Vaccinations; recent developments

[sarkeizen]

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

Case control on Non-Hodgekins Lymphoma and SV40
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15367569
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15734981
General Cancer
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12671021
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15286015

There is really no reason to believe that SV40 causes cancer in humans.

[SeaMonkey]

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.

Aye, the pipeline enabled it to perform well with a
slower clock than the Z-80.  Addressing modes
made the lack of registers unimportant.

The 8080/8085/Z-80 processors were well equipped
with registers to be sure.

With the 6800/6802 and the 6502 a different approach to
program structure was necessitated.  Good exercise
for the brain.  Particularly when creating programs and
routines at the assembler level before the high level
compilers became the norm.

Tight Code was a work of art.

Why do you put quotes around the word machine?

My first "machine" was the Timex/Sinclair 1000.  Followed
by the Atari 800 and the Atari ST then the Kaypro II and CP/M-2.
Then the Amstrad PCW (CP/M-3) before finally transitioning to
the IBM PC (DOS, Win 3.0) and its clones.

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".

The Operating System enabled the "machine" to be
used for useful work.  The Boot Loader wasn't thought
of as the 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.

Creak, creak.  As the "brain-rust" dislodges and
memories of "how to do it" return.

Aye, it does sound like great fun.

[sarkeizen]

Addressing modes made the lack of registers unimportant.

Not really, memory addressing on the 6502 was usually absolute (4 cycles), indexed absolute (~4 cycles) or zero page indirect (~6 cycles).  Z80 can load a 16 bit location in 2 memory cycles.

My first machine was a VIC-20.  Only slightly less anemic than the Sinclair.  However I had programmed for years before this my family couldn't really afford a computer.  So I would go to the school labs, or a computer store and write code.

The Operating System enabled the "machine" to be used for useful work.

I'd say that's too broad.  Well outside either the definition used at the time or today.

[SeaMonkey]

Not really, memory addressing on the 6502 was usually absolute (4 cycles), indexed absolute (~4 cycles) or zero page indirect (~6 cycles).  Z80 can load a 16 bit location in 2 memory cycles.
...

The 6502 Pipeline made the difference.

More on Pipeline.

And a bit more.

"Useful Work" via the OS interface has today become
very broad.

Words vs. Terms.  Colloquialisms.

[sarkeizen]

The 6502 Pipeline made the difference.

I know what a pipeline is but the 6502 only had a one stage pipeline and all it does is allows you to decode an instruction while one is executing (or fetch one while one is decoding).  Which means on average you can knock off a cycle.   It's still very slow to load/store a range of 16 bit addresses.