On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: Absolutely. When I was offered the choice in 2007 between a work-provided Lenovo Thinkpad (on which I would have run RedHat) or a MacBook (on which I would have left OS X, unlike some associates I know), I jumped on the MacBook. I loved it. First thing I had to fix, though, was putting the Terminal icon in the nav bar. It works fine with a multi-button mouse, you just can't get one from the manufacturer. As for the weird window manager, I just used it to keep track of a couple of browser windows and a thick stack of terminal sessions. I don't care what color or shape the widgets are - I just need to close windows, move windows, and open more terminal sessions. Nearly everything else is irrelevant. Oh... and to tie in the recent thread on X, I left that MacBook in my room (this was at the South Pole where we had individual LAN drops for a personal computer and a VOiP phone) and used it from all over station by firing up xterms and occasionally browser windows. I _did_ run a session back to North America once or twice, but the bandwidth and latency (via satellite, sharing a 1Mbps link with everyone else) made that largely impractical. So I'm an atypical user, but there's nothing like a thin (or really long) pipe to make you reconsider fighting with a remote session that slings swaths of pixels around - I find character-based remote access protocols more appealing and productive. -ethan

Not VNC? I use VNC to a little Intel Mac mini for the few times I need to run x86 Mac programs or test against 10.6 (with 10.5 in VirtualBox). -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- In memory of Greg Morris ---------------------------------------------------

The nice thing about VNC is that the Screen Sharing feature on OS X is in fact a superset of VNC, so any Windows VNC client will work. I think that's the way to go for you. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- TODAY'S DUMB TRUE HEADLINE: Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told ----

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I think that's a fair question. Certainly AT&T had that attitude as a direct result of governmental (juduical) action. Entirely possible. My first exposure to C was in the context of producing computer-based hands-on museum exhibits in the late 1970s. I was proposing a Commodore-PET-based solution written in BASIC. The other option was an S-100 box running a standalone app written in C and run from ROM. While my proposal didn't win, I did note that the winning proposal cost several times more, part of which was the royalty to the 8-bit C compiler vendor for the run-time library. The eventual unbundling of the cost of hundreds of commonly-used functions was to my observation *critical* to the commercial adoption of C programs outside of UNIX. My initial reactions to C were horribly tainted by that experience. Why would I want to learn a language that obligated me to pay or pass along the cost of hundreds of dollars per deliverable program when I could bring the entire project in at a fraction of the cost with BASIC, assembler, or a combination of the two? I read the articles in "Byte", c. 1979-1983, about C (something I can recommend to the list - there really is some good stuff in there), but was unswayed. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that I experienced C + UNIX, where there was *always a compiler* and where there was no overhead to write and distribute code that I really learned C. I've been using it ever since. -ethan

vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: went on to are the Incorrect. Those were open source until the great unbundling of June 23, 1969. In fact, it went beyond just "open source"; they were in the public domain, along with the operating systems they ran on (e.g., OS/360 21.8, DOS/360 and TOS/360 26.2, MVS 3.8, TSS/370 3.0).

From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> I wasn't involved in the years we're talking about, 1964-1969 but from what I have read and heard, what I said earlier was correct. None of the IBM compilers (and I'll add OS to the list) were ever open source. Now to clarify, the "unbundling" in 1969 was to be able to charge separate line items for software. I don't think anybody is silly enough to say when you paid a million bucks for a machine and they "threw in" the OS and compilers you actually got that for free, it was just a package deal "at no additional charge." That is not the same as free. I don't believe you had a snowball's chance in hell of getting the code from IBM if you didn't shell out for their hardware and sign licensing agreements. Heck, we had microcode listings on trolleys for the SEs in most of the shops I worked for in the early days, but nobody considered that stuff in the machine room open source either. It was just what you got to be able to have your system maintained. The operating systems Eric mentioned are in the public domain, but as far as what I have been told, it is not because IBM didn't assert copyright or intentionally placed them in the public domain, but because of U.S. copyright law prior to 1980. In fact MVS 3.8 is in the public domain and it was released around 1974, much after the 1969 unbundling. I think there is proof to this view because there are Y manuals (which would later be changed to LY for "licensed materials") that are "restricted distribution" even in the late 1960s. That shows IBM did make efforts to keep material (specifically program logic manuals) out of public distribution and only sent them to licensed customers. I don't think any wrangling was required to get source until much later. For years including MVS 3.8 you got almost all the source just to be able to do a sysgen. I was never a sysprog and never did a sysgen until a few years ago, so I have no idea why they shipped it that way. But they did, and everybody who bought a system got the OS to be able to do sysgens and bring up their own system. That doesn't mean the OS and tools were open source, I'm near certain if you didn't buy a system and sign a license agreement you had no legal way to get the OS or compilers. If not, it makes no sense to restrict manuals and make a series of manuals only for licensed customers when the source code is freely available. I have never heard that the source was available without a license which in turn requires a hardware purchase, I don't consider that open source. I worked for IBM business partners for many years and we had access to source long after they went OCO so I don't know what regular customer sites had access to. If there are any old sysprogs on the list maybe they will remember when IBM went OCO. Up until the VM version of IBMLink was taken offline a couple of years ago we could still see some source code. It dwindled every year but there was still some stuff available. 100% correct That's true of CICS and IMS as well, both made billions of dollars over the years for IBM. Those were called FDP (Field Developed Products) they were written by customers, and picked up (somehow) by IBM. So good in fact that Fujitsu settled out of court by paying IBM 830 million dollars for ripping off MVS and VSE in the 1990s.

