When I was at Bell Labs, I got to play with an amazing little box called "Alexander". It looked like a 3B2, shrunk to the size of a large book. It had a Unix that was compressed on a Nintendo-ish rom cart. When you turned it on, you got a login: instantly (from the serial port) while the rest of Unix uncompressed itself from the rom into memory. I don't think it had a hard drive. Seemingly 0 second boot time.
Amazingly cool little box at the time. But like so many things at AT&T, it never saw the light of day.
There's no limit to what the army of PHBs at AT&T could and continue to fsck up. (With or without Microsoft)
Back in the gold rush years, I think the majority of people were excited about the net because they could be heard. Everyone has their own individual interests and expertise and they wanted to share them with the world.
The net made it easy. Sometimes it was just a "my home page" or "here's a picture of my girlfriend" (remember those?) or cars, or other hobbies like favorite band lyrics. But a lot of people are well versed in certain subjects and they could now share this knowledge with an affordable accessibility that print and the airwaves didn't provide.
Then came the lawyers and the media and corporate IP money to back them up. The law firms could hire cheap help to comb AltaVista for their client's keywords.
The law firm shows the giant list to the client, they get paid a bundle for easy work and out went the cease and desist letters. This killed 90% of the personal interest websites.
These days, if you search for something, all you'll get back are offers to sell you what you probably already have.
In the gold rush days, you would actually get back somebody's personal opinion, insight or opinion. It was great, and that also fostered the desire to give back your contribution to the collective. Heady times and the possibility to be heard, to matter, to exist.
In about 8 years, greed has killed it all off almost completely. Now with Google, it's 2 billion channels with nothing on. That and spam.
It's a shame too. I don't think we'll ever have that chance again.
Apple has never shipped 13W3 video as far as I know. (Sun, SGI and NeXT have but they were not targeting the consumer market.) For years, Apple's been DB15 VGA and recently, modern digital video connectors, providing a higher quality image than analog. Times have changed.
The G4 is made for your needs, but I guess you're more of a Dell dude. The world needs ditch diggers too.
In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell.
After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where? I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto. Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23 with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it. Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time....
The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing, as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time, the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice/usr/games and I got a Zork for it from a friend.
We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the first commercial Unix sold in the US.
Re:Why does style have to be masculine?
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 1
fag-wagon huh? Have you ever waxed a New Beetle, preferably a red one? A delightfully sensual experience if there ever was one.
Re:Apple Laptop ADB keyboards?
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
ADB? What are you talking about? You mean like old Apple Desktop Bus Keyboards? You sure are HTML-enhanced-bitchy for an AC that's clueless. ADB!! ABD!!!! It's terrible!! What the keyboard does is a driver layer issue anyway... and I've learned to adapt to any keyboard I'm sitting at in a few minutes anyway. Go play with your Dell.
Putting OS X on wintel makes little marketing sense, it might
please a few people that like to roll their own cheap boxes
but they probably would run a pirated copy anyway.
It would be far more interesting to put OS X on Sun boxes.
There's no real overlap in market segment; Sun isn't going
after the home or laptop market and Apple, at least right now,
doesn't have anything in the big iron server market.
Solaris is ok, but it's not got much of a desktop environment
and some Sun customers might like to have unified access
to Office, Photoshop, iApps etc. New iMacs would make spiffy front
end terminals to big Sun boxes. And a partnership with Sun might bring
some of Solaris robustness and torque into OS X.
Plus, Apple's got a good appreciation for Java, at least better
than M$. I've heard that wintel is banned at Sun, which makes
the TiBook and iBook the laptop of choice there (hearsay, I
don't know if that's true).
I can't see any downside in having OS X/SPARC for Sun,
Apple, or their customers.
I've used almost everything over 25 years and after all of this time, I'm now a Mac user and
developer. I only spend maybe %5 doing system maint things and the rest of the time
I can focus on the task at hand, not troubleshooting problems with my machines.
And now with OS X and it's Unix services, the Mac meets every need I have with style, grace,
and consistency.
Sure for some, tweezing a kernel, wrangling DLL's, or editing config files might be fun but
life's more enjoyable and productive when you get past getting your computer to work right.
Moving OS X to peecee hardware would bring much of that grief back into the user experience,
plus the overhead and hassle with fat binaries for developers and their customers.
Sure, I still have wintel boxes, develop software on them. But they stay in my out-building.
Only Macs are allowed in the house.
