Vaccinations; recent developments

[Pirate88179]

Joel:

Do you even know who this guy is?

His autographed photo is hanging here on the wall at Pirate Labs.
(I blacked out my last name to protect the guilty, the innocent need no protection)

Bill

PS  I'll give you a hint...that is the Apple II in the photo with him.

[SeaMonkey]

I was more of a 6502 man myself.  In fact right now I'm attempting to help out a friend and resurrect one of their machines which has no OS and nobody they know has media with the OS on it. I have an electronic copy of the OS from the internet.  So I'm attempting to bulk load it into memory over RS232.

Fun, fun, fun!

Aye, it does sound like fun!  The 6502 had/has some unique
features amongst the early microprocessors.

Would you mind telling which "machine" you're working with?

Apple?  Commodore?  Atari?  Presuming that it is one of the
home computers from that era.

The OS was generally found on a ROM which could be replaced
with an EPROM if desired for added flexibility. Perhaps the machine
you're working with loaded the OS from a floppy or cassette?

[sarkeizen]

Aye, it does sound like fun!  The 6502 had/has some unique features amongst the early microprocessors.

In what sense?
It was cheap - IIRC it was introduced at $25 in singles when the 8080 was $125
It was pretty easy to make a computer from - it had a simple two phase clock which left room for doing DMA.  You could argue that the Z80 with it's built in refresh circuitry make it easier for someone to build a machine from scratch.
It had a relatively orthogonal ISA (not quite the PDP-11 but that wasn't a Micro) I suppose and zero page addressing might be pretty unique but if it didn't have that it would have been an even greater pain to develop for.
It's got a short cycle time IIRC nothing longer than 8 the filpside of that is that it needed faster memory than the longer cycled Z80.   The 6502 got away with at 1 Mhz what the Z80A did with 4Mhz.
It was anemic in the register dept. Three 8 bit registers not counting the stack pointer. The Z80, 6809 and TMS9900 all beat it out - to be fair the TMS's register file was external but that wasn't uncommon in the minicomputer world from whence it came.

Don't get me wrong.  I loved the thing as a kid and I had my share of elitism about it and I can still write 6502 assembly off the top of my head BUT it was, like everything else a series of engineering compromises.

Would you mind telling which "machine" you're working with?

It's an Apple //c - rev 2 motherboard.  Why do you put quotes around the word machine?

The OS was generally found on a ROM which could be replaced with an EPROM if desired for added flexibility. Perhaps the machine you're working with loaded the OS from a floppy or cassette?

The term "operating system" doesn't really have a precise definition.  Back in the 80's to micro users it would probably refer to Disk Operating System.  However to people who used mini's and mainframes it's unclear if they would have even recognized what DOS did as being a full OS.  As it didn't schedule tasks - most of them had rudimentary interrupt handling.  It might have been seen as a component of an OS.  Like a control program, Gary Kidall called his creation CP/M - control program/monitor.

Outside of DOS I'm not sure either group would have recognized the collection of routines in most micro ROMs as an "operating system".

For the Apple IIs - DOS was generally bootstrapped from ROM but the OS was primarily on disk.  IIRC the Commodore and Atari machines used a ROM based DOS.  In this case I don't have any disks lying around for this machine.  So I rigged a NULL serial cable.  There are programs which will bootstrap the machine automatically over RS232 however they don't appear to work.  I suspect that the //c's ridiculous RTS/CTS wiring doesn't work quite right with the generic serial cables I had lying around.  I'm kind of on a clock on this one so the obvious thing (to me) was to have a tiny program on the computer which reads the serial port and pushes the result into RAM.  Force the OS image down the wire.  Then execute it.  Effectively emulating the bootloader. 

It actually worked but the OS is complaining about something.  So I may have to patch it. 

[sarkeizen]

His autographed photo is hanging here on the wall at Pirate Labs.
(I blacked out my last name to protect the guilty, the innocent need no protection)

That's awesome.  How old is the pic?  Ten?  Fifteen?

[kEhYo77]

CDC Admits 98 Million Americans Received Polio Vaccine Contaminated With Cancer Virus

The CDC has quickly removed a page from their website, which is now cached, ( but now has been removed) admitting that more than 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine within an 8-year span when a proportion of the vaccine was contaminated with a cancer causing polyomavirus called SV40. It has been estimated that 10-30 million Americans could have received an SV40 contaminated dose of the vaccine.
V40 is an abbreviation for Simian vacuolating virus 40 or Simian virus 40[/i], a polyomavirus that is found in both monkeys and humans. Like other polyomaviruses, SV40 is a DNA virus that has been found to cause tumors and cancer.

SV40 is believed to suppress the transcriptional properties of the tumor-suppressing genes in humans through the SV40 Large T-antigen and SV40 Small T-antigen. Mutated genes may contribute to uncontrolled cellular proliferation, leading to cancer.Michele Carbone, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Loyola University in Chicago, has recently isolated fragments of the SV-40 virus in human bone cancers and in a lethal form of lung cancer called mesothelioma. He found SV-40 in 33% of the osteosarcoma bone cancers studied, in 40% of other bone cancers, and in 60% of the mesotheliomas lung cancers, writes Geraldo Fuentes.