From: Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> Your statement appears to be correct. On the source I have for 3.8 they specifically state copyright = none or n/a. Thanks for pointing this out. I disagree. The provision of source code to anybody who wants it, whether a licensee or not, is what makes something open source. If you can't get the source unless you buy hardware and sign a license agreement, that is certainly not open source. That is just conjecture and nothing more. There's no evidence anybody who wasn't a paying customer obtained a copy. That suggests to me there was an intent to protect the source and they didn't know how. YMMV. It is in the public domain *now* because somebody (Rich Fochtman) received explicit permission from IBM along with the archive tapes, and made them available on a web site. Since *at the time it was released* none of these OS were posted anywhere and were shipped only to paying, licensed hardware customers on tapes, it was not open source at the time.

vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: whether a That's a strange definition of open source. You're saying that if I have source code to a program from Joe, and I have a legal right to give a copy of it to anyone (including you), but that Joe won't give you a copy directly, that it isn't open source? The definition of open source is about someone who possesses the source code having the right to distribute it, not whether anyone (including the original author or the owner of the copyright) is under an obligation to give it to anyone who asks. You're not confusing "open source" with the GPL, are you? The GPL can impose obligations to distribute, but "open source" does not. It wasn't the case that you could only get the source if you bought hardware and signed a license. Anyone who had the source code was allowed to give it to you, since it was in the public domain. Whether any particular party was willing to give it to you is irrelevant. In the past, I have personally released source code into the public domain. I happen to no longer distribute that particular source code. If you ask me for it, I will tell you that I am unwilling to provide a copy to you. Nevertheless, it is open source, as anyone that has it is allowed to give you a copy, if *they* choose to do so. It has nothing to do with who *you* choose to ask for it. No, it is not conjecture. There is no legally recognized natural right to a monopoly on a work; it is copyright law that grants a monopoly for a limited time. Absent the copyright, there is no monopoly. Since the IBM software was not copyrighted, anyone who had it could legally give you a copy, and IBM would have no recourse. This is true regardless of whether you could actually find someone willing to give you the copy. A party choosing not to exercise a right to distribute doesn't demonstrate that they didn't have a right. I don't think there is hard evidence either way, so that lack of evidence doesn't really support either of our arguments. Whether it was legal for someone to give you a copy, and whether they actually did give you a copy, are two completely different things. Even if no one actually gave you a copy, they had the legal right to do so. It suggests that there was an intent to protect the manuals. It is *highly* speculative to conclude that there was an intent to protect the source code. However, it is also completely irrelevant since they didn't protect the source code. received Wrong. It is in the public domain because it is not copyrighted. The law at the time was that to be protected by copyright, works had to bear a copyright notice. There was a minor exception for works on which such a notice was accidentally omitted, and that exception required that an attempt be made to correct the omission, and there is no evidence that this was done. The law today still holds that works published before March 1, 1989, and not bearing a copyright notice, are not copyrighted. There is a new exception for works first published outside the U.S. before March 1, 1989, without a copyright notice, but which had copyright protection in the country of publication. It does not appear that the pre-unbundling IBM software is eligible for this exception. There are any number of reasons why Rich Fochtman may have asked IBM for permission. For instance, he might not have been sure that the code was in the public domain. By getting permission (even if it wasn't necessary), Rich was protecting himself in case the works turned out (for whatever reason) not to have originally been in the public domain. The fact that the request was made doesn't prove that the works weren't already in the public domain. There are any number of reasons why IBM may have granted such permission. IBM granting permission could not possibly make it *more* public domain than it already was. Beyond that, even if IBM had *denied* permission, it still would have been public domain. A work that is not copyrighted is in the public domain regardless of what the author has to say about it; it is a matter of law, not of anyone's opinion, request, or demand. hardware It most certainly *was* open source, and there is a simple proof: 1. The software (including source code) lacked copyright notices. 2. By U.S. law, due to the lack of copyright notices, the software (including source code) was not copyrighted. 3. By definition, since the software (including source code) was not copyrighted, it was in the public domain. 4. Source code that is in the public domain meets the definition of "open source" (regardless of whether any particular party is willing to give you a copy). Eric