You should write your game in C# (or Java or C++) so when it collapses under the weight of it's own sludge, you'll learn what it's like to toss away 6 months worth of work on a bad decision and never make that mistake again. Then you can write it again in ultra clean C and maybe actually ship something that runs halfway decently. With what you are planning, you'll need to get every bit of efficiency out of every critical loop. In a 3D game, especially in massive-multiplayer, you can't afford to trade ease of implementation with not knowing what's going on in your code.
didn't MS just buy a bunch of OpenGL stuff from SGI?
No, they bamboozeled SGI by getting them to build NT boxes and during the romance, got SGI to disclose the OpenGL family jewels. Just like how the M$/Sega relationship begat Xbox while tanking Dreamcast, the M$/SGI relationship begat DirectX3D and a castrated SGI (and the M$ president's spot for R. Belluzo as a reward for a job well done).
Microsoft...masters of the we-win, you-lose "relationship".
Belluzzo was sent in specifically by Microsoft to rape SGI. Mission accomplished, he was rewarded with a top M$ exec job. Thus was born DirectX 3D. If Microsoft knocks on your door and you let them in, it's like taking a big hit of mil-grade anthrax.
The most significant change to computing in 2002 will be that Microsoft will do an Enron into oblivion. Xbox will prove to be a 3 month Xmas blip, XP sales will be a tenth of projections and a few key bank failures in March will induce panic in M$ investors.
Amazing close-mindedness here. No wonder you guys use POS PeeCees, load some pedestrian OS that's not much different than what you could get in the '80s (Coherent etc.), and think you're cutting edge. If this was 1970, you would be defending that slide rule hanging on your belt.
On a more positive note, this is the US, it's a thing that moves, we're gonna race 'em. Speed, distance and endurance records will drive the technology forward.
If Kamen can build one for ~$5K, think of what $100K worth of Ginger would do. Oh, that's right, you've got no vision.
Sun a small little company making low end Unix boxes for Berkly
Stanford, actually. That's what the 'S" stands for. And the i386 was a dog compared to "real" Sun boxes. It could barely get out of it's own way.
NEC? I think you mean NCR.
When I was at Bell Labs, I got to play with an
amazing little box called "Alexander".
It looked like a 3B2, shrunk to the size of a
large book. It had a Unix that was compressed
on a Nintendo-ish rom cart.
When you turned it on, you got a login:
instantly (from the serial port) while the
rest of Unix uncompressed itself from
the rom into memory. I don't think it
had a hard drive. Seemingly 0 second
boot time.
Amazingly cool little box at the time.
But like so many things at AT&T, it never saw the
light of day.
There's no limit to what the army of PHBs
at AT&T could and continue to fsck up.
(With or without Microsoft)
Just like the music and film industries, the game companies keep churning out the same thing:
80% puppet manipulation
10% vehicle manipulation
Then again, that's a lot like real life.
How many times are you going to paste
this fsckin' rant here? This must be the
sixth time I've seen it here.
Yeah, we get the point.
Take some time and work up a fresh thought.
Back in the gold rush years, I think the majority of people were excited about the net because they could be heard.
Everyone has their own individual interests and expertise and they wanted to share them with the world.
The net made it easy. Sometimes it was just a "my home page" or "here's a picture of my girlfriend" (remember those?) or cars, or other hobbies like favorite band lyrics.
But a lot of people are well versed in certain subjects and they could now share this knowledge with an affordable accessibility that print and the airwaves didn't provide.
Then came the lawyers and the media and corporate IP money to back them up.
The law firms could hire cheap help to comb AltaVista for their client's keywords.
The law firm shows the giant list to the client, they get paid a bundle for easy work and out went the cease and desist letters.
This killed 90% of the personal interest websites.
These days, if you search for something, all you'll get back are offers to sell you what you probably already have.
In the gold rush days, you would actually get back somebody's personal opinion, insight or opinion. It was great, and that also fostered the desire to give back your contribution to the collective. Heady times and the possibility to be heard, to matter, to exist.
In about 8 years, greed has killed it all off almost completely. Now with Google, it's 2 billion channels with nothing on. That and spam.
It's a shame too. I don't think we'll ever have that chance again.
Apple has never shipped 13W3 video as far as I know.
(Sun, SGI and NeXT have but they were not targeting the consumer market.)
For years, Apple's been DB15 VGA and recently, modern digital video connectors, providing a higher quality image than analog.
Times have changed.
The G4 is made for your needs, but I guess you're more of a Dell dude.
The world needs ditch diggers too.
In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft
/usr/games
but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that
you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except
without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny
Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell.
After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have
Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where?
I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto.
Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit
to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the
day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was
only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue
from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix
distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23
with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb
drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch
floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards
that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which
I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing
where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it
auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed
pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it.
Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time....
