[ih] booting linux on a 4004

[Jack Haverty]

On 9/29/24 08:58, Dave Taht via Internet-history wrote:
> See:
>
> https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004
>
> While a neat hack and not directly relevant to ih, it sparked curiosity in
> me as to the characteristics of the underlying architectures arpanet was
> implemented on.
>
>

For anyone interested in the "underlying architectures arpanet was 
implemented on", I suggest looking at:

https://walden-family.com/bbn/imp-code.pdf

Dave Walden was one of the original Arpanet programmers.  He literally 
wrote the code.  This paper describes how the Arpanet software and 
hardware were created.  Part 2 of his paper describes more recent 
(2010s) work to resurrect the original IMP code and get it running again 
to create the original 4-node Arpanet network as it was in 1970.   The 
code is publicly available - so anyone can look at it, and even get it 
running again on your own modern hardware. Check out the rest of the 
walden-family website.

When Arpanet was being constructed, microprocessors such as the Intel 
4004 did not yet exist.   Neither did Unix, the precursor to Linux.  
Computers were quite different - only one processor, no cores, threads, 
or such.  Lots of boards, each containing a few logic gates, 
interconnected by wires.   Logic operated at speeds of perhaps a 
Megahertz, rather than Gigahertz.  Memory was scarce, measured in 
Kilobytes, rather than Gigabytes.   Communication circuits came in 
Kilobits per second, not Gigabits.  Persistent storage (disks, drums) 
were acquired in Megabytes, not Terabytes. Everything also cost a lot 
more than today.

Computing engineering was quite different in 1969 from today.  Every 
resource was scarce and expensive.  Much effort went towards efficiency, 
getting every bit of work out of the available hardware.  As technology 
advanced and the Arpanet evolved into the Internet, I often wonder how 
the attitudes and approaches to computing implementations changed over 
that history.  We now have the luxury of much more powerful hardware, 
costing a tiny fraction of what a similar system might have cost in the 
Arpanet era.   How did hardware and software engineering change over 
that time?

Curiously, my multi-core desktop machine today, with its gigabytes of 
memory, terabytes of storage, and gigabits/second network, running the 
Ubuntu version of Linux, takes longer to "boot up" and be ready to work 
for me than the PDP-10 did, back when I used that machine on the Arpanet 
in the 1970s.   I sometimes wonder what it's doing while executing those 
trillions of instructions to boot up.

Jack Haverty

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