test-drb October 2018

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

176 participants
160 discussions

by billdegnan＠gmail.com

Here is a great example of why the keyboards and terminals are getting separated https://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-3101-beam-spring-keyboard-purchased-new-in-198… Note the price $2000 so far. How could one blame the seller. I wonder if this is the terminal I sold to a buyer in California years ago when I sold my Series/1 computer. All he wanted was the terminal, I donated the rest to what was the MARCH museum. At the time I remember having a few words with the buyer who would not also take the Series/1 system (2 racks) or the manuals. There is a naked terminal up for grabs if you're out his way. Bill

6 years, 1 month

Desktop Metaphor

by commodorejohn＠gmail.com

> Liam Proven wrote: > On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 18:59, Paul Berger via cctalk > <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: >> >> This is my issue with a lot of Linux distros they seem to try to hard to >> look and work like mac or like windows while I would rather have them >> look and work like the xwindows I knew and loved. One of my biggest >> aggravations is cut and paste I would very much rather it worked more >> like it used to on X. > > If you want it old-style, build it old-style. > > Install the minimal or server version of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, > whatever you want, then install X.org and your window manager of > choice. > > This is how I have been experimentally assembling GNUstep desktops for > years now. Have to concur with this. Even the "minimalist" (i.e. non-GNOME/KDE) *nix "desktop environment" projects these days are getting so bloated that I've given up bothering with them and set up an X environment one component at a time. Currently running Window Maker with SpaceFM and ROXTerm; getting it all properly set up and tweaked to my liking took some doing, but the payoff was well worth it. Now if I could only excise the GTK3 blight entirely, I'd really be set.

6 years, 1 month

70's computers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Ben Bfranchuk > I just can't find a clean simple design yet. ... > The PDP 11 is nice machine, but I am looking for simpler designs > where 16K words is a valid memory size for a OS and small single user > software. There was a recent discussion about code density (I forget whether here, or on TUHS), and someone mentioned this paper: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/papers/iccd09/iccd09_density.pdf which shows that for a combo of benchmarks, the PDP-11 had the densest code out of all the ones they looked at. (They didn't look at the PDP-8, but I suspect that since it's a single-address design, it's almost ceertainly not as dense.) The PDP-11 dates back to the days of core (it went through several generations before DRAM arrived - e.g. the -11/70 originally shipped with core), and given core prices, minimizing code size was pretty important - hence the results above. So if you want to get the most bang out of 16K buck... Not the simplest machine to implement, mind - the -8 is a lot simpler. Which axis is the most important to you? Noel

6 years, 1 month

Not really vintage computing, but just in case it's of interest to anyone..

by evanlinwood＠hotmail.com

taken from the listing : "It was used ( I Believe ) to process Geophysical Seismic Data during the exploration of Oil in Bass Straight. The circuitry is all NASA standard." https://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/gosford/other-electronics-computers/vintage…

6 years, 1 month

Microsoft-Paul Allen

by commodorejohn＠gmail.com

> Grant Taylor wrote: >> *Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95. > > Nope. That's simply not true. > > The following three vast families of window managers / desktops prove > (to my satisfaction) that your statement is wrong. > > ? Common Desktop Environment (a.k.a. CDE) and it's ilk. > ? The various *Box window managers / desktop environments. > ? Motif window manager and it's ilk. > > They are all significantly different from each other and from Windows's > Explorer interface, first publicly debuting with Windows 95. There's also the Afterstep/Window Maker crowd, open-source reimplementations of the NEXTSTEP desktop environment, which predates even Windows 3.x. Win95 was certainly very influential in the design and refinement of many other desktop environments going forward, but it's not the be-all and end-all of anything. >> Liam Proven wrote: > > How many graphical Unix desktops are sold or distributed in the world > today that are not Linux? Excluding Mac OS X as I specifically address > that point, I think. > > Now, I can point to 3 living (FSVO "living") descendants of those OSes: > > * CDE is now FOSS > (It had a conceptual re-implementation, the XForms Common Environment, > XFCE. Here's a screenshot: > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Xfce3.jpg > Note, it has now moved to a Windows-like model) > > AFAIK no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux > offers CDE as a desktop choice. > > * NeXTstep inspired GNUstep > http://www.gnustep.org/ > (and LiteStep but that's now dead) > > No current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux offers > GNUstep as a desktop choice. > > * Risc OS inspired the ROX Desktop: > http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ > > Again, no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux > offers ROX as a desktop choice. But this is kind of a questionable standard to begin with, because the whole point in the Freenix world is choice. No distributions offer those as default options during the install process, but all of them (aside from CDE, which only just went open-source a couple years ago and is still in the process of being cleaned up and forward-ported to modern *nixen) are available in the repositories for most major distributions, and all of them are still actively updated. > BeOS used the Windows model. Kinda-sorta-not-really. BeOS (like just about everything post-1995) takes cues from Win95, but its roots are in classic Mac OS and it definitely hews closer to that in most respects, despite the absence of a global menu bar. > Outside of Apple, I think it is fair to say that no new OS or desktop > environment since 1995 has used anything other than the Win95 model. Haiku says hi. Or would, if they could spare the time from trying to awkwardly kludge Linux development models into a BeOS world. > The fact that there are a small handful of clones of the Apple Mac OS > X GUI doesn't really invalidate this point. This "aside from the things that don't match up with my argument, my argument is flawless!" line of reasoning is novel.