The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing,
as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and
the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time,
the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice
and I got a Zork for it from a friend.
We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was
called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue
of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the
first commercial Unix sold in the US.
You work for Enron?
fag-wagon huh?
Have you ever waxed a New Beetle, preferably a red one? A delightfully sensual experience if there ever was one.
ADB? What are you talking about? .. and I've learned to adapt to any keyboard I'm sitting at in a few minutes anyway.
You mean like old Apple Desktop Bus Keyboards? You sure are HTML-enhanced-bitchy for an AC that's clueless. ADB!! ABD!!!! It's terrible!!
What the keyboard does is a driver layer issue anyway.
Go play with your Dell.
He should have restored it back to working order. At least then he could play tranquility on it.
When I click on MayaPLE351.img, DiskCopy says "Could not mount"
Anyone else have that problem?
I've never seen a Linux desktop that ever could be considered anything but ugly...
again...
M$ owns no part of Apple, influential or otherwise. $150 Mil worth of non-voting shares, long since sold.
Putting OS X on wintel makes little marketing sense, it might
please a few people that like to roll their own cheap boxes
but they probably would run a pirated copy anyway.
It would be far more interesting to put OS X on Sun boxes.
There's no real overlap in market segment; Sun isn't going
after the home or laptop market and Apple, at least right now,
doesn't have anything in the big iron server market.
Solaris is ok, but it's not got much of a desktop environment
and some Sun customers might like to have unified access
to Office, Photoshop, iApps etc. New iMacs would make spiffy front
end terminals to big Sun boxes. And a partnership with Sun might bring
some of Solaris robustness and torque into OS X.
Plus, Apple's got a good appreciation for Java, at least better
than M$. I've heard that wintel is banned at Sun, which makes
the TiBook and iBook the laptop of choice there (hearsay, I
don't know if that's true).
I can't see any downside in having OS X/SPARC for Sun,
Apple, or their customers.
I've used almost everything over 25 years and after all of this time, I'm now a Mac user and
developer. I only spend maybe %5 doing system maint things and the rest of the time
I can focus on the task at hand, not troubleshooting problems with my machines.
And now with OS X and it's Unix services, the Mac meets every need I have with style, grace,
and consistency.
Sure for some, tweezing a kernel, wrangling DLL's, or editing config files might be fun but
life's more enjoyable and productive when you get past getting your computer to work right.
Moving OS X to peecee hardware would bring much of that grief back into the user experience,
plus the overhead and hassle with fat binaries for developers and their customers.
Sure, I still have wintel boxes, develop software on them. But they stay in my out-building.
Only Macs are allowed in the house.
You should write your game in C# (or Java or C++) so when it collapses under the weight of it's own sludge, you'll learn what it's like to toss away 6 months worth of work on a bad decision and never make that mistake again. Then you can write it again in ultra clean C and maybe actually ship something that runs halfway decently. With what you are planning, you'll need to get every bit of efficiency out of every critical loop. In a 3D game, especially in massive-multiplayer, you can't afford to trade ease of implementation with not knowing what's going on in your code.
didn't MS just buy a bunch of OpenGL stuff from SGI?
No, they bamboozeled SGI by getting them to build NT boxes and during the romance, got SGI to disclose the OpenGL family jewels. Just like how the M$/Sega relationship begat Xbox while tanking Dreamcast, the M$/SGI relationship begat DirectX3D and a castrated SGI (and the M$ president's spot for R. Belluzo as a reward for a job well done).
Microsoft...masters of the we-win, you-lose "relationship".
No more Sting?
Maybe this does have an upside. It's almost worth it.
Belluzzo was sent in specifically by Microsoft to rape SGI. Mission accomplished, he was rewarded with a top M$ exec job.
Thus was born DirectX 3D.
If Microsoft knocks on your door and you let them in, it's like taking a big hit of mil-grade anthrax.
The most significant change to computing in 2002 will be that Microsoft will do an Enron into oblivion. Xbox will prove to be a 3 month Xmas blip, XP sales will be a tenth of projections and a few key bank failures in March will induce panic in M$ investors.
At this rate it'll take forever to get to Deep Space Nine.
On a more positive note, this is the US, it's a thing that moves, we're gonna race 'em. Speed, distance and endurance records will drive the technology forward.
If Kamen can build one for ~$5K, think of what $100K worth of Ginger would do. Oh, that's right, you've got no vision.
ahhh....APL....
That's a level of innovation we don't see today. Nobody would even dare.
Nice security boys...
[header] S:\WPSHR\LEGGNSL\XYWRITE\COMMS\COPYRITE.5A
--