A Brief History of I/O
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- čas přidán 7. 06. 2024
- Benno Rice
lca2018.linux.org.au/schedule/...
Whether it’s video and keyboards, disks and network interfaces, or touch screens and cellular modems all computers do some form of input and output. The ways in which I/O happens have changed massively over the years though.
On the hardware side we’ve gone from paper tape to punch cards to tape to many generations of hard drives and now various forms of solid-state storage. We’ve also gone from serial lines and modems to 2.5Mbps Ethernet all the way up to 100Gbps and beyond not to mention Wi-Fi. On the software side there have been many different ways to communicate with the POSIX file APIs and Berkeley socket APIs looming over much of it.
This session will give you an overview of historical hardware I/O mechanisms and how they’ve evolved into the mechanisms we have today. It will also look at the software side of things starting with mainframe I/O mechanisms and looking at the progression from there to the modern POSIX APIs. Lastly it will look at some of the ways I/O is changing and what the future of I/O may hold.
This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA2018) which was held on 22-26 January 2018 in Sydney Australia.
linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see linux.conf.au/
#linux.conf.au #linux #foss #opensource
I'm not a programmer but I watch all of Benno Rice, dude knows his stuff and how to keep me engaged.
I concur
Fantastic talk, really gives a great history of how interdevice I/O
Also, busbars have their origin in eletrical power distribution; there are bars of solid copper that carry high current electricity where an equivalent sized wire(s) would be impractical.
They are also used in modular cabinets to allow safe live disconnecting and reconnection to a live bus. The same action as racking in a hard drive or card. The similarity in that action to installing/removing early computer and electrical control systems componets is probably where the bus first got its name.
I quite like Benno's talks anyway.... but that was BRILLIANT!
A few historical notes from an old git:
I saw a working magnetic drum sometime around 1982.
The great irony with the EISA Vs MCA "war" was that pretty much no one gave a fsck! Instead we used VESA local bus for a temporary stop gap for video and HDD cards (yes Hard disks had their own controller card) and once it no longer "stopped the gap" PCI was around... I had a bunch of scraped MCA machines to play with just a few years later... and have never ever seen an EISA card in my life. Oh god, yeah, and those scrapped MCA machines I played with... each card needed a bloody boot floppy to configure it's IRQ, Address, etc. A BOOT FLOPPY! GAH!
EISA cards were really popular in the server world back in the day.
I'm quite old, but came late to computing (early 90s). I only ever saw 10Base2, not 10Base5
VMS QIO is awesome - miss it
Does anyone have a picture of the old bus bar (power) he was referring to around 16:55? I would like to see what that looked like but searching for it doesn't seem to bring up any old pictures of one.
Google "electrical bus bar". That's how I found pictures.
uhm