Richard Erlacher wrote: That is not what I asking for. One I developed a design (using undefined software) I don't want have a $2,000 computer running windows 2022 to re-program my chips from a printer port that developed in 2002 as the chips only have a 20 year life span, from data files that have been sitting on a floppy for years. It is getting a FPGA programmed that is the problem. I found this out the hard way, as they don't make under $500 programers for the serial FPGA proms and very few people even publish a J-TAG interface for a printer port for the stuff that can be programed that way. Funny what ever happened to assembler programing??? I know, I know ... managment never tells a programer what to program until a week after it needed in the field. LINUX != UNIX. ( But you are right ) -- Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu * www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html

Richard Erlacher wrote: I forgot to state CANADIAN :) and that was a ball park figure. I have not been able to find Altera's. Xilinx's schematic is in the documentation as a apendex to the programing manual. With altera ( the fpga I have ) serial proms are the only easy way to program the chip.I still need a uP to program the FPGA from standard memory. I guess waiting for 4k focal to load on a TTY gives me a bias against bigger systems. -- Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu * www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html

Richard Erlacher wrote: Well I need a mail order supplier to CANADA thus that rules out ALTERA. I may even NOT use Xlinix CPLD's because I like the idea that with TTL I don't need any programing DONE. The price of PCB's and low cost TTL is about the same as using higher cost chips. I might use 2901's from B.G.Micro as they are cheap ($1.50) but does anybody know of the original data sheets of the web in pdf form? -- Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu * www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html

Richard Erlacher wrote: I hate waiting a month for stuff! I am single and live 600 miles from a reasonable USA city. That would be about a month by bicycle. -- Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu * www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote: If you're saying that you'd _buy_ that setup, please send me you're snail-mail address off-list. I'd really like to establish a fee-based support contract. :) Really high-end PC hardware isn't much better than midrange, but low-end hardware is a verifiable black hole. To wit, it is guaranteed to suck. Doc

Not comparing them to today's Windows machines but to the PC offerings out during the same timeframe, I doubt you really could've found a PC comparable in capabilities to Unix workstations such as the SGI machines, for running applications such as Lightwave 3D, or the NeXT machines, for such things as Mathmatica and other scientific-type apps. The hardware on PC's has only in the last few years caught up to the various workstations in video capabilities and the CPU's have yet to come near the MIPS and DEC Alpha processors except in terms of raw clockspeed. Of course, you paid for machines of this level, but you got a lot more as well. With Mac OS X, more new machines are shipping with a UNIX derived OS than ever before. With so many home machines being networked, a secure OS is becoming a must....something Windows has shown time and again to fall short on. Plus, I'd use the freely downloadable and time-proven Apache webserver over the similar NT/2000 offerings any day given it's better track record and wider installed base. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

Perhaps, but why would one have wanted one of them back then? In fact, why would one want one now? BTW, when the NEXT boxes first came out, we had a few of them sitting around for people to look at and play with. I personally was not impressed. They were EXTREMELY low on gigaflops per picobuck and, aside from the OS, I don't remember any applications that didn't have the same look and feel as a small mono-MAC costing ~1/10 as much. The problem with these machines, as borne out by the market, is that they weren't what the home user wanted. They weren't what I wanted either. I recently saw a NEXT cube for sale in a thrift store complete with its original (Black) laser printer for $10 for the whole shootin'match, and it was running. AFAIK, nobody bought it. I haven't been back to see whether it's sold yet, but it's been a couple of weeks. The laser printer had been there a week or two longer. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Hellige" <jhellige(a)earthlink.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 6:57 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) use Netscape,

I don't see 'em often but if you send me the details off-list, I'll do it. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Rice" &lt;jrice(a)texoma.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 8:23 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) <snip> or

I think you may be underestimating the "home" market. After all, the Apple][ was a "home" computer. By comparison the C-64 among others were like a baby's rattle. My point, however, was that nobody seems to want that NEXT cube, since both it and the associated printer and 19" monitor, mouse, and keyboard, were sitting at the thrift store for a over a week, while the typical running PC setup, priced between 40 and 80 bucks, seldom sits there for more than half a day. I'd say it probably ended up out in their dumpster. That's what normally happens to MAC's. It's not unusual to see several MAC's in the dumpster. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ethan Dicks" &lt;erd_6502(a)yahoo.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 2:29 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

Well, what I know is that my kids had a C64 before they were both in elementary school and had outgrown it by the time they were 10. I didn't make that choice, having been divorced from their mother, but it was apparent to her that they needed something more capable. They had PC/AT's when they were 10. Those were not great, but at least they were adequate. Frankly, if one considers the competition, the Commodore people picked the video toy market to play in rather than the home computer market, because they couldn't compete with Apple and Radio Shack, though they attempted to compete with RS' low-end. That low-end, e.g. COCO wasn't much to compete with. All these were capable if you were determined to make them into what they weren't, but if you wanted a home computer, you were better off buying something that was alread a computer. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cameron Kaiser" &lt;spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 6:40 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) like Unix, http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu Clinton ----------------------------------

--- Bryan Pope &lt;bpope(a)wordstock.com&gt; wrote: I certainly don't. For several years, it was the source of my paycheck. I didn't do More like the original PC - both came out about the same time - 1982. The C-64 was $595 (no disk), the original PC was $2880, 64KB of RAM and, also, no disk. The PC-AT came out several years later with a standard configuration price (including hard disk) of $5K. ISTR it took several years until the PC (and descendents) beat the C-64 in total sales in dollars and years after that until it passed in total units sold (the C-64 had a run of about 17 million, IIRC). Up until EGA, that was true. But it wasn't the graphics that did it - 80 column text was important to the PC, as was compatbility between home and work. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/

And thusly Richard Erlacher spake: No... But could a Commodore 64 read a PC disk? No - until the Commodore 128 came out with 1571 drive. Then the PC could read (PC formatted) disks made on the 1571. Bryan

Suitably programmed, the 1571 can read FAT disks as well, and so can the 1581. And 1581 disks can be read in PCs. But I know Bryan already knew this ;-) -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- Obscenity is the last refuge of a weak mind. -- Bonnie Fortney -------------

Waidaminnute, waiddaminute ... Just because you couldn't buy an AMIGA clone for cheap doesn't mean you can peg its cost to a BigBlue pricetag. I bought the board separately from the box, used a mouse I already had, and bought the VGA card (pretty pricey) from my ex business partner's retail store. The year I got my first PC/AT (I used 'em at work all the time, but didn't get one at home for a while.) I bought a 25 MHz clone (NEAT architecture) with 8 MB RAM and a pair of 700 MB ESDI drives for $1080. That was with a 1kx768x16 VGA display board. I hacked it to work with a fixed-frequency (sync-on-green) monitor I had sitting around. It was WONDERFUL. That was in early '89. more below ... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" &lt;cisin(a)xenosoft.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 6:34 PM Subject: Re: C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers) I remember that, in '84, my partner and I were selling compete XT's using gray-market boxes with motherboards and putting our own drives, using TEAC FDD's and Fujitsu hard disks in 'em with a Western Digital controller and selling the entire thing with 256KB of RAM for about $1500. Now, I had connections with a local manufacturer that was using about 2880 of the 64K drams per hour, so it wasn't difficult to get a "price" on them, and a friend was at a local HDD specialty house, so when I couldn't get 'em cheaper directly or from the west coast, I'd get 'em from him. Nevertheless, we were only about $25 under most everybody else.

