The Windows calculator is only an algebraic one. It does not handle RPN notation, In my younger days, I wrote a program in 8bit rombasic that emulated something like a HP15, but you could set the operation in 'base by', eg "base 73 by 10's". You could set your own degrees and logs as well, independently of the base (eg 28 sto T would set the circle to 28 degrees.)
The calculator on the desktop is not really all that useful, unless you can edit the calculation history. For plain dos and Windows, i used to use a thing called 'acalc' from PC-DOS 7, but i wrote a rather cute calculator in REXX, which does much of the same thing. (It supports trig functions in circles too).
Of course, we see reactos has a nice calculator that looks pretty much like the windows one. They had the thing set up so you could run the winxp type version under w2000. Microsoft forced you through a large DLL for this activity. Nothing like what you need to run the norton desktop for windows one though. It uses quite a large slab of the application.
The runs on the LU are too short to do staff-changes in this way. It's easier to just have the new crew take over at some station. Most suburbab trains here don't have staff-cars. Staff who are travelling to a point do so in the passenger cars.
In Australia, there are runs from Melbourne to Darwin, or Sydney to Perth, which are handled by sets of on-board crew, these change at various places where there is no staff-room or even town. Because there are a lot of companies operating, each company would provide its own facilities, and as such one would have a coach behind the engines, where the off-duty crew would ride on.
The Inlander is a main-line passenger train from Townsville to Mt Isa, of some 600 miles. Mount Isa is the terminus, is an unstaffed halt, so the train-crew do things there too. The journey used to be 24 hours when I travelled on it, and they don't have staff-points along the way.
The Pilbara routes are short enough to do the trip in a day. But runs typically in the 600 mile run get staff-cars. The Westlander and Inlander in Qld run staff-rooms in the van. The main reasons for putting on staff-cars are to be able to close remote engine-sheds, like Charleville and Cloncurry.
My brother worked coal trains, and they would depending on the company, work to Mooronbah (where quarters were provided), or crew change at points halfway between depots, so in and out of copperbella.,
It's interesting that AC says that 'decisions about the control of the train are done in real time on the train' and then says 'these trains operate without any people on them'. This sounds like some kind of on-board computer is in place, so what are the people in Perth who oversee all this do?
The trains are being drive remotely, rather like the London Tube trains have been for years. There's still someone at the controls, but no one on the footplate. This means you can change staff half-way through a trip, without requiring a staff-car attached.
Given that in the news too, is where BHP derailed a train that ran away from the driver (who was inspecting the train), they used remote signalling control to throw a set of points and run it into a passing loop with no escape, it would be interesting. But this is a run-away train, the sort that has happened many times before on suburban networks.
I imagine that to forfill the full function of the driver, one needs to deal with the likes of hot axle boxes, cracked and broken tyres, and all sorts of other things before it would be fully remote.
The problem, I think, is that the overall model is lost. That programing has become something different to doing things on the computer.
In younger days, I could program Lotus for DOS, even doing clever things like programmically hiding lines in print, or adding one's own menu to a spreadsheet. Then Windows came along, and it was all hidden in things like VBA. It no longer was a copy of the commands with logic.
When you could get into files, and see what was needed, you could program for it. I used an RTF file as a batch for a rexx processor, that created documents based on the user input file, and checking the file you could produce good copies of letters. It's a lot harder to do this with a binary file.
I still use REXX. It's a simple language, and IBM envisaged it as the glue of the OS. But they did not lock it up like visual basic. The thing is an extension of the command prompt, and you can write neat filters for things, or fiddle with INI and registry, and create desktop icons from a batch. The current install on my computer is to copy a directory structure, and run the batch file to create links to lots of programs.
The thing with using paragraphs, sentences, etc, is that it allows one to bite off bits of information. We already use em-dashes to mark off particular clauses we wish to emphersise -- to this point -- but now argue about spaces. White-space helps the reader catch the large-scale of the text. Setting a sentence off in double-space is one devise that does this. Even in the font i type here, it is easier to pick sentences off.
