13 Jul
2016
13 Jul
'16
7:44 p.m.
Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob
Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF
West.
That's all I can say for now. :)
13 Jul
13 Jul
9:25 p.m.
On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote:
Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic
software engineer Bob Zeidman
said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF West.
That's all I can say for now. :)
THAT might be CP/M code in MS-DOS.
As to your subject line of "DOS code in CP/M", although a lot of the data
structures, commands, and API are suspiciously similar ("we did that for
software portability"), I doubt that any amount of studying of the code
of CP/M will ever show that Gary Kildall copied anything from MS-DOS to
write CP/M! (although it is suspiciously similar to CMD.EXE in
Windows)
There was never any question about MS-DOS being a copy of CP/M in how it
looked and worked. THAT was never disputed. It started as a work-similar
PLACEHOLDER for SCP to use while waiting for DRI to release CP/M-86.
BUT, in those days, work-alike was NOT considered to be infringing.
(AND, Gary Kildall was not a very litigious person)
In those days, before "look and smell", it was generally considered
perfectly acceptable to make an identical looking and behaving program, so
long as none of the actual CODE was copied. Perfectly acceptable to have
all menus the same, and to make a RAC-MAN program. ("Puckman" was one of
the pre-release names of "Pacman" (character resembles a hockey puck), but
somebody realized how easy it would be to change a 'P' into an 'F' on the
face of the arcade machine.)
Adam Osborne when he started Paperback Software was going to get rich
selling identical looking and behaving duplicates of popular software.
LOTUS changed the interpretations of copyright law.
If Adam were to have been just a touch quicker about going out and buying
any of the debris failed companies from VisiCalc (several of which had IP
rights to VisiCalc), then he could have filed a counter-suit against LOTUS
and fought them off.
and
When Novell bought the remains of DRI, all that they really wanted was IP
rights to CP/M, in case Microsoft ever sued them over copyright.
and
If Delrina were to have cut a deal with Jefferson Airplane to buy the
rights to the album cover of Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, Berkeley
Systems would have lost their case ("stealing the idea of toasters with
wings") (Am I the only one who considered the Opus and Bill
screensaver to have been a Fair-Use parody?)
and, . . .
just like the DOS code in CP/M, . . .
"The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors,
having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back
of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot
notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous
Galactic Copyright Laws. Its interesting to note that a later and wilier
editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then
successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the
same laws."
9:32 p.m.
Hi Guys,
I have been suspicious of Microsoft pirating CP/M for decades! Back in my twenties, I was
reading about CP/M in the college library where I attended thinking, "Wow! CP/M
looks EXACTLY like MS-DOS!" So I went on a reading spree and found out that CP/M was
written by Gary Kildall well before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long
history that I obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much about it on
the Internet.
I think that was why Bill Gates was so adamant about forcing licensing of his software
upon everyone though-out his ownership of Microsoft.
Just because memory is so big now and so cheap compared to the '70s and '80s
doesn't mean Microsoft should stop optimizing software. A 3GB Installation DVD for an
Operating System has got to be way too unoptimized! I don't even want to get started
on how many bugs there are in new releases of Microsoft's software.
I believe that the family of Gary Kildall finally won that war if memory serves.
Microsoft ought to pay his family's linage royalties forever in my opinion. I wonder
how many people Microsoft stepped on to get where they are. I'd love to know the
inside scoop on that one, but I'm sure that those in the know had to have been forced
to sign nondisclosure agreements or be sued. That seems to be Microsoft's MO.
There was a movie about a very similar scenario called Antitrust released in 2001 that was
about a software giant's operating system called NURV if memory serves that starred
Tim Robbins who was the owner/chairman of the company and Ryan Phillippe as a young
software programmer. Through-out the movie I kept wondering how much of this related to
and was like Microsoft! I immediately thought of Microsoft within the first few minutes
of the movie once I began to realize what was going on!
Please forgive me. I normally don't like to rant and rave online or in emails as I
like to keep things positive since there is so much not right in this world, but this
really struck a chord!
I really wish I could attend VCF West, but unfortunately I have no access to the needed
funds so I was wondering will Bob Zeidman's talk be video recorded? If so, where is
the video repository for past VCF seminars? If not, I hope someone will step up and do
so. In any event, I hope you all have fun at VCF West! I will be thinking of you guys.
I think I was born and raised on the wrong side of the country. I was born, raised and
still live in SC, but sometimes I wished I had grown up on the west coast somewhere near
Silicon Valley where all the surplus computer electronics was always appearing. I have
been known to work endless hours on end programming and building microprocessor based
computers. I used to dream about working with DEC PDP-8s and PDP-11s years ago in high
school and college. I poured over whatever computer related magazines I could find back
then in the late '70s and early '80s. If I had it all to do over again knowing
what I know now, where would I have gone and what would I have done... :) Take care my
friends.
Kip Koon
computerdoc at sc.rr.com
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:45 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...
Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob Zeidman said
"no" in 2012 but now he has new research to
disclose at VCF West.
That's all I can say for now. :)
10:28 p.m.
On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Kip Koon <computerdoc at sc.rr.com> wrote:
Back in my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the
college library where I attended > thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like
MS-DOS!"
