so here the llanera connect Hong Kong 2018 next year is gonna be important right yes 2019 is going to be very important there's a series of anniversaries that are happening at that time and I think that these anniversaries are important to remind people of how we've built on the shoulders of giants so the first anniversaries I should talk about is the birth date of UNIX itself done by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in Bell Labs in New Jersey it was an opportunity to create an operating system that was portable that would run across different pieces of hardware up until that time operating systems tended to be fixed around the hardware which they made or the applications were save and so you had operating systems that specialized in batch or up very operating systems that specialized in time-sharing operating systems are specialized in V in real-time and Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wanted an operating system that would be flexible and so they created UNIX and the first UNIX took off very very slowly but over time it gained in popularity so flexible and in which other ways like it like has operating systems that can do more things differently than whatever was there before yes as an example when the pdp-11 computing system from Digital Equipment Corporation there was 11 different operating systems there was RT 11 which is real-time RS X 11 that was slightly real-time but also time sharing there was vistas that was time sharing for educational use there was a UNIX system and all these different operating systems basically on one architecture of hardware because the address space of those systems was only 64 thousand bytes of memory and you didn't have a lot of space to put all the different types of functionality in the operating system itself what UNIX did was have a very small kernel and then lots of functionality out in user space and this made it very portable as it could go across different pieces of hardware so a small kernel and more efficient design or something it was very efficient for the hardware of the day and one of the things you need to think about when it comes to an operating system kernel is the more code and functionality you put inside the kernel the more likely there is to be some type of mistake and when that mistake happens the entire operating system crashes if you have the functionality in libraries outside of the kernel then it may be that one part of the application stops but the kernel itself continues and the operating system can relaunch that application and continue on so the operating systems of that day that had a lot of functionality inside of the kernel were less stable because of that amount of functionality so those two guys who started the unix where were they when did they work was it something to do with apt yes Bell Laboratories was a branch of AT&T it was a pure research branch as you're developing products and things like that you may start off with pure research something that may not be practical for people to use but you're trying to gain information about the subject after that you may move it into advanced development where you take the pure research and aim it towards some type of products that might come out after that you may take the advanced development project and move that into production engineering to make it more manufacturable or usable by human beings and and other things so Bell Labs was doing the pure research part and out of bowel Labs came things like the transistor fiber optics lasers and things like that that later on became extremely useful to lots of people other than the telephone company and Ken Thompson had been working on a project called Baltics along with MIT GE and a series of other companies and his management decided to pull him off of that project because at that time they believed that computers were not really useful to telephone companies and that if the if the government thought that AT&T was getting into computers that that would be very bad for the economy so Ken Thompson came back to Bell Laboratories and started this little project that he was just doing for fun called Unix and he was joined by Dennis Ritchie they worked on it for a long period of time they used a cast-off computer that nobody wanted called the pdp-7 and they did the programming strictly in machine language they in fact they could not even assemble the operating system on that computer they had to cross a somewhat using another computer system producing a binary - paper tape and use that to load into the PDP 7 to run and was this some something to do with Berkeley involve - Berkeley came much later after a couple rounds of working on this and where ken ken and Dennis pulled in other people for Bell Labs people like Douglas Mackrell Roy Stephen Board and a variety of others ken would go on sabbatical and he would go and teach at universities about operating system design and he would take along a magnetic tape of his favorite operating system and one of those universities he went to was of course University of California Berkeley they started looking at it they started working on it and they would add all sorts of things to the lytx article so it's a UNIX operating system over a period of time the two systems began to diverge a little bit you would have AT&T UNIX which became system 3 system for system 5 and then you have Berkeley UNIX BSD that would come out with their own versions and so about 1983 there was the beginning of computer companies like Digital Equipment Corporation IBM Gillett Packard we really started to think about this academic thing called Unix and seeing that it had commercial use and they would start being their own at their own distributions part of this was because if you use the source code of AT&T or even the source code of berkeley you had to pay a $160,000 license per cpu and you had to give the serial number of your cpu to AT&T so first you had to even find the person inside of AT&T to give the serial number to and then you had to pay the money and if you wanted to move to see the code from one cpu to another you had to call them back up again and say well