----Original Message-----
From: Allison J Parent <allisonp(a)world.std.com>
>I would say that 8kbasic was the first decent software product from MS
>though it was soon to change in the early 80s.
>
>FYI the Extended BASIC interpreter for CP/M-80 and the BASCOM Compiler
>for CP/M-80 were excellent products. Neither were bloatware by any
>standard.
Quite right. Early MS products were extremely good quality software,
particularly compared to their competitors at the time. Tight, largely
bug-free and with well thought-out interfaces (exclude Multiplan, but
highlight MS Decathlon). Pity they couldn't (or wouldn't) keep up the good
work. Does the demise of quality stem from the departure of Paul Allen? I
don't know when he left MS.
David
"I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me."
A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh, Ch. 4
Given that a fair number of us are probably reading this on dumb
terminals, HTML and MIME are as out-of-place as binaries.
It strikes me that the mail/HTML thing indicates something about
attitudes, and I'm genuinely surprised that anyone on this list
would push for HTML in e-mail. The wintel PC world thrives on
style over substance; glitz rather than content. It sells to the
mass market that doesn't know any better and never will. If you
have nothing to say, you better say it loudly or no-one will listen.
The spirit of so many of these old machines was the delicate balance
between expressiveness and resource usage. As admirers of that,
shouldn't we, of all people, prefer plain text whenever it suffices?
Put only plain text in my mailbox, please. I'll be quite happy to
visit your pictures and HTML on the web. (URL's _are_ plain text!)
Bill.
Ive got an aftermarket mac external 800k drive if anyone wants it. it wont
read a disk even after cleaning. its about the same size but a bit heavier
than the 400k mac drive. otherwise it's gonna get round filed.
david
I've just been offered a "1 foot by 2 foot" manual schematic and technical
repair manual set for the Superbrain computer. The guy imported it from
Intertcech, he said. On its way to me now, I'm just letting people on the
list know of its availability.
Cheers
A
On Sun, 15 Mar 1998 20:56:58 -0500 (EST), J. Maynard Gelinas <jmg(a)iac.net>
wrote:
{big snip about b st(0,4,0)}
I did try setting the tape to both ID=4 and ID=6, both with the same
results. And, no, when I created the install tape, I did not use the "osync"
parameter. More to come...
Rich Cini/WUGNET
<nospam_rcini(a)msn.com> (remove nospam_ to use)
ClubWin! Charter Member (6)
MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
============================================
>> > Oh, CDC...Computer Dinosaur Corporation...
>>
>> And one I coined after I'd been given the price for some trivial spare
>> part (a light bulb, I think) for a PDP11..
>>
>> DEC - Darn Expensive Components :-)
>
>And most of the Unibus PDP-11's delivered in the 70's and early 80's had
>cabinet trim and/or front panel color scheme as "Purple/Magenta", leading
>to:
>
>PDP=Purple Data Processor
IBM=Intern-run Brainless Corporation (But not any more!)
<I still want a Cyber, however (any other 180s being decommissioned
<lately?).
Personally I'd love to find a Cincinati Millicron CM2000, 2100 or 2200.
I haven't seen one in about 25 years.
Allison
Thanks Don/David. Maxtor must have posted those settings after I looked
about 2 months ago. All that they had at the time was the geometry
information.
Rich Cini/WUGNET
<nospam_rcini(a)msn.com> (remove nospam_ to use)
ClubWin! Charter Member (6)
MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
============================================
>
>Actually, very little. Most of the AI researchers in the 70's/early
80's
>were working on one of the following:
>
>1. PDP-10's running a very advanced operating system such as TOPS-20,
What do you mean by "advanced"?
>2. Things such as the Symbolics LISP machine, specifically designed
for
> AI research and with all sorts of spiffy hardware features that
make
> it automatic to do some really nice things (such as actual
machine-level
> "objects" that aren't just locations in memory but are real data
types.
I HATE object oriented stuff. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At least in
C++, Java, and Visual Basic, which have been my only expoures to it.
>Unfortunately, now if you go to a CS department it's rare to see people
>using anything other than generic Unix boxes. This is a crying shame,
as
>Unix was a pretty poor choice of OS's in 1972 (when it was started) and
>on today's big computers it's a much, much poorer choice compared to
>all the OS's developed by advanced research groups in the 70's and
80's.
Well, would any "advanced" OS like TOPS be suitable for modern
machines? Anyone want to be the second Linus Torvalds?
>
>To get a feel of what life was like in a AI lab, you ought to read one
>(or both) of the following:
>
>_The Hacker's Dictionary_, compiled by Eric S. Raymond. (Yes, it is
mainly
>just the jargon file, but there's also essays by Raymond and others
which
>nicely illustrate the AI researcher's "state of mind" in the book.)
>
>_The UNIX-Hater's Handbook_, discusses many OS's developed in the 70's
>and 80's which are far superior to Unix, but never caught on because
they
>weren't "lowest-common-denominator" OS's.
Ironic that now it's the other way around -- we're pushing UNIX-like
stuff like Linux, BeOS and Rhapsody, against DOS, Windows, NT, and
MacOS
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