[Oberon] Re. Power-down restoration

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of W B Hacker
> Sent: Saturday, 3 January 2009 2:04 AM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: *Suspect* [Oberon] Re. Power-down restoration
> 
> 
> >>> Will it be economic to have a home-server, when boxes can 
> be shutdown
> >>> and rebooted to the 'same state' by saving the relevevant 
> RAM conditions
> >>> to disk ?
> 
> IOW - NVRAM, solar panel battery recharge, modest CPU (ARM'ish or 
> something developed for mobile/PDA) - and the storage 'generally 
> hibernating' in some way until called for?
> 

In the 1980's, some time before UPS systems became popular, one of my
favourite systems that I developed software on was an NCR Tower with a MC68K
processor running NCR Unix. We had half-a dozen or so dumb terminals
connected to it. The OS was able to detect an imminent power failure in
sufficient time (100's of milliseconds perhaps?) to be able to save the CPU
state, memory contents etc. etc. A small battery was sufficient to maintain
the state until mains power was restored. As far as I recall, every user was
then able to resume exactly where they had left off with no loss of data.

> >> As you know, computers won't boot if you just plug in the power
> >> cable ;-)
> >
> 
> They will if the BIOS is set to do so..
> 

I was once surprised to be woken up in the middle of night by the sound of
my PC coming to life. It turned out that a phone call had been received by
the modem and that then caused the PC to power on and boot itself up!

--
Chris Burrows
Armaide: ARM Oberon Development System for Windows
http://www.armaide.com