----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexandre Souza - Listas" <pu1bzz.listas at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 7:59 PM Subject: Re: Steve Jobs -2011 He had a good run, now we will see a million people dressed alike in black "think different shirts" at his funeral.

Interesting that google translate auto recognition thought this was french then proceeded to mangle it. It didn't have latin in the past, so I would use another site to force the translation. Way way off topic, unless one counts reading Bernie Greenberg's multics source comments in the hard core supervisor. Wonder what Gates will have to say about his passing. Jim On 10/5/2011 6:07 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 5 Oct 2011 at 18:25, jim s wrote: I note that Google has dropped Latin from its "Language tools" main page. The renderings were hilarious, if not cryptic. For example, Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio. (In laboring to be brief I become obscure.) used to translate to something like "To be brief, dance with ugly women." Using translate.google.com, it now is rendered as "Shortcut to be to work, become obscure.", which sort of misses the point, but at least skips the ugly women. Translate.google.com still shows Latin as a choice, so for the above, you get a very reasonable "Nothing but good concerning the dead" So Google's improving. If I crank the Lithuanian national anthem into Google Translate, it used to deliver, verbatim, the "poetic" Wikipedia translation. It flows well, but takes definite liberties with the text. Now, the translation is more literal, even if it doesn't know some of the words. I'm guessing that Google's algorithms for inflected languages don't work terribly well--yet. --Chuck

I will confess that when I saw the TMZ photo of Steve Jobs (looked like it was taken in Woodside) on the day of his resignation, the preface to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" came to mind: ""Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere..." For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, "I want to die." (Eliot quoting from Petronius' "Satyricon") Apple's Sybil, wasting away to a skeleton; no expense spared in keeping him alive to keep up the company stock value... How horrible. I wonder if stories will be told about his final days. --Chuck

At 07:18 AM 10/6/2011, Ray Arachelian wrote: No, that's been out for quite a while. I knew in 1983 or so. I mentioned it on this list in 1996, and Sellam mentioned it in 2000 (along with the Syrian father aspect.) It's been in the press for a while, particularly with the connection to his sister. - John

And really, when he did that he was a 20 year old kid. Both men (Jobs and Woz) long since moved on from that incident. In the end it didn't matter, Atari never used their Breakout and Woz and Jobs went on to a much more successful partnership. On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: -- Marty

On Mon, 10 Oct 2011, Chuck Guzis wrote: THAT warranted 18.5 minutes of silence.

At 08:09 AM 10/11/2011, Gene Buckle wrote: There's also one in Athens, WI. http://g.co/maps/tn47y It's not an uncommon name. - John

On Tue, 11 Oct 2011, Chuck Guzis wrote: Have the lawyers written to them about their "Apple Store"?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 3:51 PM Subject: Re: Steve Jobs -2011 Sure we need more people to design locked in closed overpriced platforms you cannot service. People here complain about Intel/Microsoft but I think Jobs was 100 time worse in his my way or the highway approach to computing.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 5:36 PM Subject: Re: Steve Jobs -2011 Yea, few people can sell a McDonalds double cheeseburger with an Apple logo on it in a pretty box for $75 and call it a steak.

On 06/10/11 6:23 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Well said. You can tell the difference the moment you pick one up. But Dell is hardly a fair comparison, even in the PC world. The crap end of the crap end, you might say. --Toby

On 10/07/2011 01:34 AM, Josh Dersch wrote: I have one of those. The problem is two fold. First, the heatsink is on the bottom of the laptop - it's a big huge pair of copper pipes that touch the CPU, GPU and northbridge and connect them to the bottom of the case and the two blower fans, so heat mostly goes to the bottom. Of course, hot air rises, so it escapes through the vent between the display and the keyboard, and some comes out of the keyboard. The 2nd problem is that these models were the ones that had thermal compound put on them with a trowel, which cooked these poor beasts. See: http://blog.johnkutlu.com/search/label/thermal%20paste and https://discussions.apple.com/message/12223482?messageID=12223482#12223482?… These, which have ATI GPUs, and a few later nVidia models develp issues with their GPUs due to the heat. The issue is supposedly that they get so hot that the BGA connectors start to have their solder melt and show display artifacts. The extra heat tends to cook other things such as batteries and hard drives too. I believe they did. But they also added wonderful innovations such as the pentalobolar screws to keep their owners from doing their own repairs, such as replacing the now "permanent" batteries. (You can buy special screwdrivers for these from iFixit and other places. Batteries for these models are starting to become available too, since these came out in 2009 and we're seeing the first batch of the batteries starting to hold less of a charge.) The one improvement to the newer unibody ones is that their hard drives are easy to replace. The earlier models, you have a lot more screws to undo, and you have to remove the keyboard to get at the hard drive. OTOH, with the earlier ones, replacing the batteries and memory is very easy. Batteries are the very first things to die in a notebook (unless you spill liquids in them, or drop them), then hard drives, then the backlights slowly dim over time for the CF models. (Not sure if the LED ones will dim over time.) Optical drives seem to go after a few years too, so when the notebook's at home, I connect to an external USB one. This push towards the replace your machine when the battery wears out for notebooks does not win my loyalty. It's even worse for things like ipods, iphones, and ipads. It's more like you're renting them and paying for the year than buying them. And don't get me started on the locked-in "store" stuff. (Instead of getting ipod, or an iPhone, I added a micro sdhc card to my blackberry, which does have a replaceable battery. While it doesn't have the best OS and the nicest mp3 player, it's good enough for my needs, and it does have a physical keyboard.) Did you also notice how you can't expand the storage in these iDevices, while their android or blackberry counterparts all have microsdhc slots? I still have much older pre-Jobs 68K and PPC PowerBooks that still run to this day (though the batteries no longer work of course.) I recently wanted a desktop computer, so I built a nice Hackintosh instead of buying a macpro. The highest end MacPro at the time cost 2x as much and only offered a 2.3GHz quad CPU. The one I built has a 3.4GHz CPU, so it was a no-brainer. I would have done the same with the notebook if the Chimera software worked fully for something like a nice high end Thinkpad, it wouldn't surprise me if it will do so eventually. As long as open source drivers for Linux exist, they can be ported to work with OS X. I loved the old IBM Thinkpad hardware, not sure if the newer ones from Lenovo are built to the same high quality as IBM made them. Hopefully they are. They're easily $1000 less for roughly the same configuration.