On 2011 Oct 17, at 10:53 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: At the time (late-60s/70s), there was an interest in having a language "just above assembler" for things like OS-development - something that would provide for symbols, expressions, and standard control flow (i.e. be readable), be independant of machine instructions (even if not an abstraction completely independant of the hardware), but still be directly translateable to machine code and leave the programmer with a sense of what would happen on the hardware. I would suggest that if not C, another C-like, CPL/BCPL/B descendant would have been developed to fill that interest. (I've mentioned it here before, I worked with such a language ("Z") in the late-70s era. Z was also a descendant of BCPL/B (hence a sibling of C), with byte addressing added and some other improvements.) For those not fond of C, one might say things went awry when C was picked up and became commonplace for 'higher-level' general-purpose programming in the 80s. But what were the choices at the time?: assembler (tedious, not portable), BASIC (gross), Algol (that might be a candidate), PL/I (big, limited availability), Pascal (limited, IMO), Ada (I remember looking forward to Ada in the time it was being developed, but it too was big and took on committee problems, and was perhaps too late to become a major presence). In a time of limited memory and speed, C was flexible and targetable to the microprocs of the 80's. In the 90s, "improved C" languages became available (splitting into two tracks - compiled/interpreted). Not all of them were an improvement however, or they were so improved (e.g. C++) that people just stuck with C for many purposes. The whole history is also a comment on independant, grass-roots development and evolution versus standards-committee bloat and mandate. I also wonder how much of the popularity of C and associated languages is just "{}" vs. "begin/end". I personally can't stand begin-end languages just because all those begin-ends present so much visual clutter in the program text (although I do have a fondness for Algol).

On 10/17/2011 04:04 PM, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: So, um, what do you do when you want to port your assembly only OS to x86_64, PPC, SPARC, MIPS, ARM from your original platform? (Re)Write in C? :-D

Well, I've tried to learn C before but never got very far because for the basic things I do with code, it's always felt like overkill. This time, I guess I'm going to have to learn it for real as a memorial. Mike

From: vintagecoder at aol.com Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 4:43 AM When IBM wanted to port the IBM OS family to POWER, they did the same thing. (Z, in your list above.) Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

[Should have changed Subject: header that sooner, but it will screw threading at this point. --rma] From: Dave McGuire Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 1:44 PM Hey, Dave, It's not a deeply researched statement. It's based on reportage in the trade press back when the z-, i-, and was it pSeries(?) systems started coming out. It sounds like emulation to me. Also, please note that I used "POWER" as a generic, not distinguishing between the chip set in a PC/RT and those in Watson's blades. I *do* distinguish "POWER" from "POWERpc", since there are specific differences that make the latter the choice for a small system. So if it's POWER6 or POWER7, or whatever, I'm not making that much of a distinction. I don't think anyone has seriously claimed that "RS/6000 chhipsets with different microcode" are involved. There's been a lot of water under the dam since those came out. My understanding is that a multi-level system is in use, with nanocode to create the microcode engine to run the code that makes it look as though you're on hardware compatible with a 360 from 1968, with bums and hacks to bring it past the 31-bit extension of the 24-bit address space into the 64-bit present day. If that's not correct, fine. I'll withdraw my comment. But that's the impression given by IBM's own press releases going back to the introduction of zSeries, and that's whence I drew my conclusions. Thanks, Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 05:47:10PM -0700, Rich Alderson wrote: The two mail clients I use take advantage of the "References:" and "In-Reply-To:" headers. (Possibly also "Thread-topic:" and "Thread-index:" which seems to be Microsofts "standard"). This means that changing the topic doesn't matter much for threading which is both good an bad. It's good when you want to see where discussion orginated from to get som background. But it is bad when someone uses "Reply" to create an entirely different discussion. I urge anyone to not use "Reply" unless you intend the mail to be sorted under some unrelated thread for a subset of readers (e.g. Me). Cheers, Pontus.

