The Pearl Street installation was turned on in 1882, which IIRC, was before Tesla did his main work with AC crcuits. The installation included a method for measuring usage (originally an electrochemical amp-hour "meter"). The US residential wiring system still uses Edison's system (albeit with 60HZ instead of DC).
Let me put it another way. Edison invented the electric distribution system (albeit DC), while Tesla invented the modern electric generation and transmission system using polyphase AC.
Edison also gets the credit for hiring Frank Sprague and possible credit for hiring Charles Steinmetz.
The source for the CP/M BIOS was shipped with CP/M - pretty common to have to hack the BIOS to support new hardware. SCP was very familiar with the BIOS source as they were the ones who developed the Z-80 card for the Apple II. It wouldn't be surprising that some of the BIOS code in CP/M ended up in 86-DOS - which also came with the source for IO.SYS.
The basic OS is a different matter, the core 86-DOS was a very different beast than CP/M: more functions built-in the command interpreter (e.g copy); using FAT instead of bit maps; file size to the nearest byte instead of rounding up to the nearest 2K; use of the 8086 segment registers to eliminate the need for MOVCPM; using INT21H instead of jumping to location 0H for OS calls.
In some ways this reminds me of the Stallman vs Torvalds pissing match.
Second, if IBM had a clue about the future value of DOS back then, they would have bought it outright rather than choosing to license it.
If they were smart, they would have bought the rights directly from SCP. Part of the agreement between SCP and MS wrt 86-DOS was that SCP would have rights to future versions of MS-DOS and the languages that ran on MS-DOS. IOW, MS did not have the right to offer an exclusive license of MS-DOS to IBM.
Edison (well Edison and his team) also invented the electric power infratsructure that made it practical to use the bulb (the high voltage filament is an importtant part).
Electric lighting finally took off with the development of the tungsten filament, allowing even higher efficiency.
An even simpler solution would have been to put a "no reverse engineering" clause in the EULA - which would have prevented Tim Paterson from cloning the CP/M interface (think Blizzard vs Bnetd).
The world would have been an even more different place had IBM inserted a "no reverse engineering" clause in the EULA for the PC BIOS. This may have given the computer industry a chance to come up with something better than the PeeCee - which was full of examples of how not to design a computer. It was the availability of cheap clones that allowed Windoze to take over - if Windoze only ran on high-priced PC's, then the Mac and Unix workstations would have had a chance.
What must be keeping Gates lying awake at nights is that the Samba and OpenOffice.org projects may end up doing to him what he did to Kildall.
Cat's dung sounds more like it. CPM had FCBS instead of handles for file operations. For all practical purposes it was a VMS hangover which was horrible to program for and would have never scaled past what CPM was used for (simple 8 bit apps).
VMS hangover??????
Say what!? VMS was released after CP/M.
CP/M was modeled on RSX-11 for the PDP-11. From this came the lame 8.3 filenames, the.com extension (.exe was VMS). IIRC, the PIP utility was also derived from RSX-11.
86-DOS (AKA PC-DOS, MS-DOS 1.x) was designed specifically for ease of porting code from CP/M.
And all that said, oftentimes the selected product is simply vaporware (as was MS-DOS until Gates bought QDOS) when there are real running products out there.
86-DOS, the sucessor to QDOS, was available from Seattle Computer and also used by used at least one other company, Lomas Data Products, before the IBM PC was announced (see the Lomas Data products ad in the June 1981 issue of BYTE).
The BizWeek article was wrong in saying that MS improved 86-DOS for use with the PC. PC-DOS 1.0 was basically 86-DOS 1.14. The big modifications was to make it look more like CP/M UI.
One of the biggest markets for CP/M was the Apple Z-80 board made by M$ and designed by Seattle Computer. The 86-DOS deal was the second time that SCP got screwed over by MS.
OTOH, it is NOT really a *public* university as you say, because we (the students) pay for nearly all of it.
I think you are wildly overestimating the share of costs supported by tuition. When I was an UC student (overlapping the final two years of the Reagan governorship) tuition was ~$300/year for CA residents - figure total tuition revenue from residents was 30 million per year which was a drop in the bucket compared to UC's budget. Tuition is a lot higher now (as is most prices), but I would be really surprised that it was anywhere near the cost of running the system.
The University is also subsidized in that it doesn't pay property tax, land in La Jolla is worth on the order of 1 million/acre - so UCSD's land would be able to generate several million per year in property tax revenue if it was privately owned.