Paragraphs are likewise set off by a blank line, or first-line indent. Where first-line indent is not permitted, then one should use blank line separation. Quotes and examples should be set in an indented paragraph, where the quote is the paragraph.
Bold text is appropriate if one wants the text to stand out on the page at first glance. Highlighted text that is meant to be emphersised in context should be in italic.
Over here, the bald eagle has a facination for removing drones from the sky. I suppose we have to add yet another dangerous wildlife to the list: ravenous cockies eating the bandwidth!
It would seem that the IBM plug-issue as a method of regulating third-party trade might rear its ugly head here. The purpose of some of Apple's 'innovations' are not new ideas, but to prevent an aftermarket of things.
I'm nigh on near sixty, these are the sort of things wizards of various kinds (inc me) did. I did a fair bit of computing from 1977, but the main iron arrived in 1992.
BASIC, the kind of stuff you find in ROMBASIC and BASICA/GWBASIC, not QBASIC.
Wiring up things like cross-over cables and null modems.
Using a line-editor to edit text files (such as MS-Edlin).
Running pipes and scripts to do things.
XYZ-Wars. eg Edlin is better than Copycon
IBM Mainframe printer codes, and how to convert these into Windows or dos.
Writing to the iron in some code.
Computers before file-systems and operating systems. (The fourth computer i used actually had an operating system).
I really like the game. I used to play the solitaire version when i was younger.
We heavily modified the rules, so that you could have unlimited building, so eg a thousand hotels on vine. Ah.. that will be £1,000,000, and we'll build another 666 hotels there.
The solitaire version is that you 'play the bank', buy all the land, and then bill the bank for staying there. Kind of like the clintons, but it was long before them.
I don't recall the cat. It used to be a lever in the versions from the sixties. Forty years on, i can still write out much of the board, and the hotel and base rentals for it. Just a little wasted time:)
There are already a lot of videos circulating that show vote-flipping, where you vote for A, but the machine records B. Making selfies illegal would make the evidence that this has happeened inadmissable in court.
They claim the boogey man (russians) did it, with little or no proof. The fact that Wikileaks is handling it suggests that it's more an inside job. They like some sort of creditability in their stuff.
The claim that the Russians did it means they don't know how to handle classified information. Having classified information outside of a classified site is a felony, and we note the poor sailor in california that got nabbed for six photos at the lowest level. Here we're talking of 22 emails at Top Secret, supposedly left on a computer come what may,
Clinton really does not want you to see the archive, because it shows some fairly serious crimes.
Some of us who lived in the dim past days of OS/2 and limited support. You just make your own i suppose. A great variety of programs are removed by hand, especially if the system is not pre-emptively single-tasking in just the way ye want. So you fire up the range of utilities needed to do things.
Until recently, I used Windows 2000, but have since moved on to Windows 7 Ultimate. They started putting on this 'free upgrade to windows 10' on Windows 7. Kind of like how websites offer you free toolbars for your web browser that pins your computer in. I suppose it's one thing if your Browser updates, cause you can dump it overboard, it's different if your OS does.
So you can hand-remove it. The trouble is that the programs are locked, and run on the user System authority of 'TrustedInstaller' So if you don't have a neat utility that can wrangle the trustedinstaller permsisions, it's pretty hard. Someone cobbled a ' run as trusted installer' program, which copies the token of TI and runs your proggie on that token. Ok. Then you can hunt down the directory and trim the files (ie you can't delete them even if you're running as administrator or system). Needless to say GWX appeared about five or six times.
Being for the benefit of users who pay by the megabyte upload, Microsoft provided a 'background' service which hammers the hard drive for a good few minutes. You can't stop that outside of running as TI either. You can't even read the strings in the binary until you do it as TI. "We're just poking around your hard disk and seeing what sort of stuff you have".
It is of course, spaghetti ini files. Microsoft tried it in the Win2k resource kit (which i looked at at this time), which uses a local ini file, bounces to a CLSID back to a DLL in the system32 directory, back to a registry for more settings, and bounce back to an INI file in the reskit directory. I wanted to add the support kit to this stuff. It worked, sort of.