Off the top of my head, SMC Fan Control is the one I used: http://www.eidac.de/?p=207 These days I use "Fan Control" which is a control pannel for System Preferences. http://www.lobotomo.com/products/FanControl/ It made some difference in mine, but not a lot. The Fan control app did a lot more. :)

On 10/7/2011 5:08 PM, Toby Thain wrote: He may have been right in theory (and where the available technology supported it) but he was incorrect in practice. Passive cooling works where passive cooling is sufficient. (And the G4 Cube definitely overheated.) Where it isn't sufficient, it doesn't work and you get laptops that are uncomfortable to use like the MacBook Pro in my example. So... buy a better fan? It'll last longer and be quieter! Fans are replaceable, a laptop that has suffered thermal component failure due to poor design, less so. When critical cooling components are left out for aesthetic reasons, that's a serious design error. - Josh

What was the deal with Jobs and fans anyway - none in the Apple ]['s, the Apple /// (I've now heard of 3 of them going on fire this year alone) --- The Mac and the iCube... what the heck?!?!? Fans aren't THAT damned loud for crying out loud... Jobs being Jobs - you'd think he would've reinvented the fan to make it silent and accommodate his needs. Toby Thain wrote:

No it *is* about the noise. The acoustic specs on Macs are *really* tight. We fight against the specs all of the time. TTFN - Guy On Oct 7, 2011, at 7:45 PM, Toby Thain wrote:

On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Geoff Reed wrote: You might try Athana. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Hi Of course, you can always by a punch from me and make your own well aligned 10 hole disk from spare 360K disk ( doube density ). I still has a few left from the build. I also have a number of 15 hole punches as well for those that might want one. You don't even need to remove the disk from the envelope. I pass these on at cost. Dwight

Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: If you have fans, they eventually break, and to do things 'properly' they also have to be monitored and the OS/firmware written to safely handle a failure condition. Maybe he just didn't want the maintenance burden for users, or the extra component and development cost, or figured that not having fans and designing the system to stay cool without would improve reliability stats (obviously it didn't quite work out with the /// :-) I don't have a problem with fans, but the norm seems to be to put them at the intake or outlet, where they can be easily heard - and burying them deeper within a machine with suitable ducting (ISTR something doing this - NeXT slab maybe) would seem a better approach (at least for non-portable systems). I do have a problem with idiot design, though - e.g. my Dell laptop has the fan intake on the bottom of the machine; fine if used on a desk where feet raise it high enough off the surface, but it gets blocked easily if actually used (perish the thought!) on a lap. cheers Jules

On 8 Oct 2011 at 18:33, Jules Richardson wrote: That's mostly because almost nobody makes good fans any more. I have some metal-frame Rotron "Sprite" fans that have passed their 40th year in operation. I also don't hear about too many of the original AC powered fans in old IBM 5150s packing up. Essentially, the problem is that purchasing managers don't want to pay for good fans. Anything than can turn in 18 months of operation without locking up must be good enough. On one of the other electronics-related forums some time ago, I mentioned using an AC-powered fan as a reasonable alternative to cheap plastic Chinese DC fans. One of the forum members took exception to my suggestion and said an AC (shaded pole) fan would kick up enough RF energy to destroy all the ICs in the box. When I pointed out that AC fans have been used on solid-state electronics since the 1950s, he was unmoved and resorted to ad hominem attacks. Where the hell do these ideas get started? --Chuck

On 9 Oct 2011 at 20:52, Tony Duell wrote: I lump them with the sort that believes that because of some mysterious exception to the laws of thermodynamics, they can take a mason jar full of water and some electrodes, hook it to their auto's battery and get a 200% improvement in fuel economy by burning the electrolysis products. They're still out there and just as evangelical about it, but lately the Rossi eCAT LENR snake oil has attracted many of the faithful. --Chuck

On 10 Oct 2011 at 21:10, Tony Duell wrote: For the mileage thing, just do a web search on "HHO mileage". "HHO" is the "in" term for what is also called "Brown's Gas", which is nothing more than a mixture of electrolysis products. I have a friend who makes custom flutes (draws his own silver tubing, etc.) and uses a water torch. But the thing uses potassium hydroxide (very caustic) to improve ionization and the rig draws about 13A at 240V to produce a fairly small flame. For him, it's probably ideal for items, such as keywork, as the oxyhydrogen flame has less heat (for a comparably-sized flame) and a lower temperature than oxyacetylene, yet is still hot enough to braze with without burning the workpiece. I haven't worked out the cost per BTU, but it could be cheaper. I do some silver-soldering, but it's low-temperature. (1000-1300F), so acetylene-air works just fine. It's the waste of good human intellect and effort that bothers me. Witness how many people jumped on Fleischman and Pons' bandwagon. Didn't France sink a considerable sum into a "cold fusion" research site? I suppose that the only people who made real money were the early palladium futures commodity speculators. Most of the claims made since F&P, including Rossi, are undoubtedly due to poor metrology and a basic misunderstanding of metrology techniques. --Chuck

On 10/11/2011 02:31 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I've used the water torches myself. The electrolyte is Sulphuric Acid for conduction and you add water daily (if used in production applications). It produces a small (maybe 1-2mm) flame and is extremely hot. We used them to weld leads to platinum wires (special application) and to join wires like those used for J and K type thermocouples. As to power it ran from a bench outlet often two or three of them from the same 100V strip and I believe the power used was well under 250W. Allison

And yet the fastest G5 and G4 models blew like wind tunnels. I own both an MDD G4 and a liquid-cooled quad G5 and they roar at full tilt. The G5 can outroar even my notoriously noisy POWER6. On the flip side, the iMac G4 (the "Luxo Jr" variety) was a very quiet machine. Even after adding a small fan to it, it is still very quiet and my iMac has never overheated. It ventilates quietly through the top of the "foot." -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- FORTUNE: You have a magnetic personality. Avoid iron-based alloys. ---------

