What’s Old is New Again
A few days ago a neat little Linux utility crossed my news feed. ttyload is a load monitor usable on a console or in an xterm (and lesser terminal emulators) displaying a near-real-time graph of the load average. Like so:
ttyload screenshot
As soon as I saw the above screenshot, I thought of an old utility named “gsar” which I used on old AT&T SysV systems, most notably an old room-filling Unisys/Sperry 5000/95. To be honest, I’ve googled for ‘gsar’ many times over the years, probably even searching for it using Altavista at one point, but never did come across any reference to the neat little command. Here it is, all shiny, new and in color! I just had to tell someone and family and the cats just look at me weird, so here you go Interwebs, here’s at least a comment about gsar and a usable clone!
And, in case you were wondering what the hell kind of computer system I’m talking about, here’s a link to a page with some pictures and descriptions of what you’re looking at. It’s capabilities are pretty much dwarfed by a new smartphone but the 5000/95 would crush it in a fight.
Posted by Mike Loseke on June 24th, 2014 :: Filed under Uncategorized