Thread: DOS Games?

Originally Posted by Tombie

Didn’t Moore update his prediction early on?
Extended it to over twice the original timeframe...

The drop in technology advances is that much, Moores law is like a pedal powered car compared to a V8 street car... No comparison any more...

I remember reading a computer magazine a month after the latest IBM clone came out, the magazine said it would be released soon, funny, I was using one at a friends...

Like the first notebook in Australia, came out in a magazine a few months later, they said they would be selling them in Australia soon as they have just been manufactured in Japan... I got to poke my nose around this thing, we where commenting about the graphics, 256 shades of grey... The friend who brung it into the club meeting, had just hopped off the plane from Japan, 10 minutes after he got to the meeting, the Notebook was sold but delivery was a week later... My best friend bought it after I said it was the quickest thing I had used... Back then the changes where faster than the media could publish, Macs where even improving quickly, IBM built new servers on new technology and most cloned cpu';s where being improved quickly...

Bio Menace..... FTW

Originally Posted by Wraithe

Mick_Marsh, do you remember how they said "Moores law" would never be broken... I think it got smashed 10 years ago, then stomped on and thrown in the bin...

Still the cheapest and easiest way to process large quantities of mathematical data, is using a cluster...

Half a dozen nodes and one server to act as master and you have quite a bit of processing power...

Imagine, Motherboard/ram/cpu/powersupply/ethernet cable x 20 all connected to a hub and one pc for the server...

I did it with 4 nodes and my desktop... was fun watching projects process a lot quicker and the warmth on cold nights made it nice... Today I have a laptop with 20 times the speed alone but if I built a 4 node cluster with todays cpus it would be a machine...

Concept of quantum computing is interesting but it would be nice if they built a unit for desktops or laptops... Sadly it will be like the parallel processing ideas, took years to happen...

I was listening to an astrophysicist a year or so ago. He needed to get some time on a supercomputer to do some number crunching. Couldn't get it so he built his own with a stack of PS4s running Linux.

Originally Posted by Mick_Marsh

I was listening to an astrophysicist a year or so ago. He needed to get some time on a supercomputer to do some number crunching. Couldn't get it so he built his own with a stack of PS4s running Linux.

Not surprised, it dont take a genius to build a cluster... The movie Titanic had the computer graphics done on a cluster, done the graphics in such a short period of time, they spent days double checking as they thought some thing had gone wrong... It had, there calculation of time!
Unlike a group of individual computers working on sections of the graphics, a cluster has only one computer working, the rest have small chunks of data to process only the computer acts like a central hub, giving jobs and receiving completed work.. This method mean the nodes do a lot more processing and less time bottlenecking the cpu with unwarranted processing jobs, like harddrive access, audio etc etc and the OS is tiny compared to a desktop mpc, thus faster, bit like dos compared to a GUI os...
Oh wow, back to DOS!...

Beowulf was one application for controlling nodes in a cluster... Dont know if its even around now and if it is, its probably pay to use now...

Originally Posted by Mick_Marsh

I was listening to an astrophysicist a year or so ago. He needed to get some time on a supercomputer to do some number crunching. Couldn't get it so he built his own with a stack of PS4s running Linux.

That's a reasonably common practice in the hacker community as well. And PS4s are CHEAP these days.

Originally Posted by Wraithe

Oh wow, back to DOS!...

UNIX, thanks.

Originally Posted by johntins

UNIX, thanks.

I stopped playing with UNIX about 1992...
I only use LINUX now, may see(and get blinded) an occasional windows system, but prefer to open and close windows using the handles... Occasionally throw things out of windows too!

Wasn't Linus very good for putting his lil' os up on the BBS so we could all see what he had tried to do... I mean honestly, we thought it would never get finished and few would use it except us computer huts.. Truth is, its still not finished, he keeps moving the goal posts and adding or removing things... Hmm now where is those discs of RH5 gone...

Actually when I had my cluster running, most of the control was done in bash in a terminal... Thats all changed, graphical interfaces now(GUI for the modern person)...

Ah memories
First game was Zork
Always a worry when you keeep your msdos 1 disk
Pick or turbo CPM anyone
OS/2 was my true love
Bought msdos 3.3 source code once, a snip at $100,000
Took an Australian made 80286 computer to Comdex and creamed the new 80386 :-)
Then i became an AS/400 junkie
Now im a manager with a smartphone and tablet :-(