Warms my SGI fanboy side to see these systems being saved! -- Ethan O'Toole

Compared to IBM, Sun big iron, Cray big iron the SGI Origin 2000/Onyx2 and Challenge XL/Onyx are very friendly fridge sized computers! They roll easy, they're lightweight and not overbuilt. They use a simple 220v or 240v or whatever outlet, and have bad-ass bargraphs on the front LCDs of the CPU load. I think they're the best of the newer large computers! If I could find a cheap Tezro I'd have to add it to my collection. The Octane (green, R12K, dual video) is heavy as hell. I mean, it's innocent looking and plastic and stuff. But oh man, so heavy. I gave away the dual 24" widescreen CRT 1920x1200 SGI monitors that came with it :-/ They were getting flyback arcing to frame. At the time I didn't know what it was but now after reparing arcade monitors I could remediate it. -- Ethan O'Toole

Only the Onyx series has graphics :-) Most of ours at NASA were headless with nothing but a serial console, and lots of CPUs. They crunched satellite data all day. 96 Processors on Origin 3800, Normally 32 IIRC on the Challenge XLs. I didn't know there was a 3 phase option. Was it an Onyx2 or Onyx? My Cray uses 5 of the Sun E10000 style Pioneer Magnetics 5000 watt 48vdc PSUs, and even it was single phase (although I had it sitting across 3 phases just to get the power to it over a 30 amp cable.) Very cool! Yes, crammed full. The video cards are stuffed! -- Ethan O'Toole

Ah okay. I like the twistlocks so much, would never let em go! I put 30A twist locks on them, they were cut from the prior owner on mine (the plugs were hacked off but there is plenty of power cable.) Man up! Mine is J932 so the CPU cabinet is about 2.5' - 3' deeper than the disk cabinet. There are these silver square box things with screw holes on opposing sides. Screw one side of them to one side, and swing the cabinets together. The floor needs to be fairly level. I usually find it's easier to push the disk rack around so I mate the disk rack to the CPU rack. I assume the CPU Rack on a J916 is quite a bit lighter (but not light.) There are screw holes for that hook together block on both sides. Maybe I just finger tighten the one on the CPU rack because it's hard to access - can't quite remember. -- Ethan O'Toole

On 19 April 2016 at 20:58, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: Intel's effort at RISC. Didn't go so well for them, but did inspire the name of Windows NT and was the original host platform for the then-new OS. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 2016-04-20 5:12 AM, Jonathan Katz wrote: There were some coprocessor cards that used it as well - I see them on ebay periodically. I think the YARC used AMD 29K... was there an i860/i960 version as well? I'm changing the subject because the subject of RISC coprocessor boards has already been interesting to me; I owned the NuBus Levco Translink II (for Mac II family) with four TRAM slots for transputers. Also going to mention the BBC Tube coprocessor here. Which had an ARM version, iirc. --Toby

On 2016-04-20 10:27 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: Nice collection. I'd forgotten about the 32016! What software ran on these respective processors? My high school had a BBC (Master?) with Z80 Tube in an OEM chassis with integrated keyboard and colour terminal. It mainly ran Turbo Pascal under CP/M, iirc. --Toby

On 20/04/2016 16:00, Toby Thain wrote: There was a collection of "scientific" software for the 32016 - things like Spice, some maths software, and assorted CAD stuff; basically the software licensed for the 32016 ACW and the Master Scientific, which came later. The Z80 CoPro ran CP/M - real licensed CP/M 2.2, not the bastardised often-not-compatible "CPN" lookalike offered by Torch, and came with GEM and various office software. The ARM CoPro originally had little software beyond TWIN (the Two Window Editor), assembler, BASIC, and utilities. The 6502 variants - including the 65C102 that was used for the Master Turbo - just ran whatever you'd otherwise have on the Beeb itself, albeit with a faster clock, larger memory space, and in some cases a "High" version that lived right at the top of memory. -- Pete Pete Turnbull

