If by "DOS Software" you meant CP/M software, the S/100 systems were software compatible -- they all ran the exact same WordStar and VisiCalc software -- using vendor-tweaked versions of CP/M and hardware-abstracting BIOSes. Considering that MS-DOS was an OEM-only product and often vendor-tweaked until v5.0, not a big difference.
And I could care less what the IBM executives of the time thought (their management record speaks for themselves) -- the engineers who built the PC knew they were using off-the-shelf tech to get on the market quick and cheap.
It's obviously speculation, but personally I don't think the world would be all that different today if IBM hadn't made a PC. Commodity hardware standards and OSes would have appeared.
Nope, the IBM PC wasn't "original" at all. It was nothing more than a gussied up S-100 machine with a big name brand on it and a retail display at Sears.
Reverse engineering the PC was just the shortcut to hardware standardization that the existing industry badly needed. IBM's control of the market proved to be a temporary phenomenon as MCA proved.
Or you could argue that IBM sabotaged OS/2 by insisting that it run on the 286-based PC AT, whereas Microsoft was smart enough to build a 32-bit portable OS with some hardware abstraction.
Going up against IBM took balls, you have to admit that -- most at the time thought MS didn't have a chance, even if they were secretly rooting for them. (If I were Gates, I would have sold out to IBM and retired to an island somewhere.) Then count the ways that IBM sabotaged the OS/2 effort themselves - pricing, PS/2 debacle, missing the boat on client-server, etc.
Considering that OS/2 almost exclusively sold as a client OS, marketing Linux-based servers is a doubtful revenge. IBM sees the bigger picture (slow W2K services sales, opportunity to sell WebSphere and DB2 to different customers, and the current pointlessness of the desktop OS space.).
IBM didn't even invent the Intel-based 'clone'. They were absurdly common before IBM entered the market, complete with BIOSes and MS BASIC, only with 8080s (or Z80s) instead of the 8088, and CP/M instead of MS-DOS.
<overstatement>
The only thing that IBM really did for the industry was standardize the disk drive, making sneakernet possible.
</overstatement>
If not IBM, then probably somebody else (Intel?) would have gotten all the hardware details standardized. The industry's been fine since IBM dropped out of the picture in the 80s.
Microsoft was positioned in the right place. If there was no IBM PC, Microsoft would probably still dominate the industry in 2001. Extending into micro applications was a no brainer for them. Trying to control the API is a no brainer from there.
Anyway, they aren't directly responsible, but their spot sure wasn't accidential.
Actually, the calendering bit is only an edge case of groupware, and then only when you get into the Invite/Accept/Reschedule bit. Groupware is discussion groups, project tracking applicaitons, document repositories, workflow approval apps, and so on and was around for decades before calendaring got integrated.
A groupware platform like Notes or Outlook enables this stuff by providing a RAD forms environment with an integrated database backend and integrated security and email integration.
The idea is that it's cheaper/easier to build client-server collaborative apps with such a platform than with VB+RDBMS, desktop DBs like Access, or web applications. YMMV. The downside is that hard stuff is harder or impossible and you are tied to the platform.
So, I don't know what exactly makes Evo "groupware" other than it looks like Outlook. Does it even do NNTP?
Both presuppose that the individual really cares about readily available, high-speed access, but many do not.
That's probably true. Virtually every non-techie that I know does a majority of Internet stuff at work (where they are getting paid to goof off) and not at home (where they are busy with real world stuff). The few that have home Internet service are often 'borrowing' someone else's dialup number. Compare that to techies which almost universally have broadband, or are bitching that they can't get it.
(Caveat: I don't know anyone on AOL, so that probably makes me statistically irrelevant.)
So, I don't even see the widescale desire to pay $20 for the ISP, much less for a second line.
Good point -- Notes was "groupware" long before it had a calendar or even a functioning e-mail client (anyone use R3!?)
Personally, I don't think that Exchange/Outlook isn't a very good model to follow because of it's lack of customizability. Once you get past the few built-in tricks, that's it. Looks good though.