And if you'd read about DEC operating systems, you'd have thought that
CP/M looks like TOPS-10, OS-8, and RT-11, though not quite as
"EXACTLY" as MS-DOS looks like CP/M.
"Bad artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso
10:53 p.m.
Hi Eric,
Hum, I wonder where Gary got his ideas? Didn't he use a DEC PDP-nn for his initial
PL/M compiler to get the first CP/M built in the first place? I'd like to find out
more about TOPS-10, OS-8 and RT-11.
Very interesting indeed!
Kip Koon
computerdoc at sc.rr.com
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 1:28 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...
On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:32 PM, Kip Koon <computerdoc at sc.rr.com> wrote:
Back in my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in
the college library where I attended > thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like
MS-DOS!"
And if you'd read about DEC operating systems, you'd have thought that CP/M looks
like TOPS-10, OS-8, and RT-11, though not quite
as "EXACTLY" as MS-DOS looks like CP/M.
"Bad artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso
14 Jul
14 Jul
7:51 a.m.
will Bob Zeidman's talk be video recorded?
Yes. We're also thinking about a live stream. TBD.
If so, where is the video repository for past VCF
seminars?
Most of the talks from VCF East are here:
https://www.youtube.com/c/VintageComputerFederation501c3
We have the raw footage from past VCF West shows + we need to get it online.
9:46 a.m.
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Kip Koon wrote:
Hi Guys,
I have been suspicious of Microsoft pirating CP/M for decades! Back in
my twenties, I was reading about CP/M in the college library where I
attended thinking, "Wow! CP/M looks EXACTLY like MS-DOS!" So I went on
a reading spree and found out that CP/M was written by Gary Kildall well
before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long history that I
obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much about it on
the Internet.
No, but you should learn it.
LOTS more details are readily available about every portion of this
over-simplified shortened history. The major aspects are undisputed, but
there are opinions about minor details. (such as various versions of the
culture clash) "Gary HAD TO blow off the IBM meeting, because there was
a binder of documentation that had to be delivered to Bill Godbout, and
it was not POSSIBLE to find ANYBODY else to carry it to Oakland
(airport). Why would he have to be there for IBM to apply for a license?"
OF COURSE MS-DOS looks exactly like CP/M!
THAT was the intent! It would have been unusable as a placeholder if it
didn't.
NO, Bill Gates did NOT write MS-DOS.
Gary Kildall wrote CP/M.
It was very well established as the defacto standard.
DRI "Digital Research Incorporated" (formerly "Intergalactic Digital
Research") began working on CP/M-86, a version of CP/M for 8086 based
machines.
Seattle Computer Products (SCP) was building an 8086 based machine.
Hardware was beginning to work, but CP/M-86 wasn't available yet.
Tim Paterson (of SCP) started working on system software.
At NCC ("National Computer Conference") 1979, SCP shared a booth with
Microsoft and Lifeboat (big distributor for CP/M and Microsoft products).
Tim Paterson was intrigued by Microsoft Stand-Alone BASIC (BASIC with
enough of an OS built in to support disk files - best known, although
without the name, is RS Coco).
SCP started shipping some 8086 based CPUs with "Stand-Alone BASIC-86".
There was an assumption that CP/M would ultimately be the OS, but CP/M-86
wasn't available yet.
Paterson started to write a "placeholder" - a crude substitute for an OS
that could be used instead of the OS for testing and completing the
hardware design.
He studied what CP/M did, and wrote a crude imitation of it as a
placeholder. Although he studied it in order to make his behave the same,
he denies [moderately credibly] ever having access to the source code of
CP/M, nor copying code directly, merely writing simple obvious code to
behave exactly the same.
He called that temporary OS, "QDOS" ("Quick and Dirty Operating
System")
http://www.patersontech.com/dos/softalk.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems
Instead of CP/M's disk formats and directory structure, he made his like
the file system of Stand-Alone-BASIC.
For marketing purposes, it was sold as "86-DOS". Apparently "quick and
dirty" didn't seem marketable!
When IBM decided to take over the personal computer market, they didn't do
their homework very well.
Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit,
instead of building a true 8 bit machine.
One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80
co-processor plus CP/M for Apple][).
IBM went to Microsoft for "BASIC and CP/M".
Microsoft sent them to DRI for CP/M.
There was an EXTREME culture clash between IBM and DRI, that included
Gary blowing off the meeting, since IBM could simply fill out the forms
"like any other customer" and leave them with Gary's wife. IBM did not
want to do business with "hippies". (4 years ago, I visited the DRI house
(801 Lighthouse,Pacific Grove), to see for myself the view from the
upstairs window ("OMG, are those guys coming to the door, DEA?").
IBM went back to Microsoft, where Bill Gates made his people suit up, and
IBM made the BASIC deal contingent on an OS.
Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated a deal
to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client.
Microsoft hired Paterson, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed to IBM.
Paterson worked to finish the OS, and start the next major revision.
Gary Kildall got tired of people telling him that he had made the biggest
screwup in history. Towards the end of his life, he was drinking heavily.
