12 Apr
2007
12 Apr
'07
2:38 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:02 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: PC-MOS?
I was looking for something else and ran across a two-binder set of
something called "PC-MOS" by The Software Link, circa 1992. I opened
the shrinkwrap on the nstallation manual and the thing looks like
it's a multi-user version of MS-DOS, talking to terminals. I
appear to have a 5 user version.
Anyone familiar with this animal? The version is 4.2.
Cheers,
Chuck
Sounds like the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to build a multi-user system using an
IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA card per user. The expansion box had
special cables for monitor and keyboard (thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III,
Wordstar 2000, etc. in an office for up to eight stations. Each station appeared to have
the PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
I wonder if I was using the same PC-MOS but a very early version.
david.
12 Apr
12 Apr
4:27 p.m.
On Apr 12, 2007, at 2:38 AM, David W. Erhart wrote:
My office in 1988/1989 used a product called "VM/386 Multiuser"
which did a similar thing, using Wyse terminals. Most DOS apps
worked very well, and it was fast. It used the virtual '86 mode of
the 80386 processor. We ran it on a cached 386DX/25 with three
terminals.
A very different sort of thing, and long after PC-MOS, but worth
mentioning. I'd love to find a copy of that again to play with; it
was good stuff.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I was looking
for something else and ran across a two-binder set of
something called "PC-MOS" by The Software Link, circa 1992. I opened
the shrinkwrap on the nstallation manual and the thing looks like
it's a multi-user version of MS-DOS, talking to terminals. I
appear to have a 5 user version.
Anyone familiar with this animal? The version is 4.2.
Sounds like the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to build a multi-user
system using an IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA
card per user. The expansion box had special cables for monitor
and keyboard (thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III, Wordstar
2000, etc. in an office for up to eight stations. Each station
appeared to have the PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
I wonder if I was using the same PC-MOS but a very early version. 
18 Apr
18 Apr
9:20 p.m.
New subject: VM/386
Thread was: Re: PC-MOS?
On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 16:27 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
My office in 1988/1989 used a product called
"VM/386 Multiuser"
which did a similar thing, using Wyse terminals. Most DOS apps
worked very well, and it was fast. It used the virtual '86 mode of
the 80386 processor. We ran it on a cached 386DX/25 with three
terminals.
A very different sort of thing, and long after PC-MOS, but worth
mentioning. I'd love to find a copy of that again to play with; it
was good stuff.
I would point out that VM/386 did NOT just run DOS -- any operating
system could be loaded in a virtual machine, and run independently,
along with DOS... or without DOS for that matter. I'm glad you liked
it... It was written by some friends of mine in Okemos, Michigan. It
was a remarkably stable environment -- I always thought they should have
gotten rich and famous for their work.
Peace,
Warren E. Wolfe
wizard at voyager.net
19 Apr
19 Apr
1:18 p.m.
New subject: VM/386
On Apr 18, 2007, at 9:20 PM, Warren Wolfe wrote:
Oh my, I was unaware of that...I thought it was DOS-only! Now I
MUST play with it again.
My office
in 1988/1989 used a product called "VM/386 Multiuser"
which did a similar thing, using Wyse terminals. Most DOS apps
worked very well, and it was fast. It used the virtual '86 mode of
the 80386 processor. We ran it on a cached 386DX/25 with three
terminals.
A very different sort of thing, and long after PC-MOS, but worth
mentioning. I'd love to find a copy of that again to play with; it
was good stuff.
I would point out that VM/386 did NOT just run DOS -- any
operating
system could be loaded in a virtual machine, and run independently,
along with DOS... or without DOS for that matter. I'm glad you liked
it... It was written by some friends of mine in Okemos, Michigan. It
was a remarkably stable environment -- I always thought they should
have
gotten rich and famous for their work.
Well the next time you speak with them, tell them I said their
product was fantastic. :-) My office ran it for a long time; it did
its job well and never gave us a lick of trouble.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
12 Apr
12 Apr
4:36 p.m.
On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, David W. Erhart wrote:
Sounds like the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to
build a multi-user
system using an IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA card
per user. The expansion box had special cables for monitor and keyboard
(thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III, Wordstar 2000, etc. in an
office for up to eight stations. Each station appeared to have the
PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
(WORDSTAR on 1/8 of an 8MHz AT == WORD on 500MHz Pentium)
5:07 p.m.
On Apr 12, 2007, at 4:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Yep. Thanks, Microsoft.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Sounds like
the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to build a multi-user
system using an IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA card
per user. The expansion box had special cables for monitor and
keyboard
(thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III, Wordstar 2000, etc.
in an
office for up to eight stations. Each station appeared to have the
PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
(WORDSTAR on 1/8 of an 8MHz AT == WORD on 500MHz Pentium) 
6:33 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
On Apr 12, 2007, at 4:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Yep. Thanks, Microsoft.
-Dave
This is pretty silly. There is a lot to criticize microsoft for, but I
don't think this is one of those things. It is just normal market
forces. If MS could get as many $$ per copy selling wordstar, they'd do
that since it would take a lot less money to develop and support.
People like the promise of new doo-dads, even if they end up not using
them. Is that something MS should take the blame for, or the customers
who buy it?