When the quad G5 (I don't know what G5 you own, this is the liquid-cooled one) is idle, it is reasonably quiet. In a room with no other computers you will hear it and it is about the same volume as my HEPA filter on low. In my old apartment, at idle, it was not louder than anything else. When I'm building stuff (it is the "buildbot" for TenFourFox) and ramp up the CPU to highest power, then it roars. A nice side benefit is I don't need a space heater in that room when I'm waiting for rebuilds ;) I can understand why Apple didn't want the G5 in a laptop, and even I have reservations about its design relative to the G4, but it was a pretty hot (heheh) Mac for the time and it still performs pretty well, six years later. I don't have any plans to retire it or buy an Intel Mac. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- Donald Knuth ------------

I used a dual G5 machine for an instructional course once upon a time. The OS was Yellow Dog Linux, and it had fallen behind the hardware in that Apple had changed hardware in the thermal control and YDL didn't recognize its reported version number. The thing was as loud as an old Hoover. I found and fixed the offending code and it purred quietly in the corner. And even with a dozen students running instances of a compute-intensive simulation, it remained cool and quiet. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Cameron Kaiser [spectre at floodgap.com] Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2011 7:44 AM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: the G5 that roared was Re: Steve Jobs -2011 When the quad G5 (I don't know what G5 you own, this is the liquid-cooled one) is idle, it is reasonably quiet. In a room with no other computers you will hear it and it is about the same volume as my HEPA filter on low. In my old apartment, at idle, it was not louder than anything else. When I'm building stuff (it is the "buildbot" for TenFourFox) and ramp up the CPU to highest power, then it roars. A nice side benefit is I don't need a space heater in that room when I'm waiting for rebuilds ;) I can understand why Apple didn't want the G5 in a laptop, and even I have reservations about its design relative to the G4, but it was a pretty hot (heheh) Mac for the time and it still performs pretty well, six years later. I don't have any plans to retire it or buy an Intel Mac. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- Donald Knuth ------------

Oh, no, haven't been on their network in years (I left full-time employ in 1999 and consultancy in 2003). I don't even know who runs their IT department now. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Man who live in glass house dress in basement. -----------------------------

Quite frankly, anything over a 13" laptop in my opinion is no longer a latop, its a fold up desktop computer.... some of these 17" "laptops" are just insane, you might as well be lugging a Compaq SLT around with you. Josh Dersch wrote:

my Toshiba has an 18.4" screen. I'm old and my eyes like it! So there! it only weighs 9 lbs. But my weight approaches 300 so what's that? on the Jobs thing, I'm sorry to hear of anyone's passing, but what did the guy really accomplish apart from his marketing? Please, the Atari ST was a better computer then the original Mac. And 40% the cost. The iphone is a cell phone and a palm pilot mashed together. --- On Fri, 10/7/11, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:

--- On Mon, 10/10/11, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: my comment had nothing to do w/software. "Palm pilot" used as generic handheld computer. Fell way way out of popularity (after everyone owning one up until about 5 years ago). It wasn't he -phone portion that made the iphone so popular (especially since AT & T was the carrier!), but rather the applications. The Palm whatevers died out big time, but they came back w/a vengeance. Despite the immense popularity, where's the innovation? My Tracphone has a Locosto processor and my HP 50g has a StrongArm, and w/that I'm done! And look at these tablets. You have to spend at least 400$ for a 10" tablet, but you can buy a netbook for a little over 200$. Both will wind you up in the insane asylum, so it's hard for me to dote on netbooks as opponents of the tablets. They're both nice in their own way, but won't replace a laptop. Nuh uh, not happening. The Toshiba I bought my mum (she has yet to turn it on 3 months later) is significantly nicer then my old Linus based Asus, but the A* was nice too. Very well made, rugged even (no h/d). But these things don't stand to "replace" anything. Sure there are instances where a netbook or tablet is ideal, for instance the guys working in the 7-11s around here routinely inventory w/their Fujitsu tablet in hand (probably run at least 1500$ per), which are beautiful. But there's no substitute 90% of the time for a desktop or full size laptop. The 15.6" Toshibas and whatnot (I do like T*s) are drop dead gorgeous and cost little over 300$. It's a joke how cheap this stuff is. So what has Apple offered recently? Why should I go out and buy a Snuggy instead of donning a bathrobe backwards? And I don't own or need one of those either! I got plenty of old fashioned towels that work just fine!

On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 18:11:44 -0400, "TeoZ" <teoz at neo.rr.com> wrote: at logo Annd as is often the case, the truth is probably somewhere in between. My experience with the reliability of recent (last ten years) Apple hardware has been that it's been pretty much on par with reasonable-quality PC hardware. We had one iMac (an early Intel one) that bounced back and forth between us and Apple at least three times (I forget the details now), each time failing again in the same way in under 24 hours. Having said that, Apple's design and build quality is generally better (but not such that the price is justified, IMO). I do agree strongly with the point made earlier that Apple's major contribution to the world has been in the field of extreme vendor lock-in and apparently anti-competitive practice. Perhaps I'm still bitter about the whole Apple II/Woz thing! Anyway, that's what I thought of when I read the original $75 dinner vs. burger comment. I don't think it's a relevant point at all; each time I go out to dinner, I can easily choose one or the other depending on what works for me at the time. If I choose McDonald's, or the $75 lunch, I'm not stuck with that choice for months/years, and end up only being able to eat the breakfast and lunch that the Applestaurant tells me I can. I really do resent companies that try to over-reach thmeselves; this annoyed me about Microsoft for a long time, to the point that I find myself astonished to be in this position regarding Apple. Now, we just have to wait for Google to take over enough of the world for me to resent them as well. Then I can sit back and watch the fisticuffs between the three of them. Not that Microsoft seems likely to put up much of a fight these days. Mike