we're moving our code to this other cpu because the first one is broken you know here's the serial number now people today would think this is ridiculous because I'm sure you know the serial number of your laptop so this is very hard and after a while companies like Sun Microsystems went to AT&T has said look if we bring out a binary only distribution not the source code would you give us a lower-cost license and would you ask for the serial number and AT&T thought about that and said no this is ok if we do that will reduce your license fee to perhaps $350 per CPU and you don't need to have the binary license so all these companies started to produce their own versions of Unix some of them based them on the AT&T code some of them based it on the code from University of California Berkeley the Berkeley code quite frankly had some nice features to it at the time these system 5 code was only a swapping system at that time it didn't have to man page virtual memory it did not have tcp/ip it had uucp as its networking as a store and forward networking style using modems Berkeley UNIX had demand page virtual memory and it had tcp/ip which actually brings about a second anniversary in the year 2019 because in 1969 the ARPANET was started and of course the ARPANET became the forerunner of the Internet so by around 1983 when these things started up with Berkeley UNIX was coming into its own the internet was being used to communicate between large systems and around the world so a lot of these vendors chose Berkeley UNIX instead of system 5 because of these features the system 5 did not have and then at some point this unique stuff was seen by a Linux tour routes Oh what well there was a couple things that happened around that time there was there was a little company called BSD I who wanted to take Berkeley UNIX and make a distribution of it and they said all this all this code that was written by Berkeley and you know do we really have to pay any licenses anymore for this to AT&T and so they started to distribute their code and AT&T started to sue them so all of this was going on it was leaving BSD in jeopardy let's put it that way meantime we back up a little bit we back up to 1984 where there was a student at MIT by the name of Richard Stallman and he objected to all these systems that he had been getting in source code now turning into binary only systems he couldn't see how they worked it made it difficult for him to write device drivers for various devices that he got and he decided to start a project called Ganu which stands for can do is not Unix to rewrite all of the code in the UNIX system to be free and open source code actually free software he would say and he started with a text editor called Emacs and he made that run across a wide variety of different operating systems and architectures so that if you learned Emacs on one system you would have Emacs when all the different systems then he went on to create other things like a compiler suite of languages that were useful on all these different systems and he kept building and building these different pieces of software and incorporating and bringing other people into this project which he called good new in 1995 he formed a free software foundation that helped to run and fund the canoe project so a little bit later one in 1991 there was a university student at the University of Helsinki who started to write a kernel because the last piece missing from the canoe system was really the kernel of the operating system and a lot of people say well why didn't reach her Stallman start with the kernel first well he might have done that he might have been able to write a kernel but then he would have no software to run on top of it and by the time he got software ported to that kernel the the kernel itself would be old and crusty and obsolete so he created all the software in the libraries around the kernel so when leanness decided to do this project he was filling a void that had not been done yet and he started a project in 1991 and by day May of 1994 version 1.0 of the kernel had come out so May of 1994 is twenty five years from 2019 so we got 50 we got 25 yes and Linda's Torvalds how how old was he when he released it when he released it I I can't remember exactly as a she was probably around 24 years old maybe 25 because in 2019 he will be 50 years old that's another wrong number right there yes it is also 30 years before 2019 was the invention of the World Wide Web that was started by Tim berners-lee and that was started I believe at 1989 so there's a lot of things that are around numbers of anniversary dates that 2019 represents 1969 was the first people to walk on the moon so he was a highly technical people working very interesting computers and science and things like that 1969 I wrote my first program as a programmer 69 yes on what what would you do well my first program was written in Fortran using punch cards on an IBM 1130 computer it was about the size of a refrigerator that was lying on its side it had 4,000 16-bit words of memory it had a hard disk drive that would hold 1/2 megabyte it had a center console with a keyboard and some switches that you could flip the switches and control your programs because it only ran one program at a time it was not multitasking or multi programming just one program and a lot of times you couldn't fit all of your data into the computer at one time so basically you had to write your program to maybe make multiple passes of your data through your program to do the processing and what did you do with the UNIX well I I after I graduated from university I went to work for a very large insurance company Aetna Life and Casualty we were the largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the free world we automatically ordered 2 of everything that IBM announced no sales person had to call us when they announced it we had to headed our way did not make any difference where there was a $32,000 disk drive where he 2.5 million dollar mainframe we ordered it right away and we had a huge for that time a huge development staff we had about 4,000 programmers we had 32,000 terminals