Since MS-DOS was an imitation of CP/M, rumors that it stole code from CP/M
have always existed. Some code WILL match - if you are doing the exact
same thing, will you, in places, write the exact same code? How much
match does it take to assume copying, instead of similar coding?
Having explicitly decided to use identical data structures, what are the
chances of coincidentally choosing the exact same algorithm for a given
portion of a task? If you both use DAA for printing a number in decimal,
will that code match?
Periodically, there will be urban legends of hidden DRI copyright
messages in MS-DOS, or easter eggs.
Easter eggs, in this context, are hidden content that can be accessed
through non-obvious ways. For example, in TRS-DOS V2, typing
BOOT.SYS.RV36, and holding down J and N pops up a full page message saying
COPYRIGHT RANDY COOK. (RV36 (a password) and J,N might not be accurate).
"Nobody" knew about it. When Apparat (APR-DOS, later NEWDOS) imitated
TRSDOS, they claimed to be non-infringing, until Randy Cook's lawyer
popped up that easter egg in NEWDEOS. APPARAT admitted infringement, and
agreed to rewrite from scratch (NEWDOS-80). Radio Shack changed "RANDY
COOK" to "TANDY CORP".
Nobody knows where any such easter eggs are in MS-DOS, in spite of
extensive searching, although Jerry Pournelle once claimed to have been
shown one, BY GARY KILDALL, in MS-DOS 1.00.
If Zeidman has found such a "smoking gun", then it is still big news.
Interpretation of software copyright has changed. In those days,
identical appearance and behavior was not considered infringement unless
actual code was copied.
NOW, identical appearance and behavior WOULD be considered infringing, so
it is no longer legal to do, even "clean-room", what Paterson did.
Because of that, Novell bought the ruins of DRI. If Microsoft were to
accuse Novell of writing something that looked too much like some
part of MS-DOS, Novell would be able to trot out their ownership of CP/M
copyrights. A copyright infringement trump-card.
"Ah, so you want to sue us for copying your program, which was copied from
another program that we now own? Are you sure?"
CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
10:03 a.m.
On Jul 14, 2016, at 9:46 AM, Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
When IBM decided to take over the personal computer market, they didn't do their
homework very well.
Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit, instead of building
a true 8 bit machine.
One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80 co-processor plus
CP/M for Apple][).
IBM chose the 8088 because the bus was close enough to the 8085 that the peripherals from
the S/23 could
be re-used with minor tweaks (in many cases just a re-layout).
They wanted something that would allow > 64KB of RAM without having to go through the
pains of what was
done on S/23 (it was an 8085 system that has 192KB of ROM and upto 128KB of RAM) and none
of the 8-bit
micros could do that.
IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was actually TJ Watson Jr that instructed
that a ?skunk? team
be formed to see how quickly a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of
Apple making
inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that. It was never
envisioned to be a huge market
for these things?it was viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take
away business from
IBM?s traditional machines.
TTFN - Guy
10:21 a.m.
> When IBM decided to take over the personal
computer market, they didn't do their homework very well.
> Intel convinced them to use the 8088, to have a gateway into 16 bit, instead of
building a true 8 bit machine.
> One of the IBM people had seen a "Microsoft Softcard" (a Z80 co-processor
plus CP/M for Apple][).
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
IBM chose the 8088 because the bus was close enough to
the 8085 that the
peripherals from the S/23 could be re-used with minor tweaks (in many
cases just a re-layout).
They wanted something that would allow > 64KB of RAM without having to
go through the pains of what was done on S/23 (it was an 8085 system
that has 192KB of ROM and upto 128KB of RAM) and none of the 8-bit
micros could do that.
It makes sense to me. Hardware would be same as for an ordinary 8 bit
machine, but lots more (1MB!!) memory map.
Since nobody could possibly need more than 10 times the current RAM, big
chunks of space could be used for memory mapped I/O, such as both a text
display AND an amazing 640x200 graphics display.
IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was
actually TJ Watson
Jr that instructed that a ?skunk? team be formed to see how quickly
a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of Apple making
inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that.
It was never envisioned to be a huge market for these things?it was
viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take away
business from IBM?s traditional machines.
They assumed [correctly] that they could, with trivial ease, simply step
in and dominate that "home computer" market. Particularly useful if
anybody was crazy enough to take in a home computer to work and use it
for some minor office tasks.
I'm glad that Apple survived IBM's entry and presence in that market.
11:50 a.m.
I don't get the significance of any of this.
CP/M-80 is what, less than 16K of code (not counting the very few
utilities that come bundled with it)? It's not rocket science and pales
in comparison with the mainframe and mini OSes that were around at the
time--and indeed, some of the more advanced OSes for microcomputers.
It's ridiculously simple to reverse-engineer (I know, I've done it),
given nothing more than the published documentation and a running system.
Everyone seems to forget about the work-alikes, such as TPM for the
Epson QX-80.
GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS functionality for
the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any
accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS.
A tempest in a teapot.
At least from where I sit,
Chuck
12:14 p.m.
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS
functionality for
the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any
accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS.
Ah, but what a funny lawsuit!!
A tempest in a teapot.
