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About the Comp Arch wiki
Wherever I have gone since I learned about computers I have been making notes about things good and bad. When I got access to USENET comp.arch I started sharing my thoughts - although newsgroups are not really good for a reference, they are mainly for discussion. I used UIUC/PLATO Notes when I arrived at the Little Software House on the Prairie. As soon as the web arrived, I started putting these notes on the web, ideally public web. When I got access to wikis...
From 2009 to 2014 I ran a wiki I called "comp-arch.net". The URL was http://semipublic.comp-arch.net/wiki/ - semipublic because only I and a few, IIRC only one, other person could edit it, although it was public to read. (I originally created a public rewrite version, but of course that got spammed. I also had a private version, where I could work on things that I was not yet ready to share, but I found it's a hassle to separate public and private at the top level.)
I did not start this public wiki before 2009 because I was employed as a computer architect at Intel, then AMD, then Intel. I did not want to risk accidentally disclosing proprietary information.
I started this wiki in 2009 because my new employer was much friendlier to open and public sharing of information.
I continued this wiki when I joined MIPS in 2011.
I stopped actively working on this wiki shortly after Imagination Technologies bought MIPS in 2013.
I took this wiki down circa 2014 after the Heartbleed security bug.
The wiki had crashed, and I feared that the wiki had been broken into (this was not long after the wiki had been spammed and then replicated by bad guys). However, it turned out that my host, Dream Host, had installed a new version of MediaWiki, which broke things. I did not learn this for several months while I was distracted with changing passwords and other Heartbleed related stuff. I never got around to restoring the wiki in my copious spare time, (a) because I did not have very much copious spare time, and (b) FUD about employer disapproval.
Quite a few people, at quite a few companies and universities, indicated that they missed the Comp-Arch Wiki.
Some of them recovered some of these pages from places like the Internet Archive / WayBack Machine, and posted them themselves. With my permission.
I have long wanted to revive this wiki. But FUD about employer reactions got in the way.
As of 2020-02-05 Wednesday February 5, my job involves much more public participation in the RISC-V effort. I therefore think it is appropriate to revive this Comp-Arch Wiki.
The process of resuscitation will be slow.
- I am using a new wiki, specifically the GitHub gollum wiki
- https://github.com/AndyGlew/comp-arch.net/wiki
- Git based, so I can edit off-line, e.g. on airplanes and in the many places in Oregon that do not have good net.connectivity
- I am NOT restoring the old MediaWiki database.
- Although I have the old backup files, I don't feel like spending the time to install old software just to recover files that I mostly have in other formats. Especially since I need to convert the wiki markup anyway.
- I will probably start by writing new pages
- and migrating old pages from places like Paul Clayton's set up and the Internet archive.
- TBD: create a to do list of such pages
- and ideally by collecting pages from the other websites I have left behind at universities and defunct web organizations