>Most of what you think of as linux, is GNU software.
People keep repeating this, but it just isn't true.
When people say or refer to "linux," they sometimes mean the kernel, and they sometimes mean the entire usable distribution. This includes the gnu utilities in all of the "working" distributions I know about save tomsrtbt (which, oddly, has started calling itself GNU/Linux). Important as those tools are, they're still a minority of what is thought of as "linux". X, sendmail, Perl, and others are larger than the GNU portion. A machine with just the Linux kernel and GNU software would be pretty close to useless for most purposes.
GNU software is significant--but it's hardly the bulk of what people mean by "linux"
>Will the next version claim that BSD has no keyboard support or shell prompt?
sure; it's supported keyboardless systems for years:)
My oldest daughter, at about 2, toddled into my office and spilled apple juice on my keyboard. By some strange quirk of fate, the only key permanently destroyed was the right command key (it was an old Apple) which is rarely, if ever, used by a touch typist.
A few years later, I had my dissertation laptop on my lap, and a mug of good beer (home made) in my right hand. Without warning, my wife plopped one of the rahter new (3 months?) twins in my left arm. Immediately, she kicked, spilling beer on the keyboard of the new (to me) thinkpad, thus becoming BoKD.
The keyboard wasn't happy. Heck, the bios wouldn't even boot due to the errors. When all else failed, I let the keyboard hang from the case so that the case could support it in the sink, removed the battery, and let the keyboard soak overnight. It took three days to dry, but all the keys worked again. I did lose the rubber springs for two of the keys when my wife spilled the bowl, though . ..
Anyway, if you need to do this, most keyboards will survive it (besides, what do you have to lose?). Distilled water is a better idea than tap water, though . ..
More recently, a friend sent an older powermac for my kids. She used to be a chain smoker; you could smell the machine from a few feet away. I took the opportunity, and had my disgusted oldest daughter (the one with the apple juice; now 8 years older) help clean it. I'm reasonably sure that after seeing that (along with some comments from me about lungs) she'll never smoke:)
She had to wash the pieces in the sink:)
I removed the electronics from the keyboard and ran it through the dishwasher without soap. It didn't survive:(
Except (maybe!!!) for a 128k mac with original roms & 400k drives, It would be rough to call *any* mac "vintage" in the same sense of a Model T or 57 Chevy.
Amost any 8 bit (save for post-Pet Commodore [VIC-20, C64]) would be vintage micro,the handful of Z-8000 and 68000 (not 68020 or later), and non-pc-compatible 8086 (generally *not* 8088) would really be the *later* limit for what might be vintage. You could stretch by arguing for the original (pre-XT) IBM PC as a transition from classic to commodity, but htat's as late as you can possibly get.
>especially the part about multiple resolutions on >the same screen,
Hardly innovative by the time of the Amiga--the Atari 400/800 had that!
The Ataris had a "display list" which indicated how manyy pixels to put in the line, what depth to use, how many times to repeat each screenline, and how many times to use this information. A trivial example would be the Apple II graphics modes, which used either 4 bit at 40/line repeated 8 times, or the high resolution with 1.2 bits (or whatever you want to call that), both with 4 lines of text at the bottom. Apple had these hard-wirecd; Atari let you do any combo you could conceive of on a line-by-line basis.
Also, you could specify where in memory the display started--so you could shake/move the screen by adjusting that adress.
The SE/30 is a timeless idea, and should be built more often.
In it's time, the SE/30 was pure brilliance. Mac had two lines, the little all-in-ones, and the Mac II line wiht the faster processors. The SE/30 was, essentially, the Mac IIx (top of the line) in an SE (bottom or near bottom) of the line case. It cost about $1000 more than the base SE, and only had the single expansion slot, but it was actually marginally *faster* than the IIx as it didn't have to deal with the nuBus.
I bought one in late 1989, and it was more than sufficient to run my law office from late '89 until it got replaced with a powerbook in Fall '93.
[Note that the replacement wasn't because it was no longer adequate, but because of stability problems from putting Chip Merchant memory in the second bank--at the time they had a (deserved) reputation for sloppy manufacture: the SIMM was a mm or two two wide, and cracked the slot. It's really amazing it lasted as long as it did with rubber cement holding the socket together . ..]
Anyway, the point is that Apple offered all of the horsepower of the very top of the line in the base system for a cost that was a fraction of the price differential--at a cost of the exandability that very few would need. Let's face it: how often do you add more than one card after you buy a system instead of replacing it outright (yes, I have, too, but it's still the exception).
I put in a controller for a 19" 1024x768 1 bit monitor--amazing for it's time, if nothing today.
anyway, an Imac/30 is an idea that should be *constantly* running around apple--keep the basic unit, with it's display, but offer a faster processor.
hawk, who still has a couple of pieces and the ROM's from Damien [1]
[1] hey, I *didn't* say we got along--the first tome the monitor swiveled 720 degrees in it's mount, it was named . ..
