we will be focusing on the needs of our developers and visitors by building out site features and establishing community trust. Eliminating the DevShare program was just the first step of many more to come. Plans for the near future include full https support for both SourceForge and Slashdot, and a lot more changes we think developers and end-users will embrace.

Stay tuned for future announcements about how we’re making SourceForge better for everyone.

Logan Abbott

President

SourceForge Media, LLC

So, it looks like staying put was the easier thing to do. And I keep all my insane old downloads and whatnot. Hopefully they update the SAN…

and all that jazz!

where I come from, this is the time of year to watch some numbers change, and watch Blade Runner, and reflect on that fleeting unicorn.

 

Best wishes!

(this is a guest post by Tenox)

I spent a day evaluating NVIDIA GRID K1 card, which is a GPU for high end, graphics intensive desktop virtualization (VDI) deployments. Otherwise called vGPU. What does it actually mean?

As you can see on the stock photo, the card doesn’t have VGA, HDMI, DVI, DP or any video output port what so ever. The output happens purely through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) extension called RemoteFX. On VMware and Citrix it works little bit different but I will be covering Windows / Hyper-v installation only.

The GRID K1 is somewhat similar to Quadro card so the driver is not your usual GeForce package, but the experience is quite similar nevertheless. Upon installation you see 4 different physical GPUs in Device manager:

This works similarly to having multiple CPU cores that show up as separate processors in the OS. Here is a first fun fact: you can’t actually use any of these directly, as they simply have no output port and can’t display any graphics… Instead, you have to use Hyper-v with RemoteFX extension:

Then for each guest machine, you add a RemoteFX graphics card as hardware:

In order to use RemoteFX you need to Remote Desktop (RDP) to the guest machine. The protocol is fortunately available since version 7.1 so even Windows 7 can use it. However only Enterprise editions of Windows support it.

Inside the guest VM you see a virtual RemoteFX Display Adapter in the Device Manager:

And as you can see Direct3D is available and enabled. Note that this is over RDP to a VM! The VM’s console curiously displays following message:

Hard to show on static screenshots, but I have to say that RemoteFX user experience is noticeably better compared to a regular RDP. Everything works smoother and faster, scrolling pages, moving windows is a snap. You can play videos / YouTube, etc. But I was more interested in real use case which are high end 3D applications. So I proceeded to install Steam…

Yes! this is GTA V running over Remote Desktop in a VM!

The frame rate sucks quite considerably, even in safe mode, but it was playable and quite responsive (no lag). I actually spent couple of hours going through it and except for low FPS had no issues.

I also spun up this Wyse Thin Client terminal:

disconnected my RDP session and reconnected from the terminal… poof the game was still going:

I even got sound out of the little thing.

I suspect that the low FPS is rather to do with small GPU horse power and vRAM assigned rather that with remote viewing or NVIDIA itself. Unfortunately in Hyper-v it’s impossible to control or fine tune assignment of GPU resources to a particular VM beyond simple on/off switch. The K1 card supports 32 users, so I was only getting 1/32th power and RAM. Perhaps I could have spawned 32 VMs with GTA. Or Call Of Duty multiplayer….

In ending notes I have to conclude that this is a rather interesting technology. According to NVIDIA, Cloud is future of Gaming. In fact they already have cloud game streaming service:

http://shield.nvidia.com/game-streaming-with-geforce-now

Beware of campers who now will be able to disconnect from online games for months at a time.

 

(this is a guest post by Tenox)

A few interesting things have happened in QNX area in a last month or so.

First of all, there is a QNX BSP for Raspberry PI:

It’s an early developer release, not fully complete, but it does boot and work. It adds an interesting os beside RISC OS and Plan9 to the Pi family. The BSP is available from SHC Products. They have a binary and source code version.

Secondly, in the archaeology department, this has surfaced:

But even more interestingly I’ve found a beta / preliminary release v0.4 of QNX:

Stay tuned for more…