The DMCA is pretty clear that 1) applies to copy control mechinisms only and 2) Reverse engineering for the sake of interoperability is still legal
The IBM PC BIOS was not a copy control mechinism, and it was reverse engineered so that IBM PC software could interoperate with non-IBM hardware.
The reason that the PC industry was "Plug Compatible" actually has a lot to do with anti-trust restrictions that required IBM to freely licence microelectronic tech. Every clone maker (indirectly) paid a patent licence fee to IBM for things like the ISA Bus and CGA/EGA/VGA graphics.
Sony couldn't sue for 'damages', but certainly they could get a restraining order telling you to stop distributing the stuff. (Which is all they've asked for in this case)
OK, even if we didn't have the DMCA, SSSCA, and 'unlimited' copyright terms, and copyright law hadn't changed since 1920*, if this guy was distributing the software for a current Sony product, it would still be illegal.
As to the greater argument -- Disagreeing with the legitimacy of a law is fine, although it's finer if you don't get caught.
* Apparently the copyright status of computer programs wasn't clear until the early 80s, but I'm assuming here that software would be covered.
Yes, VisualBasic, although for what little I do with that (usually MTS), I can work around it -- Also the.NET SDK Beta Installer shat its pants with Power User privs, but I managed to trick it into working.
That's because there's a hellava lot of broken applicaitons out there -- top of the list are MS Office 97 and Netscape 4.x. (Office 2000 and Mozilla are the cure.)
On the otherhand, I can and do get most of my work done as an 2000 "Power User", which is a partially privledged group. Developers could maybe get an secondary admin login that they could use with Run As (su) to install software or whatever.
Testing with the "User" level (which MS's idea of locked-down), caused lots of stuff to fail.
Would anyone run a Unix desktop program that required root access? NO! But that's situation normal in the NT world, where 9x is tested first and not even Microsoft does full QA as an unprivledged user (see SP6). Shipping XP Home with defaults to give everyone admin rights is a huge lost opportunity to fix the problem. Eventually Microsoft is going to have to break the eggs to get the omelet made.
You can't force Exchange to use SSL for that stuff?
Hopefully you also got rid of the super-secure LanMan hash authentication along with the other cleartext protocols.
I understand some Exchange admins don't like IMAP because it's yet another route to database corruption, but if that has been fixed there's really no reason to disallow it.
Well, I don't want to discourage anyone working on such a project, but Exchange RPC sounds like a ratsnest that's probably not even documented within Microsoft. Work has recently started on building a open source DCE/RPC piece (originally a Unix protocol -- dcerpc.net), and that would need to be completed before Exchange reverse-engineering could start.
Visions appearing of redfaced Exchange administrators yelling "Your Lin-ux crap crashed my server!!" (What? You assumed the Exchange RPC server is robust?)
To my knowledge, all data in Exchange can be accessed through IMAP, LDAP, and HTTP (with some possible slight MS twists), and that would seem like the more fruitful approach (although it might not solve your particular problems).
To shut down an OS/2 machine, you had to right-click on the desktop. I would consider that a design flaw because 1) only 25% of the users *could* guess it and 2) Of those, they would still have to guess correctly (I failed at this).
I can't think of anything so egregious in Windows, except having to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to change your password (which might have been fixed).
On the other hand, it meant that most people who used OS/2 had a handle on right-clicking.
God. I just read Levy's Crypto about a month ago, and I thought this was *over*.
The reason this was *over* in the past is because the FBI is blissfully unaware that strong crypto is standard operating procedure for US corporations, and is only used by nefarious bad guys.
We're talking about outlawing every copy of products like Windows 2000 and Lotus Notes, every router that implements VPN, and so on. The impact on US business would be horrendous. And the big money finance folks would just ignore the order.
Traditionally, the crypto issue has been framed as a rights issue with the cypherpunks against the feds. This neglects the significant commercial impact.
The sad thing about all of this is that Iraq was one of the only Mideast countries that was trying to develop it's oil wealth into a real industrial base.
Basic economics says that transforming natural resources creates far more wealth than just selling it and shipping it off. To a certain degree, Iraq was trying to build a long-term society, unlike say the Saudis, who are planning ride back into the dunes and live in tents like they always had as soon as they've pumped their oil dry. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom is that a modern economy eventually develops a modern (open) government, and Iraq was closer to a modern economy than most of those places.