see below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "r. 'bear' stricklin" &lt;red(a)bears.orgTo: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 12:27 AM Subject: Re: C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers) get with 8 1kx768x16 (sync-on-green) A Denver area company called "Orca" (still in business, AFAIK) had prices much lower. The motherboard cam with 4 MB in DIP form, and I had it maxxed out using SIPPs. I know they had the "best" price we could find because I designed a 5-ported 16/64MB buffer memory board for a high-capacity helical scan tape drive (basically a modified VCR) sold by Honeywell Test Instruments division) that used 1MB/4MB SIMMs. We bought the memory in sufficiently small quantity (these drives were not that popular due to their price) 1MB SIPPs cost about $35 at the time, though Arrow wanted $115. The price of a 1 MB SIMM was not much higher than that ~$35 price in the Computer Shopper. Have a look there and you'll see what I mean. I think your perception of dates and prices may be skewed somewhat by a number of factors. I'll have a look at the CPU on that '286 board (yes, I still have it.) to get a date code, but I'm comfortable that the 25MHz parts were available in the '87-'88 time frame. Motherboard chipsets capable of operating at that speed were not available until '89, and had to be selected for 25 MHz operation. Further, the coprocessors, though they actually operated at a lower rate, were not available at sufficient speed to accomodate 25 MHz CPU's until '89. I know I bought the '286 system BEFORE I went to work at Honeywell, only because I ultimately bought a '386 motherboard and a bunch of RAM from the folks with whom I'd established that procurement arrangement on behalf of Honeywell. The '386 board +RAM cost less than the '286 board had cost, since I got it at "cost," whatever that meant. The ads in the back of BYTE, though interesting, were seldom the best-priced ads. They were terribly expensive and nobody offering decent prices could afford them. Further, they were 90-days or more out of date by the time they were printed, so they were utterly useless if you were shopping in real time. Computer Shopper was also plagued by long delay from submission to printing. However, once you had an 800-number, you could easily shop for the best prices, often ranging over a 300% span on memory and disk drives. It's too bad you can't call back in time. > Imprimis "766 MB" $3126 (p.303) > Maxtor 8760 2579 (p.303) > Micropolis 1558 1695 (p.311) > ST4144R 605 (p.303) The prices you show for the first two are quite a bit on the high side. A couple of years earlier they'd have been in-range, but not in '89-'90. Maxtor was selling their 1.2 GB drives in high volume by then. IIRC, Miniscribe was plagued by financial woes, culminated by their "bricks" scandal, which restored their liquidity, oddly enough, but ultimately led to their demise. I was really busy at Honeywell at the time, so I had an associate of my former business partner, who even today is still in the retail business, acquire and integrate this stuff for me. He got the drives (Miniscribe 9760's) from Miniscribe, since he was a former salesman from there. The second two of the drives you list above, BTW, are not 700 MB types. The 1558 is about 300, IIRC, and the ST4144R is the RLL that famous Seagate model that had extra hardware built in just to prevent its use with RLL. The 4144R was, surprise, surprise, 144 MB. The one (its MFM version) I'm thinking of was a ~96MB drive which had the same head/cylinder spec's and looked exactly like the 4144R. I gave the remaining Miniscribe 9760 to Emanuel Stiebler a couple of years ago, IIRC, since my Lark Associates controller had gone tits up, and it was the one that made the large drive useable under DOS by splitting it into several pseudo-physical drives, which meant one had to use two controllers for two drives. The other Lark Assoc. controller went with the other drive. WD controllers, at least the ones I have, can't do that. > 1Mx9, 30-pin SIMM $ 99 (p.312) competely out of line for '89-90. I was very sensitive to memory pricing due to what I was doing at the time. I started on the VLDS buffer memory board in September of '89 and finished it in April of '90. The price I found for HONEYWELL, completely unaccustomed to buying components on the "commodity" component market, was about $35 in the limited quantity in which they bought them. That was the "going rate" from "Orca." > Base 25 MHz 80386 $ 850 (p.311) I had a Harris 'C286-25. These cost about $385 including the 4 MB RAM, IIT coprocessor, and CPU on a C&T NEAT chipset. I'd previously worked for a company that had some pretty slick software to support the NEAT in order to allow the use of the "adapter space" to load drivers. I'd found that the '286/25 outperformed the '386/25 by about 10% despite the increased data path width. Quite a surprise, but that's why I went with the '286. > I also supposed, being the bargain-conscious person you are, that you > might have been speaking of a 25 MHz 80286. I didn't offer a price because > nobody was selling them, in 1989, OR in 1990. Harris did eventually manage > to push the 80286 to 25 MHz, but I don't believe it happened until at > least 1992. While I was at Martin Marietta, we routinely used the 25 MHz CMOS part from Harris in satellite hardware in '87-'88. These were selected parts, but were common and readily available once a supply channel was established. The board I bought was populated with chips labelled "25 MHz," though the CPU was labelled 20 MHz. It worked fine, though I replaced the CPU with a selected 25 MHz part I had gotten as a sample some years earlier. > I admit some margin of error is to be expected, but these prices---sampled > fully eight or nine months after your stated date---do not come close to > corroborating your statements. In consideration of this, I must humbly > submit that you are totally full of shit, or at the very least have made a > grave typographical error. > As for the rest of you honking geese, here's an excerpt from a letter > printed in the "Chaos Manner Mail" column, from the same issue of "Byte": > "Dear Jerry," > "Over the years I've read several of your philippics against Unix. > Today I have time to write a letter, so I'm going to put my two bits in. > "Most Unix debates, when parsed, are recognizable as religious disputes > between cult insiders and cult outsiders. The position of the insiders is, > 'If you would only believe in Unix, you would be saved from the twin > demons of low productivity and ugliness.' The position of the outsiders > is, 'I can manage my productivity a damned sight better than you can, and > I spit on your aesthetic pretensions---get lost.' Such conversations get > really boring fast. > [typos my responsibility] > Can we please move on? Clearly it's an old argument. I'm just as tired of it as you, but every time I jump someone for introducing this "Of you wold only..." argument as unrealistic, a hundred "honking geese" jump in to defend their job-security-producing ultra-cryptic command-line-based baby, which, if it were so great, wouldn't need them to defend it. That's the way it is with religious arguments, I guess. I admit that I'm weak and can't let these irrational arguments pass. > ok > r.

What? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Allain" &lt;allain(a)panix.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 11:57 AM Subject: Re: C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers)

--- Richard Erlacher &lt;edick(a)idcomm.com&gt; wrote: AT AT AT 80286 IBM PC AT I don't think that model was available in 1981. I am fairly certain that the only model available in 1981 was the IBM 5150 PC. Not the XT. It came in two basic flavors - 16KB and 64KB. CGA extra. Disk drives extra. Just about everything extra. You missed my point. No it couldn't. I was attempting to suggest why the PC became the preeminent platform at home, sweeping aside the C-64 and other challengers. After 1981, people tended to have a PC at work, so they wanted something at home that could a) run software they took home with them and b) read disks and files they took home, too. If someone was going to spend more than $1,000, they wanted compatibility with the box on their desk at work. Real world example of the transition: in 1984, a company I worked for (Software Productions) debated producing a PC port of our widely successful children's products for the BBC Micro, Apple II and C-64. In 1984 there was not substantial demand for home software for DOS, not compared to the armada of 8-bit machines people had at home. A few years later, there would have been no debate. By the time EGA graphics became ordinary, no serious software company could ignore the massive quantity of PC clones in the home. There were still millions of C-64s in place, but it wasn't the undisputed king any longer. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/

--- Richard Erlacher &lt;edick(a)idcomm.com&gt; wrote: OK. A little before I remember them, but I'll concede the date. I will debate the term "clone" for a machine that came out before the machine it supposedly is a knock-off of. I will accept that there were Korean '286 boxes before IBM had one. Were they 100% AT- compatible, or did they jump the gun? This is a serious question; I personally have no knowledge of them. And where did Amiga crop up in this? We were discussing the C-64. Why are you dragging the Amiga into the fray? No... the A1000 came out in late 1985, IIRC, for $1,100, 7.something MHz 68000 processor (32-bit registers, 16MB flat address space, unlike the 80286), 256KB RAM, 4096 colors, stereo sound, 3.5" 880KB floppy, 15KHz RGB monitor, serial port, printer port, two mouse/game ports, two-button mouse. Extra 256KB of RAM was approx $100. I got mine in early 1986 for $850, new, without monitor, but with everything else (still have it, too, but with an extra 2.5MB RAM, SCSI, dual ROM socket, Rejuvinator, etc.) That's how it was equipped when it first came out. It is roughly contemporary with the widespread availability (not first release) of the PC-AT. When the Amiga came out, there were lots and lots of PC-XTs and quite a few PC-ATs in the real world. This question shows that you consider all IBM PCs and PC clones to be interchangable and undifferentiated. Was the PC-AT available in 1981? How much did _it_ cost? At least the C-64 was virtually unchanged from 1982 onward (barring a motherboard cost-redesign and a slightly modified sound chip) The "PC" changed every 3 years...PC, XT, AT, 386SX, 386DX, 486, Pentium, etc., etc., etc. Not that this is a bad thing, but it means that you cannot compare machines without clearly specifying the year and what you are models you are comparing. Most is not all. I knew plenty of those people, too. At the company I worked at from 1984 onward, we all had at least one VT100-class terminal (some DEC, some CIToH) on our desk and not a PC in sight, with two exceptions over the years - one 5150 (still have _it_, too) attached to a 68000-bus analyzer in the engineering department (c. 1983-1984) and one PS/2 Model 30 in the accounting department (c. 1986; not too sure about that) - and, you guessed it, I have _that_ as well (there is, in fact, little from that company that I _didn't_ get when they went bust, including 3 MicroVAXen, 3 Unibus and BI VAXen, numerous PDP-11s, two Straight-8s, etc...) Nevertheless, in company after company, people did have a 5150 or better on their desk at work after 1981, and I assert that that more than any other factor drove them into peoples' homes. Why buy a $500 word processor when you can steal one from work? Why learn two computers when you can get by with one? I expect that was typical. Absolutely, except for brand-name die hards who _did_ pay the $5K. I met several of them who wanted to run Windows 3.1 on their $5,000 computer and were horrified that they could not. "I just paid thousands of dollars for this..." I heard over and over. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/

I find it interesting that the gaming market is one of the main defining markets for current PC hardware...the very market that PC users used to scorn. I've always thought it was stigma that was unfairly applied to the Amiga, even if it was better at it than the PC's of the same time period. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Hellige" &lt;jhellige(a)earthlink.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 12:43 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) their brought they There are a few distinctions that have to be made here. It's probably true, though certainly not the case here in my house, that games/entertainment are a major purpose/function of the PC. The folks who scorn gaming on PC's are overlooking the benefits due to volume that they derive from the resulting sales to non-computing-users of PC's. The AMIGA was, indeed, in some of its forms, and with considerable extension of its native equipment, a very capable graphics tool, particularly for low-end and educational broadcast material editing/development. Most AMIGAs that I've seen, however, were not terribly well equipped, hence, were not particularly capable. They didn't use inexpensive conventional (yes, that means PC-compatible) peripherals, either, notably printers. A local guy here made a small fortune with an adapter that allowed the use of inexpensive (EPSON) printers with the AMIGA and some other systems. Dick

Quothe Jeff Hellige, from writings of Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 02:43:44PM -0400: That, right there, says a lot about the intellect of the average PC purchasers; their intellect is right down there in the gutter with the "professional" (how about that for doublespeak?) team sports fans and politicians. If most home users purchased computers for intellectual purposes (e.g., writing, hacking, research, etc.), Micro$oft products would be less popular than Edsels once were, and the Edsel was a much better engineered product than M$-Windoze. -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

No ... THEY at ages 10 and 8, recognized they wanted/needed a REAL computer. That's when their mom bought 'em a PC'AT clone. When they were here, which was every other weekend for most of the time until the older boy was nearly 11, and at which time he came to live with me, they had Apple]['s, a Commodore 128 that they'd once brought with them, but never used, and a range of PC-types that I used here. I simply set each of them up with a workstation and an account on the server. They played the usual games, and dinked around. They also learned about formatting their reports for school, though that was some time later. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" &lt;spc(a)conman.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 10:35 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) make to were

