Rick Altherr
On The Metal
00:00
Nostalgia for Cray Supercomputers and Alpha Processors
The chapter delves into the admiration and nostalgia for historic cylindrical Cray supercomputers, discussing their design intricacy and impracticality in modern times. It also reminisces about owning and running an Alpha station with the True64 operating system, highlighting the challenges and complexities of running Windows NT on Alpha processors.
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You can find Rick on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kc8apf and read his blog at https://www.kc8apf.net/.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
- USBAnywhere: https://eclypsium.com/2019/09/03/usbanywhere-bmc-vulnerability-opens-servers-to-remote-attack/
- Rick's talk at OSFC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrcdHHsfaKQ
- OpenBMC: https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc https://lwn.net/Articles/683320/
- Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/ https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark
- Ghidra: https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/ghidra/ https://ghidra-sre.org/ https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
- ASPEED: https://www.aspeedtech.com/products.php?fPath=20&rId=440
- Nuvoton: https://www.nuvoton.com/products/cloud-computing/ibmc/?__locale=en
- CRAY 1: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cray/CRAY-1/2240004C_CRAY-1_Hardware_Reference_Nov77.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1
- Deutsches Museum: https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/computers/
- Seymour Cray: https://www.cray.com/company/history/seymour-cray https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seymour-R-Cray
- CDC 6600: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/104327
- Alpha Station: https://web.archive.org/web/20060701073452/http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/workstations.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStation
- Tru64: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!original/bit.listserv.esl-l/BovGe3q9yWE/cqlcCYfxmbAJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX
- Windows NT: https://web.archive.org/web/20040610122846/http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1998/winntfs.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20020503172231/http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4494 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
- Windows NT on Mips: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_Windows_NT_4.0_on_Qemu(MIPS)
- Palo Alto Goodwill: https://goodwillsv.org/store/palo-alto-store/
- SGI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
- Cray 1 on ebay: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/24/cray_1_gate_module_ebay/
- root calvin: https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln306783/dell-poweredge-what-is-the-default-username-and-password-for-idrac?lang=en https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2wem6s/is_there_any_story_or_history_behind_rootcalvin/
- Redfish: https://www.dmtf.org/standards/redfish https://redfish.dmtf.org/
- iKVM: https://www.ikvm.net/ http://www.ikvm.net/userguide/intro.html
- IPMI: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/servers/ipmi/ipmi-home.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Management_Interface
- I2C: https://i2c.info/
- Non maskable interrupt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-maskable_interrupt
- Read and write heads: https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/thin-film-heads-introduced-for-large-disks/ https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hard-drive-magnetic-storage-hdd,3005-2.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head
- Fly height: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height http://maeresearch.ucsd.edu/callafon/publications/2011/UweIEEETonM.pdf
- The legend of the walking drives: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=103;t=000500;p=1
- Open Source Firmware Conference: https://osfc.io/
- Coreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/
- ChromeOS Firmware: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/custom-firmware
- EDK II: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2
- Open Compute Project: https://www.opencompute.org/
- Width of a Horse's butt: http://www.naute.com/stories/rail.phtml
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