As Europe has proved many times, you can get the shit bombed out of you and still get back up on your feet. However, much of what existed of Iraq's modern enconomy (roads, bridges, water projects, rail, etc) was destroyed during the war, and the embargos prohibit imports of the equipment (such as machine tools) and material necessary to rebuild and get a normal economy going.
I'm not sure what we are trying to prove -- we are apparently starving them and leaving their economy in abject poverty in the hope that they will overthrow Saddam. But when the Kurds and others approached us for assistance after the war, we refused to help them...
What we really have is WWI all over again -- the Germans were 'punished' by having their industrial base stolen from them. People sympathetic to their plight let radical elements steal it back. The result was not pretty.
Very good points, although I should point out that IBM does have some customers with 30K Notes users plus on a single 390, so it does happen somewhere. (in ye olden days, I setup Notes and Exchange environments - maybe 10K users tops, but far less per box than you can manage nowdays on normal PC hardware)
As to point 5, I was told that Exchange is sort of unconventional in that the server notifies the client when there is new mail rather than having the client poll.
It should be noted that Domino/390 isn't really 'native' -- it's a Unix port that runs using OS/390's POSIX emulation (which uses EBCDIC and presumably has other funkiness.)
I've also heard that it only has a handful of customers (the kinds of places that have spare mainframes laying around.)
I could see the argument for IBM to drop the 'native' port and have it's Domino/390 customers use the Linux subsystem. Since they are supporting x86 Linux anyway, it would probably reduce porting costs.
We tested both server platforms using a custom test suite that simulated a large population of simulated POP/SMTP users.
*POOF* There goes that argument!
How about some data that reflects how people actually use Exchange (through Outlook RPC). I also can't see what the client settings are -- maybe they're only pulling new mail once an hour or so.
(I've seen MS put out Exchange "scalablity" numbers using POP3 before. Easy way to beat up on Notes or Groupwise, but POP3's the game, a Unix box or that mainframe should be able to handily kick it's ass.)
The reason that Notes users use less e-mail is that most Notes shops have a plethera of other groupware applications that they've hacked together. That is actually a *good* thing because information is centrally managed and indexed, and not laying around people's inboxes.
I've worked at several Notes shops. People have their nose in Notes all day long. Can't say that for the Microsoft shops I've worked at (where things are spread around between different VB and Access apps, and way way too much stuff is done in e-mail for the lack of a better way.)
Exchange has most of the infrastructure, BTW. Just that Outlook is a real pile of shit from a programmatic standpoint (just as Notes is shit from a UI perspective...)
The two password problem is due to the fact that the solution being discussed is pretty adhoc -- Unix systems by in large rely on local authentication (/etc/passwd) and SSH is primarily designed to be a secure replacement for telnet. And as for "same user experience" -- having multiple passwords is usually a bad user experience and leads to all sorts of other security problems.
Now, if you substitute some form of directory system (Kerberos/LDAP/NDS/AD/NIS/whatever), you could have a system where you are externally authenticated as you login, and then you use that authentication to seemlessly get the proper level of access on remote machines through encrypted connections. Doesn't help you get a shell at your hosting company's webserver, but a better solution for institutional use than SSH. --
I totally agree, people now want anything they want while at work, personal email, phone calls, napster (napster? what's that?:P), IM, pr0n. And they want all this in total privacy.
Back in 94 or so, I was involved in a discussion about the loosening the fairly restrictive e-mail policy and the granting of full Internet access to all users.
The conclusion was "YES! If we do this, employees will spend less time on the phone, going out to lunch, shopping, and doing anything that would cause them to leave their desk. The Internet will allow them to be more productive (meaning, work longer hours), which is great for us!"
Of course, now this is being spun as lost productivity, just as how Windows Solitaire was demonized while doodling on paper or staring out the window was conveniently ignored. Sometimes it pays to remember why the company put a phone and an internet-connected computer on everyone's desk. --
Slashdot Mirror
If by "DOS Software" you meant CP/M software, the S/100 systems were software compatible -- they all ran the exact same WordStar and VisiCalc software -- using vendor-tweaked versions of CP/M and hardware-abstracting BIOSes. Considering that MS-DOS was an OEM-only product and often vendor-tweaked until v5.0, not a big difference.