Judging from the requests for funding, I'd say they're still in college. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Allain" &lt;allain(a)panix.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 11:43 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

see below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger Merchberger" &lt;zmerch(a)30below.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 3:10 PM Subject: C64 vs. CoCo Rant... were one I didn't mean to suggest that it wasn't a CAPABLE setup, as was the Com64/128, etc, but it wasn't terribly effective as shipped. The Commies were fine if equipped with more or less "standard" hardware, and the software to use it, which was NOT what they came with, but which could be added. The COCO also was quite capable after considerable modification. The reason I say this is that I was a long-time CP/M user by the time the C-128 showed up in my kids' weekend bag, and I saw lots of Commodores with stuff lying all over a hollow-core door in more than one basement. Likewise, though this one I've got here now is the first I ever saw, I've heard about what you CAN do with a COCO. RS didn't see it that way, however. The typical user, as with typical MAC and PC users, don't really want to open the box (if you've ever gotten into one of 'em, you'll know why) and cutting the foil on a PCB is enough to make the typical user, who paid what they cost back then, cringe. BTW, I've got a COCO2 in its cardboard original box, which I'll hapily send to anyone willing to pay the postage for $3 + freight. wanted I've never had to pay that much for a computer ... at least not lately, as, in the last 20 years, unless directed to do so by a client. I agree, after some time of using a fast (8 MHz) Z80 running CP/M, I really didn't need the long wait through POST and the subsequent sluggishness of the typical PC. That's why I didn't own one until there were '186-based XT's. Since I was used to the presence of a hard disk, I started with a 12 MHz 80186 with a full bank of RAM and a 30 MB hard disk. That was almost tolerable, but still not appreciably faster running DBASE or Wordstar. Nothing quite so serious. I didn't like the CRAY stuff much either. Besides, it didn't run Windows ...

It's not that ... I just don't want 'em. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cameron Kaiser" &lt;spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 7:09 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) for already use you http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu headache. ---------

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002 pat(a)cart-server.purdueriots.com wrote: You got trolled by THE guy that all those stories regarding bridges were written about. Doesn't everyone know by now that Dick Erlacher is actually a flamebot written by some sadistic bastard a couple years ago? He unleashed it on the CC list to fine tune the AI. He'll make billions off it and all you guys will have is a bad taste in your mouth :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Sellam Ismail wrote: Does that flamebot run on a Unix system?

Rumor has it that Richard Erlacher muttered these words: Well, I was talking about NEW (as in from a non-used, non-surplus vendor). Sure you can get a Pentium Pro 200 Server for $50 that's built like a tank, but that's not the same as getting a new computer for $50. Hmm, more fun to come... HUH??? I dont see how M$ OFFICE is any more necessary than anything I enumerated above. If you're looking for file compatibilty, OpenOffice does that right out of the box with no hassles. Debian costs either the same as a few blank floppies or CDs depending on how you decide to do the install. OpenOffice costs however long it takes to download the installer. And neither of them have as many bugs (oops, I mean 'features') as MS Windows or MS Office. Heh, I'd even say they're MORE USABLE than the MS Equivalents. The only reasons Microsoft still exists are: 1) Biz-droids that are scared by MS's FUD or their own ignorance of alternatives 2) Consumers who don't have a real choice because of (a) binary compatibilty (b) cheap hardware not being supported under other OS's or (c) inavailablility of machines running Linux that they can get at HH Greg, Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, Service Merchanise, etc. Uhm, since when can't a PC be a *nix box? Last I checked, most Linux and BSD distros ran on garden-variety PCs.... and were MUCH less resource intensive than M$'s alternatives. Well, I don't really follow the commodity PC market since they're typically either overpriced or pieces of junk compared to what I can build myself. Anyhow, you're talking about getting Suplus/Used machines. I KNOW there's PB's still out there in those markets. <snip> OK, you seem to be stuck on comparing a $600 new system to a $20 used system. When I said $100 above, no one had said jack squat about used, and I was talking about a *new* system. ** I don't consider a 'new in the box' system that hasn't been offered as a new model by its manufacturer for >1yr as new. OK, show me a PC in a thrift store that'll render a 3d animation as quickly as a new top-of-the-line SGI workstation. Not everyone needs that horsepower but some people (myself included) need or want something that'll compile code or do X quickly as possible. After all, time is money. OR show me a thrift-store PC for under $100 that'll convert a 2hr dvd (er MPEG2 stream) to MPEG4/DivX;-) in under 20hrs. My old Athlon 700 took approximately that long and is worth much more than $100 used. Now that's a task Joe Consumer might want to do. Well you won't get any argument from me that most consumers of PCs are complete morons. Personally, I say give them a broadband connected 'network computer' that connects to an ASP to run apps and give them a gaming console for games. Giveing Joe User a PC that they 'sys admin' themselves is a terrible idea. My $0.02 -- Pat

At 10:07 PM 4/21/02 -0500, you wrote: You gets what you pay for...... I can't count the number of headache machines i've worked on for people because they bought the cheapest wintel componants :( where if they'd spent 5 to 10 percent more i wouldn't end up working on their machine.....

I've been there too, but there's been no trouble with these boxes ... The only component in PC's that consistently gives me heartburn is the PSU. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Rice" &lt;jrice(a)texoma.net&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 9:57 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

On 22 Apr 2002, R. D. Davis wrote: You'd be surprised at the variety of work I can do on an S/390 with *none* of these. Just because they are useful, doesn't mean that's all there is. Peace... Sridhar

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Derek Peschel wrote: I definitely use XEDIT all the time. DB2 is the best database implementation on mainframes, although it doesn't necessarily have to do with SQL (and often doesn't). I don't do image processing. Period. Mainframes almost never do graphics, so something like xv is not something I would be doing with an S/390. I don't use a shell. I use JCL to set up batch processing jobs. For text processing, I use Bookmaster. It will be a cold day in hell before I let any perl code on any of my mainframes. A lot of stuff I use on the mainframe doesn't have any equivalent in the UNIX world. Peace... Sridhar

On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Raymond Moyers wrote: Your point is? Peace... Sridhar

On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Cameron Kaiser wrote: The problem is that the kind of things mainframes are used for are *extremely* performance-critical. Peace... Sridhar

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote: *I* wouldn't call them a programmer if they couldnt figure that out. I'd tell them to go back to school and get a *real* education. F*ck, I'm a junior in CompE at Purdue and am pretty good at playing with RegExp's. Just because a person says they're a programmer doesn't make them one. Would you like to have your surgeon tell you 'I don't know exactly how to stich you up, so I'm going to have my mother sew you up'? A programmer that doesn't understand simple concepts like RegExp's shouldn't be trying to program. Period. -- Pat

I'm reworking the quoting here, since the Great Richard Erlacher seems insistent upon leaving the quoted material below his response. It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated: Of the programs mentioned, od, C, Perl, shell scripts and lint are defintely developer tools, awk, nawk (which are nearly the same thing), grep, sed and diff may appear to be developer tools but do have their uses elsewhere. tar, ed, cal, at and bc are general purpose tools and while some (like tar and ed) can be used in a devopment capacity, I personally, in the 10 years or so of Unix development I've personally done, have ever used cal, at or bc as a developer. Emacs again, can be used for development, but it is a general text editor (and a programmable one at that). TeX/LaTeX is only used in development if you use the WEB programming environment that Donald Knuth uses---otherwise it's a typesetting program that does a better job at output than Microsoft Word does, and dvips is a program to convert TeX/LaTeX output files and convert them to PostScript. ghostview is for displaying PostScript files on the screen, gimp is an image manipulation program (like Photoshop, and I don't know many software developers that use it, other than the programmers working on Photoshop and/or the Gimp), xv is an image viewer and PostgreSQL and Oracle are databases and used by a wider audience than just developers. But to catagorize all of them as ``development-related tools'' is a disingenious thing to say. What does this even mean? And what does this have to do with anything? Anyone that is familiar with how Unix works and can use grep can probably use grep on a list of 100 words or phrases without much problem. Giving the same problem to someone not familiar with UNIX and yes, you'll get complaints. Heck, stick me with a Windows box and IIS to configure and I'll be lost for a week and wanting to know why we can't use Apache instead? -spc (Or why Windows has to be rebooted after making a network change, or a program has been installed, or removed, or the mouse moved too much, or ... )