around the United States in a real-time transaction processing system that we ran we wrote ourselves in assembler language we it was a very heavy place for a young man directly out of university to work and I learned a lot from that and stuff was there was a lot of eunuchs and all that we weren't using eunuchs back in those days we were using IBM's MVS and things because remember this was 1973 and UNIX still wasn't a real operating system to use it was still being developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in bill labs and some people were Berkeley were getting into it but you know nobody was using UNIX in those days overtime universities started using UNIX because they'd like to see how the operating system was written they liked to experiment on top of it and the telephone company itself started using UNIX for some of its work particularly in real time switching there was a special version of UNIX called mert which was depend which was used and for my knowledge is still used today in telephone switching systems so after I worked for a while at Aetna I went and got one of the first master's in computer science degrees because before that if you were to work with computers you did not get a computer science degree they did not have a computer science degree you would get a degree in physics with computers or mathematics with computers or chemistry with computers but the idea that somebody would be a professional programmer that's how they would earn their living was not really blessed back in those days in fact I had a professor tell me John you will never be able to earn a living as a professional programmer I'm still waiting to see if he was right the open source stuff and monetizing open source is not an easy thing right well so after I left at night I went to teach for three and a half years as small two-year Technical College and back in those days when students came to my classes it was the first time they ever touched any computer of any type in real life they saw them in movies they saw them on TV but there were no computers in the home there were no you know phones cell phones obviously after that I went to work for Bell Labs and there I became a UNIX systems administrator without ever having seen a UNIX system before so I had to learn it very rapidly which I was able to do with all the other experience I had on different computer systems look great the UNIX was interesting it was very interesting because most of these systems up to that time did not have a hierarchical file system they had a flat file system which may be a directory pointing to your data they like I said they were typically huge monolithic kernels and here was this very small kernel with a very small set of interfaces and a large number of libraries but the most interesting thing was a large number of utilities that came along with Unix so the spell command cat now has all the different Unix commands and the pipes that separated them so the commands were filters and the data passed through the different filters to come out the other side and this was a different concept it was a concept that was created by Doug McIlroy of Bell Labs he had to write some of the first unix commands to show to ken thompson dennis ritchie what he was talking about so this is a very interesting operating system and as i used it more and more i learned to appreciate the thought that had gone into creating this system I worked there at Bell Labs for about three and a half years and then I went to Digital Equipment Corporation to go into their UNIX group to to bring about the commercial version of UNIX to sell the Dex customers I was very impressed with digital I was impressed with their management and their their philosophy I appreciate the fact that they seemed to produce very good hardware and I thought that UNIX would be a good thing I had a variety of jobs there start off with programmer product manager and then eventually I was in Technical Marketing with my job of taking complex subjects and making them simple for the customers to understand and looking at the customers problems and bringing them back to the engineers so we could figure out the best way of solving them it was in that function that I met Lina's torvalds in May of 1994 I saw Linux for the first time we had just come out with the alpha processor we had the same problem that many people have with a new operating system or architecture we had a great operating system but we had no applications and so I was looking for something that could go and that all the source code would be available because with digital Unix the source code was still not available and when I saw Linux I said this is the perfect thing to put on top of the Alpha to allow people to do research and to be able to spread the research to the people who need it to be able to spread the research to the use of source code if you try and do research when a closed source proprietary system and particularly research on making the kernel better you can't really distribute the parts of your system that are good you only can write papers about it or it may be distribute dips in your code but you can't redistribute the code that you got from the closed source system with Linux you could do that and so became easy for other researchers to help you make your product better so was it like a big conference so did you sit down with Minister Roth did you say oh this looks awesome one year what was your first impression well the very first impression was given to me by a friend of mine Kurt Reisler who is the chairman of the Linux special interest group in an organization called dicus when I was university students I could not afford the $100,000 that it cost to buy a compiler and so I would go to dicuss and dicus would let me have a compiler for maybe five US dollars and this was a great thing for university student to have access to all this software dicus had user group meetings but i could not afford to go so I just bought hardware or software from the dicus organization later on when I went to work for Bell Laboratories they would send me to this dicus meetings and I got to meet some of