On 10/20/2011 02:03 PM, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: Actually, OS/400 started out with CPF on the S/38. Barry

From: vintagecoder at aol.com Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2011 11:03 AM I've snipped all the rest, because Mr. Coder won't see any of my reply. I'm familiar with the meaning of "the IBM OS family of operating systems" having worked with System/360s running OS/360 MFT in 1969, and onwards. I made a living on IBM System/370 systems from the early 1970s until 1984, at which time I moved permanently (as I thought) to DEC mainframes running TOPS-20. I was a sysprog on SVS (aka OS/VS1 Release 1) on an Amdahl 470/8 for several years, and wrote the in-house utility for converting decks (i. e., disk files of 80-byte records) of HASP JCL with ACF2 to JES2 JCL with RACF. I *know* what I'm talking about, with regard to access to IBM sources. I was at SHARE in San Francisco when the great OCO debate heated up again, and still have my button reading "When source is outlawed, only outlaws will have source" in my collection. I remember the discussions of the changes in US copyright law, including court cases, which allowed program sources to be copyrighted and have the copyrights stand up, in _ComputerWorld_ and _Datamation_ and other trade rags. I like hearing other people talk, too. I even admit when I have been wrong in interpretations, as in the case of the zSeries processors: It appears that I have drawn the wrong conclusions from the articles about the change in processor technologies in use for IBM's mainframes, and I withdraw my earlier comment about the comparability of Hercules to the zSeries. OK? Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On 20 October 2011 20:36, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote: *Applause* :?) -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 10/20/11 5:51 PM, Liam Proven wrote: My information is a little different, second-hand from IBM sources. Certainly slanted to the IBM party line.... IBM worked in project Monterey, which involved not only SCO but HP and a few other participants, on a port of OpenGroup-certified UNIX to the x86 family[0]. That effort, as far as I know, was specced as a 32-bit OS and never went to Itanium. At about the same time, IBM did port AIX v5 to Itanium. (I have pre-distribution training course materials that detail booting and installing AIX to an EFI-based Itanium system.) But as you said, that port never made it out the door. IBM made a decision at about that time that Linux would be their cross-platform OS offering and ran with it. Doc [0] I'm convinced that Monterey was the root of the SCO/IBM UNIX licensing litigation.

Liam Proven wrote: What do you mean, axed? It was *eventually* canceled, but there were at least two versions actually *released*. Peace... Sridhar

From: Cameron Kaiser Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 1:50 PM See my long response to Dave McGuire on this topic. I'm not sure that what you say here really challenges my base assumption, since an emulator can be fully compatible with the hardware it replaces. I'm not stating that z/OS is running native on a POWER architecture, and I'm willing to be shown that it's not running on top of a hardware emulation layer, but nothing I've heard about it makes that any less probable. Oh, and to answer your later comment, no, I'm not thinking only of the iSeries. ;-) Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On 18 Oct 2011 at 13:15, Rich Alderson wrote: Tangentially relevant... I wonder how many S/360 machines spent their entire operating life running in 1401 or 7080 emulation mode? --Chuck

On 10/18/2011 05:03 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Yes, but with different microcode (at least a superset of PPC), right? -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Yes, PowerPC-AS and the rest of Amazon was unified with POWER4. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright ----------------------

True, it's native. But it's nice to know my Power 520 can run System i if I ever got that crazy to dump AIX. :) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? ---------------

On 19 Oct 2011 at 18:01, Rich Alderson wrote: The USAF spent much of the 1970s running their logistics system on S/360 systems running in 7080 emulation mode. Heck, they still had 7080s until about 1974. Most of the code was written in 7080 COBOL with patched binary decks and 7080 autocoder. A really horrible mess with little documentation. I've even heard of nested emulations: 701 emulation by a 1401 running on an S/360. I suspect sine state DMVs and other offices were just as bad. --Chuck

On 17/10/11 3:33 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote: BLISS? It made sense at the time. C++ is the worse perversion. :) Yet it was good enough for the system code of Multics... ...Sadly. The 1980s were a long time ago, it's probably time we reassessed the tradeoffs. --T

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Thanks for the tip Cameron. I'll look into it when I get the chance. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Don't know if this has come up yet, but finally some press respect for dmr: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/16/john-naughton-dennis-ritch… Mike