It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated: Yes it is. That's what I get for not taking the time to look up the proper spelling. PDF seems to be a very popular format these days and that's based upon PostScript. You can still get printers that support PostScript but hey, if PostScript isn't your bag, then there are programs to convert the output exists for it that is). You can either manage the test scores on paper, or on a computer. While it may seem to be cheaper to do it by hand, there are benefits to going the computer route, expense or not. Storage space is one consideration. Speed of processing is another. Unless you really advocate going back to paper records for everything? You're going to have to write an assembler too, else you end up with a useless piece of silicon. Face it---without software, programmable hardware isn't going to do much other than be an expensive paperweight. I would contend that without software, then who in their right mind is going to use your hardware? And it's not like you, as the hypothetical hardware chip maker, have to start from scratch and generate a compiler from the ground up. GCC can be configured to compile code for your chip, and while such a task isn't trivial, it's easier than having to generate a compiler from the ground up (and yes, documentation exists for this although how good it is, I'm not sure). And with GCC, you get not only a C compiler, but C++, Fortran and Ada as well. And if GCC is not to your liking, there is also LCC, which was designed from the ground up to be an easily retargettable C compiler (and that comes with extensive documentation). -spc (Guess its back to using the abacus to keep business records ... )

see below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" &lt;spc(a)conman.orgTo: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Monday, April 22, 2002 7:50 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) Well, I had to pick on you about something. Which is why PS is of no particular use to most of us. have the have to going Whichever way you do it, it's overhead, since it doesn't contribute to the bottom line. Well, you CAN design in a core for which you've already got an assembler. That doesn't take the task out of the overhead column, though. The abacus is in the facilities column, which is overhead, and using it is overhead.

That's certainly a valid point, since there are a couple or three public-domain table-driven versions for the PC out there. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter C. Wallace" &lt;pcw(a)mesanet.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 9:50 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Ben Franchuk wrote: The int size is not a big deal and can easily be worked around. Macros can easily do the needed range checking, sign extension, etc etc... Peter Wallace

When I said 'us' I certainly didn't include you. Of all the people with whom I routinely interact, the only one other than myself, whom I know to be an owner of a PostScript printer is a MAC user. I only know one of them, any longer, since most of them have, ultimately, given them up in favor of PC's. In terms of home and small-office computer users, I think your assessment of my remarks is correct. That part of the world has no use for UNIX and those who try to use it for those purposes are, indeed, deluding themselves that it's going to be easier than taking the more popular course. Of course, if one is sufficiently determined ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" &lt;spc(a)conman.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 10:47 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) if documentation hardware use ... ) You're allowed to "toss the baby with the bath water" if you like. It's your choice. My point was that generating software is an indirect cost not directly associated with the goal. You can take that wherever you like.

You've just demonstrated what an inane line of logic this comment of yours represents. See below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Raymond Moyers" &lt;rmoyers(a)nop.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 12:07 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) case and why would that matter? Nevertheless, it's possible for a "Winblows Idiot" as you put it, to spell everything he puts out correctly, which you apparently aren't swift enough to do. Note that I'm not talking about typo's, but about syntax errors in the English, resulting in non-words that a spell-checker would reject. I'm also not referring to the acronymns you're inventing or applying from your "world." I wonder why anyone would want to do that. I've been using computers in one way or another since the '60's and have yet to encounter a need for this gibberish. Now, I know it has its place, but I've never needed it, nor, apparently, have the millions of "Winblows Idiots" to whom you refer. I submit they're all smarter than you, since they're not troubled by this at all. If explaining a "shuttle nosewhell" [sic] to a caveman were important work, I'm sure nearly any "Winblows Idiot" could do it as easily as running his spell-checker which you apparently can't do. It's like I said before, Raymond, to guys like you, making sense isn't as important as your hatred of Microsoft. It's obvious enough, but I don't know why it's got to be that way.

On Monday 22 April 2002 11:58, you wrote: eh ? you mean those systems that eschew the command line by makeing the function it provided impossible ? Unix is superior *because* it retained the command line. the Unix GUI is also superior, because it is network transparent. Ok so you dont know anything about unix, thats what you are saying here. Its also apparent that everything you have been told about it came from those equally ignorant, they are all wrong. How does that differ from my unix boxes ? i certainly have them all to myself. That is an oxymoron, even tho what unix has now makes this look like what is happening. Gimp dont translate to a tty very well, but an xterm is certainly the bitmapped representation of the tty. and the bitmapped display is network transparent, making it superior to everything else, 2 CPUs or a farm of 4000 boxes, you only need one screen to run both tty and GUI software on all of them at once. Unix already has this X11 is a standard you can run your sun apps your irix apps your freebsd apps all on the GUI of your linux box all at once. and last time i looked, all the other systems have adopted our plumbing, not the other way around. eh ? what would be wrong with a nice large 4096 x 3192 screen with whatever size fonts you desire ? and the ability to populate that screen with the workload of a whole stack of boxes. "Well the end user experience" is system agnostic except for the winblows limitations that dumbs your system down to the microset winblows can provide. unix has point and click too, but it isnt implimented stupidly. You would make a good leftist, the asurdity seems high enough. So utopian brainwashed fiction writers are now your authority on such things .. Are you a moonie of Noam Chomsky too ?