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 5:10 PM, TeoZ <teoz at neo.rr.com> wrote: I've repaired broken Mac hardware - it's not as easy as for some other platforms (like the Amiga, one of the last home computer makers I can think of that published their schematics) but one can infer a lot from inspecting a board and reverse-engineering some schematics. Yes, and not without merit. We also complain about Oracle/Sun, IBM, and other big name vendors. Being large makes you a target and does not make you immune to detractors. It's more like, "my way or Bill's Highway," when you boil it all down. I'm no Apple Fanboi but I've purchased and used Apple products over the past 25 years (often second-hand, since I'm not a fan of Apple prices). There are things I liked and things I didn't like about nearly everything the company has ever made. When the ratio is favorable, I'll likely buy and use that item. When it's unfavorable, I'll use something else. Some years, I use Apple products every day, other years, not so much. I prefer the things I buy to be openable and repairable, but just because something isn't doesn't mean I would _never_ buy it. Most people who buy cars don't do their own maintenance (I do stuff I can and pay other people for stuff I can't or prefer not to). These days, most people don't do their own computer/electronic maintenance either. They buy something, use it, break it or get distracted by the new shiny, then replace it. They just don't care that it's difficult to fix. They care how shiny it is. I'm happy to be more than a passive consumer, but that's a minority position. -ethan

Oh don't get me started. I regard the uman body as being one of the worst deisgns I've ever come across (and not just for this reason). -tony

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 10/07/2011 03:54 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That's because it wasn't designed. It's the product of stepwise refinement carried out over billions of years of iterations. I wonder how bloated and awful current software designs will be after a simliar period of stepwise refinement? BK

On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote: ....I keep hoping it'll catch up with you. Soon. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

That's because it wasn't designed. This is yet another data point showing how ill informed those who subscribe to an intelligent designer are. We are still adapted for an environment that hasn't existed for a few thousand years. Go back to a paleolithic diet and the same kind of exercise (not cardio), and you'll find modern diseases reversing and vanishing. Neolithic foods such as grains, legumes, artificial ingredients, colors, GMO foods, trans fats from corn, canola, safflower, soy, sunflower, enhanced and artificial, flavors, foods high in carbs and fructose, excitotoxins such as MSG in various forms, veganism, and modern environmental toxins are all factors that cause modern diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, alzheimers, osteoporosis, IBS, GERD, ADHD and so on. (Note that I didn't say go back to the paleolithic way of living, where you'd have to hunt and forage and be chased by tigers and other predators. Modern medicine is quite good at things such as mending bones, but not very much else.)

On 2011 Oct 7, at 9:36 AM, steve wrote: In case you hadn't noticed, the human body is largely self-repairing.

I was opened 3 times in 2008-2009 and got a whole load of new parts for my heart - the Human Body is easily repairable --- its just that some replacement parts having been designed and/or made fully compatible.... yet :-) Cameron Kaiser wrote:

On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Chuck Guzis wrote: It seems to be good enough for the occasional, "Oh god, another f*cking mac fanboy" comment. :D g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On 11 Oct 2011 at 22:13, Andrew Burton wrote: Not many. On the other hand, I've sometimes viewed humans as parasitic organisms that assist computers in evolution and self- reproduction. Once they have no need for us, we're done for... --Chuck

--- On Tue, 10/11/11, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Not only that, but the human body can fix other human bodies (or was that already said or implied?). Ok, it seems to be open season on pointing out so called deficiencies in God's ultimate machine. I once heard a bloke go on about how he kept injuring himself (playing rugby) and the associated down time. Some of his injuries became somewhat permanent. It just stands to reason that no matter how well you design something, there are bound to be circumstances that could lead to it's ultimate destruction. Anything is breakable. Oi. And with a circulatory system that could stretch from here to the moon, amongst other marvels of our anatomy, I'm pretty well persuaded that we're not the product of a vast series of accidents.

On 10/7/2011 2:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote: I *can* repair all the stuff here, but I *choose* not to, for "value of my time" reasons. Jim

To be fair, I don't think Apple machines re any harder to service than otehrs of approximatly the same age. OK, there are no official Mac scheamtics, but that's true of other machines to, and they're not that hard to reverse-engineer. Modern stuff is going to be very dificult to fix, no matter who it comes from. I have no liking of Apple products : I regard them as being difficult to do anything useful with (my esperience is that they make easy jobs trivial and diffiuclt jobs impossible). I don't care _at all_ for the hardware design of the machines I've looked at (Apple ][ and early Macs). I don't like that fact that they rarely, if ever, follow standards. I don't like the very odd disk format of The Apple ][, for example I don't like the fact that early Mac OSs didn't have any form of command line I don't like the fact that there has to be only one way to do something. That was supposed to simplify the Mac user interface, it drives me mad. I find the 'gesture based' user interface of some modern Apple products to be very clumsy. I don't like the way Apple ties you in to their products, software, etc. If I buy a computer, it's mine, to do what I like with and to run whatever programs I like on. I don't like the way they make things hacker-unfriendly -- hard to open cases, no expansion slots, no proper documetnion, etc. So, no, I am not going to be buying any Apple product. But I am also sorry that Steve Jobs is dead. I do not wish illness or death on anyone. -tony

Yes, I was thinking about pre-OSX for desktop Apple machines. I am told that OSX does have an accessible unix shell :-). However, their portable devices don't seem to have any such shell, they don't seem to have anything that makes them useful for difficult tasks How propretary? I've been known ot make special tools in the past to get screws out. But yes, I prefer manufacturers who use something standard (I do regard Torx as standard, in fact I like them). How are the batteries irreplacable? I've seen replacement batteries for Ipods, on sale over here/ :-(. Mind you, some of the HP calculators Ilove ar heat-staked together (or at lest have the PCB heat-staked in place). Other manufactuers may not be very repairer-friendly. -tony

On 10/8/2011 3:00 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: So what's changed just recently to change your opinion? What's replaced it? (Not trying to flame, genuinely curious.) - Josh

On 10/8/11 4:56 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Which Linux ZFS did you go with? I know you were skeptical a few months ago.