On 20 April 2016 at 17:32, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote: Hang on. I think you're conflating 2 different coprocessors and their software here. GEM didn't run on CP/M. It was considerably too big and too complex for an 8-bit CPU. GEM's graphics API, the VDI, was partly based on Digital's Research's CP/M graphics API, GSX, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager GEM ran on MS-DOS, DR's own DOS+ (a forerunner of the later DR-DOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Plus ... and on the Atari ST's TOS, derived in part from CP/M-68K. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager#Atari_versions The only BBC copro that could run GEM, AFAIAA, was the BBC Master 512 with the Intel 80186. http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Master512.html -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 22 April 2016 at 19:51, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: Yes indeed. In fact the first time I installed FreeDOS I was *very* surprised to find my name in the credits. I debugged some batch files used in installing the GEM component. Oh yes. Same environment. ST GEM was derived from GEM 1; PC GEM from GEM 2, crippled post-lawsuit. Then they diverged. FreeGEM attempted to merge them again. Oh no no. Same codebase. They can be quite cheap now, and the Aranym environment gives you something of the feel of the later versions. It's not exactly an emulator, more a sort of compatibility environment that enhances the "emulated" machine as much as it can using modern PC hardware. http://aranym.org/ And the ST GEM OS was so modular, different 3rd parties cloned every components, separately. Some commercially, some as FOSS. The Aranym team basically put together a sort of "distribution" of as many FOSS components as they could, to assemble a nearly-complete OS, then wrote the few remaining bits to glue it together into a functional whole. So, finally, after the death of the ST and its clones, there was an all-FOSS OS for it. It's pretty good, too. It's called AFROS, Atari Free OS, and it's included as part of Aranym. I longed to see a merger of FreeGEM and Aranym, but it was never to be. The history of GEM and TOS is complex. Official Atari TOS+GEM evolved into TOS 4, which included the FOSS Mint multitasking later, which isn't much like the original ROM version of the first STs. The underlying TOS OS is not quite like anything else. AIUI, CP/M-68K was a real, if rarely-seen, OS. However, it proved inadequate to support GEM, so it was discarded. A new kernel was written using some of the tech from what was later to become DR-DOS on the PC -- something less like CP/M and more like MS-DOS: directories, separated with backslashes; FAT format disks; multiple executable types, 8.3 filenames, all that stuff. None of the command-line elements of CP/M or any DR DOS-like OS were retained -- the kernel booted the GUI directly and there was no command line, like on the Mac. This is called GEMDOS and AIUI it inherits from both the CP/M-68K heritage and from DR's x86 DOS-compatible OSes. It was, in a limited way. Acorn's series of machines are not well-known in the US, AFAICT, and that's a shame. They were technically interesting, more so IMHO than the Apple II and III, TRS-80 series etc. The original Acorns were 6502-based, but with good graphics and sound, a plethora of ports, a clear separation between OS, BASIC and add-on ROMs such as the various DOSes, etc. The BASIC was, I'd argue strongly, *the* best 8-bit BASIC ever: named procedures, local variables, recursion, inline assembler, etc. Also the fastest BASIC interpreter ever, and quicker than some compiled BASICs. Acorn built for quality, not price; the machines were aimed at the educational market, which wasn't so price-sensitive, a model that NeXT emulated. Home users were welcome to buy them & there was one (unsuccessful) home model, but they were unashamedly expensive and thus uncompromised. The only conceptual compromise in the original BBC Micro was that there was provision for ROM bank switching, but not RAM. The 64kB memory map was 50:50 split ROM and RAM. You could switch ROMs, or put RAM in their place, but not have more than 64kB. This meant that the high-end machine had only 32kB RAM, and high-res graphics modes could take 21kB or so, leaving little space for code -- unless it was in ROM, of course. The later BBC+ and BBC Master series fixed that. They also allowed ROM cartridges, rather than bare chips inserted in sockets on the main board, and a numeric keypad. Acorn looked at the 16-bit machines in the mid-80s, mostly powered by Motorola 68000s of course, and decided they weren't good enough and that the tiny UK company could do better. So it did. It designed the ARM chip in-house, then launched its own range of ARM-powered machines, with an OS based on the 6502 range's. Although limited, this is still around today and can be run natively on a Raspberry Pi: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/ It's very idiosyncratic -- both the filesystem, the command line and the default editor are totally unlike anything else. The file-listing command is CAT, the directory separator is a full stop (i.e. a period), while the root directory is called $. The editor is a very odd dual-cursor thing. It's fascinating, totally unrelated to the entire DEC/MS-DOS family and to the entire Unix family. There is literally and exactly nothing else even slightly like it. It was the first GUI OS to implement features that are now universal across GUIs: anti-aliased font rendering, full-window dragging and resizing (as opposed to an outline), and significantly, the first graphical desktop to implement a taskbar, before NeXTstep and long before Windows 95. It supports USB, can access the Internet and WWW. There are free clients for chat, email, FTP, the WWW etc. and a modest range of free productivity tools, although most things are commercial. But there's no proper inter-process memory protection, GUI multitasking is cooperative, and consequently it's not amazingly stable in use. It does support pre-emptive multitasking, but via the text editor, bizarrely enough, and only of text-mode apps. There was also a pre-emptive multitasking version of the desktop, but it wasn't very compatible, didn't catch on and is not included in current versions. But saying all that, it's very interesting, influential, shared-source, entirely usable today, and it runs superbly on the ?25 Raspberry Pi, so there is little excuse not to try it. There's also a FOSS emulator which can run the modern freeware version: http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/ For users of the old hardware, there's a much more polished commercial emulator for Windows and Mac which has its own, proprietary fork of the OS: http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm There's an interesting parallel with the Amiga. Both Acorn and Commodore had ambitious plans for a modern multitasking OS which they both referred to as Unix-like. In both cases, the project didn't deliver and the ground-breaking, industry-redefiningly capable hardware was instead shipped with much less ambitious OSes, both of which nonetheless were widely-loved and both of which still survive in the form of multiple, actively-maintained forks, today, 30 years later -- even though Unix in fact caught up and long surpassed these 1980s oddballs. AmigaOS, based in part on the academic research OS Tripos, has 3 modern forks: the FOSS AROS, on x86, and the proprietary MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 on PowerPC. Acorn RISC OS, based in part on Acorn MOS for the 8-bit BBC Micro, has 2 contemporary forks: RISC OS 5, owned by Castle Technology but developed by RISC OS Open, shared source rather than FOSS, running on Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard and some other ARM boards, plus some old hardware and RPC Emu; and RISC OS 4, now owned by the company behind VirtualAcorn, run by an ARM engineer who apparently made good money selling software ARM emulators for x86 to ARM holdings. Commodore and the Amiga are both long dead and gone, but the name periodically changes hands and reappears on various bits of modern hardware. Acorn is also long dead, but its scion ARM Holdings designs the world's most popular series of CPUs, totally dominates the handheld sector, and outsells Intel, AMD & all other x86 vendors put together something like tenfold. Funny how things turn out. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 25 April 2016 at 16:02, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: I haven't seen a Communicator since 2006 when I exhibited some machines at the Wakefield RiscOS show - http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Acorn/WROCC2006/index.php That show produced an entire skip full of Archimedes machines and a LOT of scrap BBC Micros. -- adrian/witchy Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection? www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

