eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (06/21/85)
Today, we sent down to the NASA Dryden Flight Research Facility to view a 4 processor ELXSI system which was purchased about 1 year ago. Several interesting observations: For net.space: lots of neat aircraft sitting on the runway. A shuttle mission was in progress. What struck me: the many aircraft hangers which are like garages except with things which fly, row after row of hangers. Row upon row of interesting aircraft: F-111s, F-4, T-33s, T-38s, F-14s, F-15s, F-16s, the F-20 with a film crew (probably making a commercial), B-52s, the Scissor wing, the LEM trainer, X-1, M-24 (lifting body). The M-24 is surprising because there is so much wood (frame) and it's inside has a "just struck togther look." It's next to some recreational camping trailers at the Dryden Rec Office: reminds me something you can borrow for the weekend. For net.arch: the system was configured with 4 processors, two memory controllers and an I/O controller. There are about 10 disks (8 Fujitsu Eagles), and a Hyperchannel to several SEL-32s. This system is replacing a Cyber 70 series mainframe. For net.unix: EMBOS is tauted as UNIX-like. It's to a degree like UNIX as VMS is (sort of) like UNIX. They are running release 9 of version 1 of EMBOS. It uses main memory intelligently for performance (caching) and minimizes big I/O (but you can feel this at times). The editor is emacs with a slightly different set of keybindings. Unix SV.2 is not yet running on this system. I can give more info to those people interested if you send me mail. You have to get use to things like: v --- prompt : infile > proc > outfile : infile > proc ->> outfile ^ -- concat stderr as well as stdout to outfile : infile > proc1 | proc2 >> outfile || proc3 ^--- "||" == unix '&' commands like files == ls == vms directory dir == cd,pwd == set default bind == ld == link and so on --eugene miya NASA Ames Research Center {hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPA