... but I wish that the hideous creature which is Javascript had never, ever crawled blinking from the swamp.
Failing that I'd like a browser that had much more control over redirects and javascript. I'd like buttons on the toolbar for Javascript on/off, obey redirects on/off, and I'd also like rulesets to control them (javascript always/never for this site etc).
Yes it's true. OS/2 up to version 1.2 was a joint product of IBM and Microsoft. And the split came when Microsoft tried to let IBM develop OS/2 version 2 while Microsoft monopolised OS/2 version 3 (a preannounced vapourware product).
It was a bit like that moment in Land of the Pharaohs when Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) lets the Pharaoh bleed to death in front of her, to further her own ambitions.
Our site (a university in Oxford, but not the Oxford University) ran on NETBEUI for years and years. It was already well established when I joined in 1991, and some very privileged folk had network connections on - gasp - "the backbone" (a bit of coax that ran through ceiling voids and through the ducts between the buildings).
We ran Lan Manager 2.0 with one server (running Microsoft OS/2!) and forty DOS/Windows 3.0 clients. We evaluated and immediately rejected TCP/IP because (a) the server-side stack made the server blow up and (b) the client-side stack consisted of umpteen little TSRs which together left enough real-mode memory to run EDLIN. I should also point out that we British had brilliantly chosen X25 rather than TCP/IP as our national network protocol so the Internet dawned rather late here.
NETBEUI was succesful here for three reasons. Firstly it was "on" in a default installation of server and client. Secondly it was chatty and self-discovering, a bit like Appletalk (another technically crappy protocol that nevertheless made life easy when doing small setups). Thirdly it was monolithic and small in memory.
Now you aren't supposed to go above about 200 nodes in a bridged environment like this, as any fule kno, but we eventually had about 2,000 nodes running NETBEUI quite happily. It was only last summer that we finally got around to implementing VLANS on the central Cisco - and this brought the house down, as Microsoft's SMB clients (in 3.11 and 95) are pretty broken when it comes to working on vanilla TCP/IP with just a minimal LMHOSTS file and DNS support (we didn't want to use WINS).
Nowadays NETBEUI only operates in one of our VLANS, the one containing the main servers and the public PC labs. We've recently been remote-booting 95 using Lanworks ROMs and BOOTP. They load a floppy disk image which has the real-mode Lan Manager client (including NETBEUI), do a bit of hard disk integrity checking/maintenance, then whack the real-mode client on the head, vapourise the virtual A: drive, and execute Windows 95.
Works like a charm.
SO... what is the effect of this announcement on us? Well, back in the days of DEC we bought several big Alphas. We've been feeling pretty annoyed since Compaq/Microsoft ended development on this platform. Now, assuming that SAMBA gets modified to play nicely with this NETBEUI stack, we can give them a new lease of life by running Linux on them instead.
Microsoft's early naming strategies weren't that great. As a companion to Excel's predecessor, the spreadsheet MultiPlan, they nearly called their word processor MultiTool... but somebody saw sense and called it Word instead.
Another thing that the highly-paid naming gurus often miss is the reader's subconcious ability to correct a typo. I can't be the only one who always reads Imation as Imitation.
I was the first in our family to get a computer (Sinclair Spectrum, 1982). Made me what I am. Anyone else here moved RAMTOP?
My stepmother, a dealer in antique porcelain figurines (Dresden etc) was the second. In 1984 she rightly ignored my advice (to get a Sinclair QL, Christ forgive me!) and let a "consultant" sell her an Apricot running MS-DOS, Wordstar and some lashed-up database written in compiled BASIC using the BTRIEVE libs. Apricot (like DEC, Sanyo, Sirius, Research Machines and Phillips in those days) made non-IBM-architecture MS-DOS machines (640Kb limit? the Apricot had a 960Kb limit!).
This machine, like many in this era, shipped with DOS plus a couple of early GUIs: GEM from Digital Research and ACTIVITY from Apricot itself. I showed these to both of them and they both made comments like: - Why would anyone need these silly pictures? - Don't insult my intelligence! - This just makes it slower...
Skip forward to 1990. Stepmother is now on a 386sx using WordPerfect 5.1 and has junked the database, doing everything she needs with WP51 macros and merge. The machine has Windows 3.0 on it but she never uses it. Dad has inherited her old Apricot and is running a really weird implementation of Wordperfect 4.1. That year he too obtains a 386sx and in due course the household standardises on WP5.1. A year later I do a few image scans for him and show him how to manipulate them in an early TIFF editor called IPHOTO that runs in Windows 3.1.