So "TrustedInstaller" seems to run at a level hitherto reserved for viruses. Even the clever folk would not have the wherewithall to cope with TI without serious hacking. It is little wonder that people use GWXCP and Never10. Vigilance is the price of democracy.
None of the references point to co-gravition, or Heaviside's force, which seems to produce much of the desired results called for.
Co-gravitation just requires to rethink the nature of energy, though, since it implies that the gravitational field is a sink of energy,
Flag as Inappropriate.
A good deal of work has been done by the likes of O. Jeffimenko, and more recently T de Mees. Heaviside suggested the necessary forces in 1893.
The OS/2 and Windows shells together, complement features missing in the other. The sort of hacks you can do with REXX and the WPS don't cut it in Windows, but MSFT got the idea right when they had proper files, rather than just EAs for their shell. I even added items to a windows desktop remotely. IBM gave a lot of flexibility to the REXX api to the shell, but the SETUP string was a single element, and it could had been something akin to an environment in an INI file.
One could had done some interesting things with PIF files. For example, they could had launched an application off-path, and the same icon could have had several pages for different operating systems, so for example, the Boxer.pif could launch boxer, tko or boxer/2 for different operating systems. You put a mob of these in a directory and you could launch different applications without having to go to the desktop, or some menuing system.
So, you could have a fairly decent file patcher, and still just have a single link in the PIF file.
EXTPROC in OS/2, is the DOS version of the UNIX/! thing. Where in UNIX, you have to have perl in/usr/bin/perl or something, in the new shell, it would simply look for perl.pif, either in the pif or extproc directory. Doing this means you could run the same perl script under different environments. Extproc could be added to other languages, so one could see or launch a script under something like FAR or some other program that takes an external script.
For example, the OS/2 EWS "StartDOS" expects a REXX script as input, so if you made REXX handle EXTPROC, you could start the startDOS script as extproc/rexx StartDOS
Alternate DOS/Unix command line personalities, so that programs that look for UNIX or DOS would not have to be rewritten. Likewise, you could convert the drives into different pointers in the unix system, so that you could have multiple cwd's (eg subst c:/usr )
Run a file under a different extension. You can already do things like start OEMSETUP.BIN with the extension, and many utilities load.TMP,.MOD etc as exe files, so it's hardly a bug there. Note that in Windows 98+, the xcopy32.mod is just xcopy.exe, and works without the other files if so loaded. What it can do is to allow you to open an exe as a rar file, etc, eg open.rar rarexe.exe would instruct RAR to open it as a rar file.
Clipboard and Select interface from the command line. You could do things like 'select = ls pk*.*' , which would add the output files of the ls command to the select list, select/a is append to the list, and then/copy./paste./cut,/all,/move/reverse,/u would do various things to the list. @select is then a virtual list that can be used in any command that accepts lists.
Multiple desktops at session level. Something like LaTeX involves lots of little files in the path, which are largely used purely for Latex. A TeX desktop (by setting desktop=tex in the PIF), might open up a window of utilities that share more or less like the same virtual machine. You create objects in there which inherit the common Latex settings, so ye could have an Editor in there, like WinEdit, etc. When you are not playing LaTeX, these are no longer in the path. These could be in 'groups' like Win31 Progman, and you put links out to the common paths.
Multi-language interface, so one can use REXX. Lua, or a variety of other languages to access system functions. Something like 'fdisk' might report things like the size and file system of a device, and a function-call like call 'fdisk' diskfree, 'c:' could be used in any script, including command.com.
Network as a separate desktop, so one can be logged into several networks at once.
Some of the ideas that came out of the early computing times make much more sense than the current range of 'innovations'. Most pay-ware is legacy stuff on shipping, and eventually you move from dedicated programs for doing X to well-thought-out programs that use some sort of open idiom (like spreadsheets).
