OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices (miod.online.fr)
63 points by zdw 4 days ago
elcritch 5 hours ago
> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company).
I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)
fodkodrasz 4 hours ago
I wonder how NetBSD would work with the hardware, if the mentioned bugs were already fixed there maybe?
NetBSD has wide old/obscure platform, with a wider community using it somewhat more actively on those.
natas 6 hours ago
I really like to see those old dmesgs, quite amazing work supporting this in OpenBSD (at the time)
ninjin 5 hours ago
You still see interesting efforts today. Here is a dmesg from a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 booting 7.9 (released in May this year) that appeared on bugs@ just a few weeks ago (also, note who the person is that responds to that message):
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=178663407424547
You of course also have the absolutely insane luna88k support [1] and I have myself been looking into getting my hands on a landisk [2] box as the Hitachi SuperH CPU is fascinating (I only knew of it from old arcade boards and the Sega Dreamcast).
kev009 3 hours ago
Another oddly interesting interface related to SMD was IPI. Sun used it for a bit as their high end disks.
1over137 5 hours ago
This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?
assimpleaspossi 39 minutes ago
The site is using an obsolete version of XHTML. So it's probably using out of date other things, too, and not targeting phones.
EDIT: I just checked. There are 77 HTML errors and warnings alone.
MrVandemar 5 hours ago
Because browsers, especially phone browsers, are broken.
A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.
Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.
winrid 4 hours ago
Chrome reader mode works fine too
bitwize 6 hours ago
The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."
BlackRabbit1 2 hours ago
I'd more bet that they are the critical infrastructure pillar everyone is scared to replace in a super important system, lol.
Maybe one of it saves the earth rotation control algorithm which the Earth Rotation Service requires for shooting their hidden ion cannons to keep it spinning.
NooneAtAll3 6 hours ago
hug of death