66 pointsby todsacerdotia day ago3 comments
  • drob51816 hours ago
    That takes me back in time. I designed the original EISA logic used in the 720, 730, and 750. Those were great machines back in the day, the fastest available when they launched.
    • mysterydip16 hours ago
      This is my favorite part about HN: You have a random story about older tech, and someone who either knew someone involved or was involved themselves is right there to comment on it!
    • B1FF_PSUVM15 hours ago
      Good job. I caused the purchase of a couple of 720s (I believe they were, plus a few X terminals mooching off the workhorses, all with megapixel color displays). They served well past the demise of then-rival Sun machines. I think one of them was still in use with legacy software a few years ago.

      Fun stuff: there was one year that HP-UX got so aggressive about using free RAM for file cache that, when you tried running another program, things would slow to a crawl because it was paging virtual memory to disk ...

  • bluelightning2k8 hours ago
    Cool writeup - but not sure why it delivers on "the scariest boot loader code" title
  • actionfromafar19 hours ago
    Very "your job is to deliver code you know work".