I use REXX. My tendency is to use cross-platform stuff because the operating system could change from DOS to OS/2 to Windows, or whatever. Regina REXX is to be had on all platforms. Code i wrote back in the 1990's still work reliably today. Programs i used back in the 1990s have to be ever updated. A number of utilities do not have to be compiled. You can have a fancy program that factorises numbers, and then construct the number to factorise in rexx, and run the command from inside rexx, eg 'factor' me You can even have factor set to a variable, as in factor="c:\utils\factor.exe" and then write the line "factor me" without the quotes, and it will string these strings together, and run "c:\utils\factor.exe 1727999" at the prompt.
Essentially, one is going to find examples of printed code, like fortran or rexx, which one can import without modification. My recollection is that fortran does not require one to think too hard about variable kinds. A chemist is a chemist, not a computer science graduate. He's more interested in formalderhides than data type declarations.
I suppose that when terminals cost the price of houses, and the computers lived in air-conditioned pens with white-coats at hand, and boas under the floor, computing time was scarse.
Technology depends on how far one lives out from the main stream. I used punched cards and paper tape when i went through my course in the seventies. I used a teletype machine at work, it had a fairly large recriprocating mass, it used to "walk".
Still, it amuses me to think back then we talked about 'Automatic Data Processing' (ADP), but every bit was expensive and one spent a good deal of trying to get as much information into the available data space. Now-days, data is cheap, and everyone calls it "Information Technology". Its rather silly really. Most IT people spend their time pouring data from one jug to another, with little regard to 'information' or how to optimise things.
I still know how to find the main cycles of a program and bum speed out of it. You did that in the ancient days, and because i wanted to run the cycle a couple of thousand millions of times, it is of some profit to do this even today.
I have been using these letters since i was at high school, say early 1970s. I tried out ð too, but Modern english represents both of these by a single letter 'th'. One has ick and in, weaer or neier. It's in alphabets already, there's no need for a new rune when its been with us years. Writing "ðe" for "e" is like writing "as" as "az", and other 'newspeak' idioms.
Writing orn is pretty easy, and you get to learn to keep the ascenders on p quite short. Other than that, one gets people who get confused with is. I had a comment or three to the effect that "all of my ths come out like 'p's". I usually respond along the lines of trying to enquire about whether they were Non-English-Speaking Background or something.
The letter has existed for quite some time. A recent tome in the post 'archelogical papers', bought for yet another OE thing that most folk have long forgotten (the long hundred = counts by 120), has a church registery, with the likes of 'Richard, ye son of Peter and Mary', where ye is a form of e the capital looks something like an I, with a rod coming from the middle to 1 o'clock.
The 'polygloss as nature intended' on my website, is constructed in thorns, it's quite an 'easy read', and does not look too ugly. There are some 'th' in there, because some words have a separate t and h, eg the name Wythoff, which is Wyt (white) + hoff (yard). A simple s/th// does not work. The two polygloss pages are based on the same code, made up in a homg-growm markup. `T and `t are th becoming , 'f and `F are always , and `D `d are always Th th. This allows one to search the code for "th" and correct these on demand.
I worked on both sides of the help-desk in my time.
Being a computer whizz back then, one is asked of members how to do this or do that. One gets 'programming projects', to pretty-print and sort the download docs, and to Y1999 fix proggies. Still. One acquires a reputation from the newtork lads, because while the fixes work, they were not really in accord with the network aims.
On the other side, one gets to see the strange sort of things users do. They look strange, some work and some dont. Network people see boxes as swappable things, not places where users hide things. Some of the things i used to do there (like drop live icons on the user's desktops), sort of horrified them, but it saved a walk, and a good deal of time.
Slashdot Mirror
The Windows calculator is only an algebraic one. It does not handle RPN notation, In my younger days, I wrote a program in 8bit rombasic that emulated something like a HP15, but you could set the operation in 'base by', eg "base 73 by 10's". You could set your own degrees and logs as well, independently of the base (eg 28 sto T would set the circle to 28 degrees.)