For a few more years they live in WordPerfect for DOS and only use Windows when the REALLY HAVE TO... Both of them are uncomfortable with the core feature of Windows, namely BEING IN MANY PROGRAMS AT ONCE. The "state cues" are poor in Windows, whereas in the old world life is simple: If the screen is black you are in DOS, if the screen is blue you are in WordPerfect.
Skip forward to now. Dad spends most of his life in WP51 for DOS on a 90MHz Pentium. Drops into Windows 3.11 to run the scanner. Stepmother is about to buy a new machine to replace her still-functioning 386sx. She wants to use the Web and email, but not all the time. Mostly she wants to be single-tasking in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
So sometime next month I shall travel to their house and monkey with her MSDOS.SYS so as to leave her, most of the time, in "Windows 98 Command Prompt only", i.e. DOS...
Personally, I think they have a point. They like a machine to be in only one state at a time.
I couldn't see a "reply" button on Microsoft's page so I'll reply here.
I happen to work from a P166 equivalent with 48 Mb RAM. I can work with X, Netscape, Winframe client, TV, Audio mixer, pppd, xdaliclock, videotext app, nice CD ap (xmcd) all at once.
Try all the same under NT and it will page like a bastard - assuming that hauppauge's own drivers don't make it trap instead!
In the TNG episode "The Inner Light", Picard's brain is directly accessed by a probe from a long-dead civilisation, and during his experience he lives among them for 40 years, eventually (at an apparently great age) witnessing the launch of the probe itself.
I have to say, this was my personal greatest lump-in-throat, tears-in-eyes moment of the whole of Star Trek. A generic meme off the telly...
Hercules's first attempt to dig themselves out of their one-product hole probably harmed their chances - it was a pair of cards, one mono and one colour, which were basically done to the original Herc resolution but with downloadable soft text fonts and, in the case of the InColor card, colour text attributes plus a bitmapped color mode that was never used, I believe, except by Hercules's own demos. Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS did use the funky text modes to provide onscreen Greek and italics.
Everybody else was making VGA-compatible stuff and Paradise (now Western Digital) had the market sewn up for a time.
N10 did exist (I was wrong about it never seeing the light of day - it was renamed the i860) and was the original NT platform (see here for a nostalgia-inducing account.
"New Technology" was retrofitted to the NT monicker by the marketing department.
As for the Dec/Compaq thing - maybe we just had good luck with Dec and (ongoing) bad luck with Compaq.
In 1996, here at Oxford Brookes University, the Computer Services Helpdesk got a weird call.
Nobody recognised the error message (BDOS error on A:) but eventually they got the user to describe her machine: dark green, with an integral 3" disk drive. The manufacturer's logo said Amstrad. At this point they passed the call over to me.
When I had recovered sufficiently (I swear the whole of St Elmo's Fire passed before my eyes) I established that:
The user had received the computer in 1986 - it cost about 400 British pounds at the time.
She had undergone three hours training at that time.
She had done useful word processing in Protext on CP/M for ten years.
After ten years she had had her first ever error message, and correctly called the helpdesk. Who eventually referred her to someone old and sad enough to be able to help her, i.e. me.
I found this whole episode very encouraging, though it put my head in a serious 80's timewarp for a while...
At the university where I work, we were unfortunately committed to NT quite a while back - mainly because we had built a lot of custom code on top of MS Lan Manager on Netbeui.
We'd had an annoying time with Compaq's Intel boxes, and their crappy dealer-based sales system, and their pathetic support, so when we wanted some new high-end kit to run NT we happily bought DEC Alphas because the were big and fast and made by DEC, who had always supported us well with our DECStations/Microvaxen etc. This was about 1994 I suppose.
At the time, NT was more multiplatform than Linux (eek!) as it ran on Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. Our top programmer gave us a talk explaining that "NT" had originally stood for N10 ("N-ten") a prototype chip that never went into production.
You can imagine our feelings, some years later, when DEC (good service) was bought by Compaq (terrible service by half-trained teenagers).
Recently we had a dodgy ethernet card on one of our NT Alphas, so our Compaq dealer, three days later, sent out a witless fool who half-overwrote the BIOS and left it unbootable for another day.
So now there will be no NT/Alpha expertise left within the useless parent company either.
If we could remote-boot (via BOOTP) into DOS 7 with a small-memory-footprint net client that could see a SAMBA server, we'd dump this rubbish and never pay a penny for NT again. But sadly, only a NETBEUI-based client is small enough at the moment.
It's even worse that that - the BBC report I saw had the customer saying (shouting) the amount into the ATM himself!
I'm perturbed by all this talk of muggers ripping out eyeballs, which I hadn't thought of.