On 04/25/2016 10:02 AM, Liam Proven wrote: I'm not sure if a user could go out and buy a 32016 copro, though. The only ones I've ever been aware of have come from educational institutions and I get the impression they were employed more for testing the market than anything. I had a couple of those, and I know one went to a museum, but I'm not entirely sure what I did with the other! I may still have it. cheers Jules

On 04/26/2016 01:33 PM, Guy Dawson wrote: Oh, so it was you! ;-) I'll try and file that away in my brain so I remember it in future... do you happen to remember how much it cost? (And were they advertized for sale somewhere, or did you have to call up Acorn and ask?) cheers Jules

On 22/04/2016 17:59, Liam Proven wrote: Ah yes, random access memory. You're right of course, it was GSX. Well spotted :-) -- Pete

On 04/20/2016 10:32 AM, Pete Turnbull wrote: I remember there being some connection with the ACW and Quickchip CAD, but IIRC the disks I had had been reformatted, and it wasn't obvious if any of the product actually ran on the 32016 side of the machine, or if it was just the same old 6502-side application which was available for regular BBC micros. On the back of that... the Cumana 68008 board ran OS-9, the 'bigger' of the two Torch 68000 boards could run System III Unix, and if I remember right the Casper 68000 board just came with a bunch of utilities and programming tools (although I think FLEX may have been available as an optional extra purchase). I'm not sure what the PEDL Z80 board came with. The Torch 8088 board ran MSDOS, I believe. cheers Jules

There was a Harris RTX-2000 based accelerator card around the 80386 time period. Dwight ________________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 10:04 AM To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts' Subject: RE: High performance coprocessor boards of the 80s and 90s - was Re: SGI ONYX I never had much run in with these kinds of boards as they were geared toward very specific markets. However, the Intel i860 and i960 did make it into some consumer level boards. I have a MCA SCSI RAID Controller somewhere that uses an i960 for coprocessing... Of course that may be a bit too new for CCtalk....