The calculator on the desktop is not really all that useful, unless you can edit the calculation history. For plain dos and Windows, i used to use a thing called 'acalc' from PC-DOS 7, but i wrote a rather cute calculator in REXX, which does much of the same thing. (It supports trig functions in circles too).
Of course, we see reactos has a nice calculator that looks pretty much like the windows one. They had the thing set up so you could run the winxp type version under w2000. Microsoft forced you through a large DLL for this activity. Nothing like what you need to run the norton desktop for windows one though. It uses quite a large slab of the application.
The runs on the LU are too short to do staff-changes in this way. It's easier to just have the new crew take over at some station. Most suburbab trains here don't have staff-cars. Staff who are travelling to a point do so in the passenger cars.
In Australia, there are runs from Melbourne to Darwin, or Sydney to Perth, which are handled by sets of on-board crew, these change at various places where there is no staff-room or even town. Because there are a lot of companies operating, each company would provide its own facilities, and as such one would have a coach behind the engines, where the off-duty crew would ride on.
The Inlander is a main-line passenger train from Townsville to Mt Isa, of some 600 miles. Mount Isa is the terminus, is an unstaffed halt, so the train-crew do things there too. The journey used to be 24 hours when I travelled on it, and they don't have staff-points along the way.
The Pilbara routes are short enough to do the trip in a day. But runs typically in the 600 mile run get staff-cars. The Westlander and Inlander in Qld run staff-rooms in the van. The main reasons for putting on staff-cars are to be able to close remote engine-sheds, like Charleville and Cloncurry.
My brother worked coal trains, and they would depending on the company, work to Mooronbah (where quarters were provided), or crew change at points halfway between depots, so in and out of copperbella.,
It's interesting that AC says that 'decisions about the control of the train are done in real time on the train' and then says 'these trains operate without any people on them'. This sounds like some kind of on-board computer is in place, so what are the people in Perth who oversee all this do?
The trains are being drive remotely, rather like the London Tube trains have been for years. There's still someone at the controls, but no one on the footplate. This means you can change staff half-way through a trip, without requiring a staff-car attached.
Given that in the news too, is where BHP derailed a train that ran away from the driver (who was inspecting the train), they used remote signalling control to throw a set of points and run it into a passing loop with no escape, it would be interesting. But this is a run-away train, the sort that has happened many times before on suburban networks.
I imagine that to forfill the full function of the driver, one needs to deal with the likes of hot axle boxes, cracked and broken tyres, and all sorts of other things before it would be fully remote.
The problem, I think, is that the overall model is lost. That programing has become something different to doing things on the computer.
In younger days, I could program Lotus for DOS, even doing clever things like programmically hiding lines in print, or adding one's own menu to a spreadsheet. Then Windows came along, and it was all hidden in things like VBA. It no longer was a copy of the commands with logic.
When you could get into files, and see what was needed, you could program for it. I used an RTF file as a batch for a rexx processor, that created documents based on the user input file, and checking the file you could produce good copies of letters. It's a lot harder to do this with a binary file.
I still use REXX. It's a simple language, and IBM envisaged it as the glue of the OS. But they did not lock it up like visual basic. The thing is an extension of the command prompt, and you can write neat filters for things, or fiddle with INI and registry, and create desktop icons from a batch. The current install on my computer is to copy a directory structure, and run the batch file to create links to lots of programs.
The thing with using paragraphs, sentences, etc, is that it allows one to bite off bits of information. We already use em-dashes to mark off particular clauses we wish to emphersise -- to this point -- but now argue about spaces. White-space helps the reader catch the large-scale of the text. Setting a sentence off in double-space is one devise that does this. Even in the font i type here, it is easier to pick sentences off.
Paragraphs are likewise set off by a blank line, or first-line indent. Where first-line indent is not permitted, then one should use blank line separation. Quotes and examples should be set in an indented paragraph, where the quote is the paragraph.
Bold text is appropriate if one wants the text to stand out on the page at first glance. Highlighted text that is meant to be emphersised in context should be in italic.
