Old Motorola 68000 Systems Can Finally Move Away From Linux's Deprecated IDE Code

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Old Motorola 68000 Systems Can Finally Move Away From Linux's Deprecated IDE Code

Earlier this year was talk of Linux finally removing its legacy IDE subsystem that has been deprecated for years in favor of just maintaining the still-supported libata code for IDE support. The libata path is much better supported and matured for nearly two decades, but one of the holdouts was some Motorola 68000 series hardware -- like early Macintosh computers -- not being supported outside of the legacy context. That is finally set to change with Linux 5.14 so in turn the legacy IDE code will likely be able to be removed soon...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=m68k-Switches-To-Libata

[muncrief]

I created a biological neural simulator in my early 20s on a 68000 based Atari 1040ST. I invented four unique software structures - reception, conduction, integration, and transmission - to create dendrites, somas (cell bodies), axons, and synapses for a variety of neurons. And these were true to life neurons with everything from passive, electrically, and chemically gated ion channels to anterograde and retrograde transport mechanisms.

I couldn't afford the primitive 10 MB hard drives of the time, so I would insert and eject a series of 20 or so floppy disks over and over and over until a simulation completed, which would often take over an hour. However as near as I could tell, and I used "The Principles of Neural Science Second Edition by Kandel and Schwartz" to compare my results against, it worked.

I could only simulate 10 neurons at a time with such primitive hardware, and had to kludge the extracellular fluid, but I was really excited that I'd found a way to do it, so I presented my results over the phone and via postal mail to the Stanford Neurobiology Department, where I was roundly chastised for such a foolish pursuit, and scolded for wasting their time. And when they found out I'd barely graduated high school, and had no formal training at all, they outright made fun of me.

Unfortunately simulating the human brain was considered impossible at the time, so most scholars, and industries, pursued the idiocy of "neural networks", instead.

And that's why we don't have anything even close to artificial intelligence now, and instead have run into the dead end of pattern recognition that I warned of.

The sad truth is that the last four decades have mostly been wasted, and only now is that being realized, with many researchers finally turning back to modeling the human brain, as we should have been doing all along.

In any case, the relevance to this article is that the 68000 was a fantastic processor, and enabled me to do many things I never could have done without it.

[grigi]

where I was roundly chastised for such a foolish pursuit, and scolded for wasting their time. And when they found out I'd barely graduated high school, and had no formal training at all, they outright made fun of me.

This is the reason I never went into academia. It's run by ego-driven kleptomaniacs whom lord all over the people doing actual work. Often for effective negative payment.
There are so many good people in academia, but if the leadership is rotten, they rot people reporting to them. And so the bad attitudes spread.

Sorry for my reaction but that part of your message triggered some really bad memories.

[Chewi]

I will almost certainly use this driver at some point so thank you, Finn Thain!

[paulr]

And when they found out I'd barely graduated high school, and had no formal training at all, they outright made fun of me.

That cuts and speaks terribly about them. I would have expected a friendly chat and discussion of why, at the time, the current research was not heading in that direction, at least based on the personalities of the physics people I know.

[schmidtbag]

This is the reason I never went into academia. It's run by ego-driven kleptomaniacs whom lord all over the people doing actual work. Often for effective negative payment.
There are so many good people in academia, but if the leadership is rotten, they rot people reporting to them. And so the bad attitudes spread.

Sorry for my reaction but that part of your message triggered some really bad memories.

muncrief
Often when academics, researchers, and scientists make fun of an idea, it either shows a lack of understanding or it shows they don't want to be proven wrong.

[thunderbird32]

Based on the driver name, I assume this is based off an IDE driver written for the Atari Falcon? Humorous that a system as rare as the Falcon should be the basis for supporting machines as common (comparatively) as the Macintosh.

[edwaleni]

Wow, Maybe I can run this on my 1990 CBUS era Cisco MGS and AGS+ with the Flash option. Wahoo.

[bavay]

muncrief
Often when academics, researchers, and scientists make fun of an idea, it either shows a lack of understanding or it shows they don't want to be proven wrong.

Not to defend them, there are many known examples of academia outright rejecting perfectly right and disruptive ideas. Moreover, there is no need to be disrespectful. But as part of academia (I do snow cover modeling in a research institute and I develop everything open source), trust me that we definitely receive enough totally bogus ideas (perpetual motion and more) from people who are convinced the Nobel prize is waiting for them. When you are jumping between projects, papers, proposals and you get one more of these emails, you might be tempted to just send it to the trash. It's really a (moral) fight to take the time to read the email and reply with a polite negative response. In my case, you can also add to the mix all the questions about things that are documented with our model (in a "Getting started" page) or general computer questions like "how do I open a terminal" (although by now this is also in our documentation), but this is the daily business of open source developers...

Mathias
PS: and I forgot questions like "my teacher asked me to use your model, could you give me a list of things it has been used for" (hint: use a search engine to find all the relevant papers!)

[schmidtbag]

Not to defend them, there are many known examples of academia outright rejecting perfectly right and disruptive ideas. Moreover, there is no need to be disrespectful. But as part of academia (I do snow cover modeling in a research institute and I develop everything open source), trust me that we definitely receive enough totally bogus ideas (perpetual motion and more) from people who are convinced the Nobel prize is waiting for them. When you are jumping between projects, papers, proposals and you get one more of these emails, you might be tempted to just send it to the trash. It's really a (moral) fight to take the time to read the email and reply with a polite negative response. In my case, you can also add to the mix all the questions about things that are documented with our model (in a "Getting started" page) or general computer questions like "how do I open a terminal" (although by now this is also in our documentation), but this is the daily business of open source developers...

Mathias
PS: and I forgot questions like "my teacher asked me to use your model, could you give me a list of things it has been used for" (hint: use a search engine to find all the relevant papers!)

I see your point, and if someone has enough of an ego to think they're the next Nobel Prize winner, then they deserve to be deflated. As the saying goes, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". So, if someone really thinks they have a perpetual motion machine, you can always tell them "show the math and explain how to replicate the experiment".

The Youtube channel Veritasium covers a lot of subjects of seemingly impossible things. The most recent was about a wind-powered vehicle that could move faster than the wind. It's not breaking the laws of physics and it's not doing anything especially complicated either. Mathematically, it's very simple (Steve Mould does a good job explaining the math in a simple way). But, that's a very easy thing to dismiss, because if you don't think outside the box, you're just going to say "that isn't possible" and move on, which the creators of this project faced multiple times. Granted, I don't like their ego, but, it's easy to have one when you have a working proof-of-concept that nobody believed could work.