On Monday 22 April 2002 20:28, you wrote: And today you have enough hardware in a PC box to support 5,000 people doing the same thing, not that your lust for faster hardware is over, because unix is doing things that Ken and Dennis never envisioned. http://www.nop.org/misc/unix/ken-and-den.gif ""If we prevent them from doing stupid things, we also prevent them from doing creative things"" - Cant Remember Who And these new things are seem seemless because the system concepts are extensable with flexability in depth Winblows by contrast has the depth of leftist reason and the flexability of a socialist utopian machine gunner setting up 40 paces from a fresh dug mass grave ditch. and like winblows, equal use and benifit to you if your aim and desire dont fit with theirs. Flexability is freedom, freedom gives birth to creativity. True or false dont matter ? you really would make a good leftist ( called liberal today, even as the real liberal is the opposite of a leftist, its George Orwells newspeak, todays liberals are not liberals they are leftists, perhaps Marxocrat would be a good label ) What makes you think they wont ? you can have any size you want. This is wrong, to do so would eliminate creativity. New protocols are invented every day, the usefull ones end up being adopted and the bad ones on the ashheap. Software darwinism is a good thing. This is wrong ... X11 does come with a full set of standard fonts. and adding more is easy. On a 2 button mouse, you press both buttons to simulate button 3, it works smoothly and perfectly well. Public space travel to where ? I also dream of the day when a colony on mars is in full tilt of the 100 - 1000 year job of terraforming the place, complete with a planetary mag field generator to fend off them nasty solar rays, but we are still suffreing the leftist egalitarian poison that has raped the planet of man potential. ( and left 200 million of its citizens in mass graves ) When the social enginners are no longer putting the jackboots of goverment on the necks of the acheavers in the name of "social justice" and the envirowackos stand fully discredited by the emissions data from the volcano Penetubo, perhaps then we can get along back to the accent of man. Raymond

On Monday 22 April 2002 23:43, you wrote: the brainwashed anti reality feelings-based moonified left have butchered 200 million people, In first place we have Stalinist USSR that butchered 60 million of its own people. In second Place is Mao who murdered 40 Million of his own people In third place is the National Socialists (Nazi) under Hitler with 20 Million dead Those are the top 3 of the left Your a Holocaust denier ? Sure, we all end up in the have-to mode all the time . Thats the leftist brainwashing at work, when people can no longer identify right or wrong or true or false, they are ready to be fed lies and be complicit with horrendus evil, as the 200 million murdered, thats 4 times the 43 Million battle dead of all wars, would testify if the dead could talk. Eh ? thats the standard of a tty and any xterm can be streached full screen and run huge fonts ... the font i use for xterms is 9x15bold If Big Brother handed down a book of news speak we would have your utopia then ... with all such non-words eliminated. The tcpip suite itself has all the rules you need, all else is userspace and should be and must be freeform or else creativity is stiffled just as bad as leftism stomps out creativity by removing incentive and its slavery like condition of existance. Freedom isnt chaos, the free world has rules, the ip stack has rules, but the only valid rules are those that restrict others from .... be it an individual or the demands of the mob ( usually led by a tyrant ) ..... impinging on that freedom. These quotes are good illustrations of the concepts "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." -- Thomas Jefferson "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient... The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." -- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." -- George Washington, in a speech of January 7, 1790 False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. -- Cesare Beccaria, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson's Commonplace book The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. -- Albert Gallatin, Oct 7 1789 Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. -- Daniel Webster The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859 Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences. -- C. S. Lewis It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed? -- James Madison, Federalist Papers 62 Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you. -- Paul Williams, `Das Energi' To understand open source unix is to see the parallels it has with the free market populated by a free people Its why america remains the powerhouse that it is, we are more powerfull because we have more freedom All goverments that follow the leftist model are known for famine mass murder and dispair or are following the same path as the poor fools that went before them. Unix is a great system because of the same freedom, it does not dictate the language you use or the look or feel of the interface, the X11 primatives push look and feel into userspace. Dont like Gnome or Kde ? Windomaker is my fav, there are dozens of desktops that look like riscos or macos or plan9 or .. the choice is all up to the user, Freedom ! And the choice of interface dont dictate what apps you run, the kde and gnome stuff run fine on a windowmaker desktop Freedom ! Choice ! Freedom ! Creativity ! freedom of action, freedom from dictate. Then i dont see what your complaint was here then .. Much of their stuff seems wrapped around the same socialist mindset that butchered 200 Million people. Off the planet to where ? Every time we have reduced taxes, Kennedy, Reagan, the boom in the economy created a boom in goverment income. But because leftist are not focused on the greatest tax income but in bloodstained marxist egalitarianism the misery industry and utopian dreamer feelgood schemes the potental and treasure of our people has been wasted, we could have been a lot farther along, but we have blown it on social engineering, small sips of the same egalitarian poison that has butchered so many after they fell into the whole leftist program. This is more brainwashing Capitalism has no holocaust to its discredit Even bill gates has never machined gunned people into a fresh dug ditch. If body count is the measure of evil, and you was to make a graph then the leftist murder bar would reach to the moon before the free marketers bar could be scaled to an inch. In the free market the goverment does not have the authority or the power to commit such crimes, but the all powerfull central controling goverment of the left is stained with blood like nothing else ever seen in the history of man. I would say that perhaps sim earth, is a bit faulty, for example if penetubo errupted on sim earth, ( it let go of more CO/2 and SO/2 than all of mans activity in his entire history on earth ) then their model is programmed to show enviromental disaster Sim Earth is wrong the same way one volcano shows that the evirowackos are total bilthering idiots. Mars only needs a little warmth and it could kick start it would warm easilly for the same reason earth is warming resistant,, No plants on mars !!! On earth ... a volcano can belch an amount of CO/2 that makes all the oil burned on earth at one time insignificant, and the only thing that happens is faster plant growth and in 2 years several mankind history of total possible oil burnings worth of CO2 is gone and the envirowacko climate catastrophe left to be nothing but their usual hairbrained nonreasoned nattering nabob effuent. On mars however, No plants, and lots of CO/2 frozen at the poles and if you warm it up a bit and gassify the dri ice, the resulting greenhouse effect can do the rest.. the next problem would be controling plant growth so that it didnt suck out all the CO/2 before you could populate it with lots of us nasty humans burning oil to feed the plants to keep it out of slipping back to its ice age, On earth our food production has grown along with our CO/2 supply, im quite convinced if it was not for mans activity the earth would have gone back into its ice cube period. The plants suck up CO/2 like a sponge as the penetubo emissions show us ... a whole human historys worth of gas many times over is sucked up like it was nothing, The ice caps are already melting on mars btw, the REAL factor for climate change, the sun is gasifying the mars poles a bit the past couple years ( the sun is having a double peak sunspot cycle ) its too bad leftodumbo envirowacko PC religion that they pass off as science these days is too busy with their leftist delusion, away from emotion, and wishfull thinking, out here in the realm of reality and facts, there is some interesting things happening. Too bad they are too deep in their dogma to take notice. Read it again, or wait 30 years when you are wiser, then read it again. Raymond