I'm not aware of an legal system where assumption of innocence is suspended for this kind of criminal case - please reference one.
The state of California maintains a registry of all people accused of child abuse and does not inform the people on that registry that their name is on it. The people on that registry are almost never told who did the accusing.
If you want a horror case, look up what happened to Robert Wade in San Diego in the early 1990's. San Diego county taxpayers (including me) ended up paying the Wades several million.
Can't you see that there is a difference between having to defend yourself against charges and not even being told what the charges are against you?
Who said anything about charges being filed in the IMC case?? If there is a difference, I would much rather have my hard drives taken from me than go through what Wade went through.
I've yet to meet the diehard conservative who, with all else stripped away, is anything more than a selfish kid struggling to make-believe greed into something wholesome-sounding.
I've yet to meet the diehard liberal who, with all else stripped away, is anything more than a selfish kid struggling to make-believe imposing his/her will on others into something wholesome-sounding.
In the last few years, the assumption of innocent until proven guilty and the right to know the charges against you and defend yourself have been encroached upon.
IRS CPS
If the IRS says that you owe them money, you have to pay up unless you can prove them wrong.
Same thing with Child Protective Services in many states - if someone accuses you of child abuse you often will be treated as guilty until proven innocent and you will have to pay through the nose for that "privilege".
Yeah that freedom of speech thing is a real pain, isn't it?
Let's look at the Democratic record.
During FDR's reign, anyone caught taking a picture of FDR in his wheelchair would have his camera and film confiscted by the Secret Service. He also was quite fond of having the IRS invetsigate his political oponents.
LBJ was the one responsible for barring non-profits from being involved with influencing an election. He also wasn't above using the IRS to investigate political opponents.
There was a man from Berkeley that got all sorts of crap from HUD becuase he had the temerity to criticize how HUD was being run during the Clinton administration - till a judge told the head of HUD to lay-off the guy. Anyone remember the brouhaha over the Skipjack encryption scheme with the built-in back doors?
Woodrow Wilson had 100,000 people listening for any negative comments about the US involvement in WW1 - and those who reported faced jail or prison time. Before every public gathering, someone from George Creel's minuteman group had to get up and give a pep talk on the war, which included outright lies (e.g. genocide) about what was going on in German occupied territory (remember, this WW1, not WW2).
From Suns perspective of selling an E10K for $1mil to a customer to solve a database problem (as an example), this is a very neccessary feature. From a customers perspective, however, I can solve this problem with either an E10K or a Linux cluster.
For starters, Sun would much rather sell a SF25K than an E10K (which would be a remanufactured machine).
One drawback of the cluster approach is a much higher latency between nodes when compared to the memory latency on a big Sun box - not to mention the cache coherency features on the big Sun boxes.
Google is not necessarily the best example of a transaction processing database - the Google model is essentially read-only.
"Can open source and closed standards work together?
No they can't really, and even if it were possible why wouldn't people just use Eclipse?
So you're telling me that the Samba project doesn't work? At least Sun gives away a test suite - with SMB you have to do a lot of network snooping to verify things are working correctly.
When they got into fight over java with Mircrosoft the result was MS making.NET.
Part of the $2bn settlement was due to M$ inability to make.NET without infringing on Sun's patents.
The iAPX432 was already under development in mid-1980 (it was known as the 8800 then). At that time, only a handful of companies were shipping systems with 8086's - the most relevant one being an outfit in Seattle that had an S-100 based system (firt shown in May 1979) for which they developed a CP/M clone with some UNIX like features:
e.g.: copy source destination
instead of: pip destination source
The iAPX432 was so fiendishly complex that it inspired Patterson to work on a RISC processor at Cal and Hennessy to work on what was to become MIPS at Stanford.
Red Hat is the MS of the Linux world in one very important and strangely positive way. Microsoft unleashed a all-consuming trend of commoditization when they licensed PC DOS to IBM and MS DOS to Compaq.
What you meant to say was that M$ bought the rights to 86-DOS, repackaged it as PC-DOS for IBM and MS-DOS for the other guys - poaching Tim Patterson from SCP, etc.
The real commodization came from the folks at Compaq (and later Pheonix) who successfully cloned the PeeCee BIOS. The early versions of MS-Windoze and Flight Simulator would only run on an IBM PC or a really good clone (which from 1983 to 1986 was basically Compaq). The clone wars really didn't take off until after Pheonix started distributing their BIOS.