these people I had only correspondent with dicus - those days was around 19,000 people going to the conference and we would hold the conferences twice a year and there were other people who also got software from the dicus libraries also shared and improved it and so it was this this culture of sharing of information we had special interest groups inside of dicus some people were interested in compilers some people interested in networking some people invested in security and this one special interest group unasyn was interested in UNIX systems Kurt was the president very unusual person and in May of 1994 he started sending these emails to people to these little companies saying we'd like to bring this guy from Europe to dicuss in New Orleans and we would like to we were gonna pay his way so could you contribute money and all these little companies would write back and say well we'd like to but we're very small we don't have some money but we could give you some CDs to hand out and after about 15 or 20 of these letters and Kurt always copied me on this so after about 15 or 20 of these letters went past I went to my management and I said I don't know who this guy is I don't know what he did but sometimes Kurt has good ideas I think we should fund this so my management went to their management they said we don't know who this guy is we don't know what he did and we don't know who Kurt is but Mad Dogs sometimes has good ideas so I think we should fund us and we got $5,000 to bring this person from Helsinki Finland default god-awful places to New Orleans for dicus now for those people who may be watching this video and are not familiar with New Orleans I will tell you that there were two adult Disneyland's on the face of the earth one of them is Las Vegas and the other is New Orleans and in those two places and particularly in purpose Street in New Orleans you can get anything you want and a lot of things you don't want so we went down there oh I forgot one thing not only did we fund the $5,000 but Kurt wanted a PC to run the software one and that was almost a thing that killed the deal because we made real computer systems VAX computer systems MIPS workstations alpha systems real systems not those weak miserable crappy Intel pcs and Kurt wanted a weak miserable crappy Intel PC to put this software on so I got him one of those flew down to dicuss found Kurt here is trying to install this software when the weak miserable crappy Intel PC and along comes this nice young man with sandy brown hair wearing wool socks and sandals and said can I help you and Curt looks at him and smiles and says I think you can and about 10 minutes later Linux organy Linux as some people call it was now running on this weak miserable crappy Intel PC and Lina's and Kurt invited me to sit down and use it now you can play a piano and you can have a piano that's well tuned and you can actually get good music out of it but if you play a really great piano all of the keys have the same weight all of the key caps are the same height and it's just beautiful it's a pleasure to play that piano this was how Linux felt on that weak miserable crappy PC because if I thought of in his system five it was system five if I thought of it as Berkeley it was Berkeley and it was very responsive and very peppy and I said to myself oh my god this is wonderful and leanness gave two talks at that time he attracted about sixty people to each talk and I listened to his explanation of why he did Linux and what was happening and I started thinking to myself this is the answer this is what we need to put on top of the Alpha to allow researchers to look at how to use very large address spaces because Linux at that time was a 32-bit system and in 32 bits you could look at four gigabytes of data at one time and that sounds like a lot unless you're trying to model a 747 plane or unless you're trying to render Lord of the Rings or unless you're trying to do what I call real programming because at that point your data is is so big it fills your address space as you go from one address space to the other you have to do what we call an edge program and that's very complex to do and it can also cause mistakes in your program but with a 64-bit address space you can pull in all of your data at one time into the virtual address space because you can have four billion times four billion so how big is that that allows you to fill up one gigabyte disk every second of the day for the next five thousand three hundred eighty-six years and still not run out of address space for the store 128 bytes of data for every square millimeter on the surface of the earth including all the oceans it's a lot of data and I wanted people to do research in how to do this and I went him to be able to spread their research in source code form so that night I took leanness out from the Natchez riverboat is the last Depot to goes up and down the Mississippi River they play lice jazz on there and they serve these wonderful alcoholic drinks called hurricanes and the reason they're called hurricanes is because after you've had two of them you feel like you've been hit by Katrina and we're going up and down the river on the front of the boat was drinking these hurricanes and I said to Lina's Lina's have you ever thought about putting linux to the alpha a 64-bit system a risk system to get rid of the intel isms inside of the kernel and he said well i would like to do that but the deck office in helsinki finland has been having trouble getting me an alpha and i may have to do the PowerPC is dead and I dropped my hurricane and I never dropped a drink I said don't do anything rash and I went back to my office at Digital Equipment Corporation in New Hampshire and I called up a friend of mine now people may think the way you get things done inside of a large corporation this is you write a proposal and you give that to your management and they look at it and dig think deep thoughts and stuff like that but that's not the way you get things done the way you get things done is you pull in favors and since I'd work for digital for 16 years at that point I started pulling in favors the