Sent from my iPhone When the Lawyers got involved?

IIRC They wanted R.E.M.'s "End of the world as we know it" but R.E.M. said no. - Ethan

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 12:51 AM Jim Manley via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I didn't think IBM introduced token ring until 1985 or so... - Josh

That's basically Ethernet except very slow (2 Mb/s, even slower than "Experimental Ethernet"). But it's described as CSMA/CD, and it uses the much-cursed Intel 82586 Ethernet chip. Token ring ended up a failure because it was slow and completely incompatible with other 802 networks, from the backward addresses to the bizarre pseudo-multicast scheme to the source routing bridges. In spite of IBM marketing claims, 802.5 data link layer is not a well behaved design. Later token rings, like FDDI, used the 802.4 token passing algorithm ("Timed token"), avoiding the 802.5 algorithms completely. paul

On 10/19/18 1:14 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: I used to have a bunch of Sytek gear, including a StatMon.? I once wrote a program in C on a 3B2 to collect, display and analyze the data from the StatMon.? I also, working with a good friend who now teaches at Texas A&M (unless he finally retired!) helped write a program to function as a DNS for a Sytek Network.? Delivered a paper on it at the Sytek Users Group Conference at NTSU in Denton, TX.? Good luck getting it running.? Hope you know a lot about broadband networks because it ain't as easy as cable TV. :-)? I even used to have a portable cable plant for explaining it to potential customers. Those were the days.? Sigh.... bill

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote: My experience was similar. I got the technical Reference Manual immediately. I then had to wait a few months to get a computer. But, there was no apparent shortage of boards or accessories. I got a PC, with keyboard, 16K of RAM, Floppy Disk controller, async card, PC-DOS 1.00, and CGA board. Since the parts were same/compatible with TRS80 ones, which were cheaper, I put in my own RAM, Tandon TM100-1s, and used a [CCTV] composite monitor. I soon got a 192K (ECC!) RAM card (Boulder Creek?), and serial and parallel cards. Much (10 years?) later, I got a deal on some surplus Wyse 700 video displays. (1280x800?) There was apparently some perception among some users that MDA was for "serious"/business use, and CGA for games. Many of those same users then complained about lack of [graphic-oriented??] games for MDA. Soon, there were efforts to provide rationalizations why graphics were "essential" for business use. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 01:50:20AM -0600, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: [...] Oooh. My personal recollection about w95 is that there was a lot of touting before the premiere day, how advanced it was because "object oriented operating system". The premiere came, the toutings quickly faded away, never heard any kind of objection about this aspect. I, for quite long time, had been thinking W95 was a scam because for the life of me I could not spot any sign of its object-orientedness (and there was nothing else interesting enough to make me want to tinker with this... something). It was only years later that it finally came to me: I might have been one of the very few people who not only understood some of the buzzwords but also was duped into believing there should be some substance behind them (which maybe makes me exceptional, just not in a good way). Nowadays, I consider W95 as very interesting subject of study - a technical product of non-technical genius(es) (ok, if there were tech geniuses involved in its making, I would say it does not show up). It took a lot of manipulation and wind sniffing to make it such a big success, and plenty of intellectual indolence from rivals and customers. :-) -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **

On 10/22/2018 08:14 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: 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. "A" book, maybe. I don't think it was "the" book. I think /company/ is critical in that statement as it implies for profit business which excludes many other non-business related options. Even then, IBM, Sun, HP, etc were releasing commercial Unixes with CDE and / or Motif after Windows 95. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 10/23/2018 04:41 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Your statement that I replied to is: *Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95. That "every" includes desktops before Windows 95. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 10/23/2018 10:47 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Fair. I'm fairly sure that Solaris and AIX both continue to ship C.D.E. ;-) Hence why I prefer to be excruciatingly clear. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Even though Oracle only sells server hardware running Solaris, there are customers running Solaris on laptops and other systems with graphic consoles. When I bring up Solaris 11.4 in VirtualBox, I get a Gnome desktop. (I work on USB and boot, so I don't pay much attention to the desktop and couldn't tell you what version of Gnome it is.) alan - insert blurb about not speaking for my employer - On 10/23/18 10:08 AM, Paul Berger via cctalk wrote:

On 10/23/18 10:37 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: Solaris 10 defaulted to Java Desktop System (based on Gnome) and the various Solaris 11 released defaulted to other versions of Gnome (I don't know enough about Gnome to identify the versions). I think that since Solaris 11 11/11 (the original S11 release) there has been no CDE, only Gnome.