6 years, 1 month

70's computers

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Some years ago I learned the architecture of the Dutch Electrologica X1 > and X8 machines. ... they gain a lot of efficiency by allowing almost > all instructions to optionally set a condition flag, and almost all > instructions to be executed conditionally on that flag. So a lot of > code full of branches becomes much shorter. ... For example: > > if (x >= 0) { foo (); x += 2; } > else x -= 3; > > translates to just 5 instructions: Very clever! What's the word length on that machine, BTW? I ask because it would be hard to pull that trick on most short-word-length machines, there just isn't a spare bit or two in the instruction to add that. Noel

6 years, 1 month

Catalog of Braegen Compter systems FOUND! Anaheim CA. lsi 11 systems and unibuss add in stuff too printer and tape and disc subsystems...

by couryhouse＠aol.com

resent? with corrected subj. message Catalog of Braegen? Compter systems FOUND! Anaheim CA. lsi 11 systems and unibuss add in stuff too printer and tape and disc subsystems... ANY ONE HAVE THE HARDWARE IN CAPTIVITY?.. the cdc discs look like that bold one someone posted from Craigs list the other day...? ed#?www.smecc.org Sent from AOL Mobile Mail

6 years, 1 month

Microsoft-Paul Allen

by jfoust＠threedee.com

At 04:40 PM 10/22/2018, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: >As for multitasking, even Windows 10 can easily get bogged down where the >GUI becomes essentially unresponsive to user actions. MS has never grasped >that it should never be possible to wind up in a situation where the user >is stuck watching a rainbow-colored wheel spin, while some set of tasks >consumes pretty much every clock cycle on every core, and the user can't >even shift context away from whatever is hogging the system. There are lots of reasons why that can happen in any OS with a GUI You've discovered some computer that doesn't ever crash? >The Woz was then challenged about Commodore 64 sales far exceeding those of >Apple ][ and //e models, and he replied, "At Apple, we were always in it >for the long haul. What has Commodore sold lately?" Commodore, of course, >had long since gone bankrupt. CBM didn't do that until 1994, right? - John

6 years, 1 month

Catalog of Braegen Compter systems FOUND! Anaheim CA. lsi 11 systems and unibuss add in stuff too printer and rape and disc subsystems...

by couryhouse＠aol.com

Catalog of Braegen Compter systems FOUND! Anaheim CA. lsi 11 systems and unibuss add in stuff too printer and tape and disc subsystems... ANY ONE HAVE THE HARDWARE IN CAPTIVITY?.. the cdc discs look like that bold one someone posted from Craigs list the other day... ed# www.smecc.org Sent from AOL Mobile Mail

6 years, 1 month

Microsoft-Paul Allen

by spacewar＠gmail.com

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 02:36 Jim Manley <jim.manley at gmail.com> wrote: Microsoft did offer a RAM expansion board specifically to allow the Softcard to access 64K of RAM dedicated to CP/M, Even that wasn't dedicated to CP/M. It was a 16K RAM card that was equivalent to the Apple "Language Card", which allowed replacing the 12K of ROM of the Apple II and II+ with 16K of RAM, of which 4K had two banks. Although it was useful with the Softcard, it wasn't in any way specific to it. All models of the Softcard could output 80 x 24 text, not only through third-party cards, but Apple's own 64K RAM and 80 x 24 video combo card, Which was only available for the IIe. I stand by my assertion that the Softcard did not in any way provide 80x24 text. It could use the capability if it was separately provided.

6 years, 1 month

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test-drb October 2018