At least from where I sit,
To most people, assembly language and operating systems are "complex and
mysterious"
Many don't grasp the concept of reverse engineering, and assume piracy.
I think that Paterson was well able to write work-alike code.
15 Jul
15 Jul
10:30 a.m.
On 14 July 2016 at 20:50, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
Everyone seems to forget about the work-alikes, such as TPM for the
Epson QX-80.
True. And there was Pro DOS for the SAM Coup?:
http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/
ZCN for the Amstrad NC series:
https://www.ncus.org.uk/fnov00.htm
And probably others.
GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS
functionality for
the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on. Yet I've never heard any
accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS.
Not GEM as such -- it's the GUI layer. But ST GEM ran on a kernel
called GEMDOS, which was a sort of hybrid of CP/M-68K and DR-DOS: a
68000 kernel but with MS-DOS like API compatibility.
Written by DR and licensed from them by Atari.
So, a better comparison would be DR-DOS. I think nobody ever claimed
that DR stole MS-DOS source code, though. It was clean-room
reverse-engineered, and had some different internal data structures,
which manifested in a (very very few) compatibility problems.
However, the accusation is that MS -- or SCP -- did actually use CP/M
source code in creating QDOS.
It's not that QDOS' design was copied from CP/M, which it was --
that's already been admitted. It's that QDOS contained appropriated
CP/M source from DR.
--
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)
14 Jul
14 Jul
11:47 a.m.
On Jul 14, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
IBM had looked at the PC market for a while. It was actually TJ Watson Jr that
instructed that a ?skunk? team
be formed to see how quickly a PC with an IBM logo could be produced. He was afraid of
Apple making
inroads into IBM?s traditional markets and wanted to prevent that. It was never
envisioned to be a huge market
for these things?it was viewed only as a hobbyist thing that had the potential to take
away business from
IBM?s traditional machines.
And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs? which these days use a
derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed!
-- Chris
15 Jul
15 Jul
10:24 a.m.
On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:
And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of
Macs? which these days use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed!
The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel CPUs.
But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the
IBM POWER RISC processor line.
So, no, not "these days", but from 1994-2006.
--
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)
10:39 a.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a
derivative of the IBM
POWER RISC processor line.
I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight
around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their
OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a
mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have
seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for
some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of
POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with
framebuffers).
@#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in
the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of
Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things
would have been different.
Of course then something like this might have happened:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france
-Swift
11:12 a.m.
On 15 July 2016 at 19:39, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
Absolutely. Next did license out NextStep -- Sun licensed it and had
it working on Solaris, but never sold it. I don't recall if IBM did.
At least in that era, Apple and IBM missed a trick -- even if IBM was
the sole licensee, then OS X Server on IBM server kit would have
validated and legitimised OS X Server and might have given it a
chance.
There was also Novell's Portable Netware on POWER -- I even saw a demo
of it running. Never released or sold. :-(
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a
derivative of the IBM
POWER RISC processor line.
I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight
around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their
OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a
mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have
seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for
some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of
POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with
framebuffers).
@#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in
the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of
Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things
would have been different.
Of course then something like this might have happened:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france
11:27 a.m.
On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Swift Griggs
<swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
Yep. Damned them. It?s a real pain having to figure out how to allocate
development resources within a budget. That whole profit thing gets in
the way of all the cool stuff!
TTFN - Guy
But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a
derivative of the IBM
POWER RISC processor line.
I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight
around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their
OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a
mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have
seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for
some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of
POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with
framebuffers).
@#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way.
4:43 p.m.
On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:
And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of
Macs? which these days use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed!
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel
CPUs.
Yes, the CPU architecture is from Intel. The hardware *system*
architecture is from the IBM PC. That's the main reason why you can
boot Windows on an x86 Mac. (And other PC operating systems.)
14 Jul
14 Jul
10:50 a.m.
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Fred Cisin wrote:
CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera.
I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at
least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and
the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste.
You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you
happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the
name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be
wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before
FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of
DOS... but it could just be the drugs.
-Swift
3:55 p.m.
> CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and
Caldera.
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Swift Griggs wrote:
I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the
"Digital Research" name, at
least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and
the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste.
You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you
Not very. Just current events during my time.
I was never an important participant. But, I was there.
happen to know if the "Digital Research" you
mention and the use of the
name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be
wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before
FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of
DOS...
Yes. Novell acquired the remains of DRI in 1991?
They sold DR-DOS as "Novell DOS"
Caldera was formed a few years later by some Novell people.
(The Caldera V Microsoft lawsuit was not about copyright; it was
complaining about dirty dealings by Microsoft, such as putting unnecessary
code into Windoze 3.1 to make it refuse to run under DR-DOS. There was a
settlement in 2000? that was believed to be about $250M)
Caldera begat Lineo,
Lineo begat DRDOS, Inc.
DRDOS, Inc. is apparently for sale for $25K.
If you have any expectations of being sued by Microsoft for writing
anything that resembles any of their stuff, it could be cheap legal
insurance. (Adam Osborne was too slow about buying Visicalc debris)
When a company folds, the IP rights may end up with multiple people,
either in dispute, or simply non-exclusively owned by more then one.