On 10/23/18 10:45 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Excuse me, but I work for Oracle on Solaris (primarily on USB code) and it is not EOL. Oracle just released Solaris 11.4 and the next release is being worked on. alan - insert that not speaking for my disclaimer again -

Outsider EOL predictions sometimes lead to a spike in workload for the Real-Time Resume' Updater. (cf. "aerospace collapse" just under half a century ago)

Well, those were pretty much all written immediately after Oracle let go of most of the Solaris and SPARC orgs. It was brutal and I can imagine how it looked from the outside. But most isn?t all and it is more that a year later and we are still putting out Solaris releases. alan

On 2018-10-23 2:45 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: You can still get a graphics adapter with lower end P9 AIX systems but not on the high end machines maybe because there is no place to plug in a keyboard. Paul.

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: "The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous Galactic Copyright Laws. Its interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws." -HHGTTG For those prone to misinterpretation, "wilier editor" is NOT a reference to "John Wiley & Sons" publishers.

Hi Liam, On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 8:15 AM Liam Proven via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: This reference to "object-oriented" is way off, conflating GUI "objects" and true object-oriented software. OO in code has nothing to do with manipulating virtual objects (desktops, icons for folders, documents by type, trash cans, etc.). It's a combination of attributes supported by programming languages, such as classes, methods, encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, delegation, etc. Even Ivan Sutherland's 1960 - 1961 Sketchpad truly implemented object-oriented design at both the GUI and code levels, despite being developed for the discrete-transistor MIT Lincoln Lab TX-2, with all of 64 K-words (36-bit word length) of discrete-transistor memory. Ummmm ... no. You're apparently completely uninformed about MIT Project Athena, aka The X Window System, or X11, or just X, for short, and no, it's not plural. The latter is ironic, because MS Windows only supports one windowing desktop per user, while X Window not only supports multiple desktops per user (each with its own context that can be swapped in to occupy the display area), but natively supports remote desktop access from a number of users over networks (MS Windows still doesn't support this). While the early aesthetics of X's icons, windows, widgets, etc., are just what you'd expect some harried engineer to cobble together well after midnight the date of a major early release, the underlying technology was light years ahead of what MS spent decades screwing around with (per your description of the dead ends). Unfortunately, X, as well as other earlier GUI systems, was bitmap-based, and still is, so, the aesthetics haven't been improved over the past three-plus decades it's been around, despite incredible advances in graphics hardware, which was designed from the ground up to largely support floating-point computations necessary for 3-D and advanced 2-D graphics. Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has found it necessary to spend a considerable amount of its meager resources (compared with those in commercial developers' piggy banks, emphasis on the "piggy") to GPU hardware accelerate X, that its Debian-based Raspbian OS uses for its GUI (the changes to open-source code are released upstream to benefit the entire Debian community). 99% of the die area on a Pi's system-on-a-chip (SoC) is the GPU, which is what boots on power-up. The ARM CPU in the SoC was originally included as just a traffic cop for shoveling video data coming in from the Ethernet port and routed to the GPU for decoding and generation of HD video signals in Roku 2 streaming media boxes. The acceleration included conversion from the integer bit-mapped representations used in X to floating-point data structures on which the GPU is designed to primarily operate. When you're limited to one GB of RAM, your CPUs are RISC-based, and the CPUs' clock speed is limited to 1.4 GHz, you need all the help you can get. BTW, MacOS X is based on Mach, the version of Unix that was designed for multiple, closely-coupled processors, and it, too, uses X as a basis for its GUI. Even in its early days, the Mac graphics system had a lot to admire. When the Mac II brought color video and full 32-bit processing to the product line, the OS was very cleverly provided a single System32 extension file that only had to be dropped into the System folder to make older black-and-white-only, 16-bit external-to-the-microprocessor (even the 68000 is 32-bit internally) Macs compatible with the new 32-bit, color-based graphics architecture. No changes were necessary to applications, with colors merely mapped to dithered patterns of black-and-white pixels having equivalent luminance as the colors on the older hardware. 