New Computer wanted

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Or.........Punching paper tape to drive a PDP8 - the tape was impossible to splice reliably, so any mistake meant starting over. The added wrinkle was that the computer was driving a goniometer inside a nuclear reactor, so you couldn't just pop in to see how it was doing
 
Aside.

I remember been jealous of a Digital pdp/11, because it was nice and small, even though I had mainframes to work with.

I remember reading/enjoying a book called. “The Soul Of The Machine” which was an inside look at the development of a Data General computer.

BTW . The data prep machines I wrote apps for were Burroughs.

Coming back to today. We now have gone full circle, from punch cards and mono character screens, many current apps cannot yet properly deal with high resolution screens. Where legacy apps are not written to specifically cater for high rez screens, in many cases, the screen is rendered as a low res image and scaled up to the rez of the screen, and looks horrible. This will fade as old apps are shelved and updates to current apps catch up.
 
Picking up from several threads:

IBM 7040 with tape drives.. System 360/50 and 370/155. IBM 1130 with 4K words. Fortran II, Fortran IV, and PL/1 (various compilers). GPSS.

At one point in my career, my company was bought by Unisys. Lots of old Burroughs people there. BTOS anyone? Previously I had worked for Shugart Associates, which invented the 5 1/4" floppy drive.

Phil Burton
 
Gnits said:
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Later this year I intend to purchase a custom built workstation.
This will have something like the following and may change.
Ryzen 3900 processor
32GB of fast memory
Graphics Card (tbd, based on recommendations at that point in time and how much Adobe are using the graphics card for Lr and Ps)
High End Motherboard (to ensure max bandwith for internal drives and graphics cards and most efficient handling of heat generated by fast cpu's and graphics cards. Details to be worked out as I do not want fans running all the time).
Drive 1 M2 Nvme SSD 1TB for operating system and apps only
Drive 2 M2 Nvme SSD 512GB for Lr Catalog and Lr/PS cache
Drive 3. Sata 6 internal drive 7200 rpm 8-10TB for data/image storage
Drive 4 Sata 6 internal 7200 rpm 8-10TB for fast internal data backup.
At least 1 Thunderbolt 3 40gb/s port.

I may replace drive 3 and 4 with a Thunderbolt 3 disk enclosure, which will allow me easily share my main image repository with my recent travel images on my laptop. My new laptop may allow me to push back building a new workstation, as I have not had the opportunity to travel with it yet and experience how it performs in a real world scenario.

I also backup my data to an external nas drive (slow but fine for backups).

These may appear as extreme specs, but my experience has been that a well specified machine lasts a lot longer and is cheaper than replacing in a few years time. My last custom built workstation is still going strong after 10 years, but it was not built to handle 60GB image files.

There are lots of combinations possible between the Laptop and Workstation described above.

At the time I was buying the laptop there stores were running out of supplies, but was lucky to get a good deal. Not sure if the current corvid scenario may present some good deals as the initial surge for new remote working hardware has passed.

I am happy to try and answer any questions arising.
Click to expand...

About two weeks ago, I built up a new system.
  • Ryzen 3900X CPU, because it was only slightly more expensive than the 3800, which was my original choice.
  • ASUS Republic of Gamers Strix-E motherboard. (I am not a gamer, but I wanted the build quality and built-in WiFi)
  • Crucial Ballistix RAM, 2 x 16 GB, 3600 speed.
  • Sabrent Rocket 1 TB NMVe SSD drive, which will replace the SSD I now use. For Windows and Programs, DATA including the LR catalog and cache files, and some program download images.
I reused the rest of my old 2014 system, including the case and power supply, adapter card for an extra USB 3 internal header, 7200 rpm HDDs for bulk storage of photo files and backup drive, DVD drive, and drive bay flash card reader.

For now I'm using my very old nVidia 660 graphics card, because I am with Gnits. I haven't yet decided on which card to buy but it will be nVidia. I had originally intended to get an AMD 5000-series card, until I read all the reviews that described poor quality, unstable drivers that lead to lots of system crashes.

If you live in the USA, consider getting a Payboo card from this store. B&H Photo Video Digital Cameras, Photography, Camcorders No sales tax on out of state orders, and free two-day shipping. Prices are extremely competitive with Amazon or Newegg.
 
@Phil Burton : I worked for Burroughs (later Unisys) during all my 40 years career. I started with the B6700 and B1700. I liked BTOS (name of CTOS when installed on the Burroughs B20) It was a very interesting and a real "Plug&Play" OS.
 
Phil, Hoping that you are satisfied with performance of the new config. Create a folder for Adobe Cache Files on the fast SSD and configure Lr and Ps to use these specific cache folders (raw cache and scratch disks). It might default to this drive anyway, but better to be sure.

