From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On 5/02/2025 8:25 pm, Arno Welzel wrote:

Newyana2, 2025-02-03 21:15:

<Snip>

Lawrence just spends his days trying to one-up other people,
especially with tech trivia. Why do you let him?

SSD is unambiguous. Like you, I don't call it a flash drive. I
don't call anything flash. There are USB sticks, SSDs and SD
cards. The type of data strorage they use is not a practical
concern. Those terms are specific in terms of IDing the item.

Well - it was not about not calling SSD "flash media". The origin of
this discussion was this sentence by Carlos:

"Also I *never* edit a file residing in flash storage."

And "flash storage" or "flash memory" is the name for a storage
technology. SSD is "flash storage" as well as USB sticks or SD cards,
because all these media use the same basic technology, just with
different detail implementations like wear leveling etc..

Also see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory> and the
sources referred there.

Of course you can always decide to only call an SD card "flash media"
and anything else working with the same technology "SSD" and "USB
stick" depending on what you use exactly. But using technical terms
this way makes any discussion about technology quite difficoult -
because then you always need to know, that a person understands as
"flash media". One might see only SD cards as "flash media" while
another one would call a USB stick as "flash media".

In a similar feign, might one include a Floppy Disk (remember them??) as
a form of "flash media"?? ;-P
--
Daniel70
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On Sun, 27 Apr 2025 20:23:42 +1000, Daniel70 wrote :

That's an insightful question, where it's my estimate that something like
one in a thousand people understand enough of portable storage in this
context to make it so convenient that it's actually seamless to do.

Thank you for your detailed response.

My query stemmed from my 'belief' that you were working with just the
phone and the old and new SD Cards. Only one SD plugged in at a time so
how did you get data from one to the other ..... unless you removed the "Phone System" SD (losing the phone function, maybe), plugged in the
"new" SD then did the tranfer from "old" SD content to "new" SD then reorganised things so you could plug in the "Phone System" SD again.

You don't have a PC?

Where do you live?
On Mount Everest?

If you're in the middle of nowhere, then you use the clusterfuck method.
You know the clusterfuck method. It's what Apple sells all day every day.

Everest is at ~30K feet & the lowest comms satellites are ~350 miles.
A round trip is about 700 miles but you have to add the server connection.
So let's just count it at 4 hops of ~350 miles which is ~1500 miles.

Instead of going a few inches back and forth in two hops to your PC,
what you seem to be proposing is about 1500 miles to do the same thing?

I get it that all Apple owners think nothing of that clusterfuck.
But it's one of the reasons Apple users are so paranoid about encryption.

But, you're the one asking the questions, so here's your rightful answer.

I get it that your situation is you sit on top of Mount Everest, which is
as far as you can get from your home PC, so you have only the Internet.

Step one of the Apple clusterfuck is you purchase 64GB of cloud storage.
Don't forget that step because it's part of why Apple is so profitable.

Then, since you have no access to anything but the Internet (which is how
the Apple clusterfuck method works, as you must be aware of by now), you
upload to the satellite your 64GB of data from the top of Mount Everest.

Luckily, that's the SHORTEST distance that the Apple clusterfuck works at.
But that's only one hop of 350 miles because the satellite has to log into
the Cupertino matrix to store your 64GB of data on that sd card, right?

So your precious private data just went 700 miles to be on the cloud.

Then you shut the phone; swap out the sd cards; and boot the phone back.
And then you download back the 64 GB of data stored on the Apple cloud.

That's another two hops, so add another 700 miles for your private data.
(And a bunch of Internet hosts in between, some of whom are nefarious).

Voila!

After pushing your data 700 miles and pulling it back another 700 miles,
you have successfully completed an Apple clusterfuck round trip for data.

Instead of copying your private data directly the few inches from your PC. Congratulations.
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no rCLboot ROMrCY. The first-stage bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

(No doubt seasoned operators had this memorized.) It was handy that
this could be preserved across power cycles, assuming it didnrCOt get overwritten by some wayward buggy program.

Then there were applications that ran without an OS as such. For
example, on the PDP-8, you could load a BASIC interpreter. This would
take about 20 minutes to load off paper tape. So the fact that a
power cycle did not wipe memory was helpful if you had a lot of BASIC programs to run.

--
Daniel70
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

I used similar machines ((16-bit instead of 12-bit) HP2116 and later)
and toggling the precursor to the BBL (Basic Binary Loader) in the late
60s, early 70s.

In 1982, I was already using 32-bit (HP) Unix machines which had
firmware bootloaders and also the earlier/same_time 16-bit HP RTE (Real
Time Executive) machines had firmware bootloaders many years before
that.

(No doubt seasoned operators had this memorized.) It was handy that
this could be preserved across power cycles, assuming it didn?t get overwritten by some wayward buggy program.

Then there were applications that ran without an OS as such. For
example, on the PDP-8, you could load a BASIC interpreter. This would
take about 20 minutes to load off paper tape. So the fact that a
power cycle did not wipe memory was helpful if you had a lot of BASIC programs to run.

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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On 14/05/2025 10:54 pm, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage
bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

For computing, yes, that might seem rather late ... but for its purpose (Training us in how an Aust Army Direction Finding system worked) it was
quite reasonable. I don't know what the actual DF system used.
--
Daniel70
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From Newsgroup: comp.editors

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 14/05/2025 10:54 pm, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage
bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

For computing, yes, that might seem rather late ... but for its purpose (Training us in how an Aust Army Direction Finding system worked) it was quite reasonable. I don't know what the actual DF system used.

I see! Yes. Defense Force systems have a very long lifecycle. In
aerospace even longer, for obvious reasons.

They used HP 21MX (16-bit) mini-computers in some missiles. At the
time, it felt rather strange, letting an expensive computer
self-destruct. Sadly enough, these days it's no longer strange at all!
:-(
--- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.editors

On 17/05/2025 12:13 am, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 14/05/2025 10:54 pm, Frank Slootweg wrote:

Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:

So you never used core memory.

Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent*
memory, even when it can be used this way.

It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on
machines from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?.
The first-stage bootloader was typically around a dozen
machine instructions or so, which had to be hand- entered
using front-panel switches.

I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

That seems rather late!

For computing, yes, that might seem rather late ... but for its
purpose (Training us in how an Aust Army Direction Finding system
worked) it was quite reasonable. I don't know what the actual DF
system used.

I see! Yes. Defense Force systems have a very long lifecycle. In
aerospace even longer, for obvious reasons.

They used HP 21MX (16-bit) mini-computers in some missiles. At the
time, it felt rather strange, letting an expensive computer
self-destruct. Sadly enough, these days it's no longer strange at
all! :-(

Hey, if that missile is aimed at my next door neighbour, I'm glad they
are allowing those "expensive computers" to self-destruct. ;-P
--
Daniel70
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