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. Other than completing a valid low-level task, such as flushing queues to large-capacity storage, the user should always be in control of what the foreground process with highest precedence is. Loading ads from an incoming network connection for products and services, that the user has absolutely no interest in, is never higher than the lowest-precedence task. It's pretty obvious that advertising business deals abrogate that user-centric edict, where making yet-more bucks on the user's back is considered the highest priority. One reason that Apple has never had a problem with users being dispassionate about its products and services is that, when a new employee starts at the company at any level, they spend their first week, or so, in a user experience (UX, aka usability) lab, as soon as the HR paperwork is done. They're given a set of goals to accomplish on a new product/service or revision, and video is taken of the display and of them. They're then interviewed by UX folks to find out why they did certain things to accomplish a goal, even where goals were inserted to provide enjoyable breaks from more serious work. By observing and interacting with people a huge treasure trove of why people do things, which sometimes are just "It seemed like a good idea at the time." A year or so before Steve Jobs passed away, Bill Gates was asked why MS bailed out Apple in 1996, when Steve returned and Apple was within a few months of not being able to make payroll. He flatly stated that Apple's products and services were great inspirations to MS and they couldn't let such a valuable source of R&D disappear (and that Apple customers had paid for ... a lot). He also knew that the key people at Apple would never work for MS, and would rather take their chances with a startup than wind up in an org chart that involved being anywhere below Steve Ballmer. They didn't really need any more money that badly, anyway - Apple made a lot of very talented people very rich. It also didn't hurt that MS was going to get access to Apple's patent portfolio for some time, either, and would benefit significantly in a financial way when, not if, Apple rebounded. Steve and Bill were actually pretty good friends when out of sight of everyone else, while also being extremely fierce competitors in public. None of this is to say that Apple has always been right and MS has always been wrong - far from it. Steve was infamous for saying that Apple would never do certain things, often for years ... until they did. He even went as far as to construct major logical arguments against them in keynotes ... and then blew up those arguments in the keynote address the following year, albeit usually by defeating a Kobayashi Maru scenario by changing the rules. The iPhone was the best example of this - after swearing there would never be an iPhone for years, they actually shipped the original version, not only without an elegant copy/paste mechanism, but no means of performing copy/paste at all for the first year, let alone not provided a means for anyone outside Apple and its partners to create native apps. They hadn't gotten copy/paste right, and weren't going to deliver something they weren't as proud of as their first-born children. This would have been suicide for any other company, but Steve held the helm steady, with customers believing that Apple would make things right, and they did, eventually, in spades. It was recently revealed that Steve was the most surprised person on the planet when the App Store not only surpassed their wildest dreams, but just kept growing, still with no end in sight today. I'm guessing that there was a knock-down, drag-out fight, where he wound up placing a sword of Damacles over the head of whomever disagreed with him about it if it didn't succeed. When Steve Wozniak appeared on stage with Jack Tramiel to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Commodore 64, it was noted that Commodore had acquired MOS Technology, manufacturer of the 6502 microprocessor used in Apple's products. When asked why Commodore didn't constrain the supply of 6502s to Apple, its arch-rival at the time, Jack replied, "The middle name of Commodore Business Machines is Business, and a good businessman doesn't screw his best customer. We actually made more profits from the 6502 than we did from the C-64, despite the much larger revenue associated with the latter." 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. It's hard to believe that 6502-based Apple models sold for an incredible 16 years - imagine that happening today. Of course, we can't - the world is unrecognizable today, in terms of 6502-based computing. Now, the House that iPod/iTunes/iPhone/iPad Built has been the first to achieve a sustained 13-digit market capitalization valuation. All that, without the ugliness of having to sign a consent decree for abusing market power through illegal shenanigans, on top of claiming that a browser couldn't be divorced from an OS ... and just that was then demonstrated in front of the presiding judge and the world ... oops. All the Best, Jim