Also, word does stuff that wordstar never did, and yes, it comes at a
cost. Word allows vastly superior control over layout than wordstar
could. Perhaps *you* don't embed spreadsheets in word documents, but I
(and others) often find it useful, vs having to say: please see blah.xls
for proof. The real time spell checker is useful. Etc. Yes, nobody
use more than 10-20% of the features, but there is a market slice using
just about every one of them.
I'm sure back in the day there were those who complained that wordstar
was bloated and all one really needed was electric pencil. And then
there were the old timers who complained about the screen oriented
editors as being overkill and good old line editing was just fine.
As a hardware analogy, many dolts have complained about how ugly the x86
instruction set is and that intel engineers are a bunch of incompetent
hacks for not "fixing" it. Yet at each step of the way, it would have
been ruinous for intel to break software compatibility with those ugly
warts that they started with. The 8086 was a stop gap between the 8085
and the 432; intel had no way of guessing that it would be even 1% as
successful as it has been. The fact that intel has kept the x86
instruction set competitive despite the warts in a testimony to their
smarts (architecture, design, and fab process), not their stupidity.
What were we discussing? :-)
Sounds
like the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to build a multi-user
system using an IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA card
per user. The expansion box had special cables for monitor and keyboard
(thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III, Wordstar 2000, etc. in an
office for up to eight stations. Each station appeared to have the
PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
(WORDSTAR on 1/8 of an 8MHz AT == WORD on 500MHz Pentium) 
9:50 p.m.
On 12 Apr 2007 at 17:33, Jim Battle wrote:
This is pretty silly. There is a lot to criticize
microsoft for, but I
don't think this is one of those things. It is just normal market
forces. If MS could get as many $$ per copy selling wordstar, they'd do
that since it would take a lot less money to develop and support.
People like the promise of new doo-dads, even if they end up not using
them. Is that something MS should take the blame for, or the customers
who buy it?
Drifting a bit off-topic, but you'll see a change in thinking in the
newest version of Word. The problem can be that there is just *too
much* stuff for most humans to deal with.
I still get a fair amount of work from publishers whose authors still
perfer to write their stuff on an old word processor or electronic
typewriter--no bells or whistles, just pages and pages of double-
spaced manuscript.
While I used an add-on package to prop space using WS 3.3 under CP/M,
it wasn't pretty. Neither, for that matter, was WS 2000 under x86
DOS. The basic problem was that when you wanted PS, the "WYSIWYG"
idea went out the Window (sorry!).
Was there ever manufactured a non-graphics display terminal that
could display proportional spacing text?
Cheers,
Chuck
8:34 a.m.
At 08:50 PM 4/12/2007, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Drifting a bit off-topic, but you'll see a change
in thinking in the
newest version of Word. The problem can be that there is just *too
much* stuff for most humans to deal with.
And the new Word seems to be far more in the direction of
hiding obscure function X hidden in several levels of tabbed menus.
Two seconds to hunt, minimum. But the same could be said about
old Word, except you're hunting menus and dialogs.
I still get a fair amount of work from publishers whose
authors still
perfer to write their stuff on an old word processor or electronic
typewriter--no bells or whistles, just pages and pages of double-
spaced manuscript.
Which platform, which program?
Was there ever manufactured a non-graphics display
terminal that
could display proportional spacing text?
Terak? By non-graphic, do you mean not windowed or not bitmapped?
Terak was bitmapped, but it had loadable customizable fonts, so it
handled Hebrew and Elvish.
- John
12:16 p.m.
On 13 Apr 2007 at 7:34, John Foust wrote:
Which platform, which program?
Platform? Program? It's whatever the box does when you turn it on.
In the past week, I've done a set from a Smith Corona typewriter and
another from a Brother word processor. Olivetti and Brother seem
to be the common "platforms"--and the Brother 240/120K GCR diskettes
seem to be very common.
I suspect that a fair number of people just don't want to fool with a
conventional general-purpose PC and cherish their old WP equipment.
One customer was lamenting that her old IBM Displaywriter (or rather
its printer) finally gave up the ghost. She was using it well into
1999.
Contrast the simplicity of a box that's ready when you power it on
and requires no external software to load and which writes all the
work on diskettes to a modern PC.
I can appreciate the attitude. I can open a can with a Swiss Army
knife (heck, I probably could *make* a can with one), but a
contentional can opener is simpler and cheaper and does the job
better. Professional writers are more concerned with getting their
thoughts down and less concerned about "pretty".
I think there are some simple ideas that are not amenable to
"improvment" by addition of extra functionality. I've still not
figured out all of the weird settings on my FM receiver, even though
it affords no more additional functionality than the receiver I
purchased in 1968. And, although it has a volume control knob, it
lacks a tuning knob, a shortcoming in my book.
Terak? By non-graphic, do you mean not windowed or
not bitmapped?
Terak was bitmapped, but it had loadable customizable fonts, so it
handled Hebrew and Elvish.
I was thinking along the lines of "downloadable proportional fonts
with hardware kerning".
Cheers,
Chuck
12 Apr
12 Apr
10:33 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
(WORDSTAR on 1/8 of an 8MHz AT == WORD on 500MHz
Pentium)
Now now, be fair; Word functions just fine once it's all loaded into
memory. Yes, as you type, more things are swapped out/in (which is
annoying) but after about 30 seconds it's quite snappy.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
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