And I could care less what the IBM executives of the time thought (their management record speaks for themselves) -- the engineers who built the PC knew they were using off-the-shelf tech to get on the market quick and cheap.
It's obviously speculation, but personally I don't think the world would be all that different today if IBM hadn't made a PC. Commodity hardware standards and OSes would have appeared.
Nope, the IBM PC wasn't "original" at all. It was nothing more than a gussied up S-100 machine with a big name brand on it and a retail display at Sears.
Reverse engineering the PC was just the shortcut to hardware standardization that the existing industry badly needed. IBM's control of the market proved to be a temporary phenomenon as MCA proved.
Bullshit -- IBM was calling the shots.
Or you could argue that IBM sabotaged OS/2 by insisting that it run on the 286-based PC AT, whereas Microsoft was smart enough to build a 32-bit portable OS with some hardware abstraction.
Going up against IBM took balls, you have to admit that -- most at the time thought MS didn't have a chance, even if they were secretly rooting for them. (If I were Gates, I would have sold out to IBM and retired to an island somewhere.) Then count the ways that IBM sabotaged the OS/2 effort themselves - pricing, PS/2 debacle, missing the boat on client-server, etc.
Considering that OS/2 almost exclusively sold as a client OS, marketing Linux-based servers is a doubtful revenge. IBM sees the bigger picture (slow W2K services sales, opportunity to sell WebSphere and DB2 to different customers, and the current pointlessness of the desktop OS space.).
IBM didn't even invent the Intel-based 'clone'. They were absurdly common before IBM entered the market, complete with BIOSes and MS BASIC, only with 8080s (or Z80s) instead of the 8088, and CP/M instead of MS-DOS.
<overstatement>
The only thing that IBM really did for the industry was standardize the disk drive, making sneakernet possible.
</overstatement>
If not IBM, then probably somebody else (Intel?) would have gotten all the hardware details standardized. The industry's been fine since IBM dropped out of the picture in the 80s.
Microsoft was positioned in the right place. If there was no IBM PC, Microsoft would probably still dominate the industry in 2001. Extending into micro applications was a no brainer for them. Trying to control the API is a no brainer from there.
Anyway, they aren't directly responsible, but their spot sure wasn't accidential.
Actually, the calendering bit is only an edge case of groupware, and then only when you get into the Invite/Accept/Reschedule bit. Groupware is discussion groups, project tracking applicaitons, document repositories, workflow approval apps, and so on and was around for decades before calendaring got integrated.
A groupware platform like Notes or Outlook enables this stuff by providing a RAD forms environment with an integrated database backend and integrated security and email integration.
The idea is that it's cheaper/easier to build client-server collaborative apps with such a platform than with VB+RDBMS, desktop DBs like Access, or web applications. YMMV. The downside is that hard stuff is harder or impossible and you are tied to the platform.
So, I don't know what exactly makes Evo "groupware" other than it looks like Outlook. Does it even do NNTP?
Both presuppose that the individual really cares about readily available, high-speed access, but many do not.
That's probably true. Virtually every non-techie that I know does a majority of Internet stuff at work (where they are getting paid to goof off) and not at home (where they are busy with real world stuff). The few that have home Internet service are often 'borrowing' someone else's dialup number. Compare that to techies which almost universally have broadband, or are bitching that they can't get it.
(Caveat: I don't know anyone on AOL, so that probably makes me statistically irrelevant.)
So, I don't even see the widescale desire to pay $20 for the ISP, much less for a second line.
Good point -- Notes was "groupware" long before it had a calendar or even a functioning e-mail client (anyone use R3!?)
Personally, I don't think that Exchange/Outlook isn't a very good model to follow because of it's lack of customizability. Once you get past the few built-in tricks, that's it. Looks good though.