Some corrections related to Mach and Apple. TTFN - Guy No. Mach is a microkernel based system that split apart BSD into ?kernel? portions and Unix portions. It really didn?t have anything to do with SMP as the premise behind Mach (which was a furthering of Accent) was message passing between tasks. I can dig up the original papers if anyone is interested. ;-) OS X does *not* use X as the basis of its GUI. It stems from NEXT which used display postscript (modern OS X uses display PDF). An (optional) X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them all the time) but is not part of the base install which belies the comment of X as the basis of the GUI. BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the native OS X display rendering framework. TTFN - Guy

On 10/23/18 11:12 AM, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: Jim, have you ever WORKED for Apple???? Both Guy and I have, and your level of misinformation on topics both he and I are VERY familiar with is getting annoying.

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 12:55 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote: No, it's not. You don't need any third-party X components to use Screen Sharing, and it works across all platforms, in both directions, that have a VNC-compatible client and/or server (depending on which direction you're looking from, remotely). I could show you in the source, but, then I'd have to kill you, if Apple didn't get to both of us first. There's what's in the public docs and especially marketing (including technical) material, and then there's what's actually In There. It's the sort of stuff marked with "COMPANY PROPRIETARY" watermarks that, if you try to scan or run it through a photocopier, produces black output due to opto-molecular chemical overlays. Believe me, after developing graphics hardware and software for the past 46 years, I'm starting to think Apple would have the right idea with you, as noted above. My first graphics "workstation" was a Tektronix 4014 vector-based display hooked up to a PDP-11/70 (the high-voltage green flashes that cleared the capacitive display "memory" probably explain the lack of kids ... as far as I know!). My second (actual) workstation was an Evans & Sutherland (yes, Dave and Ivan) Picture System 1 (PS/1), which was dual-port mind-melded to one MB of static RAM in a box 3 x 3 x 3 feet, that cost a million bucks all by itself. The other RAM port connected to the Mass Bus on yet-another PDP-11/70 that connected to a network from which my user account files were accessible, from which 3-D vertex-and-edge model coordinates were loaded into the mega-RAM. The PS-1 then sucked in the coordinates and performed translation, scaling, and rotation in custom 3-D optimized floating-point hardware. However, it could only display wireframes in real time on a very short-persistence 23-inch diagonal, absolutely flat CRT (that cost somewhere in the six-figure range). It was a completely vector-based display in any two colors you wanted, as long as it was white strokes on a black background. There was no frame rate, as there were no frames - it just kept drawing line segments as commanded all day and night (which is what it took to get things working as intended, not as stated to the machine!). My third and fourth graphics workstations were a pair of $50,000 (each) SGI 2400s, delivering a whopping 30,000 Gouraud-shaded polygons/second. My $5.00 Raspberry Pi Zeroes can each deliver 40,000,000 Gouraud-shaded polygons/second ... in 1040p60. Where, oh where, did I park that pesky time machine, so I could take what's in my pocket now and buy the entire federal government from three-to-four decades ago??? There are a few more decades of those sorts of things on my ledger. Let's just say that "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." As far as OS X is concerned, X is just another OS X application that wants That's the case for your add-on X components - that's not how it can be done under the covers, but you apparently don't have access to that level. Screen Sharing isn't the only function that has this sort of capability, as also do 3-D graphics and video - they aren't constrained to the low-speed 2-D world for which Display Postscript/PDF, Quartz, etc., were developed. Performance is everything in these technologies, and they have their own APIs through which the hardware is accessed (the GPU), because going through the gobbledy-gook stack that's fine for documents and other high-drag data structures is a non-starter for them. All the Best, Jim

On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 at 00:31, Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Oh dear. Let me guess -- do you also worry about chemtrails and fluoride in the water? -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 20:12, Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Not true. VNC isn't X-based. And Apple supports it, sure, but as an accessory thing. VNC also works fine on Windows, and there's no X.11 in Windows. Jim, you seem awfully convinced of this stuff, but as others are telling you, you have it almost all wrong. :-( -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053

Ok guys, just to make things clearer, here are two pages from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming What I was thinking back at the time of premiere: classes, objects derived from the classes, user able to make his own object from system-provided class or define class of his own, or define his own class and inherit from other class, including system-provided one. Examples: - an object pretends to be a disk object, but is double-disk partition or zip file - an object pretends to be file object but in fact it is a composition of few different files, mapped into virtual file-like object (so as to avoid costly copying) - an object says it is a printer but is a proxy, connected via serial-line object to another such serial-line object on remote computer where the real printer sits (connected via parallel, as usually) - object with execution thread, aka active object (in 199x nomenclature -> aka process), can be serialized and migrated to another computer without big fuss either via system provided migration service or via (really easy to write in such setup) user's own - same active object, serialized and stored to file because I gotta go home and have to turn computer off, so I can resurrect it next morning Plus, some kind of system programming language - I had no idea what Smalltalk was and I still have no idea but I might have swallowed that. I think it was possible to have this. But, not from MS. And as time shows, not from anybody. On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 07:34:32PM -0700, Chris Hanson wrote: [...] Well, I am not going to bet my money on this. What you wrote might be true but I would like something, say a blog or article, in which author shows how I can count those COM objects. I tried to verify your statement and the earliest Windows which could be claimed to be built from many COMs was Windows 8. But the truth is, I have departed from Win-Win land long ago, and only use Windows when someone wants me to unscrew a Windows laptop. C'mon, we are not talking about windows on 8-bit computer. I think they had loads of cash even back then and could pick from heaps of CVs. According to ReactOS wikipage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactos On 1 May 2012 a 30,000 euro funding campaign was started to finance additional development projects.[43][44] On the end of the year approximately 50% of the funding goal was achieved and it was decided to continue the funding campaign without deadlines. (...) The development progress is influenced by the size of the development team and the level of experience among them. As an estimate of the effort required to implement Windows 7, Microsoft employed 1,000 or so developers, organized into 25 teams, with each team averaging 40 developers.[85] As of 2 September 2011, in the ReactOS entry in Ohloh, the page followed through the "Very large, active development team" link lists 33 developers who have contributed over a 12-month period and a cumulative total of 104 present and former users who have contributed code to the project via Subversion since its inception.[86] In his presentation at Hackmeeting 2009 in Milan, ReactOS developer Michele C. noted that most of the developers learn about Windows architecture while working on ReactOS and have no prior knowledge. With this funding and so few people those noble folks achieved quite a lot. Do you think MS limitations were bigger? On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 04:14:34PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote: Very true, but if someone promises and does not deliver, who is he? And nobody makes a small print saying "this is just marketing material, so do not count on it". If I cannot count on it, why waste my time? [...] No objection, except "everybody copied". I have seen those copies, including Gnomes and KDEs (up to about 2014, when I gave up trying) and considered them increasingly dysfunctional. The only thing that was better than original Windows GUI was stability (but after Windows2000 this one improved a lot, IMHO). And I was able to use virtual desktops and they did not suck (while I tried few virtual desktops on Win95 and they sucked like black hole and then some). By virtual I mean multiple desktops on one, not remote. This was available on Linux from day one after my first install in 199..5? (olvwm was the name of WM). And before that, on Solaris (first olwm, then olvwm). Later on, I switched to FVWM, because olvwm could not deliver enough. I still use FVWM, after few years long trial of alternatives. They became too unusable. FVWM continues to work like a charm. What do I care if other people voluntarily push screwdrivers through the random body cavities of their own? Hey, sounds like golden opportunity for sharp hardware shop. This should be a responce to your message in this other thread, but I am not sure if I have this many time, so, as you claimed that Windows wrote a new book of UI or something: :: Interface Hall of Shame / - Windows95 - http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/msoft.htm There are few other interesting pages there, too. And yet I choose to use Linux harder, just because it did job, whereas Windows could not (unless I wanted unreliable computer, and I cannot use unreliable when reliable is available or I get flaming mad). As a side note, I do not claim Linux is oh so the bestest of them all. It just can do things I consider important while Windows could not (every time I try using it in serious manner, after about hour my index finger wants to fall off from constant mouse stimulation). And some time ago Linux started accumulating certain fringe elements, so a jump to another platform is necessary. [...] I am amazed too. Apparently you do with Windows something else than I would, and if it works for you, I am cool. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **

It was thus said that the Great Tomasz Rola via cctalk once stated: Yes, the typical method of OOP, which is not what Alan Kay had in mind when he developed Smalltalk: I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful). -- Alan Kay Basically, very small programs that talk to each other to do stuff. Today this is known as "microservices" [1]. You can do this now on Linux using the FUSE driver---this allows a user process to service file system requests. To bring this back to topic, QNX (from the 80s) and Plan-9 (from the 90s) also allowed this, and were easier to use than FUSE (to be honest). But of not one of Linux, QNX or Plan-9 could be considered an "object oriented operating system." Fancy that. I think I would classify this as a variant on the first example. Under QNX, this was a trivial operation. It was probably pretty trivial under Plan-9 (depending upon how they handled printer queues). Unix (including Linux) has something like this, but the name escapes me since I do almost no printing what-so-ever. I do know that of the last N printers I've had [2] (actually, my girlfriend has---she's the one who prints more than I do) were all "plug on, turn on, oh look! The computer found it on the network---print!" These two are related, and the later one is actually a bit easier to accomplish if you are doing it to all the processes on a computer. The major problem though is dealing with resources other than the CPU. For instance, a process has an open file its working with when it's migrated. Problems I see right off the bat: * Does the file exist on the destination? * If it does, does the process have permissions? * Now you have issues with syncing the file to the destination. And if the file is served off a network, then you have issues with network connections---i.e. they break! (Which is an issue today with hibernation) You can't reliably provide this functionality invisibly---you have to pretty much involve the process in question in the process. An object-oriented image based programming language. Except for some critical routines written in assembler, the entire system (operating system, compiler, GUI, utilities, etc.) were all written in Smalltalk and every "object" could be inspected and modified at runtime (including the operating system, compiler, GUI, utilties, etc.). Citation needed. How many threads are running? There's your count. Well, COM (Component Object Model) was first developed by Microsoft in 1993, but was based off an earlier technology Microsoft developed call OLE, which in turn came from DDE in 1987. He's talking about Windows on a 16-bit computer with a limit of 1M of memory (but really 640K due to the architecture of the IBM PC [3]). Reactos is a team building something which already exists---they're keeping up with Microsoft. It's Microsoft that spends the money to extend and enhance the features of their operating system in reponse to customer demand. For a more apples-to-pears type of comparison, the number of active Linux developers in 2013 was nearly 1,400 [4], which compares nicely to Windows for active, new development. A marketer, a politician or a liar. There have been plenty of projects announced and not delivered (Taligent anyone? Xanadu?) for a variety of reasons. It's nothing new. To disuade you from buying from a competitor? Because they truely believe it at the time? -spc (Oh, the i432 from Intel! Announced, then disappeared with nary a trace ... ) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices [2] Modern printers are crap, and it's sad that it's often cheaper to *buy* a new printer than it is to replace the ink. Grumble. [3] There were computers based on the 8088 that were *not* IBM PC comptabible but did run MS-DOS that allowed for memory to exceed the 640K barrier. But they died in the market for not being IBM PC compatible. [4] https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-development-by-the-numbers-big-and-getting-…

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 05:40:54AM +0100, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote: [...] PVM, not PVN, sorry (PVM blurred with PCN, both used for distr prog). -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **

When I was teaching at the U of Delaware I helped make a computer exhibit containing 4 of the Microsoft logos: http://www.vintagecomputer.net/UofDelaware/microsoft/large_MS_poster_final.… Bill On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 6:01 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

On 10/19/18 8:24 AM, William Sudbrink via cctalk wrote: There is something in the Jim Warren West Coast Computer Faire correspondence we have http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102739208 I'd have to pull it to see what is there.