On Tue, 2002-04-23 at 03:21, Huw Davies wrote: I might have been the one that posted it. I snagged it from google, so I don't know how accurate it is. On my pentium 3/1.7GHz I get 4.0 vups under simh. $! CALCULATE_VUPS: $! $ set noon $ orig_privs = f$setprv("ALTPRI") $ process_priority = f$getjpi(0,"PRIB") $ cpu_multiplier = 10 ! VAX = 10 - Alpha/AXP = 40 $ cpu_round_add = 1 ! VAX = 1 - Alpha/AXP = 9 $ cpu_round_divide = cpu_round_add + 1 $ init_counter = cpu_multiplier * 525 $ init_loop_maximum = 205 $ start_cputime = f$getjpi(0,"CPUTIM") $ loop_index = 0 $ 10$: $ loop_index = loop_index + 1 $ if loop_index .ne. init_loop_maximum then goto 10$ $ end_cputime = f$getjpi(0,"CPUTIM") $ init_vups = ((init_counter / (end_cputime - start_cputime) + - cpu_round_add) / cpu_round_divide) * cpu_round_divide $ loop_maximum = (init_vups * init_loop_maximum) / 10 $ base_counter = (init_counter * init_vups) / 10 $ vups = 0 $ times_through_loop = 0 $ 20$: $ start_cputime = f$getjpi(0,"CPUTIM") $ loop_index = 0 $ 30$: $ loop_index = loop_index + 1 $ if loop_index .ne. loop_maximum then goto 30$ $ end_cputime = f$getjpi(0,"CPUTIM") $ new_vups = ((base_counter / (end_cputime - start_cputime) + - cpu_round_add) / cpu_round_divide) * cpu_round_divide $ if new_vups .eq. vups then goto 40$ $ vups = new_vups $ times_through_loop = times_through_loop + 1 $ if times_through_loop .le. 5 then goto 20$ $ 40$: $ new_privs = f$setprv(orig_privs) $ set message /nofacility/noidentification/noseverity/notext $ ASSIGN/SYSTEM/EXEC 'vups' MACHINE_VUPS_RATING $ set message /facility/identification/severity/text $ write sys$output "Approximate System VUPs Rating : ", - vups / 10,".", vups - ((vups / 10) * 10) $ exit Brian

On 23 Apr 2002, Brian Wheeler wrote: On my VAXstation 3200, it said 3.0, which is to the 2.7 that Compaq says it should be. -- Pat

What the hell is this blatant political bullshit doing on this mailing list? Off-topic postings, flame wars, spam, and now this. Laudie, laudie, what comes next? Bring on the kiddie porn! On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Raymond Moyers wrote: Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

Hey! ... spell it right! it's LAWDY, LAWDY ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" &lt;foo(a)siconic.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 9:20 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) liberals Festival -- http://www.vintage.org *

Well ... that's the way it's supposed to be spelled! The Lawd Gawd said so. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" &lt;foo(a)siconic.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 12:12 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) Festival -- http://www.vintage.org *

You need to get your facts straight, Raymond, and your grammar, syntax, and orthography need work too. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Raymond Moyers" &lt;rmoyers(a)nop.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 1:41 AM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) 100 planet graves

On Tuesday 23 April 2002 11:26, you wrote: There is no middle, there is freedom or slavery, and those that dont know or dont care. Ruled by the thirst for power, something that having worthless money ( USSR ) did not avoid. The only real solution for keeping evil in check is to limit the power it might weild over you. Perfection dont exist, there is only the least of the worst, that sucks the least. Again, if murder by goverment was the measure of good and bad, nothing is even in the same galaxy with the crimes of the left, all else pales into insignificance. The left never avoid this evil because changing the policy and idology that caused it to happen requires admitting the wrongness of everything their dogma is based upon. Mass murder isnt part of the sales pitch for socialism, it simply their most infamous and intractible unintended side effect. Again this is marxist, the will of the majority is the base of power for every tyrant that leads them and manufactures that will with charisma. the tyranny of the mob is the most important thing the individual needs to be protected against Hitler was elected, democracy with the unchecked will of the mob lead by a tyrant. But all these tennats are marxist, the goverment has no business having this authority, weilded by marxocrats with feel good schemes or moral busy bodies imposing their morality on everyone is one and the same evil. Hardly, from the ussr to china to hitler, you target and demonize a scapegoat or your opposition, and with public approval you can then butcher them. Again, without protection of the individual against the desire and demands of the mob, ..... I said Unix not linux. even tho i would group Linux as a unix For me, UNIX95 complaince or the content of USL code in the kernel means nothing to me for this definition. If this original unix http://www.nop.org/misc/unix/1972 ( well the most original code known to exist anyway ) was the definition of what unix is .. well linux and the bsd's certainly include everything there, and do things the same way. well thats enough of a defintion for me what is a unix and what isnt. Im a slackware fan myself, and they can all be upgraded over a modem, slackware is also trivial, with the bsds a bit more work and time ( or so to me it seems ) but still not all that painfull. Hehehe ... ok I surrender on this one. And who decides how much is too much ? Even the robber barrons came nowhere close to the pain and suffring at the hands of the egalitarians, nothing comes close and hopefully, Cuba, N Korea, and China and such are the last of the terror states. The blanket is right on point, todays leftist program is identical to taking Hitlers old documents and transcribing them onto new letter head. Its the same 1930's egalitarian crap, but with all new scapegoats and new logos. Perfection exists nowwhere, but the lack of perfection does not infer the opposing idologies have equality One system degrades to mass murder for "the good of society" and is responsible for the worst holocausts ever seen on planet earth. The other has a history of freedom and prosperity never before seen on earth. In the free world today, the majority enjoy an existence that was beyond the dreams of kings not so long ago. Sure ! free people posses the tools to revolt against the goverment as a check against goverment power. That is what our 2nd amendment is all about These are some of my Favs ... "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government" -- Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 "The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good" -- George Washington "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188 "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mahatma Gandhi The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings. -- Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun, August 1588 "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861 "One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms." -- Constitutional scholar Joseph Story, 1840 "The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being..." -- J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S. "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only] moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion to your walks." -- Thomas Jefferson, writing to his teenaged nephew. "Taking my gun away because I might shoot someone is like cutting my tongue out because I might yell `Fire!' in a crowded theater." -- Peter Venetoklis "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom." -- John F. Kennedy The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." -- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court "...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.] -- (Lucius Annaeus) Seneca "the Younger" (ca. 4 BC-65 AD), No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. -- Political Disquisitions -1775 & what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that his people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787 "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." -- Patrick Henry, June 5 1788 Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the *real* object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands? -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 9 1788 "To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." -- George Mason, June 14, 1788 "The great object is, that every man be armed. [...] Every one who is able may have a gun." -- Patrick Henry, June 14 1788 That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms... -- Samuel Adams, in "Phila. Independent Gazetteer", August 20, 1789 The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the *government*, not to *society*; and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage. ..... [The disarming of citizens] has a double effect, it palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: a habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral [force]; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression. -- Joel Barlow, "Advice to the Privileged Orders", 1792-93 Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' -- Mao Tse-tung, 1938 The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. -- Hitler, April 11 1942 The right to buy weapons is the right to be free. -- A.E. Van Vogt, "The Weapon Shops Of Isher", ASF December 1942 Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible. -- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1960 No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever before. -- Colin Greenwood, "Firearms Control", 1972 Let us hope our weapons are never needed --but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government -- and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." -- Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road", 1979 The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner. -- Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session (February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5 In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis. -- Stephen P. Halbrook To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst form. -- Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 1988 Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power. -- Yoshimi Ishikawa "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." -- Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. -- Frederick Douglass Depends on what effects you are pointing at One lone volcano certainly showed the Koyoto supporters to be totaly wrong. Sure ! shove the name in google, the data is all over the net. Some of the commentary is quite entertaining " the world's leading scientists said that the ozone depletion was a hoax. He noted if it were true then the eruption of Mount Penetubo [ That has ] spouted more chlorine into the air then humans ever could. "" " One of the ironic conclusions to emerge from the study of global warming is that sulfur dioxide actually cools the earth by blocking sunlight. (This effect was evident globally in the early 1990's when Mount Penetubo erupted in the Philippines, producing lots of SO2, and leading to a couple of cooler than usual years.) " Pre-Eruption Vapor in Magma of the Climactic Mount Pinatubo Eruption: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Projects/Emissions/Reports/Pinatubo/pinatubo_abs.… "" contained a minimum of approximately 96 Mt H2O, 42 Mt CO2, and 3 Mt Cl, in addition to 17 Mt of SO2. " " Thus, the minimum volatile emissions for the climactic eruption--from preeruption vapor phase and degassing of melt--were 17 Mt SO2, 42 Mt CO2, 3 Mt Cl, and 491 Mt H2O. " Yes ,, Solar variation seem to be the large factor, basically making all else insignificant ( except for asteroid impacts ) this is seperate from the climate change argument, are you saying that animals and plants are not in symboisis ? There have been studies of plant growth in CO/2 enriched enviroments as well as crop data, and its has been proven that without the population and our activity belching CO/2 we could not get the quanity of food we have with the active ariable land we have. The data suggests that if we was to really cut CO/2 production we would need to bring all of our farmland back online ( including that land now occupied by housing ) to have the same quanity of food. Modern farming deserves equal credit for the high productivity but the data suggest that without the CO/2 supply, well .. Perhaps the left will blame the cap errosion on mars on our SUV,s as well ;=) That the polar caps on mars is melting the same time as ours... Just another data point helping to show the lefto science isnt science, but just another mule for their agenda. Raymond