>First off, congratulations on holding off (longer than I did) on the grading of the papers that I > predict are currently stacked on the "visitor" chair in your office.:-)
Who me? No, there are not 40 business law term papers on the visitor's chair; There's about 25 next to it, and 15 more on my desk:)
>Secondly, what part of Canada would you really want to have in the US anyway?
Yikes, I didn't wan tot go *that* far! My only interest in annexing any of Canda would be for them to force a weakening of the central goverment as part of the deal . . . we have enough bad beer of our own without making it easier for theirs to come down . ..
Yes, we should count ourselves fortunate that transoceanic messages were slow in 1815 and that noone in Paris knew that there were no longer *any* British armed forces in North America:)
I'm a recovering lawyer--next month marks eight years since I've sued anyone.
My new machine still doesn't work (I'll do another round with the vendor tomorrow before sending it back to purchasing as not conforming with the purchase order), but I have 2G, 2 Atlhons, and it ran $5300 or so. It doesn't need to have *all* the power itself; it's sufficient to be fast and check models on multiple processors before sending them to the heavy iron on main campus (either the clusters or one of the SP2's).
I squeaked out a lot of startup money for a small campus, but $20k for a personal machine . . .
Well, at least I need 64 bits of addressing space.
One of the bugs I found in Absoft's compiler came when I made an array too large: in a derived type in a copiler of Cray lineage, the resulting array is bit-addressed. I had the physical memory for the array I needed, but couldn't adress it in 32 bits . ..
hawk, who had more memory than any of absoft's test machines at the time
As a military mission, Vietnam *was* a success. We achieved *exactly* what we were trying to do, right until we walked away--and when the enemy didn't want us to awlk away, but wanted to kill us instead, we bombed them into submission.
The problem wasn't military failure, but that what we set out to do was just plain dumb: hold this imaginary line, chase them back across when they come across, but don't go over it to end thing (that might annoy them).
It's beyond me what could *possibly* be achieved in such a manner--the long-term cease fire of Korea seems to be the absolute best case outcome.
The real tragedy of vietnam is that by any rational military measure it was a success:(
World Cup? Why worry about that when we have the Superbowl every year:) [Oh, and for those preparing to whine about the label "World Series": It does not, nor has it ever, mean "world championship". _The World_ was the newspaper that sponsered a series of games between the champions of the two major baseball leagues so that it could get exclusive coverage rights and sell newspapers. The title of the series survived the newspaper's demise . ..]
>It's a bit like Cold War-era disagreement between >the US and the USSR about who invented airplanes.
Nothing goes *that* far. According to official histories, the USSR invented *everything* before *everyone* else--and they manufactured the documents to prove it.
> the *only* major computer technology advancement made in the state of Iowa *ever*?
Gee, it sure would be cool if I could stick a piece of paper in a machine and have it come out another machine anywhere else in the world . . . hey, maybe it could use the phone lines somehow . . ..oh, wait! It's already done.
One guess as to which university gets a royalty on every fax machine . ..
hawk, a Nevadan who spent a few years in iowa, and whose exile has moved to Pennsylvania
>Instead of this wacky US Presidential system, >most countries tend to use Parlimentary systems,
Depends upon continent, now doesn't it? Does *anyplace* in the americas besides Canada[1] use a parliamentary system.
>which in turn are prone to having higher turnout,
Grossly overrated. I'd rather the uninformed stay away from th polls.
>better ability to implement policy, quicker >response times,
You say that like those are good things. Having seen those, we *deliberately* set up the system to avoid them.
>higher stability,
huh? I'd have to see a definition of stability that qualifies.
>and are generally agreed to be a better system.
By those who prefer them. They terrify us for the reasons that you call "adavantages" . ..
Finally, we are *not* a democracy, and our founders considered it a dirty word. We are a republic (albeit a democratic republic), and will fight to keep it that way. It is the principle of government by consent of the governed that is important, not the particular implementation.
Calculation was electronic. There wee indeed spinning cylinders--with capacitors. On display in Atanasoff (two F's!) Hall are a tube module and a memory drum. I want to say that one's original, while the other is a replica.
The machine was binary, another first.
Anyway, you can find all you wnated to know and then some at
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
Quite often the losing lawyers and clients believe the case was wrongly decided (not that *I* ever had that happen:), but among those qualified to have a technical opinion, there isn't much dispute. Many of the "innovations" of the ENIAC were taken straight from the ABC.
I do mean "taken from"--they came to the campus, met with the folks who were left, read what schematics existed (there were never schematics for the whole thing), and built the ENIAC.