The DMCA is pretty clear that 1) applies to copy control mechinisms only and 2) Reverse engineering for the sake of interoperability is still legal
The IBM PC BIOS was not a copy control mechinism, and it was reverse engineered so that IBM PC software could interoperate with non-IBM hardware.
The reason that the PC industry was "Plug Compatible" actually has a lot to do with anti-trust restrictions that required IBM to freely licence microelectronic tech. Every clone maker (indirectly) paid a patent licence fee to IBM for things like the ISA Bus and CGA/EGA/VGA graphics.
Sony couldn't sue for 'damages', but certainly they could get a restraining order telling you to stop distributing the stuff. (Which is all they've asked for in this case)
OK, even if we didn't have the DMCA, SSSCA, and 'unlimited' copyright terms, and copyright law hadn't changed since 1920*, if this guy was distributing the software for a current Sony product, it would still be illegal.
As to the greater argument -- Disagreeing with the legitimacy of a law is fine, although it's finer if you don't get caught.
* Apparently the copyright status of computer programs wasn't clear until the early 80s, but I'm assuming here that software would be covered.
Yes, VisualBasic, although for what little I do with that (usually MTS), I can work around it -- Also the .NET SDK Beta Installer shat its pants with Power User privs, but I managed to trick it into working.
That's because there's a hellava lot of broken applicaitons out there -- top of the list are MS Office 97 and Netscape 4.x. (Office 2000 and Mozilla are the cure.)
On the otherhand, I can and do get most of my work done as an 2000 "Power User", which is a partially privledged group. Developers could maybe get an secondary admin login that they could use with Run As (su) to install software or whatever.
Testing with the "User" level (which MS's idea of locked-down), caused lots of stuff to fail.
Would anyone run a Unix desktop program that required root access? NO! But that's situation normal in the NT world, where 9x is tested first and not even Microsoft does full QA as an unprivledged user (see SP6). Shipping XP Home with defaults to give everyone admin rights is a huge lost opportunity to fix the problem. Eventually Microsoft is going to have to break the eggs to get the omelet made.
You can't force Exchange to use SSL for that stuff?
Hopefully you also got rid of the super-secure LanMan hash authentication along with the other cleartext protocols.
I understand some Exchange admins don't like IMAP because it's yet another route to database corruption, but if that has been fixed there's really no reason to disallow it.
Well, I don't want to discourage anyone working on such a project, but Exchange RPC sounds like a ratsnest that's probably not even documented within Microsoft. Work has recently started on building a open source DCE/RPC piece (originally a Unix protocol -- dcerpc.net), and that would need to be completed before Exchange reverse-engineering could start.
Visions appearing of redfaced Exchange administrators yelling "Your Lin-ux crap crashed my server!!" (What? You assumed the Exchange RPC server is robust?)
To my knowledge, all data in Exchange can be accessed through IMAP, LDAP, and HTTP (with some possible slight MS twists), and that would seem like the more fruitful approach (although it might not solve your particular problems).
To shut down an OS/2 machine, you had to right-click on the desktop. I would consider that a design flaw because 1) only 25% of the users *could* guess it and 2) Of those, they would still have to guess correctly (I failed at this).
I can't think of anything so egregious in Windows, except having to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to change your password (which might have been fixed).
On the other hand, it meant that most people who used OS/2 had a handle on right-clicking.
I knew I shouldn't have posted something about Lotus Notes!
God. I just read Levy's Crypto about a month ago, and I thought this was *over*.
The reason this was *over* in the past is because the FBI is blissfully unaware that strong crypto is standard operating procedure for US corporations, and is only used by nefarious bad guys.
We're talking about outlawing every copy of products like Windows 2000 and Lotus Notes, every router that implements VPN, and so on. The impact on US business would be horrendous. And the big money finance folks would just ignore the order.
Traditionally, the crypto issue has been framed as a rights issue with the cypherpunks against the feds. This neglects the significant commercial impact.
The sad thing about all of this is that Iraq was one of the only Mideast countries that was trying to develop it's oil wealth into a real industrial base.