Hence, Novell could spin off CP/M, without giving up their joint ownership
of IP rights as protection against Microsoft.
but it could just be the drugs.
Could be.
15 Jul
15 Jul
10:22 a.m.
On 14 July 2016 at 19:50, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at
least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and
the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste.
You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you
happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the
name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be
wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before
FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of
DOS... but it could just be the drugs.
Novell bought DR for DR-DOS, which became Novell DOS.
It also sponsored development of Linux under the codename "Corsair" as
a Windows-killer.
When it eventually became clear that Linux wasn't ready to rival
Windows on the desktop yet and wasn't going to be for quite some years
to come, they spun off the Linux division as Caldera -- including the
former DR, notably including the UK R&D centre that had created much
of DR-DOS.
Caldera was focussed on desktop Linux, though. (It's the first distro
that I personally adopted, and it was a good one, too.) E.g. before
WINE existed, Caldera licensed and ported Sun's WABI to Linux -- where
it ran better than it did on Solaris because it was on native x86 &
didn't have to do CPU emulation.
Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g.
many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that
couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced:
DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly.
Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS,
took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo.
Some bits had been sold off or licensed separately -- e.g. Concurrent
DOS (to Concurrent Controls and IMS), & FlexOS to IBM -- so they
couldn't be open sourced.
Later Novell realised that the best use of Linux for them was to
replace Netware as a server OS, and bought SUSE.
--
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Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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10:38 a.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the
old DR products, e.g.
many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that
couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced:
DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly.
Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the
archive in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an
inventory of what was lost and it's a horror show. :(
All the GEM stuff that could be found was released - including ViewMAX.
Then it discovered that actually there was still
interest in DR-DOS,
took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo.
...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS. The kernel & command.com sources
were released and then it was canceled. I contacted them a number of
years ago about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to
basically had a melt down over it. You'd have though I was asking if it
was ok if I slow-cooked one of his children.
I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get all this stuff released - it
was bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the
project.
For grins I set up a build environment today on a virtual machine - an
i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes. It
takes 2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :) In 1996 it took a
200Mhz Pentium 2 hours for the same task.
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://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
11:10 a.m.
On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:
I recall.
I have one copy of the source-code CD for DR-DOS. I should put up on
Bittorrent somewhere!
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
Ahhhh... I would both like to see that, and not to see it, IYSWIM.
Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all*
the old DR products, e.g.
many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that
couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced:
DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly.
Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive
in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of
what was lost and it's a horror show. :( All the GEM stuff that could be found was released -
including ViewMAX.
Ahh yes. I remember the enhanced versions of that. If you recall, we
were both on the DeltaSoft FreeGEM list, gods, nearly 2 decades ago
now. (!)
Then it
discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS,
took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo.
...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS. The kernel & command.com sources were
released and then it was canceled. I contacted them a number of years ago
about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to basically had a
melt down over it. You'd have though I was asking if it was ok if I
slow-cooked one of his children. I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get
all this stuff released - it was
bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the
project.
:-(
For grins I set up a build environment today on a
virtual machine - an
i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes. It takes
2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :) In 1996 it took a 200Mhz
Pentium 2 hours for the same task.
We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old ones,
because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.
Running BeOS on a 200MHz Pentium 1 showed the potential of the
hardware like nothing else I've ever seen on x86.
It was as snappy and responsive as RISC OS was on the early
Archimedes. This is IMHO the definitive review of them, and it is well
worth a read:
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimed…
I vividly remember reading it as a 19YO student...
"The hard disk in the A500 is most noticeable for its ferociously
rapid access speed. It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise,
in the time it takes to blink an eye. The reason for this speed is
that the disk is run with no interleaving of sectors. On an IBM XT,
for example, the disk rotates about six times between each read to
give the puny CPU time to digest; Archimedes eliminates this dead time
as the ARM processor can suck stuff off the disk as fast as it can
rotate."
"It felt like the fastest computer I have ever used, by a considerable margin".
... and the amazement of being able to afford one a few years later.
It's by Dick Pountain who later became a colleague and friend.
Also see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/
As radical a computer as the Amiga, and far more influential -- it's
the origin of the ARM chip and that is _everywhere_ now.
But the OS, although not architecturally radical, was radical in other
ways: live window dragging! Universal real-time font antialiasing!
It felt like the fastest thing ever, as Dick said.
Well, the only OS that's felt like that since, for me, was BeOS.
I'd _love_ a modern BeOS on a modern multiprocessor PC. But nothing
like it exists any more, and Haiku is nothing like as snappy.
If I were a billionaire, I'd buy Access (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_(company) ), give the BeOS
sources to the Haiku guys and sponsor them to update it. All it really
needs today is a built-in hypervisor -- then you could run something
bloated like Linux in a VM to get a modern browser etc. while some
native ones were developed or ported.
--
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)
11:30 a.m.
On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are
than the old
ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.
Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the
mid-80s when he was working for Cray. I was grousing about the time
spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining
the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those
parts needing it). Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and
confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial
recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable.
Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated
STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long.
--Chuck
11:52 a.m.