Finally, there are now two replicas of the ABC that were built a few years ago: one permanently at the Smithsonian, and the other on tour. One of them was actually fired up to run a program. You can find replica information on that page as well. Among the things to find is that they relied on photographs that happened to exist to figute out the wiring and circuits, and old university purchasing records--and found thatthey were still able to order some of the same exotic parts from the same places.
Why a replica? It seems the thing was cannibalized for parts for other projects after it served its purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
what would *anyone* expect a=b to do?
pip, though, has a serious bug: all important commands should contain no more than two letters.
hawk, off to file bugs against mkdir and rmdir
the long-sought missing link!
:)
hawk, setting out with some moldy jam to grow a rock-group
People keep repeating this, but it just isn't true.
When people say or refer to "linux," they sometimes mean the kernel, and they sometimes mean the entire usable distribution. This includes the gnu utilities in all of the "working" distributions I know about save tomsrtbt (which, oddly, has started calling itself GNU/Linux). Important as those tools are, they're still a minority of what is thought of as "linux". X, sendmail, Perl, and others are larger than the GNU portion. A machine with just the Linux kernel and GNU software would be pretty close to useless for most purposes.
GNU software is significant--but it's hardly the bulk of what people mean by "linux"
>Will the next version claim that BSD has no keyboard support or shell prompt?
sure; it's supported keyboardless systems for years
hawk
Not yet, he's not. Doesn't he have to do something with some actress, hot breakfast cereal, and pebbles first?
Then, and only then, can he run off on the UFO's with Elvis . .
:)
hawk
:)
hawk
A few years later, I had my dissertation laptop on my lap, and a mug of good beer (home made) in my right hand. Without warning, my wife plopped one of the rahter new (3 months?) twins in my left arm. Immediately, she kicked, spilling beer on the keyboard of the new (to me) thinkpad, thus becoming BoKD.
The keyboard wasn't happy. Heck, the bios wouldn't even boot due to the errors. When all else failed, I let the keyboard hang from the case so that the case could support it in the sink, removed the battery, and let the keyboard soak overnight. It took three days to dry, but all the keys worked again. I did lose the rubber springs for two of the keys when my wife spilled the bowl, though . .
Anyway, if you need to do this, most keyboards will survive it (besides, what do you have to lose?). Distilled water is a better idea than tap water, though . .
More recently, a friend sent an older powermac for my kids. She used to be a chain smoker; you could smell the machine from a few feet away. I took the opportunity, and had my disgusted oldest daughter (the one with the apple juice; now 8 years older) help clean it. I'm reasonably sure that after seeing that (along with some comments from me about lungs) she'll never smoke
She had to wash the pieces in the sink
I removed the electronics from the keyboard and ran it through the dishwasher without soap. It didn't survive
hawk
hawk
This isn't merely offtopic, it's spam . .
hawk
>album which only has one good song on it? A
> notable example is Paula Abdul
*really* There's a *good* song?
hawk, who figured here sales were due to people never having heard of, er, seen, Dolly Parton
Amost any 8 bit (save for post-Pet Commodore [VIC-20, C64]) would be vintage micro,the handful of Z-8000 and 68000 (not 68020 or later), and non-pc-compatible 8086 (generally *not* 8088) would really be the *later* limit for what might be vintage. You could stretch by arguing for the original (pre-XT) IBM PC as a transition from classic to commodity, but htat's as late as you can possibly get.
hawk
Hardly innovative by the time of the Amiga--the Atari 400/800 had that!
The Ataris had a "display list" which indicated how manyy pixels to put in the line, what depth to use, how many times to repeat each screenline, and how many times to use this information. A trivial example would be the Apple II graphics modes, which used either 4 bit at 40/line repeated 8 times, or the high resolution with 1.2 bits (or whatever you want to call that), both with 4 lines of text at the bottom. Apple had these hard-wirecd; Atari let you do any combo you could conceive of on a line-by-line basis.
Also, you could specify where in memory the display started--so you could shake/move the screen by adjusting that adress.
hawk
In it's time, the SE/30 was pure brilliance. Mac had two lines, the little all-in-ones, and the Mac II line wiht the faster processors. The SE/30 was, essentially, the Mac IIx (top of the line) in an SE (bottom or near bottom) of the line case. It cost about $1000 more than the base SE, and only had the single expansion slot, but it was actually marginally *faster* than the IIx as it didn't have to deal with the nuBus.
I bought one in late 1989, and it was more than sufficient to run my law office from late '89 until it got replaced with a powerbook in Fall '93.
[Note that the replacement wasn't because it was no longer adequate, but because of stability problems from putting Chip Merchant memory in the second bank--at the time they had a (deserved) reputation for sloppy manufacture: the SIMM was a mm or two two wide, and cracked the slot. It's really amazing it lasted as long as it did with rubber cement holding the socket together . .
