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That was probably by the time they had become a glorified Opel rebadge shop. I was probably going to buy another Saturn and I might have settled for an Ion, but the Astra was, to borrow from Dan Neil, "hewn from solid blocks of mediocrity." So now I drive Hondas again.

That's another difference: there are actually retail channels for new POWER9 chips. I bought at least one of mine that way.

You can certainly get Power cores with the VHDL and everything; the most notable of these is Microwatt, and IBM even maintains it. There are also A2O and A2I.

That said, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a company that put R&D money into designing a high performance chip should give away the store. There has to be some incentive. I'm satisfied that I don't have any unexplained or opaque firmware blobs in my POWER9 chips and the ISA and its internal workings are well-documented. That was good enough for the FSF, and it's good enough for me.

I loved the Saturn plastic doors. The salesdroids were conditioned to call them "polymer panels" and I got corrected when I bought my SL2 back in the day, but I was sold when in their own showroom he kicked the door in, it visibly dented, and then popped itself right back out with no damage to either the paint or the pla, uh, polymer.

That SL2 went from California to Maine, down to Georgia and back to California. It never had any dings and had only a few scratches in the paint. My Civics seem to get dinged if you look at them wrong.

I wish I could have said the same about the Saturn's stickshift, though. That actually fractured when I was in Gilroy. I mean, the shaft literally snapped.

> But the processor itself is closed

The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.

As I see it, these systems have two potential markets (some natural overlap exists): the first being people like me who don't want to necessarily feed the x86-64 beast if they can avoid it, and the second indeed being people who want a completely auditable, transparent platform. In both cases to be a practical alternative the computer needs to have similar performance to what you'd get from a modern desktop, and while POWER9 is no longer cutting edge, it still generally delivers.

I bought mine - I own two Talos systems and a Blackbird - because I want choices in ISA, and if people want that, they'll need to spend the money. (It helps that I'm a notorious pro-PowerPC bigot, having used POWER since the RS/6000 MicroChannel days.) Other than ARM, they're the only architecture with both general OS support and processing power in the same ballpark, and while IBM may sometimes be dunderheaded, they aren't going anywhere, either.

They aren't cheap and they aren't for everyone. But it meets my needs and it puts my money where my mouth is.

No. The microarchitectures have some notable similarities and cross-pollinate each other, but they are distinct.

You may be thinking of IBM i (formerly known as AS/400 and i5), which has a completely abstracted instruction set that on modern systems is internally recompiled to Power.

Sandwiches, too. Ate at the cafe a fair bit. When my buddy was living on Victory and Hollywood we hit Burbank on a regular basis.

Of the Burbank, Fountain Valley, San Marcos, San Diego, Anaheim Hills, Roseville, Sacramento, Fremont, Las Vegas and Sunnyvale locations, I think I liked the San Diego one most for selection (it was a former Incredible Universe), but the Roseville and Las Vegas ones had the wildest themes, even more than the Burbank UFO. But the Fremont location when I ended up there in 2019 was deader than a doornail, and it was like waiting for the next hit to kill them. The next hit came sooner than I thought.

For the large Power ISA machines, it's most commonly when running AIX or IBM i these days, though the BSDs generally run big too.

Quite a bit. I posted them to the gopher server (appropriate, as it was accessible via Gopher and AFP):

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu

IME NetBSD or OpenBSD are better supported options on New World Macs. I run NetBSD/macppc on a G4 Mac mini and it "just works" (tm).

Congrats. Recap first - they're probably already shot. Once it's in working order, they're great little workhorses. In undergraduate, the local Mac fileserver was a very hardworking SE/30. I managed to loot its entire contents before they decommissioned it.

It's not. The chiclet PET keyboards are uniquely horrid. The later PET keyboards, however, aren't too bad.

The FW400 MDDs are great for OS 9. I bought my dual 1.25GHz MDD G4 new specifically because it could still boot 9.2.2. Later I put a 1.8GHz Sonnet upgrade in it, and it's still my main Mac OS 9 development system. It also still sounds like a windtunnel.

I laughed until I cried. Thank you.

The funny part is I think the SDL2 porter implemented most of the software rendering with ... CopyBits!

I've had to use the CDC lab to figure out a drug-resistant Trichomonas infection. Lots of very skilled people at that facility and this is a bad one to lose; it was the only lab that did those sorts of tests. There's not enough money in it for commercial labs.

This pleasantly reminds me of the little 6502 or 1802 Altoids-tin computers you can buy and assemble, but arguably more "useful" (though I get a lot of use out of a 6502 ;-).

This is more a primer to IBM vocabulary, though. IBM midrange systems also "IPL," like the POWER6 in the next room which isn't a small system but definitely not a mainframe.

The part I'm particularly impressed with is what they determined was better to leave out ( https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare/wiki/Dropped-components ), especially the crypto and DNS portions which they quite reasonably determined they were insufficiently skilled to maintain (and modules that could be catastrophically damaging if you got them wrong). That's simply ample prudence and speaks well of the project.

Yes, on desktop (macOS and Linux). It's not a speed demon but I trust it (on Linux I build from source).

On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.

Because you like and are more familiar with the 6502? That's why I would/do.

It's an interesting device, though I'm very partial to the little metal arithmometers they produced in the 1940s and 1950s with the stylus.

Also the Texas Instruments CC-40. It was so unreliable that TI cancelled it, leaving no official way of saving files. Hope your batteries didn't run out ...

Except in this case there can be a whole bunch of parallel bears.

(author) Thank you! Was it because the cards fit badly on the CTI card edges or something else? These cards seem to be in pretty good. Doesn't look like Caltech did much with this one either. I need to get the other out and image its disk too.

Yeah, my interest in vintage systems - the C64 particularly, but even old Macs, old minis, etc. - isn't games either (though candidly it wasn't my interest really back in the day as well). It's the challenge of making it do things that are interesting by modern standards. It's Turing-complete, so anything should be possible ... ;)

The C64 protection methods that drove me most up the wall were V-MAX! and Rapidlok, especially since V-MAX! existed in several different variations. Man, those were a pain. Harald Seeley (Alien Technology Group, who developed V-MAX! and WarpSpeed, and did a number of ports for companies like Cinemaware, was in my hometown of San Diego) eventually explained a lot of the tricks later on. Some good discussion here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax and here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok .

Okay, my schoolboy French is tres terrible, but am I translating this correctly? "The Canadians and the Canadians are worried about the ass of life"?

Lynx absolutely supports TLS (2.8 and later, possibly earlier).