PAPPP

…I probably should have checked the byline before posting. It does still come from the same material, just a little more directly.

There’s some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/“Project Y” effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like …20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about “Dynamic Instruction Scheduling” in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.

There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There’s a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP’s link.

Sure, drop me a note with the details and I’ll see if I can give you a hand. I’m not super expert in all the specifics of the Chromebook ecosystem, but I have good general computer/Unix skills and have hacked a couple so I know where to look for resources.

Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever). Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.

S9

I’m still using my S9. Size is about as big as I want to deal with. Indicator LED is great. 3.5mm jack is great. SD socket for local storage. Camera is still fine. Qi charging is one of the few gimmicks that hasn’t turned out to be useless. Screen is drastic overkill. Design is a stupid friction-less glass egg, but that’s easily fixable with a minimalist case. Performance is still perfectly adequate.

It’s long out of support, but I’m finding the market wildly un-compelling, and will probably just roll with it until something renders it unusable.

I’m somewhat surprised to learn that each Snowmobile unit is only about 100PB in a 45x8x9.6ft highwall shipping container

Gonna ballpark in stupid units to see how wrong my intuition that that’s not very dense is:

Assuming dense but not hot new thing spinning rust, 16TB per 34.5 cubic inch standard 3.5" disc.

(100PB/16TB)*2 (assume at least two spindle redundant) is about 12,000 discs, so about 414,000 cubic inches of just discs without any of the supporting equipment.

A highwall shipping container is like 5,900,000 cubic inches, so only like 7% of that thing would be discs.

Or, accommodating a little bit of the support, let’s say it’s just full of those commodity 90-bay 4U storage servers. Those are 19" x 7" x 26.4" (3511.2 cubic inches) for 1440 raw TB each, again 2 spindle redundancy so you’d need about 140 of the things for 100PB, round up to 500,000 cubic inches of those… still less than 9%.

Yeah, unless I did my math radically wrong, that’s surprisingly not very dense.