On 08/10/11 9:49 PM, Al Kossow wrote: I'd still be sceptical. :) ZFS on Linux has to be a little undercooked. --T

On 08/10/11 11:21 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Well that's alright then. --T

On 09/10/11 12:55 PM, Al Kossow wrote: I thought that recently reached some kind of milestone? --Toby

Being an so-hardware-inclined man, you should :) We must remember that, at that time, it was a HUGE progress on floppies. IIRC, Woz did with 5 ICs what was done with 11 or more, and made the 5 1/4 floppy WAY cheaper. It was some simple idea, but a wonderfull achievement anyways. I have lots of respect for Woz, because of his hacks. It was a way to make the floppy drive more popular, and he was very successfull on that.

I seem to rememebr there were some issues where the original Apple SCSI, as on the Mac+ wasn't quite the same as the rest of the world. I also remmeber that Apple Nubus was not the same as the Nubus standard. Yes it does. The original Mac OSs didn't have any real way of automating tasks. A computer is good at doing the same thing over and over again with slight changes. Not to have that facility makes the machine essentialyl useuless to me. Clearly not. -tony

On 08/10/11 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Love it or hate it, it is a universal standard. :) --T

For ME, it makes easy interfacing, trivial! And it makes difficult interfacing, impossible.

THis is some new defintion of 'universal' :-) I have over 200 computers here : Almost all of them have RS232 ports Many of them have Centronics-like parallel ports Quite a few have 'user' TTL-level parallel ports And a fair proprtion have HPIB/GPIB/IEEE488 ports Not _one_ has USB, or can have USB. It's not universal here... And I am not convinced a 'universal interface' makes any more sense than a 'universal vehicle' that will carry 10 tonnes of cargo, will withstand a hit from a shell and will win a Formula 1 race :-) -tony

On 8 Oct 2011 at 17:39, Toby Thain wrote: course... Sarcasm aside, this brings up a good question... I've got a 1984 Ampex Megastore board for the PC that uses SCSI (I'll have to check the ROM exactly, to see if they call it SASI or SCSI, but it uses the command set). It connected with an external box with both tape and disk drives. I suspect it wasn't the first for the PC. Does anyone know what was? Apple wasn't even part of the USB working group for a long time. USB was on amny PC motherboards even before connectors for it became available. My earliest USB device is an Anchor Chips EZ-Link S/N 0011--I'd have to open it up to figure out the year. I've got other USB devices that are labeled for use with a specific motherboard. Plug them into a different one, and they're invisible. Early USB was an unmitigated nightmare. After spending a bunch of money on technical books and hardware and then witnessing how awful the implementations were, I lost interest quickly. --Chuck

On 8 Oct 2011 at 19:13, Toby Thain wrote: If I understand your claim, then, any PC motherboard featuring an integrated SCSI interface 1987 or earlier nullifies your claim. If so, I'll start looking... --Chuck

On 08/10/11 7:57 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Now we're done beating Apple down, we can talk about what NeXT did that was ahead of its time. :) - booted from Apple, Jobs sold all but one Apple share for a $400m windfall. - Founded NeXT with $7m and A LOT to prove. - Spec'd a ridiculous dream workstation: DSP, MO, 12" cube magnesium chassis, matt black, exotic UNIX, Display PostScript, Objective C, megapixel display with grey scale (and later, deep colour). NeXT is therefore a vanity product & its failure in the market was predictable. Discuss. --T

On Sat, 8 Oct 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: Careful Dave. If you disturb his reality distortion field with facts, he's likely to flip out. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On 08/10/11 8:31 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: This more reflects the hardware cost realities of the time, both in cards and monitors. For a time, post-Jobs Apple sold 12" & 13" grey-scale (1-8 bit) monitors alongside their colour Trinitron range. Their full page Portrait and 21" Two Page Display could do 1 and 2 bit grey scale (latter like the first NeXT). Sun was shipping megapixel 1 bit video around 1989 (entry level SS1). Video cards that could drive 24 bits were still expensive circa 1990 (i paid something like $4000 for a Truevision NuVista which was among the first to fully support Colour QuickDraw up to 32 bits), but both the Mac II and the NeXT range went there as soon as the technology was available. There were 24 bit cards with system software hacks before Colour QuickDraw (RasterOps planar). I think variations of these were even available for the non-NuBus form factor Macs. --Toby

On 10/8/2011 6:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Eh, not strictly true. If you waited long enough (until 1990), you could pay $4,000 for a NeXTDimension board for your Cube. It was released to much fanfare and then was basically completely forgotten about by NeXT. But it was pretty cool hardware: up to 64mb of onboard memory, an i860 CPU (33Mhz) running its own Mach kernel for accelerating 32-bit color Display PostScript. 32bpp, video in/out, and talks of an MJPEG accelerator add-on that never materialized. I have one, it's neat -- but I've never found any software (other than demos) that make much use of the extra hardware. - Josh

On Sat, 8 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote: Some people wanted color so badly, that they would give up resolution to get it! Personally, I never got the appeal of 256 color accounting. I was much happier with Amdek 1280/Wyse 700 (1280 x 700 B&W). But, every college administrator "had to have" VGA, while the CIS department used CGA, so that we could use cheap B&W composite monitors. (upgraded to Hercules in ~1995). They upgraded from 286 to 386 and then to 486, while we were still stuck with 8088, but wouldn't give them to us, "because we can get $150 trade-in!") When we finally got Pentiums, it was at more than twice the going rate, because somebody cut a special deal.