The RTX-2000 was an of shoot of the NC4000. Even at 10MHz, they could out compute a 40MHz 80386. One execution per clock cycle plus possibly using 3 16 bit busses in a single cycle. A 4MHz NC4000 could sort 1K 16 bit values in 19.7 milliseconds. Dwight ________________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 10:35 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Harris RTX-2000 - Re: High performance coprocessor boards of the 80s and 90s On 2016-04-20 1:28 PM, dwight wrote: I hadn't even heard of that chip :/ Interestingly: "The RTX 2000 is specifically designed to execute the Forth language" (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec4_5.html) --Toby

On Thursday, April 21, 2016 9:22 AM, "Tapley, Mark" <mtapley at swri.edu> wrote: On Apr 20, 2016, at 9:46 PM, dwight <dkelvey at hotmail.com> wrote: (top-post ?. bottom-post ?. AAagh!) :-) The Harris RTX-2010, in a rad-hard version, was for years the CPU of choice for spacecraft science instruments from Johns Hopkins APL. Those chips are *all* *over* the solar system! One of APL's lead SW engineers wrote one of the most widely-used Forth test suites, partly for that reason. It?s a pretty nice chip, for multiple reasons. ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? - Mark This chip was also used in some industrial equipment. ?In school, I worked with an MRI system that used this chip for the controller. ?It was programmed in a C-like language using a C-to-FORTH compiler. ?I used to have a manual for the RTX-2000, but sent it off to someone on comp.lang.forth to scan. ?I wonder if it ever got scanned and placed on the net. Come to think of it, I think I have one of these chips lying around, but no software. ?I think MPE still supports this chip with their forth compiler system, but it's expensive. ? I wonder if anyone has anything non-commercial that would run on it. Dave

On 21 April 2016 at 13:04, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote: PANOS you say? Here it is running on the ABC-310: http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/scripts/picshow.php?image=DSCF7209.jpg&… (that picture was taken in 2002. I powered it up again late last year and everything was OK APART from the ST225 which *nearly* works...) -- adrian/witchy Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection? www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk

I used to have this thing called a MasPar MP-2. It hung from a Decstation 5000 IIRC. Had the whole system, but the PSU in the MasPar box went bad. Sold it to someone in Florida IIRC. -- Ethan O'Toole

On 4/20/16 6:57 AM, Toby Thain wrote: Ok, this one's from the 70s, and it's a large, external unit rather than a single board, but I have a Floating Point Systems AP-120B, essentially an array processor for fast floating point operations. There's a bit of information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPS_AP-120B I'd love to get it running one of these days, just need +5V at 100A and a set of interface boards for a PDP-11... - Josh

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 8:27 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: There are docs on Bitsavers, at least for programming it. Not enough information to build the interface to the host machine, though. I also have an AMT DAP 610 (similar to this: http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/AMT_DAP.html only with 64x64 processors instead of a mere (hah) 32x32). It's actually a SCSI device the size of a refrigerator. I have it hooked to a Sun IPX because I find the size differential between host and coprocessor to be amusing. It's currently running, but I haven't yet spent too much time learning AMT's parallel FORTRAN variant to do anything fun with it. It renders the Mandelbrot set in full color quite quickly, though. (And now that the weather's heating up, I've missed my window for running it for any period of time :)) A cursory search doesn't reveal any uses in CGI (but I agree it would be suited for it), but there were a good number of applications in image processing. - Josh

There was also an 80286 coprocessor board for various VAXen. Let?s not also forget the various 370 and 390 co-processor boards that could be put into PC?s at various times to allow one to turn the PC into a small mainframe capable of running mainframe software (including the OS). TTFN - Guy

Actually, the first one was called XT/370 because it plugged into an XT! Then came AT/370. Those were obviously ISA boards. Then came some variants that were microchannel. The final iterations were PCI based. The microchannel and PCI based boards went into systems that ran OS/2 or AIX (P/390 and R/390 respectively). IBM didn?t sell the boards separately from the system (ie they delivered all of the HW). There were also various licenses (uCode for the 390 board and various drivers for AIX (RS/6000 only) and OS/2. And then of course there was the OS that you had to license from IBM (which generally was about the same cost as the HW?I think the base OS/390 was ~$28,000 (that?s just the OS folks?you still needed the HW). TTFN - Guy

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 2:34 PM, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote: I think you're thinking of the 3270 PC and 3270 AT, which was pretty much what you described here... - Josh

I don't think the CMS was "heavily" modified, modified certainly, but heavily modified I don't think so...