Basic economics says that transforming natural resources creates far more wealth than just selling it and shipping it off. To a certain degree, Iraq was trying to build a long-term society, unlike say the Saudis, who are planning ride back into the dunes and live in tents like they always had as soon as they've pumped their oil dry. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom is that a modern economy eventually develops a modern (open) government, and Iraq was closer to a modern economy than most of those places.
As Europe has proved many times, you can get the shit bombed out of you and still get back up on your feet. However, much of what existed of Iraq's modern enconomy (roads, bridges, water projects, rail, etc) was destroyed during the war, and the embargos prohibit imports of the equipment (such as machine tools) and material necessary to rebuild and get a normal economy going.
I'm not sure what we are trying to prove -- we are apparently starving them and leaving their economy in abject poverty in the hope that they will overthrow Saddam. But when the Kurds and others approached us for assistance after the war, we refused to help them...
What we really have is WWI all over again -- the Germans were 'punished' by having their industrial base stolen from them. People sympathetic to their plight let radical elements steal it back. The result was not pretty.
Very good points, although I should point out that IBM does have some customers with 30K Notes users plus on a single 390, so it does happen somewhere. (in ye olden days, I setup Notes and Exchange environments - maybe 10K users tops, but far less per box than you can manage nowdays on normal PC hardware)
As to point 5, I was told that Exchange is sort of unconventional in that the server notifies the client when there is new mail rather than having the client poll.
It should be noted that Domino/390 isn't really 'native' -- it's a Unix port that runs using OS/390's POSIX emulation (which uses EBCDIC and presumably has other funkiness.)
I've also heard that it only has a handful of customers (the kinds of places that have spare mainframes laying around.)
I could see the argument for IBM to drop the 'native' port and have it's Domino/390 customers use the Linux subsystem. Since they are supporting x86 Linux anyway, it would probably reduce porting costs.
We tested both server platforms using a custom test suite that simulated a large population of simulated POP/SMTP users.
*POOF* There goes that argument!
How about some data that reflects how people actually use Exchange (through Outlook RPC). I also can't see what the client settings are -- maybe they're only pulling new mail once an hour or so.
(I've seen MS put out Exchange "scalablity" numbers using POP3 before. Easy way to beat up on Notes or Groupwise, but POP3's the game, a Unix box or that mainframe should be able to handily kick it's ass.)
The reason that Notes users use less e-mail is that most Notes shops have a plethera of other groupware applications that they've hacked together. That is actually a *good* thing because information is centrally managed and indexed, and not laying around people's inboxes.
I've worked at several Notes shops. People have their nose in Notes all day long. Can't say that for the Microsoft shops I've worked at (where things are spread around between different VB and Access apps, and way way too much stuff is done in e-mail for the lack of a better way.)
Exchange has most of the infrastructure, BTW. Just that Outlook is a real pile of shit from a programmatic standpoint (just as Notes is shit from a UI perspective...)
The two password problem is due to the fact that the solution being discussed is pretty adhoc -- Unix systems by in large rely on local authentication (/etc/passwd) and SSH is primarily designed to be a secure replacement for telnet. And as for "same user experience" -- having multiple passwords is usually a bad user experience and leads to all sorts of other security problems.
Now, if you substitute some form of directory system (Kerberos/LDAP/NDS/AD/NIS/whatever), you could have a system where you are externally authenticated as you login, and then you use that authentication to seemlessly get the proper level of access on remote machines through encrypted connections. Doesn't help you get a shell at your hosting company's webserver, but a better solution for institutional use than SSH.
--
I totally agree, people now want anything they want while at work, personal email, phone calls, napster (napster? what's that? :P), IM, pr0n. And they want all this in total privacy.
Back in 94 or so, I was involved in a discussion about the loosening the fairly restrictive e-mail policy and the granting of full Internet access to all users.
The conclusion was "YES! If we do this, employees will spend less time on the phone, going out to lunch, shopping, and doing anything that would cause them to leave their desk. The Internet will allow them to be more productive (meaning, work longer hours), which is great for us!"
Of course, now this is being spun as lost productivity, just as how Windows Solitaire was demonized while doodling on paper or staring out the window was conveniently ignored. Sometimes it pays to remember why the company put a phone and an internet-connected computer on everyone's desk.
--