On 09/10/11 12:49 PM, ben wrote: Truevision NuVista+ had a bunch of video features including frame grabbing, and video overlay with 1 bit alpha mask. I still have the card. It also had a TI (iirc) DSP on board, which was programmable with Mac-hosted development tools. I have been unable to locate the development kit for this over the years. --Toby

On 09/10/11 2:34 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Colour was notably expensive both on the card side and the monitor side, unless you wanted a really crappy monitor or really crappy resolution/depth. And I was talking about workstations, because that is where the NeXT competed. PC/home computer graphics was another, much more primitive, ballgame entirely, in the 1980s. Sun didn't use Display PostScript for OpenWindows - but their Network extensible Windowing System did use PostScript primitives and a version of the language, which is what you are presumably thinking of. It is part of OpenWindows 3, and seems unlikely to have predated NEXTSTEP, at least in general release. Interesting detail - Jim Gosling was, I believe, responsible for the F3 outline font rasteriser in OpenWindows. Then he went on to do something else that was better known... But here we are, in 2011, stuck with X11 on many systems. Better imaging is one thing Steve Jobs got right, in NEXTSTEP and OS X. --T

On 09/10/11 3:30 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Hmm, SunDew paper by James Gosling is dated 1986, here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem From the emails cited here: http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/lang/NeWS.html ...it couldn't have been part of a product until after 1987. It did indeed ship with OpenWindows 3.0 (1991) and The NeWS Toolkit (1989). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS so by the time it was generally released, NeXT cube must have been shipping for at least a year. However, you are right about Sun using Display PostScript later on; according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWindows) NeWS was replaced by Display PostScript in v3.3 (1993). I didn't know that. :) --Toby

On 09/10/11 5:46 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Yes, they used PostScript (their own implementation) - they just didn't license *Display PostScript* per se from Adobe until later. NEXTSTEP used Display PostScript - which gave programs like Illustrator and Mathematica a bit of a leg-up. I got the NeWS early developer stuff at the time; I still have the binder. It was quite an interesting product. Pity the idea died off and Linux is still largely stuck with X11. --Toby

On 09/10/11 6:10 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Well you have to admit that the motivating model for a networked window system - thin clients, approximately, or remote computing services - has largely evaporated in favour of a model of expensive per-person workstations with more CPU and GPU than they can ever use. I'm not arguing that the latter wasteful craziness makes any sense, but it does make a lot of money for the scum^H^H^H^H Gateses and Dells of the world. --T

On 09/10/11 8:24 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: As a sysadmin I've never wanted a GUI tool except, maybe, to consolidate status graphs, which can be done easily enough without a networked windowing system. Come to think of it, the web is probably what finally killed the concept, by implementing it in an unexpected but more versatile way. --Toby

On 09/10/11 9:41 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: I think you answered your own question. It's more portable than any app, etc. Well, there you go. I'd rather not deal with NetBackup :) --T

On 10/9/11 6:41 PM, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Dunno, but I CAN tell you that rsync, cp or mv at the command line is a hell of a lot faster than drag and drop copy in OSX finder.... Or on whichever the current solaris default GUI

On 10/9/2011 3:28 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Of course, Apple only sells thin client machines. They don't make a lot of money selling systems with more CPU and GPU power than a given person could ever use, running non-networked windowing systems. (What wasteful craziness that would be!). Nope, they're not scum, no sir. Josh

On 10/9/2011 6:20 PM, Toby Thain wrote: Well, had you included Apple in your "Gateses and Dells" line above, I perhaps wouldn't have made such an assumption. - Josh

On 10/10/2011 10:03 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Not for you, apparently! ;) Others hold different opinions, though. For end-users on cell phones, of course. And again, irrelevant to you, perhaps. I and many others use it heavily. This addresses a different problem. People use X today for different reasons than they did twenty years ago, just like pretty much everything else. You don't need it, that doesn't mean nobody else does. You are correct of course about its early reason for being, but as you know, things evolve; it's used to great benefit today for reasons other than wimpy computers. As a quick case in point, I have a hugely powerful computer a few hundred feet away, and a hugely powerful computer in front of me. This morning, I am editing a large file on the far-away one. I choose to do it via emacs over X11, because it's easier and faster. It's a trivial example, but sometimes those are the best kinds. People do stuff like this all the time. Both of the companies I'm working for work this way company-wide. Hardly! It only uses network bandwidth if it's getting USED over a network, and if that's happening, it's being used because it's needed, which makes it most assuredly NOT a waste of bandwidth. When used locally, with server and clients on the same system, it uses no network bandwidth at all. Not "a little", but NONE. Yes, I'm aware. Don't misinterpret the reasons for that, though. The Ubuntu decision makers have gotten really big heads about how wildly popular their distribution has become, and they're pulling the whole "we own the world now, so let's change some stuff for the sake of changing it" crap. They did the same thing with Unity, which has a userbase penetration of essentially zero (pretty much everyone who learns it can be turned off does so immediately), forcing it down peoples' throats by making it the default in Ubuntu 11. Fortunately you can change it at the login screen, which every Ubuntu 11 user I know of has done. This is another example of the Ubuntu group flirting with unilaterally deciding how we should use our machines, which is why I just dumped MacOS X as my primary desktop platform after years of loving it. That said, though, I understand the logic behind what they're doing. Ubuntu is competing with both Windows and OS X, and in every case I've seen they're doing so very successfully. They're targeting primarily nontechnical end-users. However, as an OS for highly technical users, such as myself, it gives the aesthetic beauty and ease-of-use of an end-user-oriented platform without taking away any of the power...a line MacOS X started crossing a few releases ago. (which is why I dumped it) In other words, X11 isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It has stood the test of time on hundreds of platforms for decades...One widely-contested suggestion from the maintainers of one distribution on one platform isn't going to change that. And please don't think I'm poo-pooing Ubuntu, I just switched TO Ubuntu 11 as my main desktop platform a couple of months ago...a monumental personal decision which I take with the same level of seriousness and consideration as switching spouses. (I'm sorry that got so long! I wanted to clearly explain my position.) Our usage patterns are clearly very different. (and there's nothing at all wrong with that of course) I've been doing the same for about as long, and I've used X over networks daily since then. First for the reasons you mentioned above, distributed computing power, and now (from maybe 1994 on) for convenience. I use it to great advantage, and I don't see myself NOT using it anytime soon. VNC and related technologies work of course, but I consider them to be gigantic kludges. Mine too. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

I had one of those TIGA cards - an NEC. I bought it at a hamfest for $5 because the guy did not know what he had. For a while, it kicked ass, even if my machine did not. Hmm, that sounds like a suit made a dumb engineering decision. Oh, sorry, that was Jobs...he has nerd immunity. I think the MO was the single biggest thing that killed what would have been a great line of machines. -- Will

