John Titor and the Secrect capablities of the IBM 5100

Originally posted by bobafett
You could run programs backwards, especially with a line based language.
[edit on 9-7-2008 by bobafett]

You could run some programs backwards, especially with a line based language. But they would have to be specially crafted to do so. Palindromial programming!

reply to post by bobafett


Been playing around with M68HC11 too ? Its now 14 years since i programmed computer chips at school. At the moment, its just Perl for me.. work related .. hehe

Originally posted by tep200377
reply to post by bobafett

 

Been playing around with M68HC11 too ?

Its now 14 years since i programmed computer chips at school. At the moment, its just Perl for me.. work related .. hehe

That was from x86 intel style, I am a developer on an open source compiler, so I have to know a thing or two about these things, plus i'm just interested. I know my way around x86 to a pretty high level, know z80 inside out, and dabble in m68k. But this is all off topic.

I'm amazed to see Titor still going strong, All his IBM stuff is debunked, his Y2K claims are debunked, his physics claims seem debunked (I'm only a layman on physics). All he's got left is a few loose stool predictions.

Originally posted by tep200377
und with M68HC11 too ?

Nice! I learned on those in school too. Great fun those were.

Two such programs were included: a slightly modified version of APL.SV, IBM's APL interpreter for its System/370 mainframes, and the BASIC interpreter used on IBM's System/3 minicomputer. Consequently, the 5100's microcode was written to emulate most of the functionality of both a System/370 and a System/3.

Although I have been a professional programmer most of my life, in my earliest days in IT, I actually operated the console (drove the thing) of a IBM 370/168 and worked with DEC minis. This was in the geophysical industry.

If Titor had used the angle of oil/energy, old seismic data and such, his story about the 5100 might have been more believable to myself at least. Some overlooked oil resources? I bet no in todays world. Or maybe some future extension of our current NASA. The HASP extensions were developed for NASA so they must have been a big user of that IBM line of equipment.

One would have to think future humans wouldn't be dealing with of business records or business programs. If for some reason their current computing platform was doomed to failure, I would think that technology and coding from 60 years back would be useless as a replacement. About like UPS returning to horse and wagons for world wide package delivery.

Could it be that the mention of UNIX was a way of saying platform failure. Just fix the OS and programming of the current systems. What is useful in 60 year old code for an out of service hardware platform. Are there any systems today still running IBM 370 APL or System/3 Basic?

Emulating and compiling new code are two different things. What about a debugger to discover the problems. It sounded like a debugging and repair issue.

As for a the original post, if there really was some big magic, I have to believe we would have heard much more about it by now.

HOAX. I sense a banning.

Sorry for the long and tech-laden post but liars get my ire up.

Originally posted by titorite
It is nothing like linux, beos or windows operating systems, even though we did use windows DLL formats to assist it's routine parameters.

It is called the PE format. A real computer scientist/programmer/engineer would know that.

Therefore one of our experts named it "winux" since its a combination of linux and windows at the same time. What is it, that in the basic coding system that can accept both "executable formats" at the same time?

Uh, the NT kernel (Windows) already has multiple subsystems. One runs OS/2 command line programs, one runs DOS command line programs, and one runs Windows PE. If you use a 64 bit Windows then you also have a subsystem that enables the execution of 32-bit Windows PE.

Why the open source community hasn't made a unix compatible subsystem that will enable ELF execution subsystem for the NT kernel has more to do with politics and religion (on the opensource side) and nothing to do with NTs capabilities.

for the last couple days that we could have invented something by accident because one of our experts was trying a different format CD disk until he realized that he used the wrong disk which belonged to a linux version and it loaded up the run parameters on a windows machine which has the "winux" loaded.

That is some expert there. Did you find these computer experts through craigslist?

Wouldnt it be nice to have a computer that accepts different kinds of executables? Like for example, a windows machine that accepts .EXE, .DEB, .RPM, etc... onto the same machine. Ever thought that could be possible?

It already is possible to use different executable formats on a computer.

Maybe this was what John Titor was after... hmm... if our success leads to complete invention and patenting of a new operating system led after even those words "JT" spoke on these articles, it could very well change our path and it could be different than what was expected to happen.

Sorry you can't patent something you don't own (like windows or linux) I guess you know as much about patent law as you do about computers.

IBM 5100 Emulation design has a reversable binarial capability. Modern computers do not have this capability.

Because it doesn't work. You can not execute a program backwards, even with a complete set of state data (crash dump), and undo execution. There is information needed to execute backwards that is simply not saved anywhere. Most importantly, you need to know whether a particular instruction is used as a jump target from anywhere in the program. That information is simply unavailable.

You can not execute backwards; that is why mainframes (also by IBM) do transactional style processing using checkpoints. They save the entire state of a running program before doing anything (called a checkpoint.) If something bad occurs as they execute, the mainframe just throws out everything they have done and restores the checkpoint.

If IBM perfected reversible execution 30 years ago then why don't their multimillion dollar mainframes use it?

Like I said before, modern computers are "zero based" (speaking in binary terms) while the IBM 5100 is "one based".

Real computer experts use terms like ones-complement and twos-complement to describe different binary number systems.

Conclusion

This post does prove just how hard it is to create a convincing hoax. You have to be well versed in the subject(s) you are attempting to hoax or you end up looking like a fool. Actually, I would even go so far as to say that you have to know more about the subjects(s) you are hoaxing than a majority of the people on earth for a hoax to survive for any length of time in the internet age.

Even if Titor was a hoax, I would love to buy the guy a beer because he was a GOOD hoaxer who obviously has a lot of knowledge about physics and computers.

Jon

EDIT: Le oops.

[edit on 7.9.2008 by Voxel]

Since I see a little "check my credentials" fest going on here, please forgive me for saying that I wrote my first working program in assembly language 30 years ago, and I have since operated a wide variety of computers and OS. I agree with other experts here in stating that the OP is utter nonsense.

Originally posted by Voxel
This post does prove just how hard it is to create a convincing hoax. You have to be well versed in the subject(s) you are attempting to hoax or you end up looking like a fool. Actually, I would even go so far as to say that you have to know more about the subjects(s) you are hoaxing than a majority of the people on earth for a hoax to survive for any length of time in the internet age.

Good point. Any wonder why most 'out there' stuff is posted about UFOs and ETs. It allows for that wonderful 'who really knows how that stuff works' argument. It appears that most people figure reality is what the majority believe.

Regarding zero/one base, the 5100, like most basics, used one for the first index of an array.

Regarding the rest of the claims for the 5100...total crap.

I worked on one. I even figured out how to program it in machine language by reading the field engineer's manuals (much to his dismay...he was afraid I was going to damage the machine--somehow).

It had no special abilities, in fact it was a typical IBM design for the times... overly cautious, overpriced, and feature-poor. The tape storage density was a whopping 56 bytes per inch. That's not a typo. Writing programs for it was painful.

It couldn't even access the basic rom's directly...instead, it had ROS (read-only storage). To execute the interpreter it had to copy the ROS to system RAM and then execute the code. You could improve the performance of a program by grouping statements such as computation and printing to avoid the overlaying of the copied code.

Anyone that believes that this was a "special" machine apparently has inhaled or ingested too much of a mind-altering substance.

reply to post by stompk

Are you saying that one could enter into a file or program end first in order to bypass a password at the beginning?

PS, just keeping an open mind on this Titor stuff.
It's interesting if I with-hold being skeptical.
If there is a real John Titor, I like seeing possible evidence being presented in it's case.
Thanks OP.