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Actually, by 1978 6-bit terminals were pretty rare, at least in the computer labs I frequented. There were no longer any significant 6-bit networks, so the only reason to have a six-bit terminal was if your terminal was a electromechanical teleprinter, because mechanisms that could print the entire 7-bit ASCII character set were more expensive than those that couldn't. And by 1978, electronic terminals were beginning to replace teleprinters. This was the period in which Bill Joy used an ADM3a to write vi — the fact that vi/vim still uses h, j, k, & l for cursor motion reflects the fact that the ADM3a had arrows on those keys (its cursor motion sequences were the corresponding Control characters)

But it doesn't surprise me that ARPA was still using 6-bit teleprinters. I can't give a logical reason, there's just something very military about it. Major Czahor probably didn't even enter the message himself; he would have dictated it to a Signals Clerk. Quaint term, that.

Now wait. You're probably all thinking "What's so cool about that? Just go to Fry's/MicroCenter/your favorite electronics dealer, buy a motherboard, case, power supply, components, etc. and you're done." That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about building an IMSAI 8080. The processor was a 2 MHz Intel 8080A 8-bit processor. RAM? You had to build a separate S-100 bus card using 1Kx1 chips to have RAM in the computer. Power supply? Here are a bunch of capacitors, diodes, resistors, a circuit diagram and a printed circuit board. Go nuts. Hope you're good with a soldering iron.

I spent several weeks putting one of these together in 1976. Once I had it together and working, well, you needed something to get your results on other than the LED panel, so I built a Lear Siegler ADM-3A video terminal. Again, the logic board was a big printed circuit board and you had a couple hundred chips, resistors, diodes and capacitors that you had to solder on it. I used that terminal all throughout college to connect to Boston University's time sharing system.

<sigh>Those were the days.</sigh>

Wow, Lear Siegler sure has come a long way since the ADM3A!

Serously, unless it's a well known TLA company like AMD or IBM, a few words about the company itself would be nice.

The move to PowerPC was Apple's big mistake. That was the point at which Apple market share dropped, and it never came back. Even today, Apple has much lower market share than it did the day the PowerPC machines were announced. The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.

In fact, when the PowerPC 601 came out, Motorola was shipping the 68060, which outperformed the early PowerPC chips. The 68000 line could have been developed further; there was nothing in the architecture that limited it. But when Apple dropped it, that was the end of the demand for high-end 68000 parts.

The PowerPC transition killed many existing apps. The engineering community dumped the Mac at the PowerPC transition; existing CAD applications like AutoCAD were not ported to PowerPC, and most of the printed circuit board design applications were dropped at that point, too. So Apple lost a whole market segment, and one willing to pay for big screens and good graphics.

Copeland was actually a good operating system. The problem was that applications had to be revised for it, and Microsoft didn't want to bother. Apple no longer had the clout with developers it had had back at the System 7 transition, where all apps had to be revised. But Apple hadn't realized internally that it could no longer order developers around; the developers had the option of going to Windows. So backwards compatibility had become more important.

Copeland (the original "MacOS 8") actually shipped to some developers. It was almost ready to go. Acquiring NeXT delayed the release of a new OS by several years; it took much longer to get NeXT code onto the Apple platform than Jobs said it would. But it saved Jobs' ass financially; he was heavily invested in NeXT, which was headed for bankruptcy.

As for design, one of the coolest Macs ever was the 20th Anniversary Mac, the first Mac with an LCD panel. In 1997, way ahead of everyone else. That was before Jobs took over and "Steved" the product, because it wasn't his.

The iMac clamshell looked like the Lear-Seigler ADM 3A from 1977, which was a very popular low-end terminal in its day. It wasn't an original concept.

Jobs' big contribution was to suck up to Gates and thus keep Microsoft Office on the Mac That's what saved Apple.

So that's what it looks like with the Reality Distortion Field turned off.

Of course, that's easier said than done. I've been telling myself for years that Vi (or rather Vim, which has pretty much displaced its prototype) is totally obsolete, since its most important design constraints (must work on a time-sharing system over a 300 bps line connected to a primitive dumb terminal) no longer apply. But all the various editors I've tried seem to not be worth the trouble. Though that might have been an excuse...