On Jul 15, 2016, at 11:30 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist
at sydex.com> wrote:
On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
When I first started working on the IBM S/23, a complete build took a week
(yes, 7 days?if we were lucky). Debugging and fixing was mostly keeping
a notebook of patches to applied to the previous build. ?fixes? were first
developed by patch and then actual source changes were made. We usually
spent a day just patching the ?fixes? when a new build was released because
what we had to do in a patch vs the real change were often different.
Eventually someone wrote a cross build environment for the Series/1 and the
build went down to overnight (yea!).
You may ask ?It was IBM why didn?t you use the S/370 mainframes??. It was
accounting. We could ?buy? equipment (Series/1 and the like) and it was a
capitol expense. We were billed (at a ridiculous rate as I recall) for Mainframe
time out of the department expense budget. The expense budget was very
closely monitored. The capitol budget not so much.
Kids have it so much easier now. ;-)
P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot image) for
work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes just 2-3 seconds to
build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with SSDs. ;-)
TTFN - Guy
We don't appreciate how much faster modern
PCs are than the old
ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.
Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the
mid-80s when he was working for Cray. I was grousing about the time
spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining
the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those
parts needing it). Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and
confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial
recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable.
Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated
STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long.
12:15 p.m.
On 07/15/2016 11:52 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot
image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes
just 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7
with SSDs. ;-)
The problem is that while the PCs are getting faster, I'm slowing down.
One vivid memory I have of the S/360 F-level assembler is that while the
macro language was very rich, macros could take a very long time to
evaluate. Some of the "system" macros were real doozies.
Of course, none of that compares to the card-only systems without mass
storage.
--Chuck
4:54 p.m.
On 7/15/2016 12:15 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 07/15/2016 11:52 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
Hasp and I
think Control program (??) on MVT were about a foot high.
The system programmers for our shop at University of Missouri, Rolla,
360/50, MVT 19 thru 21 era had a hot plate, skillet, and they snacked on
spam while waiting and working. Made for a unique aroma to the computer
center.
P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and
creating the boot
image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes
just 2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7
with SSDs. ;-)
The problem is that while the PCs are getting faster, I'm
slowing down.
One vivid memory I have of the S/360 F-level assembler is that while the
macro language was very rich, macros could take a very long time to
evaluate. Some of the "system" macros were real doozies. Of course, none of that compares to the card-only
systems without mass
storage.
--Chuck
1:32 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and
creating the boot
image) for work takes < 1 hour. The firmware I?m working on takes just
2-3 seconds to build! This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with
SSDs. ;-)
Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or embedded
systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile binaries for
completely alien systems is just awesome.
-Swift
1:42 p.m.
Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for
targeting old or
embedded systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile
binaries for completely alien systems is just awesome.
But it comes at a price. NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble
self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native
builds. Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the
cross-compiler generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle
bug in the compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what.
(Or at least that's what I've gathered from following port-vax at .)
If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to
figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
2:13 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote:
But it comes at a price. NetBSD/vax, for example, has
trouble
self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native
builds.
Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I've only used it in the context of other
platforms and variants.
Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the
cross-compiler
generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle bug in the
compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what. (Or at least
that's what I've gathered from following port-vax at .)
Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly motivated VAX
gods. :-)
If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a
real VAX and trying to
figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.
It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. You'd be a killer asset
to any FOSS project, I'm sure. That goes 10x for one involving VAXes.
-Swift
3:40 p.m.
NetBSD/vax,
for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows
why, because it shows up only in native builds.
Hmm, I wasn't aware of that.
I've only used it in the context of
other platforms and variants. Nobody knows
[...]. (Or at least that's what I've gathered from
following port-vax at .)
Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of
highly
motivated VAX gods. :-) If I were
still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying
to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.
It's too
bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. [...]
1:30 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
I don't recall seeing it since I moved house in 2006, so it may be lost.
I'll try to see if I can find it.
Caldera
didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive
in Monterey, CA flooded. Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of
what was lost and it's a horror show. :(
Ahhhh... I would both like to see that, and not to see it, IYSWIM.
Ahh yes. I remember the enhanced versions of that. If
you recall, we
were both on the DeltaSoft FreeGEM list, gods, nearly 2 decades ago
now. (!)
Yep. That list is here: http://www.simpits.org/pipermail/gem-dev/ as well
as the gem-chat list. The archive only goes back to 2003 though.
I have one copy of the source-code CD for DR-DOS. I should put up on
Bittorrent somewhere!
Send it to the Internet Archive. :) It's nice to know that Roger sent out
more than one copy. BTW, I talked to Roger a few years ago, he's into
sailboats now. No where near anything even resembling 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://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
16 Jul
16 Jul
4:12 a.m.
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 08:10:24PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimed…
I vividly remember reading it as a 19YO student...
"The hard disk in the A500 is most noticeable for
its ferociously rapid
access speed. It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time
it takes to blink an eye. The reason for this speed is that the disk is run
with no interleaving of sectors. On an IBM XT, for example, the disk rotates
about six times between each read to give the puny CPU time to digest;
Archimedes eliminates this dead time as the ARM processor can suck stuff off
the disk as fast as it can rotate."