From: Josh Dersch Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2011 1:08 PM On 10/9/2011 12:20 PM, William Donzelli wrote: It's not apocryphal. We got at least a dozen, more likely 2 dozen, Cubes at LOTS. The MO disk as personal universe was touted as a major advantage. As the OS went from 0.8 to 0.9 to 1.0, we provided upgrades to those students who had purchased disks. Remember that the NeXT cube was priced at $5,000 with a metric boat load of software. I priced out a Mac IIfx and an IBM PS/2 Model 80 (which were brand new at the same time, and comparable in processor specs) with the same software load (or nearest equivalents, if necessary). Both of them came in at close to $12,000. That was the university pricing, of course. I still have a couple of NeXT MO disks. They may have become highball coasters in the last 25 years, but next (<snrk!>) time we're both at the SRCS meeting with your NeXT, we can try them out. (OK, now I have to dig them out of the closet.) Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Yes, this matches what I have heard. Universities would have NeXTs in the labs, and the students and researches would just have the disk in their backpack. Yes, but it sort of tarnished the first impression. -- Will

On 10/9/2011 5:16 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: :). I perhaps should have added the qualifier, "It's an interesting idea -for a UNIX system- ..." to my original statement. - Josh

On Sat, 8 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote: There's a difference between wider use and "being first" or "before...notice". Overtaking volume of use is NOT "being first". YES, there were SASI implementations before the Macintosh was publically released. Almost certainly SCSI, also. But my memories of the timeline are fading. where are they now? Even I can get a modem or a printer working on a parallel or serial port. Even I can get hardware and software to work on parallel or serial ports. (OK, I don't HAVE any parallel port modems. Wish I did.)_ I can't get a USB modem to work, nor printer drivers to STAY working on some machines. "Troubleshooting" now seems to consist of: 1) check whether it is plugged in. 2) Throw entire new machines at it. Progress. But, YES, USB is nowhere near as USELESS of a SERIAL BOTCH as it used to be. Again. Putting it on all of the product line is NOT "being first to use it". THAT kind of logic makes DELL a major, maybe the greatest, innovator! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Tony Duell skrev 2011-10-09 21:39: I once wrote a turbopascal program that used the parallel port and it's control lines to transmit and receive a 128 bit synchronously 300 baud signal to a care phone (not a car phone, it was a home alarm for elderly people). So the parallel port can be used as a modem. :-) /G?ran

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Tony Duell wrote: and LATER IBM "printer interface"s did not require ANY modifiaction for use bi-directionally, in spite of that NOT being what IBM had "intended".

At 03:17 PM 10/17/2011, Tony Duell wrote: Being pedantic about it, I'd say that twiddling more than one line at once changes it from serial to parallel. - John

At 04:15 PM 1/18/2011, Tony Duell wrote: Sounds like redundancy to me. Reminds me of bits and baud. So if I'm sending two bits at a time over two wires, that's parallel? - John

On 10/19/2011 04:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote: And v.35, some flavors of SCSI, the drive-side interface in FibreChannel, SATA, SAS, SSA, twisted-pair forms of Ethernet, PCIe (and indeed most other high-speed digital signals on PCBs these days), most copper-based telephony, all the signals in a Cray-1...differential signaling is everywhere. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On 09/10/11 10:38 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: My mistake. The SE and Mac II certainly had ADB. In my defence, it was a long time ago :) (A Plus was the first computer I bought for myself.) --T

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Any motherboard with an Intel Pentium chipset starting with the Triton II 430HX / 430VX and the 82371SB PIIX3 southbridge had USB 1.0 support in the chipset, although the BIOS could disable and hide the PIIX3 USB controller. Those chipsets date to the beginning of 1996. That's a couple of years before the first iMac with USB support in 1998. But the original iMac without a built in floppy drive did do a lot to boost the interest in USB floppy and USB Zip drives at the time. The first USB device I worked with was the Intel 8x930Ax eval board. Basically an 80251 core with an on chip USB SIE. I don't know if anyone makes an 80251 core USB controller anymore. -Glen

On 10/8/2011 2:39 PM, Toby Thain wrote: There is no such thing as "perfect" interoperability on older SCSI drives. Until drives had matured, the ITLQ nexus didn't work on most, and you could kill drives by just sending out too many tag queue entries. The PC world had several scsi vendors, but SCSI never caught on there because the PC vendors always had a cheaper solution, again thru to the current SATA interfaces. successor FCAL drive interfaces with scsi were the same, never hit price points to work on the PC desktop. There was a well known malfunction that had to do with CD rom blocksize negotiation that both Sun and Apple exploited since very few drives had the firmware fixed to conform with the change in blocksize they set properly early on in the boot process. So you could not use a lot of CD drives on either Apple or Sun systems. whether intended or not, that contributed a sense that Apple didn't care if their system products worked with third party products, since the problem went unchanged until most CD vendors eventually changed their firmware to conform with the command sequence that was a problem. IIRC the standards committee resolved the problem by changing the standard to resolve an ambiguity that was the real issue. It is a matter of perception that a vendor of systems could have changed, both Sun and Apple in their products. The change from 2k blocksizes to 512 was not really necessary at the time they did it in the boot sequence. They both talked to any drive just fine from the OS, it was an issue only on booting. Don't even slightly try to sell that Apple give a crap about interoperability of product lifetime in their marketing and product decisions. Their products are the textbook example of weird and cute quirky hardware. Another example, way off cctalk track. Ipod power / data connection. Can anyone justify why there are different ipod connectors which are incompatable, and why they don't use the mini usb?