How about using voice-print ID on a random text flashed up at the time of the cash request - so I would at least have to be alive in front of the ATM. The bank would have previously analysed enough of my recorded voice to re-recognise me saying practically anything in English. When I actually use the ATM it randomly composes a phrase and tells me to recite it back ("The goat hides the green trousers under the observatory"). This would mean that muggers would have no incentive to mutilate me...
Here in the UK the most significant low-price computer vendor was Amstrad, famous for their monochrome CPM v3 machine the PCW8256 (launched in the mid-80s, with GSX and all). It was on this seminal machine that I learned the syntax for PIP, the silliest COPY command ever written.
When they moved into the 16-bit world it was with the twin 5.25" drive Amstrad 1512. In a moment of madness they launched it with both MS-DOS and DR-DOS, GEM, and the worst ever version of Wordstar. Ever.
At the time I had both affection and respect for Intergalactic Digital Research (they dropped the "Intergalactic"). But on this Amstrad camel, the DR stuff seemed like a struggle, whereas the MS stuff just worked.
For me the battle was fought and won by beastly Microsoft when I found that Ventura 1 needed a special cooked version of DR Gem, when Pagemaker 1 worked fine on regular Windows 1.
I was inordinately impressed when I ran the same binary (fish.exe) under Windows on an IBM-compatible, a Sanyo, an Apricot Xen, and an RM Nimbus (186!). The last three were non-IBM compatibles that ran MSDOS back then.
People today are rightly scathing of MS, but in 1990 they delivered Windows 3.0 which provided both huge leaps in functionality and liberation from the arrogance of IBM, who were then in the business of fraudulently tying OS/2 to their proprietary PS/2 bus.
What a difference nine years makes! Today I find Microsoft's lies and evasions almost as fatuous as those of my own elected leaders...
Slashdot Mirror
... but I wish that the hideous creature which is Javascript had never, ever crawled blinking from the swamp.
Failing that I'd like a browser that had much more control over redirects and javascript. I'd like buttons on the toolbar for Javascript on/off, obey redirects on/off, and I'd also like rulesets to control them (javascript always/never for this site etc).
Yes it's true. OS/2 up to version 1.2 was a joint product of IBM and Microsoft. And the split came when Microsoft tried to let IBM develop OS/2 version 2 while Microsoft monopolised OS/2 version 3 (a preannounced vapourware product).
It was a bit like that moment in Land of the Pharaohs when Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) lets the Pharaoh bleed to death in front of her, to further her own ambitions.
george
Our site (a university in Oxford, but not the Oxford University) ran on NETBEUI for years and years. It was already well established when I joined in 1991, and some very privileged folk had network connections on - gasp - "the backbone" (a bit of coax that ran through ceiling voids and through the ducts between the buildings).
We ran Lan Manager 2.0 with one server (running Microsoft OS/2!) and forty DOS/Windows 3.0 clients. We evaluated and immediately rejected TCP/IP because (a) the server-side stack made the server blow up and (b) the client-side stack consisted of umpteen little TSRs which together left enough real-mode memory to run EDLIN. I should also point out that we British had brilliantly chosen X25 rather than TCP/IP as our national network protocol so the Internet dawned rather late here.
NETBEUI was succesful here for three reasons. Firstly it was "on" in a default installation of server and client. Secondly it was chatty and self-discovering, a bit like Appletalk (another technically crappy protocol that nevertheless made life easy when doing small setups). Thirdly it was monolithic and small in memory.
Now you aren't supposed to go above about 200 nodes in a bridged environment like this, as any fule kno, but we eventually had about 2,000 nodes running NETBEUI quite happily. It was only last summer that we finally got around to implementing VLANS on the central Cisco - and this brought the house down, as Microsoft's SMB clients (in 3.11 and 95) are pretty broken when it comes to working on vanilla TCP/IP with just a minimal LMHOSTS file and DNS support (we didn't want to use WINS).
Nowadays NETBEUI only operates in one of our VLANS, the one containing the main servers and the public PC labs. We've recently been remote-booting 95 using Lanworks ROMs and BOOTP. They load a floppy disk image which has the real-mode Lan Manager client (including NETBEUI), do a bit of hard disk integrity checking/maintenance, then whack the real-mode client on the head, vapourise the virtual A: drive, and execute Windows 95.
Works like a charm.