Isn't that mostly down to the difference between polled- and DMA-driven I/O?
Not that IBM should be given any slack, given what a complete dog's breakfast
ISA DMA is.
Back in 1987, the Amiga had crap hard disk performance because while the
controllers generally supported DMA, the disks still had to be formatted with
that awful filesystem it inherited from Tripos. (This wasn't fixed until 1988.)
I wonder how the Atari ST fared back then. Probably reasonably well given its
filesystem is a FAT derivative.
17 Jul
17 Jul
8:09 a.m.
On 16 July 2016 at 13:12, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
Isn't that mostly down to the difference between polled- and DMA-driven I/O?
Not that IBM should be given any slack, given what a complete dog's breakfast
ISA DMA is.
Back in 1987, the Amiga had crap hard disk performance because while the
controllers generally supported DMA, the disks still had to be formatted with
that awful filesystem it inherited from Tripos. (This wasn't fixed until 1988.)
I wonder how the Atari ST fared back then. Probably reasonably well given its
filesystem is a FAT derivative.
If it's a real question, I still know some RISC OS gurus, so I can
probably find out. But RISC OS was, technically, very primitive. I am
not 100% sure it even did DMA.
I recall around '96 or so, when busmastering DMA hard disk drivers for
Windows NT 4 on the Intel 82430FX "Triton" PCI chipset and its PIIX
EIDE controller appeared.
They existed for Win9x too but didn't make as much difference, because
the 9x kernel didn't have the internal multithreading to take
advantage of it. NT did.
The thing is, in a fast PC, they weren't massively quicker in terms of
raw transfer speed. What they did was massively reduce the CPU load of
intensive disk activity. Obviously you could only see this in
Performance Monitor once the machine was booted, but it was
interesting. With the ordinary default MS EIDE drivers, NT used Polled
I/O. Under heavy disk load, such as loading a large modular app, the
kernel CPU usage in PerfMon went very spiky. If the CPU was reasonably
quick -- which around then meant a P1 at 166MHz, or maybe a Pentium 1
MMX at 200MHz, then it didn't max out the CPU, but it was working
hard.
With the DMA drivers, intensive disk activity barely caused a trickle
of CPU activity. You could hardly see it.
The difference was so dramatic, you could hear it from the changing
noise of the movement of the disk heads. With PIO, it was staccato,
clicky; with DMA, it became bursts of buzzing and occasional silences
as the OS digested the new data it received and then requested more.
Of course, if you had some expensive SCSI disk system, this wasn't
anything new -- but then, with a decent SCSI host adaptor, such as an
expensive Adaptec AHA2940, you never heard it in PIO mode, so the
contrast wasn't there. It was harder to compare some cheap terrible
SCSI adaptor with a good one -- nobody sane would put a fast hard disk
on a cheapo ISA-bus AHA1510 meant for driving a scanner.
Whereas with Triton drivers and a good fast EIDE HD -- the de-facto
choice then was a Quantum Fireball 1.2GB -- you could install the OS,
get it working, then take the floppy with the Triton drivers, install
it and reboot. Presto, the machine booted faster and became
significantly more responsive. Big difference.
This is the most dramatic demo of DMA-driven hard disk access that
I've ever personally encountered.
In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305 and A310 came with
ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive
workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was
a series, not a model.
There was, later (1990), the A540:
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html
This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX.
The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD:
http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm
... but then it was the thick end of three thousand quid.
Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506
drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS
with a desktop written in BBC BASIC).
So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know.
--
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Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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12:07 p.m.
On 17 July 2016 at 16:09, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305 and
A310 came with
ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive
workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was
a series, not a model.
The A500 was the development prototype which pre-dated the A310
(originally with pre-multiply ARM1 CPUs). Only a 100 or so made. I
think they used pretty much the same Hitachi HD63463 as the (optional
podule for the) A300 series which I think was DMA capable.
There was, later (1990), the A540:
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html
This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX.
The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD:
http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm
The A540/R260 was a completely different class of machine, with an
ARM3 and the ability to take multiple memory (each with memory
controller) cards.
... but then it was the thick end of three thousand
quid.
Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506
drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS
with a desktop written in BBC BASIC).
So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know.
Think of it as an A310 with integrated disk controller, in a big metal
box with a lot more soldered wires internally :-p
Acorn kept them in internal service for white a while, including for
development versions of RISC OS 3 with the multitasking filer.
18 Jul
18 Jul
9:02 a.m.
On 17 July 2016 at 21:07, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
On 17 July 2016 at 16:09, Liam Proven <lproven at
gmail.com> wrote:
Fascinating -- thanks for that!
OK, so the HD controller chipset was DMA capable, but did Arthur take
advantage of that fact?
I note that the first PDF datasheet I find for that chip is on Peter
Howkin's Martuan site. Pete is a friend of mine and maints RPCemu as
well as the open-source version of CDE, and is a major Acorn expert.
Said datasheet indicates that the HD63463 needs an accompanying
HD63450 DMA controller for DMA operation.
