About ten years ago, IBM made some computers like this (eg, the Aptiva 2142). The drives (CDROM and floppy), the power button, and the keyboard and mouse connectors were all in the 'media console' - a box on the desk (which would fit under the monitor). This was connected by a cable a couple of metres in length to the tower case containing the CPU and hard drives.
Unfortunately it made upgrading rather difficult; the motherboard had extra connectors for the media console which no other motherboard had, so if you wanted to upgrade you'd first have to rebuild the PC as a 2140 with the drives and power switch back in the tower case (and that meant ordering extra parts from IBM).
Also, having the CDROM in the media console and the hard drive in the tower did strange things to the IDE bus. The only way I got Windows NT running on one was to stick a SCSI controller and drive in there.
I'm sure something better could be arranged these days, perhaps using USB2 or Firewire.
I saw a suggestion quite a long time ago (I think it was by Jamie Zawinski) that the drawing for widgets should be handled by a 'widget server' rather than the programs themselves.
Since then, Windows XP has come out, and does something similar with UXTHEME.DLL. To draw a disabled button on previous Windows versions you'd have told it to "draw a filled rectangle with a border round it and put some grey text on it"; on XP, you say "Draw the {background; border; text} for a disabled button".
So all you do is write one GTK+ and one KDE theme that use a widget server to draw their controls, and there you are - unified themes. It still wouldn't make the scrollbars in the NeXTSTEP themes actually behave like proper NeXTSTEP scrollbars though:-(
A couple of years or so ago, I wrote clones of some of the CP/M utilities (DATE, DIR, SHOW). The project was of course called ZINC (since ZINC Is Not CP/M).
The original (pre lawsuit) GEM was a very close clone of the Mac UI. However, it didn't support multitasking.
GEM/XM does multitask; I don't know if it was released in the 1980s, but it is downloadable now. For GEM apps it works like MultiFinder on the Mac; for DOS apps it's like the DRDOS Task Manager.
A lot of the look-and-feel changes between GEM/1 and GEM/2 verge on the petty. Apparently only Apple were allowed to have shading in the title bar for the active window. And only Apple were allowed to have scrollbar thumbs that went to the edge of the scrollbar. And having the Desk menu (Apple menu) on the left rather than the right was obviously something Apple would never have allowed to fall into enemy hands.
It's much better if the code's opensourced under the GPL or the BSD licence. That way chunks of it can be used elsewhere.
We need a licence for binaries where the source has been lost. Something like: "You may reverse-engineer these programs; if you distribute disassembled source or derived works these must be under the GPL."
Even if the software's ancient, people will manage to find uses for it. When Caldera released the source to CP/M (not Open Source; the licence is for noncommercial use only) it was 16 years since the last release, but there were still people who wanted it updated for Year 2000 compliance.
It comes in very handy if you want to read a file produced by the abandoned program. Perhaps it's documented, and perhaps it isn't - but even so, where would the documentation be by now?
If the product is open-sourced, there's much less chance of the source getting lost or destroyed by accident.
After your brain has seen a few dozen Win32 style buttons (grey, with a little beveled edge, Arial font with the hotkey underlined)
That isn't Arial. It's MS Sans Serif. Except in MS Office, of course, where it's Tahoma. Or in 16-bit apps, where it's MS Sans Serif Bold. Or in Windows 2.x apps, where it's Fixedsys.
I get very tired with the same plot device being used every time someone uses virtual worlds or gaming in a plot, what we always end up with is "what happens to you in the game, happens to you in life" or somesuch.
Doctor Who did it in the 1970s. And the environment was called the Matrix then, too.
Although both participants "died" quite a bit, they didn't (quite) die in real life, though they came close (temporary stoppages of brain activity and so on). What finally did for one of them was when the villain put the physical system into overload and fried his own henchman.
That story contains the classic line
You were a fool, Doctor, to venture into my domain.
which I think about every time some computer at our office joins an NT domain:-)
Actually, the first version of WinNT was 3.1, either to match the current Windows 3.1, or because it was/wasn't based on OS/2 3.x.
DRDOS went from 3.41 to 5.0. The reason: Since MSDOS 4.0 was so appallingly bad, DRI thought that no-one would want to have any 4.0 version of DOS.