lots of people would be favors particularly a person named Jim Jackson and I called him up and said Jim I need to have an alpha system sent to Helsinki Finland right away I don't have time to tell you who is four or what or why need it I just need it now so you asked sorry dude battery cut you asked who to send a battery and they'll send an alpha 2 News fiddling right so I called up Jim Jackson and I said Jim I need to have this alpha sis adolphus system sent to Helsinki Finland right away I don't have time to tell you who it's for or why I just need to have it now the Alpha system is back in those days they weren't like a PC they weren't really inexpensive and they were still relatively new and rare there were a lot of engineers at digital that did not have an alpha system to work one of their own they had to go out in the laboratory and wear ear muffs to protect their ears from the large machines we had there so this was very bad that I was asking for this system that was still very rare to be sent to this person for though justification whatsoever other than me saying it has to be done so Jim says well fortunately I have an alpha system that just came back from a customer and I have it here of my office it has and remember this is 1994 it has 96 megabytes of main memory it has a 4 gigabyte hard drive it has a 4 X cd-rom it has a 19-inch CRT monitor a three diamond 3d graphics or keyboard and mouse and its cost is $30,000 in 1994 I said that's great if you throw in a six thousand dollar tape drive so he can do backups you have a deal and by this time Jim is laughing he says what are you gonna pay for I said I'll pay for the postage is shipping and so the next day that system was headed to Helsinki Finland and Lina's had it and that started to alpha Linux project how long did it take him to port the Linux on that well remember that the first version of Linux Linux version 1.0 had only come out in April of 1994 so leanness wanted to bring out version 1.2 he wanted to make one datos stable fix the bugs in it so he didn't start the project right away but what he did was start reading the documentation about the Alpha and figure in his mind how he wanted to lay out the source code tree and instead of making it only two architectures Intel and alpha he decided to make it n architectures so that in the future other architectures could also be supported we actually started the project in January the 1st of 1995 and after nine months the software was effectively ported and this was done by people who did not meet each other face to face it was all done over the internet and it was probably one of the most amazing projects I ever worked on I went into digital and I found an engineering group that was willing to help with some of the low-level things and one of those people was mr. David rustling who worked for the digital semiconductor group who helped to build the alpha and digital and Dennett David wrote a loader a boot loader called Melo which is a lot like lilo except it was for the Alpha this was David's first surgery into open source he didn't know anything about it but later on he actually became the instigator of lunaire oh and the chief technical officer of lunaire Oh as well as an arm fellow so this was David's introduction into free and open source software so you say that this is a RISC processor so in some ways similar to your arm or yes in a lot of ways it's similar to the arm very reduced instruction set so many years ago in around 1937 there were these two people one was named Alan Turing and the other was named Maurice Wilkes they were classmates at the University of Cambridge and they were both very brilliant Alan Turing is credited with creating the concepts of modern day computers and Maurice Wilkes also worked on computers now Alan Turing tended to believe in making a minimal instruction set and then just giving it lots of memory and lots of speed Maurice Wilkes believed in creating the computer to use micro code so that each assembly language of machine instruction would be doing something specific to some type of a problem and for many years somebody there is fights between them as to which was the right philosophy now Intel and AMD and some other ones like IBM 360 and the pdp-11 those are complicated instruction set computers and they used microcode the arm the MIPS processor and and the Alpha were all reduced instruction set computers and so they have very simple instructions but they use the space on the silicon to have more registers more cache and the they utilize the compiler to generate the instructions in in the most optimistic optimal way to to run the code so the alpha we would typically run it at very high clock frequencies with a lot of cash a lot of registers and it was in a very wide data bus which we could all do because we weren't taking up the so again with multiple copies of micro code and the Alpha for a long period of time was the world's fastest microcomputer who's actually listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest microcomputer eventually digital semiconductor division was sold off to Intel by that time a lot of the technologies of the Alpha had actually moved into companies like AMD Intel and arm so a lot of modern-day processors take the technology that was developed at digital in the alpha processor and implemented in their own so what you're saying is that the alpha and the arm and account like the idea came kind of from the Alan Turing already well so he's like he's kind of like the founder of what what became risk and what became arm and what well Alan Turing what he did which kind of woke up everybody was he recognized that there's two types of problems in the world there are problems that can be solved and there are problems that can't be solved so what's the example of a problem that can't be solved what is the last digit of pi there is none because on forever what is the last digit of e there is none because one forever but what is the answer of two plus two that's easy it's four and that is a computable result as far as the parts that are not solvable we may be able to get close enough for government work and