SO... what is the effect of this announcement on us? Well, back in the days of DEC we bought several big Alphas. We've been feeling pretty annoyed since Compaq/Microsoft ended development on this platform. Now, assuming that SAMBA gets modified to play nicely with this NETBEUI stack, we can give them a new lease of life by running Linux on them instead.
george
Microsoft's early naming strategies weren't that great. As a companion to Excel's predecessor, the spreadsheet MultiPlan, they nearly called their word processor MultiTool... but somebody saw sense and called it Word instead.
george
Another thing that the highly-paid naming gurus often miss is the reader's subconcious ability to correct a typo. I can't be the only one who always reads Imation as Imitation.
george
I was the first in our family to get a computer (Sinclair Spectrum, 1982). Made me what I am. Anyone else here moved RAMTOP?
My stepmother, a dealer in antique porcelain figurines (Dresden etc) was the second. In 1984 she rightly ignored my advice (to get a Sinclair QL, Christ forgive me!) and let a "consultant" sell her an Apricot running MS-DOS, Wordstar and some lashed-up database written in compiled BASIC using the BTRIEVE libs. Apricot (like DEC, Sanyo, Sirius, Research Machines and Phillips in those days) made non-IBM-architecture MS-DOS machines (640Kb limit? the Apricot had a 960Kb limit!).
This machine, like many in this era, shipped with DOS plus a couple of early GUIs: GEM from Digital Research and ACTIVITY from Apricot itself. I showed these to both of them and they both made comments like:
- Why would anyone need these silly pictures?
- Don't insult my intelligence!
- This just makes it slower...
Skip forward to 1990. Stepmother is now on a 386sx using WordPerfect 5.1 and has junked the database, doing everything she needs with WP51 macros and merge. The machine has Windows 3.0 on it but she never uses it. Dad has inherited her old Apricot and is running a really weird implementation of Wordperfect 4.1. That year he too obtains a 386sx and in due course the household standardises on WP5.1. A year later I do a few image scans for him and show him how to manipulate them in an early TIFF editor called IPHOTO that runs in Windows 3.1.
For a few more years they live in WordPerfect for DOS and only use Windows when the REALLY HAVE TO... Both of them are uncomfortable with the core feature of Windows, namely BEING IN MANY PROGRAMS AT ONCE. The "state cues" are poor in Windows, whereas in the old world life is simple: If the screen is black you are in DOS, if the screen is blue you are in WordPerfect.
Skip forward to now. Dad spends most of his life in WP51 for DOS on a 90MHz Pentium. Drops into Windows 3.11 to run the scanner. Stepmother is about to buy a new machine to replace her still-functioning 386sx. She wants to use the Web and email, but not all the time. Mostly she wants to be single-tasking in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
So sometime next month I shall travel to their house and monkey with her MSDOS.SYS so as to leave her, most of the time, in "Windows 98 Command Prompt only", i.e. DOS...
Personally, I think they have a point. They like a machine to be in only one state at a time.
george
I couldn't see a "reply" button on Microsoft's page so I'll reply here.
I happen to work from a P166 equivalent with 48 Mb RAM. I can work with X, Netscape, Winframe client, TV, Audio mixer, pppd, xdaliclock, videotext app, nice CD ap (xmcd) all at once.
Try all the same under NT and it will page like a bastard - assuming that hauppauge's own drivers don't make it trap instead!
Let's hear it for code that is small in memory!
george
Windows 95's clouds were, well, just clouds.
They redesigned them for Windows 98, and whenever I see them, I expect to see, in the centre, not the Windows logo, but Donald Duck.
george
hmm, that would then be pronounced Care-on as its really a letter Chi (as in TeX).
george
In the TNG episode "The Inner Light", Picard's brain is directly accessed by a probe from a long-dead civilisation, and during his experience he lives among them for 40 years, eventually (at an apparently great age) witnessing the launch of the probe itself.
I have to say, this was my personal greatest lump-in-throat, tears-in-eyes moment of the whole of Star Trek. A generic meme off the telly...
george
Hercules's first attempt to dig themselves out of their one-product hole probably harmed their chances - it was a pair of cards, one mono and one colour, which were basically done to the original Herc resolution but with downloadable soft text fonts and, in the case of the InColor card, colour text attributes plus a bitmapped color mode that was never used, I believe, except by Hercules's own demos. Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS did use the funky text modes to provide onscreen Greek and italics.
Everybody else was making VGA-compatible stuff and Paradise (now Western Digital) had the market sewn up for a time.
george
Oh yes - fired up DU, the well-known disk sector editor for CP/M, and cudgelled the disk into behaving itself.
The cause - I suppose most floppies' sector marks begin to fade 10 years after formatting.
george
"Disk Editor? We hand-wrote bits to the disk with a magnet!"
N10 did exist (I was wrong about it never seeing the light of day - it was renamed the i860) and was the original NT platform (see here for a nostalgia-inducing account.
"New Technology" was retrofitted to the NT monicker by the marketing department.