As they say: Gawd help all of us.
It would have been nice if the original post had expanded VPN at least once, so people who have not encounted it could understand it.
It would seem that the IBM plug-issue as a method of regulating third-party trade might rear its ugly head here. The purpose of some of Apple's 'innovations' are not new ideas, but to prevent an aftermarket of things.
I wonder what role the doctorine of first sale applies. That is, does apple's rules apply to what happens to the bits and pieces after sale?
Or putting an incomming call through the facs machine. Done that a few times. It works!
I thought programmers still do this. I recently bummed some code that accelerated ten days' run into a couple of hours, if not less.
IBM Series M keyboards.
TeamOS/2. These was one of the scenes you hung out in, if you wanted to be a PC-hacker.
Tag Lines: eg OS/2: because a 386 is a terrible thing to waste. or OS/2: a multi-threaded suite.
AT (and other pretentious terms that dated just too quickly).
Floppies (of all sizes).
I'm nigh on near sixty, these are the sort of things wizards of various kinds (inc me) did. I did a fair bit of computing from 1977, but the main iron arrived in 1992.
BASIC, the kind of stuff you find in ROMBASIC and BASICA/GWBASIC, not QBASIC.
Wiring up things like cross-over cables and null modems.
Using a line-editor to edit text files (such as MS-Edlin).
Running pipes and scripts to do things.
XYZ-Wars. eg Edlin is better than Copycon
IBM Mainframe printer codes, and how to convert these into Windows or dos.
Writing to the iron in some code.
Computers before file-systems and operating systems. (The fourth computer i used actually had an operating system).
Think of it as Clinton's "win-win". everyone at the party wins, and the people who were not there pay. Super simple stuff.
I really like the game. I used to play the solitaire version when i was younger.
We heavily modified the rules, so that you could have unlimited building, so eg a thousand hotels on vine. Ah.. that will be £1,000,000, and we'll build another 666 hotels there.
The solitaire version is that you 'play the bank', buy all the land, and then bill the bank for staying there. Kind of like the clintons, but it was long before them.
I don't recall the cat. It used to be a lever in the versions from the sixties. Forty years on, i can still write out much of the board, and the hotel and base rentals for it. Just a little wasted time :)
There are already a lot of videos circulating that show vote-flipping, where you vote for A, but the machine records B. Making selfies illegal would make the evidence that this has happeened inadmissable in court.
They claim the boogey man (russians) did it, with little or no proof. The fact that Wikileaks is handling it suggests that it's more an inside job. They like some sort of creditability in their stuff.
The claim that the Russians did it means they don't know how to handle classified information. Having classified information outside of a classified site is a felony, and we note the poor sailor in california that got nabbed for six photos at the lowest level. Here we're talking of 22 emails at Top Secret, supposedly left on a computer come what may,
Clinton really does not want you to see the archive, because it shows some fairly serious crimes.
Some of us who lived in the dim past days of OS/2 and limited support. You just make your own i suppose. A great variety of programs are removed by hand, especially if the system is not pre-emptively single-tasking in just the way ye want. So you fire up the range of utilities needed to do things.
Until recently, I used Windows 2000, but have since moved on to Windows 7 Ultimate. They started putting on this 'free upgrade to windows 10' on Windows 7. Kind of like how websites offer you free toolbars for your web browser that pins your computer in. I suppose it's one thing if your Browser updates, cause you can dump it overboard, it's different if your OS does.
So you can hand-remove it. The trouble is that the programs are locked, and run on the user System authority of 'TrustedInstaller' So if you don't have a neat utility that can wrangle the trustedinstaller permsisions, it's pretty hard. Someone cobbled a ' run as trusted installer' program, which copies the token of TI and runs your proggie on that token. Ok. Then you can hunt down the directory and trim the files (ie you can't delete them even if you're running as administrator or system). Needless to say GWX appeared about five or six times.
