rchiang · HackerTrans

rchiang

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قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

I'd make the argument that TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 covers the details of TCP/IP in a very "packet and fields" oriented way. Volume 2 goes into a lot of the "data structures and implementation" way. That makes for a very good supplemental reference, but makes for a less than ideal introductory textbook on the subject of computer networking.

Kurose's book really does take the top-down approach from high level networking concepts through the application layer to the transport layer and downward. It provides just enough of the necessary details (here's a datagram with fields A and B) over a comprehensive list of all the details (here's every field, every field size, and a list of every field option).

قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

I agree that five books won't ever cover every discipline withing Computer Science. Just providing an introductory book, a university-level textbook, and an expert/graduate-level reference for each discipline turns into a long list.

See if this blog post helps out with sorting through the various CS subjects: https://tolerablecoder.blogspot.com/2022/03/a-short-list-of-...

قبل 7 أشهرdiscuss

There's almost too much volume these days. There's dedicated websites/apps/podcasts for Apple, Android, PC gaming, Xbox gaming, PS4 gaming, Switch gaming, etc. Product Hunt was a hot thing for a while and is still running. In terms of more general coverage, The Verge, Engadget, Lifehacker, Wired, and NYT Wirecutter are still good among many many others.

There was a good run of Computer Chronicles, TechTV, and G4 for a while there. These days, This Week in Tech still exists in podcast form. G4 had a short revival as G4TV a few years back. There's nothing nearly as popular these days, but there's still lots of good ones like Waveform, SomeGadgetGuy, and AwesomeCast.

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Henessey and Patterson "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" has 6 published editions (1990, 1996?, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2019) with the 7th due November 2025. Each edition would have a varying set of CPUs as examples for each chapter. For example, the various chapters in the 2nd edition has sections on the MIPS R4000 and the PowerPC 620, while the 3rd edition has sections on the Trimedia TM32, Intel P6, Intel IA-64, Alpha 21264, Sony PS2 Emotion Engine, Sun Wildfire, MIPS R4000, and MIPS R4300. From what I could figure out via web searches, the 6th edition has RISC-V in the appendix, but the 3rd through 5th editions has the MIPS R4000.

Patterson and Hennessy "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" has had 6 editions (1998, 2003, 2005, 2012, 2014, 2020) but various editions have had ARM, MIPS, and RISC-V specific editions.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Adding on some of the "Oral History" series from the Computer History Museum (videos don't seem to be on YouTube):

- CJ Date: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10265816...

- Don Chamberlin: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270211...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I feel like this comment needs some extra emphasis, especially when it comes to third-party drivers, perhaps even more than application software.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The Windows 9x series (and earlier) were tightly coupled with x86 (and DOS).

The Windows NT family of operating systems has always had the "Hardware Abstraction Layer" (aka HAL) which helped with porting the operating system to other architectures.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Well, two engineers and one mathematician IIRC.

I don't expect any single article to cover all the details of a company that just passed it's 30th year. And even then, they're missing bits of lore, like the CEO playing ping pong as a teenager (see https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/jen-hsun-huang-nvidia-...).

This WIRED article from 2002 gives an interesting snapshot of the same company and CEO:

  Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete.
  https://www.wired.com/2002/07/nvidia/
  - Quote: "What we can do in the next five years is going to blow your mind. In 10 years, we should be bigger than Intel." (which took until July 2020)

Then you can see how things evolved by the 2009/2010 timeframe, plus where they thought they might be headed:

  Mercury News interview: Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of Nvidia
  https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/09/mercury-news-interview-jen-hsun-huang-co-founder-of-nvidia/

  I’m Prepared for Adversity. I Waited Tables.
  https://archive.is/2iUbf

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Even prior to those guys, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain have the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Kilby received the same in 2000 (Noyce passed away in 1990).

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Nice post there. There's definitely a lot of 20/20 hindsight that people apply to PARC's history with respect to computing.

It's clear that just the investments that Xerox did have would have been huge had they just held on to them. That's ignoring what they could have done had cashed out less conservatively and reinvested in ongoing technology concerns the same way that Intel Capital or Google Ventures has.

Beyond that, it would have been beyond epic for Xerox to have had all the right pieces to replace a huge chunk of the high tech ecosystem by itself. Each of the successes that "should have belonged to PARC" involves VCs, hundreds or thousands of employees, business pivots, decades of existence, and plain luck and timing.

Hank Chesborough's (formerly of Harvard Business School, at Berkeley Haas School of Business last I checked) lists 35 companies that spun out of Xerox in "The Governance and Performance of Xerox's Technology Spin-Off Companies". Just that level of brain drain/distraction was bad enough at times for PARC's ongoing work.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I think it's important to note that much (all?) of PARCs research has been oriented around the "office of the future". In the broadest sense of that vision, they had a huge hand in originating a lot of computing technologies.

And while SRI has had their impact in the computing industry, they also have other research labs that have very little to do with computing such as biomedical, education, and policy.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

This article gives a bit of context about Siri's history with SRI International: https://hbr.org/2015/09/the-president-of-sri-ventures-on-bri...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

It's a fine distinction that maybe computer historians know best. Doug Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" showed off the first computer mouse. The computer mouse that shipped with the Xerox Star is credited as being the "first commercially available computer mouse".

Along similar lines, while the original Ethernet was invented at PARC, Ethernet gained more popularity in industry through Silicon Valley companies like 3Com (with founder Bob Metcalfe, recent ACM Turing Award winner and ex-PARC researcher) and SynOptics Communications (with founders Andrew Ludwick and Ronald Schmidt, both ex-PARC employees).

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole.

Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The Morningstar article had a few more details that I couldn't find anywhere else:

"As part of the donation, Xerox will enter into a preferred research agreement, called the Technology Exploration and Innovation Program, in which SRI will provide contracted research and development services to Xerox and its clients. Through the collaborative program, Xerox and SRI will identify topic areas relevant to Xerox’s core print, digital and IT Services business, with the final goal of creating proofs-of-concept and roadmaps to implementation. Xerox will also retain a branded Innovation Hub at PARC to host meetings, demonstrations and annual conferences for its clients."

It's unclear what the size of this revenue stream is compared to SRI's current revenues.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

To be fair, Apple released their iPhone after building iPods for 6 years. So, it's not like they had zero experience with handheld devices at the time.

Also, while Apple did create their first chip (at least of their current families) in 2007, they did acquire 150 or so engineers when they bought PA Semi in 2008. So, that gave them a leg up compared to building a chip team completely from scratch.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Which they got through their acquisition of Gaikai (considered a competitor of OnLive).

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Yes. That was one of the ways to plug it in to sync. I had one for a while and carried it around in my wallet.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

According to ASML, they have 4700 suppliers (https://www.asml.com/en/company/sustainability/responsible-s...). How many of those are essential to the development of EUV equipment and would be affected by this ban is unclear (though I'd expect a reasonably large percentage).

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

GAAFET is the next step after FinFET to allow such small transistors to be feasible.