As for the Dec/Compaq thing - maybe we just had good luck with Dec and (ongoing) bad luck with Compaq.
george
In 1996, here at Oxford Brookes University, the Computer Services Helpdesk got a weird call.
Nobody recognised the error message (BDOS error on A:) but eventually they got the user to describe her machine: dark green, with an integral 3" disk drive. The manufacturer's logo said Amstrad. At this point they passed the call over to me.
When I had recovered sufficiently (I swear the whole of St Elmo's Fire passed before my eyes) I established that:
The user had received the computer in 1986 - it cost about 400 British pounds at the time.
She had undergone three hours training at that time.
She had done useful word processing in Protext on CP/M for ten years.
After ten years she had had her first ever error message, and correctly called the helpdesk. Who eventually referred her to someone old and sad enough to be able to help her, i.e. me.
I found this whole episode very encouraging, though it put my head in a serious 80's timewarp for a while...
george
At the university where I work, we were unfortunately committed to NT quite a while back - mainly because we had built a lot of custom code on top of MS Lan Manager on Netbeui.
We'd had an annoying time with Compaq's Intel boxes, and their crappy dealer-based sales system, and their pathetic support, so when we wanted some new high-end kit to run NT we happily bought DEC Alphas because the were big and fast and made by DEC, who had always supported us well with our DECStations/Microvaxen etc. This was about 1994 I suppose.
At the time, NT was more multiplatform than Linux (eek!) as it ran on Intel, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. Our top programmer gave us a talk explaining that "NT" had originally stood for N10 ("N-ten") a prototype chip that never went into production.
You can imagine our feelings, some years later, when DEC (good service) was bought by Compaq (terrible service by half-trained teenagers).
Recently we had a dodgy ethernet card on one of our NT Alphas, so our Compaq dealer, three days later, sent out a witless fool who half-overwrote the BIOS and left it unbootable for another day.
So now there will be no NT/Alpha expertise left within the useless parent company either.
If we could remote-boot (via BOOTP) into DOS 7 with a small-memory-footprint net client that could see a SAMBA server, we'd dump this rubbish and never pay a penny for NT again. But sadly, only a NETBEUI-based client is small enough at the moment.
george
Just be grateful he didn't call Tipper!
george, once again regretting the passing of Frank Zappa
It's even worse that that - the BBC report I saw had the customer saying (shouting) the amount into
the ATM himself!
I'm perturbed by all this talk of muggers ripping out eyeballs, which I hadn't thought of.
How about using voice-print ID on a random text flashed up at the time of the cash request - so I would at least have to be alive in front of the ATM. The bank would have previously analysed enough of my recorded voice to re-recognise me saying practically anything in English. When I actually use the ATM it randomly composes a phrase and tells me to recite it back ("The goat hides the green trousers under the observatory"). This would mean that muggers would have no incentive to mutilate me...
george
Is it just me, or do most of us here read lots of tech news sites - and probably caught that story a monht ago?
george
"That green-blooded sonovabitch! It's his revenge for all those arguments he lost!"
I remember these days too.
Here in the UK the most significant low-price computer vendor was Amstrad, famous for their monochrome CPM v3 machine the PCW8256 (launched in the mid-80s, with GSX and all). It was on this seminal machine that I learned the syntax for PIP, the silliest COPY command ever written.
When they moved into the 16-bit world it was with the twin 5.25" drive Amstrad 1512. In a moment of madness they launched it with both MS-DOS and DR-DOS, GEM, and the worst ever version of Wordstar. Ever.
At the time I had both affection and respect for Intergalactic Digital Research (they dropped the "Intergalactic"). But on this Amstrad camel, the DR stuff seemed like a struggle, whereas the MS stuff just worked.
For me the battle was fought and won by beastly Microsoft when I found that Ventura 1 needed a special cooked version of DR Gem, when Pagemaker 1 worked fine on regular Windows 1.
I was inordinately impressed when I ran the same binary (fish.exe) under Windows on an IBM-compatible, a Sanyo, an Apricot Xen, and an RM Nimbus (186!). The last three were non-IBM compatibles that ran MSDOS back then.
People today are rightly scathing of MS, but in 1990 they delivered Windows 3.0 which provided both huge leaps in functionality and liberation from the arrogance of IBM, who were then in the business of fraudulently tying OS/2 to their proprietary PS/2 bus.
What a difference nine years makes! Today I find Microsoft's lies and evasions almost as fatuous as those of my own elected leaders...
george
They are using a material unknown in all Federation records!
"Someone is trying to kill me - he keeps sending me plastic bags, but with the warning about not putting them over my head CROSSED OUT!"
(Alexei Sayle, 1991)