Being for the benefit of users who pay by the megabyte upload, Microsoft provided a 'background' service which hammers the hard drive for a good few minutes. You can't stop that outside of running as TI either. You can't even read the strings in the binary until you do it as TI. "We're just poking around your hard disk and seeing what sort of stuff you have".
It is of course, spaghetti ini files. Microsoft tried it in the Win2k resource kit (which i looked at at this time), which uses a local ini file, bounces to a CLSID back to a DLL in the system32 directory, back to a registry for more settings, and bounce back to an INI file in the reskit directory. I wanted to add the support kit to this stuff. It worked, sort of.
So "TrustedInstaller" seems to run at a level hitherto reserved for viruses. Even the clever folk would not have the wherewithall to cope with TI without serious hacking. It is little wonder that people use GWXCP and Never10. Vigilance is the price of democracy.
None of the references point to co-gravition, or Heaviside's force, which seems to produce much of the desired results called for. Co-gravitation just requires to rethink the nature of energy, though, since it implies that the gravitational field is a sink of energy, Flag as Inappropriate. A good deal of work has been done by the likes of O. Jeffimenko, and more recently T de Mees. Heaviside suggested the necessary forces in 1893.
GUI
The OS/2 and Windows shells together, complement features missing in the other. The sort of hacks you can do with REXX and the WPS don't cut it in Windows, but MSFT got the idea right when they had proper files, rather than just EAs for their shell. I even added items to a windows desktop remotely. IBM gave a lot of flexibility to the REXX api to the shell, but the SETUP string was a single element, and it could had been something akin to an environment in an INI file.
One could had done some interesting things with PIF files. For example, they could had launched an application off-path, and the same icon could have had several pages for different operating systems, so for example, the Boxer.pif could launch boxer, tko or boxer/2 for different operating systems. You put a mob of these in a directory and you could launch different applications without having to go to the desktop, or some menuing system.
So, you could have a fairly decent file patcher, and still just have a single link in the PIF file.
EXTPROC in OS/2, is the DOS version of the UNIX /! thing. Where in UNIX, you have to have perl in /usr/bin/perl or something, in the new shell, it would simply look for perl.pif, either in the pif or extproc directory. Doing this means you could run the same perl script under different environments. Extproc could be added to other languages, so one could see or launch a script under something like FAR or some other program that takes an external script.
For example, the OS/2 EWS "StartDOS" expects a REXX script as input, so if you made REXX handle EXTPROC, you could start the startDOS script as extproc /rexx StartDOS
Alternate DOS/Unix command line personalities, so that programs that look for UNIX or DOS would not have to be rewritten. Likewise, you could convert the drives into different pointers in the unix system, so that you could have multiple cwd's (eg subst c: /usr )
Run a file under a different extension. You can already do things like start OEMSETUP.BIN with the extension, and many utilities load .TMP, .MOD etc as exe files, so it's hardly a bug there. Note that in Windows 98+, the xcopy32.mod is just xcopy.exe, and works without the other files if so loaded. What it can do is to allow you to open an exe as a rar file, etc, eg open .rar rarexe.exe would instruct RAR to open it as a rar file.
Clipboard and Select interface from the command line. You could do things like 'select = ls pk*.*' , which would add the output files of the ls command to the select list, select /a is append to the list, and then /copy. /paste. /cut, /all, /move /reverse, /u would do various things to the list. @select is then a virtual list that can be used in any command that accepts lists.
Multiple desktops at session level. Something like LaTeX involves lots of little files in the path, which are largely used purely for Latex. A TeX desktop (by setting desktop=tex in the PIF), might open up a window of utilities that share more or less like the same virtual machine. You create objects in there which inherit the common Latex settings, so ye could have an Editor in there, like WinEdit, etc. When you are not playing LaTeX, these are no longer in the path. These could be in 'groups' like Win31 Progman, and you put links out to the common paths.
Multi-language interface, so one can use REXX. Lua, or a variety of other languages to access system functions. Something like 'fdisk' might report things like the size and file system of a device, and a function-call like call 'fdisk' diskfree, 'c:' could be used in any script, including command.com.