Josh, So I am. Thanks for the clarification. BTW: for those wanting more info on the AT/370 here is a good link to some IBM brochures - http://typewritten.org/Articles/IBM/g520-5087-1.pdf. -Ali

On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, Paul Berger wrote: I never understood the dynamics of 3720 emulation. Was it *just* a terminal emulation protocol ala vt100 ? The main thing that confused me was the existence of these emulation cards that folks are mentioning. I remember seeing "3270 boards" (as folks in the know gestured at them). They appeared to run on some kind of twinax, IIRC (been a while and I was probably 14 years old). Were these extra keys on the keyboard the cruxt of the issue ? ie.. the card was there so you could use a "real" 3270 keyboard ? Why did folks install those boards just to run "3720 emulation" ? Couldn't they have just bought something like Reflections and done it all in software ? Can someone school me and tell me what I'm missing about these boards or 3270 in general. I know little of IBM mainframes, obviously. I'm a Unix zealot, so that figures, but I'm still curious about them. Thanks! -Swift

On Thu, 21 Apr 2016, Guy Sotomayor wrote: Ah okay. Someone told me that the voltage on those was enough to feel/shock you. Was that true, or just a myth ? Ah, so there was some electrical signaling going on to the terminal controller and that couldn't be done in sofware, if I'm understanding you correctly. Hmm, considering all the limitations at the time, it's seems like that whole 'buffer <-> forward <-> update' mechanism isn't a bad idea. Ah, okay and this is where software emulation became an option, I take it. I had to look up the "TN" part, I didn't find anything solid, but from some Wikipedia chatter I take it to mean "TelNet". Also guessing they created some out-of-band channel to send all the stuff that used to rely on electrical signaling. Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain that. -Swift

On 2016-04-21 6:53 PM, Swift Griggs wrote: The cards handled the communication protocol between the control unit and the terminal as well as having the appropriate line driver and receiver. The 3270 system used coax, I think you are thinking of 5250 emulation when you mention twinax. 5250 emulation was used to to connect to SS/34, S/36, S/38 and As/400. The 3270 or 5250 emulation card is just the adapter card that is appropriate for the connection just like you would use a RS-232 adapter to emulate a VT100, but these cards also handle all of the protocol where as for most serial terminal emulation most of the protocol would be handled by software. There was also 3270 terminal emulation that connected via a BiSync or SDLC adapter card as well. Yes I understand "a while ago" it has been at least 20 years since I have seen any of these machines. Yes the extra keys on the extra keys on the keyboard gave you a layout much like the later 3270 system keyboards, but not like the 3275,6,7,8, and 9 which had considerably fewer keys. The display was also a high quality display and it was likely attached to a special display adapter, since it could support the 3270 system vector graphics, but I don't recall what the used for display adapters. Yeah me too now after supporting UNIX system for more than 25 years, but I am more a hardware person than software, but I started out fixing 3270 terminals as well as other IBM terminal products that connected to mainframes. Paul.

Steve Ciarcia (BYTE) had a Z8000-based PC coprocessor ("Trump Card"?) which main purpose was (I think) to run BASIC programs faster. Another of those things that I wanted in the early 80s, along with a PC to use it with. On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 10:18 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:

On 4/19/16 14:58, Swift Griggs wrote: It so happened that I had a front-row seat for that debacle (ok, maybe fourth-row), having attended one of the SGI road show events at which the Visual Workstation line was introduced, by none other than Rick B. himself. I worked with several people who were doing 3D modeling at the time. None of us could figure out why SGI would dive into the low end of the market when it seemed as though 3D hardware was about to become commoditized in a big way. Maybe they were gambling on becoming Nvidia or 3DFX, and lost. That wasn't the only SGI-Microsoft collaboration which went bad though; Around that time, I also went to a technical presentation about the Fahrenheit graphics API which was going to replace OpenGL. It was stillborn and went nowhere. Although I think I've read that bits and pieces of Fahrenheit went into Vulkan, much later on.

On Tue, 19 Apr 2016, Jules Richardson wrote: I hope you have the deskside stand for it. That made them look a bit cooler. Hmm. It's the kind of thing that could probably be 3D printed these days, too. While I'm rambling about 3D printing, I've often speculated that with a not-insignificant investment of time, one could built new skins for the Indy on some larger 3D printers. Granite in most cases. The Indigo2 had a longer run than many SGI models. Plus, since there was also a lot of differentiation in models (everything more than one. I remember seeing a few show up brand-new (deep-purple Max Impact models) and they came with 21" Trinitron SGI re-branded monitors with granite PS/2 keyboard and a granite PS/2 mouse. Difficult, but not impossible. Maya 6.5 was the last version made for the SGI. You can buy media on Ebay. I note that the last auction (for a set of 6.0 disks) was in Feb 2016. So, it seems possible. However, I got mine commercial app/tool is going to have flexlm copy protection, hence the large amount of Irix warez & cracks you'll notice on p2p networks like eMule. -Swift