Oh yes - and let's not forget how well Solaris NFS works with Linux. There are definite problems there.
As has been mentioned several times before, it is Linux that has NFS problems, not Solaris. Apparently NFS on the *BSD's work just fine with NFS on Solaris.
Criticizing Sun because Linux NFS doesn't work right would be exactly the same thing as criticizing Linux because it isn't fully comaptible with the Linux runtime environment (lxrun, Janus) on Solaris.
6) RPC's, as we know them, came from where? Again, it wasn't created for FOSS. Microsoft created SMB. Do you credit them for bring it to FOSS in Samba? No.
FWIW, Sun did a much better job of documenting NFS than Microsoft did with SMB. It did help that some thought was given to the design of NFS, rather than the accretion of guano that was par for SMB development (That's SMB not Samba).
Sun's focus on Red Hat is that commercial software for Linux is usually geared to Red Hat, not Debian.
As for free tools, the performance of code compiled by GCC is usually below the performance of code compiled with commercial compilers. OTOH, GCC is much more portable than any commercial compiler.
There is a reason why NIS and NFS are so closely associated - NIS is what guarantees that the user names will be the same. Sun is now deprecating NIS in favor of LDAP.
As for security, NFS is built on top of RPC, secure RPC and you have secured NFS. Sun's latest implementation of RPC does include a collection of security features.
I've heard (actually read...) a lot of rude noises about NFS on Linux.
As for DIY magazines, there once was a magazine called "Circuit Cellar" by the columnist from BYTE (back when *IT* didn't suck).
Circuit Cellar is still alive and well.
If Make is broader based technology than Circuit Cellar, they may have a chance. Back in the 60's, rags like PopSci, PopMech, MexIllustrated had a very hands on approach (Pop Sci even had some electronics construction projects).
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm...
The Pearl Street installation was turned on in 1882, which IIRC, was before Tesla did his main work with AC crcuits. The installation included a method for measuring usage (originally an electrochemical amp-hour "meter"). The US residential wiring system still uses Edison's system (albeit with 60HZ instead of DC).
Let me put it another way. Edison invented the electric distribution system (albeit DC), while Tesla invented the modern electric generation and transmission system using polyphase AC.
Edison also gets the credit for hiring Frank Sprague and possible credit for hiring Charles Steinmetz.
The basic OS is a different matter, the core 86-DOS was a very different beast than CP/M: more functions built-in the command interpreter (e.g copy); using FAT instead of bit maps; file size to the nearest byte instead of rounding up to the nearest 2K; use of the 8086 segment registers to eliminate the need for MOVCPM; using INT21H instead of jumping to location 0H for OS calls.
In some ways this reminds me of the Stallman vs Torvalds pissing match.
If they were smart, they would have bought the rights directly from SCP. Part of the agreement between SCP and MS wrt 86-DOS was that SCP would have rights to future versions of MS-DOS and the languages that ran on MS-DOS. IOW, MS did not have the right to offer an exclusive license of MS-DOS to IBM.
Electric lighting finally took off with the development of the tungsten filament, allowing even higher efficiency.
The world would have been an even more different place had IBM inserted a "no reverse engineering" clause in the EULA for the PC BIOS. This may have given the computer industry a chance to come up with something better than the PeeCee - which was full of examples of how not to design a computer. It was the availability of cheap clones that allowed Windoze to take over - if Windoze only ran on high-priced PC's, then the Mac and Unix workstations would have had a chance.
What must be keeping Gates lying awake at nights is that the Samba and OpenOffice.org projects may end up doing to him what he did to Kildall.
VMS hangover??????
Say what!? VMS was released after CP/M.
CP/M was modeled on RSX-11 for the PDP-11. From this came the lame 8.3 filenames, the .com extension (.exe was VMS). IIRC, the PIP utility was also derived from RSX-11.
86-DOS (AKA PC-DOS, MS-DOS 1.x) was designed specifically for ease of porting code from CP/M.
86-DOS, the sucessor to QDOS, was available from Seattle Computer and also used by used at least one other company, Lomas Data Products, before the IBM PC was announced (see the Lomas Data products ad in the June 1981 issue of BYTE).
The BizWeek article was wrong in saying that MS improved 86-DOS for use with the PC. PC-DOS 1.0 was basically 86-DOS 1.14. The big modifications was to make it look more like CP/M UI.
