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For those that don't know him, Hal Stern has been associated with Sun for a long time and is one of the "sharp good" guys IMHO. He's written several Sysadmin related books including the classic "Managing NFS and NIS" and here's a 1995 Sysadmin article where he dives into adb - clearly a technical guy who knows his stuff ... although the article is more about marketing and pricing.

It's actually a lot closer to Solaris autoclients.

Another point worth to be noted is that, under Un*x, the DLL Hell is a non-issue, as we've had libraries versioning since day 1. So, I might as well install multiple versions of a library, and yet do not have the need to recompile an application.

Unix versioning is based on sym links. Given that it doesn't look like sym links came into play until somewhere around SVR 3.2 which seems to have come from 4.2BSD (I base the "come from" on a diagram on page 5 of The Design & Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix OS), and Linux didn't get them until .95.

Now, I don't know what your definition of "since day 1" is but if it's 14 years (First Edition released in 1969, 4.2BSD released in 1983) then you're absolutely correct.

I'd also point you to the fact that Unix didn't have passwords on day one. They were added later. So much for security can't be added on, it's gotta be designed in. Not that you claimed that they did but it's an example of where Unix came from.

You see when Unix was designed it was a stripped down Multics. Multics was too big, too bulky, too much operating system with too many features. But if you look at the features of Multics we all have them on our desktops (and Unix systems). So Unix barely had anything from day 1. You wouldn't want to use day 1 unix today. Oh, maybe you'd find some level of nostalgia in it - it'd be like whipping out a Pong console - but you wouldn't ever make it your desktop, let alone attempt to install multiple versions of software on it.

Robik http://kvant.mccme.ru/1979/09/p52.htm

Rapira http://ershov.iis.nsk.su/archive/eaindex.asp?lang= 1&gid=391

Seeing that the 1992's screenshot you gave have netscape on it is very impressive as Netscape was released in 1994

I remember SGI's 4DWM having completely vector based graphics back in 1992 (and probably before that). Has anyone else done it in the interim?

Lisp has changed. A lot. It outgrew its "mathematical roots" very quickly--the first documented implementations had a lot of side-effecting functions that weren't based on mathematical formalisms. You might be surprised just how "unpure" the first Lisps were (and how the most common versions remain so to this day).

They did. Note that chapter 6.1 of the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual is called "Preparing a Card Deck". You might also want to read appendix J, and look at all the *very* side-effecty and non-mathematical functions present in this very early Lisp. :)

All of these cd copy protections could be defeated using a virtual audio cable. That's good for me because I like to fit 10-12 albums (that I ALREADY OWN) onto 1 cd for my rio volt player in my car.

I do medical imaging, so I've been used for quite a while to dealing with monochrome/color displays. While color monitors are becoming quite good if you're willing to spend the money (All the color monitors I work on have trinitron tubes), matching the pitch of a grey monochrome monitor is quite chalenging (put R,G,B channels in the space of one grey pixel).

The first time I came across this fact was in Russia, with diagnostic filmless X-ray here. You wouldn't want to see the difference when compared to a color normal display! Displaying the same images on a color monitor just look awful, and can be quite dangerous if you rely on the quality of the monitor for diagnostic purposes!!!!

So anyway, a few years later, here I am with my two monitors (saved from the skip). Both are 1280x1024 21" DEC monitors, there's a color one (VRT19HA) and a BW (VR21 I think) that is plugged on the green output of the color monitor (so in fact both display the same stuff).

If I program and do a lot of text stuff, I will look at the BW monitor, whereas if I do color stuff, I will look at the color one, clever hey? ;-)

Even better, with Xfree 4.0 I should now be able to get a different display on both of them (haven't tried x2x though), especially now that I managed to get myself a second matrox millennium 2, ideal for the purpose with the sync-on-green hack! When I am done, I will definitely use a true monochrome setup, because while the green channel is okay with most of the stuff, it's a little bit weird if you get color information in your xterms, sometimes you just miss some of the stuff :-)

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