curiousmarc
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David Boggs holding a pic of the Digibarn Alto displaying David Boggs
🕑 Added 2021-08-16 06:00:04 +0000 UTCI just got this picture of David Boggs. He was the famed designer of the first ever Ethernet card for the Xerox Alto. That's also a picture of younger him shown on the just restored Digibarn Alto screen! I'm tickled pink that we are also in the photo - we are not worthy...
David came to my restoration basement during our first Alto restoration and was featured in this episode: https://youtu.be/XhIohWr10kU
Thanks Robert Garner (our dear restoration team leader at the Computer History Museum, and former Xerox Star and Sun RISC processor designer) for visiting him and giving him the picture!
Marc
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Marcwolf
Back in the early 80's a colleague of mine developed a board where we could connect multiple IBM PC's equiv to a 5 mb HD. This worked very well up to 50 feet away. However one issue was record locking. We could lock the access to the HD so one computer had exclusive R/W to it but that was all. A bit of experimentation by myself and I found that the interface had a 128 byte buffer. So I created a matrix in a file, and when I needed to lock a record I'd signal an HD lock, read my locking file, set the record/file lock , and then write out the file plus 128 additional byte. After the HD was release another computer could do the same. For a POS system with complex inventory it worked very very well.