Lately, I've been playing with jEdit which absolutely demolishes every excuse I have for not switching to it. But every time I face the task of retooling my Vim macros and customizations for jEdit, and retooling my aging brain to use jEdit's interaction paradigm, I suffer a total failure of nerve. Help, I'm locked in and I can't get up!

Brush up on your Windows architecture--everything is an object to the NT kernel. When you're bored, play with WinObj or the "NT Obj" tab in ReactOS Explorer to see how Windows really looks before the awful Win32 API comes and messes everything up.

Brush up on your Windows architectureeverything is an object to the NT kernel. When you're bored, play with http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/winobj. shtmlWinObj or the "NT Obj" tab in http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/ReactOS Explorer to see how Windows really looks before the awful Win32 API comes and messes everything up.

Me too. I used to buy singles fairly regularly JUST FOR the b-sides. In many cases I already owned the album and wanted some of the stuff that they hadn't thought should go on the album. Bands like the Wildhearts would regularly put record brand new songs for the B sides. Then bad things happened... the BPI introduced rules limiting what could be released as a single to be eligible for the chart. Naturally this means B-Sides get thrown to the wayside and a crappy remix gets thtown in to make up the space (should point out that this isn't true with the Wildhearts - Ginger started a singles club last year with the aim of puting out 4 new songs every month. If you haven't heard them do your selve a favour and get them collected)

I like music a lot and its where the guts of whatever spare cash I have get spent. I buy 2 - 3 albums a month, but rarely buy anything through iTunes, Napster and the like (eMusic and Magnatune are a rare exception). Why? I like CDs. I like holding the disc and seeing the pretty label, opening up the case and reading the booklet. I like being able to listen to it on the stereo, in the car or horror of horrors, ripping it and sticking it on my iRiver. Having it on CD originally makes a pretty good back up.

Technology isn't killing albums, they are alive and well. I still haven't grasped the logic of spending $9.99 on an album, downloading it and for my money only having a pile of scream electrons, just waiting to disapper at the next HD crash (how many people really back up all their downloaded legal mp3s?).

As long as I can get music on shiny discs I will!!

Youngster!

I'm using ulog for this very thing, it's pretty neat. It logs the packets into a mysql (or PostgreSQL) database and then uses a php interface to display the info a very friendly way. The problem of course, is that if you are not already running a mysql server and an apache server, you have to start them up. Running these two servers just for this program does seem to a little silly. Still I've been really happy with the ease that I can view my logs. Beats the heck outa looking through the text log!
Here are some links to check out:
ulog-php
ulogd

It works just fine under XP as a shell. If you want to test it without replacing your current shell, just launch it from the command line with the -desktop option.

Err... smartcards just store data, they don't have an embedded OS on them.

Really? The creators of:

• STARCOS
• JCOP
• MPCOS
• MFC
• MULTOS
• SOSSE
• Cryptoflex
• andWindows for Smart Card

might disagree.

I've actually used all but two of the above. There are many more, but I got tired of googling for links.

There's a port of the open-source Amiga ANSI C compiler VBCC to Unix, too. It's a competent pure ansi C compiler.

Also, the since it's licensed under the restrictive GPL license, any programs it compiles contain GPL-licensed code, which makes it impossible to compile and sell closed-source programs with it.

No, you're WRONG there. It's perfectly legal to use GCC for proprietary applications - 99% of devlopers in the embedded world do that, for example (the other 1% are thinking about quitting, since they're stuck arguing with their PHB about having to shoehorn wince into their device, after the PHB had a great golf game with teh "nice" microsoft rep.)

America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.

As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.

It hides inside the computer of your co-worker, your bowling buddy, even your trusted family physician. It's sitting on your PTA board. It's waiting in the hallways of your neighborhood parish. It may even be watching your children as they sleep.

What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.

The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.

The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.

So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.

That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.

Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.

--- Stolen from MutantWatch and mangled.

America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.

As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.

It hides inside the computer of your co-worker, your bowling buddy, even your trusted family physician. It's sitting on your PTA board. It's waiting in the hallways of your neighborhood parish. It may even be watching your children as they sleep.

What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.

The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.

The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.

So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.

That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.

Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.

--- Stolen from MutantWatch and mangled.

Some people really don't realize that their actions can lead to repercussions.

Well, there's gcc, borland C is coming soon. Dice C and VBCC both compile on linux as well as AmigaOS, and VBCC in particular would be a viable replacement for the C subset of GCC. And there's also LCC.