9 Aug
2012
9 Aug
'12
8:48 p.m.
On 2012-08-09 22:10, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 8/9/12 10:21 AM, Richard wrote:
Gah! It's over 20 years now since I used the window system on Domain OS,
but I still shudder at the memory. It was not fun.
From what small details I can still remember it made no difference
between the mouse pointer and the text cursor. Move one, and you moved
both. Input for a window was normally done in a special sub-window one
line high, at the bottom of the window.
In general it was weird and somewhat unintuitive, and we *longed* for a
switch to X11, but since X11 took much more resources, it took a few
years before we actually switched.
There were some cool concepts in Domain/OS, but for the most part, it
was just weird and horrible.
Johnny
>I have been attempting to find details on the
Apollo DOMAIN/OS
>windowing environment before they started running X11, but so far
>haven't been able to find much of anything.
>
There wasn't anything in the Apollo documents on bitsavers?
In the queue are about 100 ESDI Apollo disks with what HP had left of Apollo's
development environment. I'm hoping they're still readable. 
10 Aug
10 Aug
9:12 a.m.
New subject: Domain OS
Am 10.08.2012 02:48, schrieb Johnny Billquist:
On 2012-08-09 22:10, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
It is a matter of what one was accustomed to use before. When I started
with Aegis in the 80s, it looked like a comfortable graphical system,
however, with a lousy Unix clone - coming from a SYSV textual
environment; fortunately, there was a SysV/BSD emulation layer (which,
unfortunately, was buggy as hell). Programming was another issue, as
Aegis seemed to be written in Pascal, where all other Unixes used C.
This was Aegis 9.7. Later moved to SunOS with Sunview, and that was -
compared to Aegis - awkward und unusable. When Sun moved over to X11 /
NeWS, this X11 was a rather strange, and in particular slow (on the same
hardware) beast, and I wished I had SunView back. XView and Openview
were not adequate replacements. Meanwhile, I am accustomed to
X11, and are relucant to look at Wayland...
--
Holger
On 8/9/12 10:21 AM, Richard wrote:
Gah! It's over 20 years now since I used the window system on Domain OS,
but I still shudder at the memory. It was not fun.
From what small details I can still remember it made no difference
between the mouse pointer and the text cursor. Move one, and you moved
both. Input for a window was normally done in a special sub-window one
line high, at the bottom of the window.
In general it was weird and somewhat unintuitive, and we *longed* for a
switch to X11, but since X11 took much more resources, it took a few
years before we actually switched.
There were some cool concepts in Domain/OS, but for the most part, it
was just weird and horrible. >I have been attempting to find details on the
Apollo DOMAIN/OS
>windowing environment before they started running X11, but so far
>haven't been able to find much of anything.
>
There wasn't anything in the Apollo documents on bitsavers?
In the queue are about 100 ESDI Apollo disks with what HP had left of
Apollo's
development environment. I'm hoping they're still readable. 
11 Aug
11 Aug
8:03 a.m.
On Friday (08/10/2012 at 02:48AM +0200), Johnny Billquist wrote:
There were some cool concepts in Domain/OS, but for the most part,
it was just weird and horrible.
And at ETA Systems here in St. Paul, from about 1983 to 1989, we had
the largest Domain "ring" Apollo had ever built. We pushed the total
node count to something like 4x or 6x what they had ever anticipated.
We had to devise little "transfer switches" that could isolate the
network, keeping smaller rings running when the big ring was foobar'd.
I think we ended up selling those transfer switches back to Apollo :-)
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist
4344
days inactive
4345
days old
2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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bqt＠update.uu.se -
chrise＠pobox.com -
holger.veit＠iais.fraunhofer.de