On 08/10/11 7:06 PM, jim s wrote: Connector design was an area where Apple would definitely change the connector in order to meet Jobs' design goals. Examples include: - ADC for early LCD displays (had to carry power, so DVI wasn't an option) - Power Macs - MiniDVI (Macbook) - MiniDisplayPort (Macbook) - AAUI (vs huge AUI) on Mac II and later - Appletalk serial on classic Mac (vs PC DB-connector) - keyboard RJ on classic Mac (PC was mostly using DIN at the time, I guess) - 25 pin SCSI on Mac Plus (space saving on motherboard) - whatever crazy breakouts the Macbook Air needs In most cases they had to go their own way because smaller variants of connectors (like MiniDVI, MicroUSB, etc) take a very long time to arrive, and Jobs/Apple tended to pressure design constraints in advance of the rest. --T

[Apple SCSI[ I am _sure_ I rememebr there being different firmware EPROMs for some hard disks -- Mac firmware and 'stnadard' firmware. I am thining of the 1985-86 timeframe. All the world is not a PC :-). I am sure there were other machiens with SCSI at the time. Actually, i did realsie that. But AFAIK they weren't included as standard. I though the whole point of a Mac was that it worked straight out of the box... -tony

I would be very suprised if the Mac+ was the first computer to have a SCSI interface. The Mac+ uses a stnadard single-chip SCSI cotnroller (5380 IIRC), which was not designed to go into the Mac, or even to go into a 68000 machine. It's a standard chip, off the shelf. My experience of designs of that period suggests that often the first machines to use a particular interface implemented it using TTL, small progamamble devices (PALs), est. The single-chip implementation came later, when the IC manufacutrer realised thaere was going to be a market for such an interface chip. -tony

--- On Sun, 10/9/11, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: if you have the earlier true 80186 based one, yes it does. Incidentally is the difference between yours and a version w/o scsi a pal and the 53c80? I have a later version and that's what mine requires. If you have the means to dump the contents of the pal, I for one would be most appreciative. I guess I could try and contact Ampro. It does look like they're producing afro-centric products these days though.

Tony Duell wrote: Thinking about it, Whitechapel's MG-1 had SCSI on the main PCB as standard equipment, and that was in 1984, so a couple of years before the Mac Plus. The mono display was somewhere around the 1024x768 mark IIRC, and although they were fully-fledged UNIX crates they were primarily intended as single-user desktop machines. Of course for the purposes of argument (umm, I mean discussion) maybe we need to be limiting contenders to those selling within a few % of the Mac Plus :-) (the MG-1 was pretty expensive, given the display resolution, 32-bit CPU and memory expansion options) cheers Jules

On 10/11/2011 03:53 PM, Tony Duell wrote: The AmproLB+ had SCSI (using the NCR5380 chip) then it was actually SASI as the SCSI spec was not real then. Also the MicroMint SB180 had a SASI/SCSI board (used the 5380) Allison

On Wed, 12 Oct 2011, Chris M wrote: The board I was referring to is a Z-80 based CP/M machine. It's living in the "Bookcase" enclosure that Ampro made. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, Christian Corti wrote: Yeah, it looks like amavis got tired of it. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

There is no metnion of SCSI in the techncial manual The mainboard cotnaisn a uPD7261 chip, which is essentially a 'raw' disk controller often used with ST412 drives. The board also contins the support circuitry, linked ot the normal 34 pin and 20 pin headers. Much of the support circuitry is socketed so it can be removed, there's another header (not well documented in the manual) which conencted to the drive interface pins of the 7261. It was intended for use with an extenal data spearator board for SMD drives, but as the manual says, the system couldn't handle the data rate. I haev no idea how many pins this data separator connector has, maybe 50 pins. I don';t feel like dismantling my MG1 tonight either... I think i trust the techncial manual and schematics more than I trust Wikipedia... -tony

On 06/10/11 3:51 PM, Tony Duell wrote: _And how_. --Toby

It was thus said that the Great joe lobocki once stated: Monte Davidoff? Paul Allen? Tim Paterson? Seattle Computer Product? -spc (Steve Jobs?)

On Mon, 10 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote: Prove it. Seriously. I want to see concrete, incontravertible(sp?) evidence that Bill Gates steals from almost everyone who uses a personal computer. You've stated something that you apparently think is a fact. Put up or shut up. FYI, go watch that "1984" commercial that Apple is so famous for. Every time you hear "IBM", say "Apple". It fits really well. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Gene Buckle wrote: OK, I just did that. I tried to make the substitution you suggested, but the ad mentioned "IBM" exactly *zero* times.

On 10/11/11 8:01 AM, Gene Buckle wrote: And since we're in the mood for spreading disinformation, there is this bit of BS floating around: Q. A vistor told me that the speech given by the giant head in the Macintosh 1984 superbowl commerical was actually excerpted from a speech given by an an IBM executive. Who was the exectutive, what was the topic, any other details? http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/1984-good-it-gets-125608 In the original board, there was no voiceover. But, Richard O'Neill, the agency?s executive producer, called me from London where they were casting and asked if I could bang out something for Big Brother to say for casting purposes. I had lunch that day with my brother, David, who is an international lawyer and Sinophile. We kicked around phrases from Mussolini to Mao, and by the time I got back to work, Big Brother?s speech just wrote itself. Ridley liked it so much that it wound up in the finished spot. It did hold everything together.

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1298665666970544 Section III - Heading H. Old, but relevant.

On Tue, 11 Oct 2011, Gene Buckle wrote: Then they would be the TWO largest software companies. (think back to ALaska's comments to Texas half a century ago)

You're relying on the ruling of a judge who was found to be prejudiced in the case and removed? And "steal[ing]" is a pretty harsh word to use in relation to the pricing policy of a product you were not compelled to buy. -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jason McBrien [jbmcb1 at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 10:10 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Steve Jobs -2011 On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1298665666970544 Section III - Heading H. Old, but relevant.

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote: " In addition, Microsoft charges a lower price to OEMs who agree to ship all but a minute fraction of their machines with an operating system pre- installed." For a while, you simply couldn't buy a PC without Windows. Even if you were going immediately uninstall Windows and install Linux, or Solaris x86, or OS/2, or BeOS. This directly affected a company I worked for who bought commodity PCs to run various Solaris x86 staging and development environments. The net result of their pricing policy was everyone who bought a computer was charged for Windows, whether they used it or not. I'd say that veers into "stealing" territory.