Just to be clear, it wasn't that the CGA hadn't been designed and put into production by the launch of the PC, the demand for the CGA was simply overwhelming compared with the much lower demand and relatively greater supply of the MDA. Plus, IBM had no experience selling into retail, let alone non-business consumer channels, which had come to expect "high-resolution" color graphics built into a system (e.g., on the Apple ][ motherboard). There were all sorts of distribution mismatches for the PC where various package combinations were offered through various channels that had no relation to reality, demand-wise. They offered employee discounts thinking that the PC would need to be promoted from as many directions as possible, not realizing what kind of tiger they had by the tail. Its suppliers suddenly had to start a world-wide scramble just to meet the sudden increased demand for resistors, let alone color graphics video ICs. IBM wasn't even aware of the penetration of dial-up among consumers and very small businesses, or they would have initially offered modems, at least as options, if not in package combos. Retailers who understood the consumer and very small business markets quickly began offering modems in response to the vacuum that IBM had created. Another sign that IBM wasn't confident about the longevity of the PC is that they outsourced the development of its OS to Microsoft, believing that Microsoft owned CP/M because of an Apple ][ compatible product described in the next paragraph. A small business to IBM was much larger than the sizes of businesses that Apple was typically serving at that time. Many are unaware that the largest fraction of CP/M licenses ever sold were for the Microsoft Softcard for the Apple ][ (about 300,000 sold, all told), not S-100 systems (somewhere around 150,000 systems built by hobbyists, or sold by small manufacturers). The Softcard was a Z-80 based single-board computer that plugged into an Apple ][ slot, equipped with its own 80x24 character x line black-and-white video output, RAM, etc., and that shared Apple ][ electrical power and floppy disk drives. The Softcard was Microsoft's first really successful product, responsible for its first tens of millions of dollars in revenue and profits. The Softcard was developed by Seattle Computer Products, the same two-man company in a Seattle garage that later sold its prototype 8086/8088 OS to Microsoft for $50,000. Microsoft turned around within a day and sold it to IBM via a _non-exclusive_ license (a critical factor that allowed them to field MS-DOS, their self-branded version of IBM's PC-DOS), for $3 million _plus_ about $50 per computer sold with PC-DOS. That model, updated for Windows, is the cash cow that's still printing profits for Microsoft to this day.

At 05:55 AM 10/20/2018, Adam Sampson via cctalk wrote: Thw Wikipedia page fot the Softcard has more numbers and dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard - John

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018, Jim Manley via cctalk wrote: They DID offer the Async Card (Serial RS-232, AND 20mA) for using modems, serial printers, etc. Similarly, although they sold a joystick board, they didn't sell joysticks. DA15 connector for two joysticks. In some of the documentation, the sketch of a joystick was clearly the Radio Shack Coco joystick (which needed a different connector) LATER, they sold a joystick when the PCJr came out. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018, Tony Duell wrote: Could you provide some remedial tutoring on what I am misunderstanding? All of that circuitry is in the "controller". The joystick itself consists of pushbuttons and two potentiometers. NO other active circuitry. Moving the joystick does not itself vary the output voltage, when it is not so connected. Moving the joystick varies the wiper position along a resistive element. (admittedly, if the ends of the resistive element are connected to voltage and ground, then the wiper connection provides a variable output voltage) If the resistance is compatible, then what modifications need to be made to convert a "voltage divider" potentiometer to a "rheostat"/"variable resistor"? (wire to wiper and one end of the resistive element (already present), disconnect the connection at the other end of the resistive element) YES, it was "intended" to be used differently. If one KNOWS that it is impossible to make it work, then it makes it more difficult. Could one safely ignore the "No user serviceable components inside" sticker on the bottom of the joystick? :-) And, of course, there is the difficulty of locating a DA-15 connector! There are some on eBay, but the seller says that they are DB-15 :-) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Tony Duell <ard.p850ug1 at gmail.com> says: The Tandy 1000 series has Color Computer joystick ports (and the TRS-80 card-edge parallel port). I've read that some software is incompatible with CoCo joysticks, but don't remember seeing any such with my 1000SL. -- geo:37.783333,-122.416667

On Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 01:46 Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.orgwrote: It wasn't. It was only a processor card. that plugged into an Apple ][ slot, equipped with its own No version of the Softcard had it's own video output. It used normal Apple video output. If you wanted 80x24, you had to use a separate third-party 80-column card, or (later) and Apple IIe, IIc, IIc+, or IIgs. RAM, etc., I'm not sure what you're referring to by "etc.", but the vast majority of Softcards and their clones did not have their own RAM, and used that of the Apple II. The PCPI Applicard and it's clones had their own RAM. Some very late models of the Softcard had their own RAM.

I'd heard, but have no sources for said hearsay, that the most common CP/M machine in volume was the Apple II. There were definitely knockoffs of the Microsoft Z80 Softcard. One of my IIe systems has one from SPACE BYTE, the other is no-name. I've personally seen more knockoffs than actual Microsoft cards. The two I have currently are definitely "photocopy" type knockoff/clone cards, the layout is nearly identical to the real Microsoft card I've got. That of course doesn't speak for what was actually deployed. Some Apple II compatibles also came with CP/M compatibility out of the box, I don't personally know if that was MS Z80 Softcard compatible or something else. Thanks, Jonathan On Sat, Oct 20, 2018 at 5:54 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

I have a Basis (apple ][ clone) with a cpm card built on the main board?. George

Excellent! Thanks very much! Bill S. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred Cisin via cctalk Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 2:05 PM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: Microsoft-Paul Allen On Fri, 19 Oct 2018, William Sudbrink wrote: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_06/Homebrew_CC_J un76.pdf "Greenberg, Mark; Charles Grant (February 1977). "Kentucky Fried Computers advertisement". BYTE. 2 (2): pg 103. Slogan: "A Computer in Every Pot" Address was 2465 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710" https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-02/page/n103 upper right hand corner quarter page ad Hmmmm. where to find "Google streets" of 2465 4th street (east side of street, near Dwight Way) from 40 years ago?, . . . 10 years ago, when I was looking for pictures and memorabilia from those days, a friend of mine said that he thought that he remembered them having a small sign on the front of the building; but he's dead, and his collection of pictures of interest of Berkeley and Albany was dumpstered immediately after his death. Now, there is a biodiesel place and some maildrops there. Hmmm. Maybe, if you contacted KFC and asked their IP lawyers for details and anecdotes for how they have protected their trademark?, . . . --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Wait! It gets stranger. I just squinted hard at that Byte Mag ad. "Kentucky Fried Computers" is offering a "North Star Computers-FP8 & disk"??? -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of William Sudbrink via cctalk Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 2:15 PM To: 'Fred Cisin'; 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: Microsoft-Paul Allen Hmmm... so they were only "Kentucky Fried Computers" while they were reselling other (IMSAI, etc.) brands? You will never see a Northstar Horizon like case with a "Kentucky Fried Computers" badge on it? Bill -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Fred Cisin via cctalk Sent: Friday, October 19, 2018 2:05 PM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: Microsoft-Paul Allen On Fri, 19 Oct 2018, William Sudbrink wrote: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_06/Homebrew_CC_J un76.pdf "Greenberg, Mark; Charles Grant (February 1977). "Kentucky Fried Computers advertisement". BYTE. 2 (2): pg 103. Slogan: "A Computer in Every Pot" Address was 2465 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710" https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-02/page/n103 upper right hand corner quarter page ad Hmmmm. where to find "Google streets" of 2465 4th street (east side of street, near Dwight Way) from 40 years ago?, . . . 10 years ago, when I was looking for pictures and memorabilia from those days, a friend of mine said that he thought that he remembered them having a small sign on the front of the building; but he's dead, and his collection of pictures of interest of Berkeley and Albany was dumpstered immediately after his death. Now, there is a biodiesel place and some maildrops there. Hmmm. Maybe, if you contacted KFC and asked their IP lawyers for details and anecdotes for how they have protected their trademark?, . . . --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018, William Sudbrink wrote: Probably not. UNLESS, . . . their earliest products?