Anyway, the point is that Apple offered all of the horsepower of the very top of the line in the base system for a cost that was a fraction of the price differential--at a cost of the exandability that very few would need. Let's face it: how often do you add more than one card after you buy a system instead of replacing it outright (yes, I have, too, but it's still the exception).
I put in a controller for a 19" 1024x768 1 bit monitor--amazing for it's time, if nothing today.
anyway, an Imac/30 is an idea that should be *constantly* running around apple--keep the basic unit, with it's display, but offer a faster processor.
hawk, who still has a couple of pieces and the ROM's from Damien [1]
[1] hey, I *didn't* say we got along--the first tome the monitor swiveled 720 degrees in it's mount, it was named . .
hawk
hawk
hawk
> predict are currently stacked on the "visitor" chair in your office.
Who me? No, there are not 40 business law term papers on the visitor's chair; There's about 25 next to it, and 15 more on my desk
>Secondly, what part of Canada would you really want to have in the US anyway?
Yikes, I didn't wan tot go *that* far! My only interest in annexing any of Canda would be for them to force a weakening of the central goverment as part of the deal . . . we have enough bad beer of our own without making it easier for theirs to come down . .
Yes, we should count ourselves fortunate that transoceanic messages were slow in 1815 and that noone in Paris knew that there were no longer *any* British armed forces in North America
hawk
My new machine still doesn't work (I'll do another round with the vendor tomorrow before sending it back to purchasing as not conforming with the purchase order), but I have 2G, 2 Atlhons, and it ran $5300 or so. It doesn't need to have *all* the power itself; it's sufficient to be fast and check models on multiple processors before sending them to the heavy iron on main campus (either the clusters or one of the SP2's).
I squeaked out a lot of startup money for a small campus, but $20k for a personal machine . . .
:)
hawk
hawk
One of the bugs I found in Absoft's compiler came when I made an array too large: in a derived type in a copiler of Cray lineage, the resulting array is bit-addressed. I had the physical memory for the array I needed, but couldn't adress it in 32 bits . .
hawk, who had more memory than any of absoft's test machines at the time
:)
hawk
The problem wasn't military failure, but that what we set out to do was just plain dumb: hold this imaginary line, chase them back across when they come across, but don't go over it to end thing (that might annoy them).
It's beyond me what could *possibly* be achieved in such a manner--the long-term cease fire of Korea seems to be the absolute best case outcome.
The real tragedy of vietnam is that by any rational military measure it was a success
World Cup? Why worry about that when we have the Superbowl every year
hawk
>the US and the USSR about who invented airplanes.
Nothing goes *that* far. According to official histories, the USSR invented *everything* before *everyone* else--and they manufactured the documents to prove it.
hawk
Gee, it sure would be cool if I could stick a piece of paper in a machine and have it come out another machine anywhere else in the world . . . hey, maybe it could use the phone lines somehow . . .
One guess as to which university gets a royalty on every fax machine . .
hawk, a Nevadan who spent a few years in iowa, and whose exile has moved to Pennsylvania
>most countries tend to use Parlimentary systems,
Depends upon continent, now doesn't it? Does *anyplace* in the americas besides Canada[1] use a parliamentary system.
>which in turn are prone to having higher turnout,
Grossly overrated. I'd rather the uninformed stay away from th polls.
>better ability to implement policy, quicker
>response times,
You say that like those are good things. Having seen those, we *deliberately* set up the system to avoid them.
>higher stability,
huh? I'd have to see a definition of stability that qualifies.
>and are generally agreed to be a better system.
By those who prefer them. They terrify us for the reasons that you call "adavantages" . .
Finally, we are *not* a democracy, and our founders considered it a dirty word. We are a republic (albeit a democratic republic), and will fight to keep it that way. It is the principle of government by consent of the governed that is important, not the particular implementation.
hawk
Calculation was electronic. There wee indeed spinning cylinders--with capacitors. On display in Atanasoff (two F's!) Hall are a tube module and a memory drum. I want to say that one's original, while the other is a replica.
The machine was binary, another first.
Anyway, you can find all you wnated to know and then some at
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
Quite often the losing lawyers and clients believe the case was wrongly decided (not that *I* ever had that happen
I do mean "taken from"--they came to the campus, met with the folks who were left, read what schematics existed (there were never schematics for the whole thing), and built the ENIAC.
Finally, there are now two replicas of the ABC that were built a few years ago: one permanently at the Smithsonian, and the other on tour. One of them was actually fired up to run a program. You can find replica information on that page as well. Among the things to find is that they relied on photographs that happened to exist to figute out the wiring and circuits, and old university purchasing records--and found thatthey were still able to order some of the same exotic parts from the same places.
Why a replica? It seems the thing was cannibalized for parts for other projects after it served its purpose.
hawk