The best fun I had with hardware were Stratus and Tandem fault tolerant machines, except for one incident, where a Tandem engineer was doing planned maintenance and was really nervous before bringing the disk system back on line, so decided to double check his config by opening up the disk carriage on the fault tolerant drive system. He had now disconnected all drives from the system and atm's and foreign currency trading across a continent went down. It almost caused a national security incident. We used large Tandems also for Real Time Gross Settlement between the banks and the central bank with huge volumes of transactions. The word computer virus was not know then as all systems were closed systems. Not sure if they were happy times as the stress levels were high. The biggest shock was replacing old legacy mainframe systems with modern client server systems. I could not believe how inexpensive the server and disk systems were on the new system.

BTW. Back to Lr/Ps. The gains we are making on improved cpus and disk drive speed we are losing because we are now feeding 4k plus high rez screens....
 
Gnits said:
Phil, Hoping that you are satisfied with performance of the new config. Create a folder for Adobe Cache Files on the fast SSD and configure Lr and Ps to use these specific cache folders (raw cache and scratch disks). It might default to this drive anyway, but better to be sure.
Click to expand...

I have already noticed a significant performance improvement just in working in the Library Grid view.

The best fun I had with hardware were Stratus and Tandem fault tolerant machines, except for one incident, where a Tandem engineer was doing planned maintenance and was really nervous before bringing the disk system back on line, so decided to double check his config by opening up the disk carriage on the fault tolerant drive system. He had now disconnected all drives from the system and atm's and foreign currency trading across a continent went down. It almost caused a national security incident. We used large Tandems also for Real Time Gross Settlement between the banks and the central bank with huge volumes of transactions. The word computer virus was not know then as all systems were closed systems. Not sure if they were happy times as the stress levels were high. The biggest shock was replacing old legacy mainframe systems with modern client server systems. I could not believe how inexpensive the server and disk systems were on the new system.
Click to expand...
Great industry war story. IBM always had extremely high markups on components for mainframes. That spawned an entire PCM, "Plug Compatible Mainframes," and compatable disk drive vendors. Remember Amdahl? Storage Technology Corporation? (Yes, I know I'm dating myself.)
BTW. Back to Lr/Ps. The gains we are making on improved cpus and disk drive speed we are losing because we are now feeding 4k plus high rez screens....
Click to expand...
It's like an arms face. it's also a justification for Adobe to limit support for older releases and older hardware and operating system versions.

Phil
 
Lr/PS..... Arms race is a good analogy .... but who remembers the Dreadnoughts or later still... the Cold War.

Mainframe components. We bought a small mainframe utility, for about 2k, which was peanuts for mainframe software, which had a massive impact on efficiency of our systems programmers in terms of porting JCL decks to production. At the time good mainframe System Programmers (remember CICS) were getting a 1000$ a day.
 
Gnits said:
Lr/PS..... Arms race is a good analogy .... but who remembers the Dreadnoughts or later still... the Cold War.

Mainframe components. We bought a small mainframe utility, for about 2k, which was peanuts for mainframe software, which had a massive impact on efficiency of our systems programmers in terms of porting JCL decks to production. At the time good mainframe System Programmers (remember CICS) were getting a 1000$ a day.
Click to expand...
I never got $1000 a day. In the '70s I world for the largest consumer of magnetic tape in the world after the Federal government. The procedure was to create massive punch cards decks along with a list of tapes for the Tape Library for submission to the mainframe. I had acmes to a tecktronics workstation and discovering that I could run my own jobs from there. I then figured out how to produce card images. Management was able to phase out the keypunch department after I walked a tape request list to the library with no punch cards.
 
We had two systems programmers, both brilliant, on very good salaries ans a lot less than 1000 per day, but from time to time we had to get in contract system programmers who could command such rates.

We had a full time qualified librarian to manage our library of tapes. I remember the fear and trepidation as the day approached to migrating from paper librarian records to a computerised system, integrated into the operations consoles. Thankfully, it went smoothly. The tape management system was also an example of a non IBM 3 rd party system.

I do remember the process of migrating applications from development into production, which required the use of punched cards to set up the production jcl. As a systems analyst at that stage I was not allowed near these processes for security reasons, but could see them happening thru the glass walls into the ops rooms. Amazing what we can drag from our memories when prompted. I also remember seeing the first colour monitor (no pixels, just low definition characters). By the time I arrived, we had key to disk data prep, but everything was punched for batch processing.
 
The Windows 10 currently working on my computer was created by myself 2 months ago,everything is fine.
 
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