Firebird At 20 Years

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Posted by Hemos on Monday September 6, 2004 @01:18AM from the the-future-moves-fast dept.

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

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And to think... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-06 01:36 · Score: 5, Funny

Some wankers tried to steal its name.
PhoenixFoxBird! by orthogonal · 2004-09-06 03:12 · Score: 4, Funny

September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird./i.

It's a great browser, but I think this is a bit premature.

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Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Re:Xenix or Venix? by Liquor · 2004-09-06 05:48 · Score: 3, Informative

If I recall correctly, Xenix was indeed produced by Microsoft at the time (the Santa Cruz Organization was to be a 'second source').

But the article mentioned a dislike of Xenix, which I recall as being a fairly well polished product compared to Venix, which had poor manuals (although it did have some real-time extensions), and may have been missing a number of utilities.

The main reason I recall for using Venix over Xenix on the LSI-11/23 type machines was that Xenix was priced to run on the full-blown systems like an 11/44 (competing with RSTS11 or MUMPS at about $5K a copy) while Venix was something like $500.

Then again, I seem to recall that Xenix on the X86 could be bought without any compilers as an almost useless 'run-time' package - I would imagine that using thie would be somewhat annoying.

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Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
The reason why this wasn't on the front page... by ninejaguar · 2004-09-08 04:04 · Score: 3, Funny

The submitter offered the wrong quote...they should've put this one in instead:
"My second real job was with DEC. DEC was a great place to work. Near total anarchy. I put out a very successful product called Datatrieve, which, due to a stupid political ploy by a manager, got cancelled. It didn't mean a thing. I got to write a monthly report saying "Problems: The project has been cancelled. If this isn't rectified, it could affect the schedule." It really didn't make any difference. The second version shipped on schedule, still cancelled. You've got to admire a company that succeeds despite the best efforts of its management."
Classic.
= 9J =