so even though they're not solvable if you get them to the point where they're close enough that's okay and Alan Turing put this down into paper and then he stated that if a problem is solvable it can be solved by a digital computer and you know as long as a digital computer has enough time and memory to solve the problem so everybody started looking at this as saying oh my god this is true and they started thinking about computational and automating the processes there was actually a person who many years before had thought about much the same thing his name was Charles Babbage and he created the Babbage Difference Engine an analytical engine back around the 1860s he had a mathematician who helped write programs for this and her name was Ada Lovelace she was the daughter of Lord Byron and most people consider her to be the first programmer many years later when comment' electronic and electromechanical computers came into being another lady became known as the first modern day programmer and her name was Rear Admiral grace Murray hopper she helped to program the mark 1 computer that was the first electronic digital computer built in the United States so so that's that's awesome and fascinating the the all that stuff from the from the past and but you you also said that was fascinating to Portland Linux on the alpha so it was an IRC chatroom how did it actually go did you have did you have to travel and go and sit in a room we work with somebody else oh no though no the the entire porting of Linux was done completely over the Internet leaders announced that he was going to do the port there were people who liked Linux they knew about the Alpha they knew how fast it was and they actually went out and purchased alphas on their own to simply help with this port $30,000 alphas well at that time there were certain parts of the Alpha that had come out very early and they would end up in electronic junk shops stripped of their memory stripped of their discs and everything people go DS like trying junk shops by that alpha part putting their own memory their own discs and come up with an alpha system and a much lower price but yes it was very expensive and these people did it because they wanted to see the Linux project successful and they wanted to see a run on a 64-bit processor and that was 1995 around right 1995 yeah so arm was in those acorn computers they were doing their RISC OS and I guess well when did Linux start on the arm well that I don't really know I haven't really kept track of when because after that there was a whole series of different ports to different architectures actually David Miller has started a port to the SPARC architecture Sun SPARC architecture even before we started the Alpha Linux port but that was that was taken as an offshoot or a fork of Lee missus tree the Alpha was the first port that leanness himself had cooperated in and therefore I knew that the support would still be there you know in the future that because if you do a fork and the code starts going off like this you're not sure you're gonna have the same functionality in both both different types of the kernel and that's what you want you don't want to have one kernel with what functionality and another kernel with another functionality right you need to keep that in sync and by having Lina's participate in this port I knew that it would be in sync and by getting him to agree to help to get it ported over and their risk it kind of was a forefather of getting armed support and more yeah absolutely because then every other port to other processors could be done with Venus's source code tree not somebody else's source code tree that was forked off to something else and it's is it amazing to think that the Linux is like the dominant OS in the world everywhere else and everything well it's a funny thing about that because after I bet leanness I went back to my engineering group in New Hampshire and told all the engineers about this wonderful operating system called Linux and everything and they looked at me and they said well we've been using it for like six months we've been using Linux on Intel to do our development work because we can put Linux when a laptop computer take it out to the middle of our back yard underneath the tree and work on it out there instead of having to work on it what a vac system or an alpha system you know in the office or in our work and then once we have our code compiling and working on Linux we bring it in and compile and get it working on alpha or fax or whatever system they were working on so once again I I felt that I was moving in the right direction if this is where the way my engineers worked but I was going in the right direction because if this is what my engineers were doing then I I felt I was moving in the right direction so it was there's a pretty heavy thing to do this right and my management thought I was extremely crazy now why are you spending your time on this you should be promoting digital eunuchs I said I am promoting digital eunuchs because digital eunuchs even though it was a great operating system it didn't spark the minds of the researchers it was just another operating system but Linux sparked the imaginations of the researchers the educational people and because of that they started thinking about deck again when you are looking for an operating system or an architecture to solve your problem you usually create a short list of the number of companies you want to talk to and back in those days if you were doing UNIX the first company you thought of as Sun then maybe you would think of IBM or hewlett-packard and usually DECT was third or fourth but when your third or fourth on a list you may as well not even exist and there was a lot of people that just never thought about Dec but when the Alpha program when the Alpha Linux program started it brought made digital visible again and I had letters from people who wrote to me and said I just bought 3,000 digital UNIX servers I would not even have thought of digital if it hadn't been for the Alpha Linux project and you were saying that earlier you were that company whether I had to of IBM - of