--
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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)
In 1987 or so, the early Archimedes like the A305
and A310 came with
ST-506 controllers and 20-40MB Conner drives. The expensive
workstation-class models -- Dick mentions having an A500, but that was
a series, not a model.
The A500 was the development prototype which pre-dated the A310
(originally with pre-multiply ARM1 CPUs). Only a 100 or so made. I
think they used pretty much the same Hitachi HD63463 as the (optional
podule for the) A300 series which I think was DMA capable.
There was, later (1990), the A540:
http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A540.html
This was the Unix R260, but shipping with RISC OS instead of RISC iX.
The A540 came with a snazzy SCSI HD:
http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume9/issue2/blast20/index.htm
The A540/R260 was a completely different class of machine, with an
ARM3 and the ability to take multiple memory (each with memory
controller) cards.
... but then it was the thick end of three
thousand quid.
Back in '87, I suspect Dick had an A310 or something, with an ST-506
drive & Arthur (i.e. RISC OS 1 -- an ARM port of the BBC Micro's MOS
with a desktop written in BBC BASIC).
So I suspect no DMA... but I don't know.
Think of it as an A310 with integrated disk controller, in a big metal
box with a lot more soldered wires internally :-p
Acorn kept them in internal service for white a while, including for
development versions of RISC OS 3 with the multitasking filer.
15 Jul
15 Jul
11:15 a.m.
On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:
Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of
what was lost and it's a
horror show. :(
While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I
wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and
DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources.
DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very interesting FOSS OS. It
so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with
built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy.
Later, DR-DOS even got VFAT-compatible Long Filename support. That
would have really helped DVX -- one of the problems with it that I
read about was the need to mangle X.11 font filenames in an
incompatible way, so that they'd fit into 8.3 characters.
--
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)
1:35 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb <geneb at
deltasoft.com> wrote:
I don't believe that for a second. I bet Some jackass manager decided it
wasn't worth anything and binned it without telling anyone.
Somewhere around here I've got an inventory
of what was lost and it's a
horror show. :(
While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I
wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and
DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources.
DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very
interesting FOSS OS. It
so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with
built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy.
Well interesting if nothing else. :)
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://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
14 Jul
14 Jul
10:57 a.m.
From: Fred Cisin
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 9:47 AM
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Kip Koon wrote:
> So I went on a reading spree and found out that
CP/M was written by Gary
> Kildall well before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates! It's a long
> history that I obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much
> about it on the Internet.
No, but you should learn it.
LOTS more details are readily available about every portion of this
over-simplified shortened history.
[snip]
Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated
a deal
to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client.
Not Bill Gates, Paul Allen, as detailed in his autobiography _Idea Man_.
Just for the record.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/
11:13 a.m.
> Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and
negotiated a deal
> to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client.
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Rich Alderson wrote:
Not Bill Gates, Paul Allen, as detailed in his
autobiography _Idea Man_.
Just for the record.
Thanks!
I appreciate corrections to get it right on such details.
Someday, perhaps there should be a detailed version of this part of the
history.
(if only to answer some of the really absurd ridiculous ones, such as
"Pirates Of The Valley" (Bill Gates cold-calling IBM to sell them on the
idea of having an OS??, and then telling us that we should learn their
version!))
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
13 Jul
13 Jul
9:43 p.m.
Hi Guys,
I have to laugh at myself. I just realized that when I read the title of the email, I
thought it had said CP/M code in DOS? Revisited..." Sometimes I really think I'm
dyslexic. Maybe. In love with computers, definitely. I think I was born with food in
one hand and computers in the other with Star Trek and Star Wars somewhere in the
vicinity. :) Take care my friends.
Kip Koon
computerdoc at sc.rr.com
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/Kip_Koon
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 10:45 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...
Did MS-DOS use code copied from CP/M? Forensic software engineer Bob
Zeidman said "no" in 2012 but now he has new research to disclose at VCF
West.
That's all I can say for now. :)
14 Jul
14 Jul
7:53 a.m.
New subject: Doh! Oopsie in the subject line / was Re: CP/M code in DOS? Revisited...
I have to laugh at myself. I just realized that when
I read the title of the email, I thought it had said CP/M code in DOS? Revisited..."
Sometimes I really think I'm dyslexic. Maybe. In love with computers, definitely. I
think I was born with food in one hand and computers in the other with Star Trek and Star
Wars somewhere in the vicinity. :) Take care my friends.
Wow, I really (bleeped) that one! Subject line indeed should have been
"CP/M code in DOS" not the opposite. Sorry. :)
7:58 a.m.
New subject: Doh! Oopsie in the subject line / was Re: CP/M code in DOS? Revisited...
On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Evan Koblentz wrote:
Wow, I really (bleeped) that one! Subject line indeed
should have been "CP/M
code in DOS" not the opposite. Sorry. :)
Then my entire time travel hypothesis is for naught.
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abs＠absd.org -
abuse＠cabal.org.uk -
cclist＠sydex.com -
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cisin＠xenosoft.com -
cmhanson＠eschatologist.net -
computerdoc＠sc.rr.com -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
ggs＠shiresoft.com -
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RichA＠LivingComputerMuseum.org -
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