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote: Thanks! I wanted to respond to the rambling idiotic rant but could not figure out where to start... You summed up my feelings quite succinctly... Peter Wallace SNIP--------------------------------------------------------

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Torquil MacCorkle III wrote: Yes. moonified threw me for awhile... kinda reminds me of some spell checker that we once used that suggested broccoli as a replacement for Berkeley... Peter Wallace Mesa Electronics

That post to which you refer was a glaring example of the useless "stream of consciousness" writing style so popular among new HS grads. Unfortunately, they're not taught to read well enough to recognize that nobody could divine what they intended to say from it. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter C. Wallace" &lt;pcw(a)mesanet.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 5:24 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

now, this is just a short excerpt ... seamless extensible flexibility flexibility don't Flexibility Every one of your posts has this sort of syntax/orthographic error in quantity. Doesn't your OS' email handler have a spell-checker? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Raymond Moyers" &lt;rmoyers(a)nop.org&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 9:53 PM Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format) > On Monday 22 April 2002 20:28, you wrote: > > > > Ok so you dont know anything about unix, thats what you are > > > saying here. > > > > True, but considering most of unix was developed > > in a educational atmosphere were only a few programs ran > > -- text editor -- C Compiler -- TROFF at once because that > > all a student or staff member could run because resorce limitations. > > And today you have enough hardware in a PC box to support > 5,000 people doing the same thing, not that your lust for faster > hardware is over, because unix is doing things that Ken and Dennis > never envisioned. > > http://www.nop.org/misc/unix/ken-and-den.gif > > > > > Its also apparent that everything you have been told about it came > > > from those equally ignorant, they are all wrong. > > > > What is true or false is not important as this is the view I have > > of the systems with the knowlage and understanding from what I have > > seen. > > True or false dont matter ? you really would make a good leftist > ( called liberal today, even as the real liberal is the opposite of a > leftist, its George Orwells newspeak, todays liberals are not liberals > they are leftists, perhaps Marxocrat would be a good label ) > > > > Gimp dont translate to a tty very well, but an xterm is certainly the > > > bitmapped representation of the tty. > > > > BUT I MAY NOT WANT a bit map when running under XWINDOWS! > > I want a 80x25 screen (640x480) because I can read the screen for > > text-editing! > > No font's under X-windows (linux) would give me that! > > > What makes you think they wont ? you can have any size you want. > > > > > Unix already has this X11 is a standard you can run your sun apps > > > your irix apps your freebsd apps all on the GUI of your linux box all > > > at once. and last time i looked, all the other systems have adopted > > > our plumbing, not the other way around. > > > > It is not the plumbing -- it is what goes down the pipe that needs to > > be standarded! > > > This is wrong, to do so would eliminate creativity. > > New protocols are invented every day, the usefull ones end up > being adopted and the bad ones on the ashheap. > > Software darwinism is a good thing. > > > > > eh ? what would be wrong with a nice large 4096 x 3192 screen > > > with whatever size fonts you desire ? and the ability to populate > > > that screen with the workload of a whole stack of boxes. > > > 1) Not everybody has the same standard fonts! > > 2) I like 1 screen 1 program and screen flipping. > > This is wrong ... X11 does come with a full set of standard > fonts. and adding more is easy. > > > > "Well the end user experience" is system agnostic except > > > for the winblows limitations that dumbs your system down > > > to the microset winblows can provide. unix has point and > > > click too, but it isnt implimented stupidly. > > > > But the 3 button mouse is hard to find! > > On a 2 button mouse, you press both buttons to simulate > button 3, it works smoothly and perfectly well. > > > > You would make a good leftist, the asurdity seems high enough. > > > After 40 years waiting for public space travel, my faith in NASA > > is wearing thin. > > Public space travel to where ? > > I also dream of the day when a colony on mars is in full tilt of the 100 > - 1000 year job of terraforming the place, complete with a planetary > mag field generator to fend off them nasty solar rays, but we are > still suffreing the leftist egalitarian poison that has raped the planet > of man potential. ( and left 200 million of its citizens in mass graves ) > > When the social enginners are no longer putting the jackboots > of goverment on the necks of the acheavers in the name of > "social justice" and the envirowackos stand fully discredited > by the emissions data from the volcano Penetubo, perhaps then > we can get along back to the accent of man. > > Raymond > >

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 12:03:13AM -0400, R. D. Davis wrote: You are ignorant. (Sorry) There are other systems beyond Unix that can provide a powerfull work environement. e.g. VMS. Sometimes I feel sad about the fact that these days are only two classes of OS are left: Windows and *ix. Even MacOS (X) is mostly *ix. Where are alternatives like VMS, Genera, a "native" Smalltalk system...? [1] Yes, I know that e.g. EMACS and TeX originates from the PDP10 and is / was no native *ix programm. Similar for Kermit. -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/