each - you would just get two of whatever new stuff they would announce like right now for example you just got two of the we can check it out the the newest the most interesting and you're getting lots of 96 boards to and stuff like that so right here you have two that this may be the most powerful this little board right here is one of the nine six boards it's called the Heike 970 and especially it has a special chip on there which is made for doing artificial intelligence work no oil networks and things like that it was especially designed and I'm going to be taking this board to the University of Sao Paulo where they have an a artificial intelligence Club and I'm going to be allowing them to do some development work on this so and and so the students from that university potentially maybe get more and more involved with the Leonardo stuff and they might be joining menara in the future right that's entirely possible but even if they don't join lunaire oh I'm trying to stimulate students to think beyond what it might be the Raspberry Pi I love the Raspberry Pi program and I love the Raspberry Pi people I know many of them personally from the years gone past but when the first Raspberry Pi came out I looked at it and said you know it's a half a gigabyte of memory it's a single core processor and even though it's great that students can get this for cheap amount of money it's not a challenge to a university student later on they added more memory they had more cores now it's becoming a little bit interesting because you could do multi-threaded programming on it you can experience what happens when you write a program of this multi thread but it's still missing things like field programmable gate arrays like digital signal processing chips like you know a whole series of different more modern processors arm has a series of little boards that we call big little where you have four cores that run a little slower but they use a lot less power and four cores that use a lot of power but they're very fast and when you put your operating system on there the operating system can use those cores depending upon how much load you have and so to teach students how to program this and how to make it and make it efficient is one of the things we should be teaching in computer science and computer engineering it is the future the heterogeneous multi-core all that big little stuff scheduler and it's at the core of what dinero is specialized in right yes because I give a talk about what is performance and in in the days that I was programming mainframe computers performance was simply how fast can you get your program to work on a computer system but these days performance is measured in a different way it's measured by how long does it battery just cell phone lasts how much heat does your cell phone produce its measured by real time support how you know can you meet the needs because your nuclear power plant is melting can you can you shut the nuclear power plant down before it explodes these are types of things that determine performance you know performance is I need to be able to analyze 10 terabytes of data or 10 petabytes of data very quickly these are types of things we need there's there's us there's a satellite up in space which is transmitting data down you know at gigabytes per second I have to filter that data to find out one thing I'm looking for I don't care about the rest of the data I just need that little bit and these are all things that have to performance and you don't do with Java I'm sorry you don't you know you need to know more than that get into the deep deep of the hardware and all these development boards and also the one with Sai links with FPGA is interesting yes doesdoes idling sport is very interesting to me because it has an FPGA a very nice FPGA built into it and FPGAs can induce certain types of processing hundreds of times faster than a regular core based computer it also can do processing with a lot less use of electrical power which is very important in this world these days we have so many difficult and gigantic problems to solve and we need to be smart about how we solve them and the use of FPGAs and digital signal processing chips is one of those ways and the students the university students are hopefully going to be able to solve all these problems well in the last couple of connects I've had professor Marcelo super calm tear and because of a side comment I made to him one time about how you could do a GPU using an FPGA he actually had a student create an apartment he actually had a student create a GPU out of an FPGA now why is that important it's important because in a lot of embedded systems you may need a GPU just to do some simple 3d graphics anti-aliasing blending of background and foreground you know fog effects things like that nothing complex and nothing that's very high power but if you stick a regular GPU in there you get a lot of vendors to say I'm not going to give you all of the code for that for the GPU in source code I'm gonna create a binary blob that you have to put into your system and every time you change the kernel I'll give you a new copy of that binary blob so that it'll still continue to work well they may do that for the first two years three years five years but after a while they lose interest in this they may go out of business and the person who has this little computer is now stuck they cannot upgrade their system and eventually the system will die so if you were able to do this GPU functionality in an open-source FPGA well then you'd have all the source code you need it and you can keep building that forever and so for longevity of the functionality of the little computer if you're putting it in your elevator if you're putting it in your car your bus to train your plane if it has the last 10 15 20 years this would be a solution that people could use oh and the student did this work in only three months so it's gonna be very interesting to see what's gonna happen and with those students the future and so let's do another video just after we let's talk about this this company you have right there
pls stop moving the camera.