Microsoft Visual C++ went from 2.0 to 4.0, to sync up the compiler and library version numbers (VC++ 2.0 had MFC 3.0; VC++ 4.0 had MFC 4.0). Unfortunately they then lost it with later versions (VC++ 5.0 had MFC 4.2, and VC++ 6.0 has MFC 6.0 in a file called MFC42.DLL!)
Microsoft Visual J++ went from 1.0 to 6.0, to be in step with Visual C++.
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cpdread under DOS, or dsktrans under Linux, can convert CPC floppies into the .DSK format used by CPC emulators.
The Spectrum +3 and PCW can read CPC-formatted discs without any hassle, but not the other way around.
About ten years ago, IBM made some computers like this (eg, the Aptiva 2142). The drives (CDROM and floppy), the power button, and the keyboard and mouse connectors were all in the 'media console' - a box on the desk (which would fit under the monitor). This was connected by a cable a couple of metres in length to the tower case containing the CPU and hard drives.
Unfortunately it made upgrading rather difficult; the motherboard had extra connectors for the media console which no other motherboard had, so if you wanted to upgrade you'd first have to rebuild the PC as a 2140 with the drives and power switch back in the tower case (and that meant ordering extra parts from IBM).
Also, having the CDROM in the media console and the hard drive in the tower did strange things to the IDE bus. The only way I got Windows NT running on one was to stick a SCSI controller and drive in there.
I'm sure something better could be arranged these days, perhaps using USB2 or Firewire.
I saw a suggestion quite a long time ago (I think it was by Jamie Zawinski) that the drawing for widgets should be handled by a 'widget server' rather than the programs themselves.
:-(
Since then, Windows XP has come out, and does something similar with UXTHEME.DLL. To draw a disabled button on previous Windows versions you'd have told it to "draw a filled rectangle with a border round it and put some grey text on it"; on XP, you say "Draw the {background; border; text} for a disabled button".
So all you do is write one GTK+ and one KDE theme that use a widget server to draw their controls, and there you are - unified themes. It still wouldn't make the scrollbars in the NeXTSTEP themes actually behave like proper NeXTSTEP scrollbars though
A couple of years or so ago, I wrote clones of some of the CP/M utilities (DATE, DIR, SHOW). The project was of course called ZINC (since ZINC Is Not CP/M).
GEM/XM does multitask; I don't know if it was released in the 1980s, but it is downloadable now. For GEM apps it works like MultiFinder on the Mac; for DOS apps it's like the DRDOS Task Manager.
A lot of the look-and-feel changes between GEM/1 and GEM/2 verge on the petty. Apparently only Apple were allowed to have shading in the title bar for the active window. And only Apple were allowed to have scrollbar thumbs that went to the edge of the scrollbar. And having the Desk menu (Apple menu) on the left rather than the right was obviously something Apple would never have allowed to fall into enemy hands.
But DRDOS 7 is a pre-emptive multitasker.
There's always GNUstep.
Ah, but in nearly every adventure game after that, XYZZY was an easter egg. Taking, at random, "Zork: A Troll's Eye View"...
>XYZZY
A hollow voice says "Troll".
That isn't Arial. It's MS Sans Serif. Except in MS Office, of course, where it's Tahoma. Or in 16-bit apps, where it's MS Sans Serif Bold. Or in Windows 2.x apps, where it's Fixedsys.
Doctor Who did it in the 1970s. And the environment was called the Matrix then, too.
Although both participants "died" quite a bit, they didn't (quite) die in real life, though they came close (temporary stoppages of brain activity and so on). What finally did for one of them was when the villain put the physical system into overload and fried his own henchman.
That story contains the classic line
which I think about every time some computer at our office joins an NT domainActually, the first version of WinNT was 3.1, either to match the current Windows 3.1, or because it was/wasn't based on OS/2 3.x.
DRDOS went from 3.41 to 5.0. The reason: Since MSDOS 4.0 was so appallingly bad, DRI thought that no-one would want to have any 4.0 version of DOS.
Microsoft Visual C++ went from 2.0 to 4.0, to sync up the compiler and library version numbers (VC++ 2.0 had MFC 3.0; VC++ 4.0 had MFC 4.0). Unfortunately they then lost it with later versions (VC++ 5.0 had MFC 4.2, and VC++ 6.0 has MFC 6.0 in a file called MFC42.DLL!)
Microsoft Visual J++ went from 1.0 to 6.0, to be in step with Visual C++.