Network as a separate desktop, so one can be logged into several networks at once.
Some of the ideas that came out of the early computing times make much more sense than the current range of 'innovations'. Most pay-ware is legacy stuff on shipping, and eventually you move from dedicated programs for doing X to well-thought-out programs that use some sort of open idiom (like spreadsheets).
I use REXX. My tendency is to use cross-platform stuff because the operating system could change from DOS to OS/2 to Windows, or whatever. Regina REXX is to be had on all platforms. Code i wrote back in the 1990's still work reliably today. Programs i used back in the 1990s have to be ever updated. A number of utilities do not have to be compiled. You can have a fancy program that factorises numbers, and then construct the number to factorise in rexx, and run the command from inside rexx, eg 'factor' me You can even have factor set to a variable, as in factor="c:\utils\factor.exe" and then write the line "factor me" without the quotes, and it will string these strings together, and run "c:\utils\factor.exe 1727999" at the prompt.
Essentially, one is going to find examples of printed code, like fortran or rexx, which one can import without modification. My recollection is that fortran does not require one to think too hard about variable kinds. A chemist is a chemist, not a computer science graduate. He's more interested in formalderhides than data type declarations.
I suppose that when terminals cost the price of houses, and the computers lived in air-conditioned pens with white-coats at hand, and boas under the floor, computing time was scarse.
Technology depends on how far one lives out from the main stream. I used punched cards and paper tape when i went through my course in the seventies. I used a teletype machine at work, it had a fairly large recriprocating mass, it used to "walk".
Still, it amuses me to think back then we talked about 'Automatic Data Processing' (ADP), but every bit was expensive and one spent a good deal of trying to get as much information into the available data space. Now-days, data is cheap, and everyone calls it "Information Technology". Its rather silly really. Most IT people spend their time pouring data from one jug to another, with little regard to 'information' or how to optimise things.
I still know how to find the main cycles of a program and bum speed out of it. You did that in the ancient days, and because i wanted to run the cycle a couple of thousand millions of times, it is of some profit to do this even today.
I have been using these letters since i was at high school, say early 1970s. I tried out ð too, but Modern english represents both of these by a single letter 'th'. One has ick and in, weaer or neier. It's in alphabets already, there's no need for a new rune when its been with us years. Writing "ðe" for "e" is like writing "as" as "az", and other 'newspeak' idioms.
Writing orn is pretty easy, and you get to learn to keep the ascenders on p quite short. Other than that, one gets people who get confused with is. I had a comment or three to the effect that "all of my ths come out like 'p's". I usually respond along the lines of trying to enquire about whether they were Non-English-Speaking Background or something.
The letter has existed for quite some time. A recent tome in the post 'archelogical papers', bought for yet another OE thing that most folk have long forgotten (the long hundred = counts by 120), has a church registery, with the likes of 'Richard, ye son of Peter and Mary', where ye is a form of e the capital looks something like an I, with a rod coming from the middle to 1 o'clock.
The 'polygloss as nature intended' on my website, is constructed in thorns, it's quite an 'easy read', and does not look too ugly. There are some 'th' in there, because some words have a separate t and h, eg the name Wythoff, which is Wyt (white) + hoff (yard). A simple s/th// does not work. The two polygloss pages are based on the same code, made up in a homg-growm markup. `T and `t are th becoming , 'f and `F are always , and `D `d are always Th th. This allows one to search the code for "th" and correct these on demand.
I worked on both sides of the help-desk in my time.
Being a computer whizz back then, one is asked of members how to do this or do that. One gets 'programming projects', to pretty-print and sort the download docs, and to Y1999 fix proggies. Still. One acquires a reputation from the newtork lads, because while the fixes work, they were not really in accord with the network aims.
On the other side, one gets to see the strange sort of things users do. They look strange, some work and some dont. Network people see boxes as swappable things, not places where users hide things. Some of the things i used to do there (like drop live icons on the user's desktops), sort of horrified them, but it saved a walk, and a good deal of time.