One of the biggest markets for CP/M was the Apple Z-80 board made by M$ and designed by Seattle Computer. The 86-DOS deal was the second time that SCP got screwed over by MS.
I think you are wildly overestimating the share of costs supported by tuition. When I was an UC student (overlapping the final two years of the Reagan governorship) tuition was ~$300/year for CA residents - figure total tuition revenue from residents was 30 million per year which was a drop in the bucket compared to UC's budget. Tuition is a lot higher now (as is most prices), but I would be really surprised that it was anywhere near the cost of running the system.
The University is also subsidized in that it doesn't pay property tax, land in La Jolla is worth on the order of 1 million/acre - so UCSD's land would be able to generate several million per year in property tax revenue if it was privately owned.
The state of California maintains a registry of all people accused of child abuse and does not inform the people on that registry that their name is on it. The people on that registry are almost never told who did the accusing.
If you want a horror case, look up what happened to Robert Wade in San Diego in the early 1990's. San Diego county taxpayers (including me) ended up paying the Wades several million.
Can't you see that there is a difference between having to defend yourself against charges and not even being told what the charges are against you?
Who said anything about charges being filed in the IMC case?? If there is a difference, I would much rather have my hard drives taken from me than go through what Wade went through.
Swedish??????
ISTR that Sweden and Switzerland are separate countries - though I have both Swedish and Swiss ancestry...
I've yet to meet the diehard liberal who, with all else stripped away, is anything more than a selfish kid struggling to make-believe imposing his/her will on others into something wholesome-sounding.
IRS CPS
If the IRS says that you owe them money, you have to pay up unless you can prove them wrong.
Same thing with Child Protective Services in many states - if someone accuses you of child abuse you often will be treated as guilty until proven innocent and you will have to pay through the nose for that "privilege".
As the OP said, get some perspective.
Let's look at the Democratic record.
During FDR's reign, anyone caught taking a picture of FDR in his wheelchair would have his camera and film confiscted by the Secret Service. He also was quite fond of having the IRS invetsigate his political oponents.
LBJ was the one responsible for barring non-profits from being involved with influencing an election. He also wasn't above using the IRS to investigate political opponents.
There was a man from Berkeley that got all sorts of crap from HUD becuase he had the temerity to criticize how HUD was being run during the Clinton administration - till a judge told the head of HUD to lay-off the guy. Anyone remember the brouhaha over the Skipjack encryption scheme with the built-in back doors?
Woodrow Wilson had 100,000 people listening for any negative comments about the US involvement in WW1 - and those who reported faced jail or prison time. Before every public gathering, someone from George Creel's minuteman group had to get up and give a pep talk on the war, which included outright lies (e.g. genocide) about what was going on in German occupied territory (remember, this WW1, not WW2).
For starters, Sun would much rather sell a SF25K than an E10K (which would be a remanufactured machine).
One drawback of the cluster approach is a much higher latency between nodes when compared to the memory latency on a big Sun box - not to mention the cache coherency features on the big Sun boxes.
Google is not necessarily the best example of a transaction processing database - the Google model is essentially read-only.
Having seen the web page, there is one very OT question going through my mind - Is she or is she not wearing a bra?
No they can't really, and even if it were possible why wouldn't people just use Eclipse?
So you're telling me that the Samba project doesn't work? At least Sun gives away a test suite - with SMB you have to do a lot of network snooping to verify things are working correctly.
When they got into fight over java with Mircrosoft the result was MS making .NET.
Part of the $2bn settlement was due to M$ inability to make .NET without infringing on Sun's patents.
iAPX432
Wrongo!
The iAPX432 was already under development in mid-1980 (it was known as the 8800 then). At that time, only a handful of companies were shipping systems with 8086's - the most relevant one being an outfit in Seattle that had an S-100 based system (firt shown in May 1979) for which they developed a CP/M clone with some UNIX like features:
e.g.: copy source destination
instead of: pip destination source
The iAPX432 was so fiendishly complex that it inspired Patterson to work on a RISC processor at Cal and Hennessy to work on what was to become MIPS at Stanford.
What you meant to say was that M$ bought the rights to 86-DOS, repackaged it as PC-DOS for IBM and MS-DOS for the other guys - poaching Tim Patterson from SCP, etc.
The real commodization came from the folks at Compaq (and later Pheonix) who successfully cloned the PeeCee BIOS. The early versions of MS-Windoze and Flight Simulator would only run on an IBM PC or a really good clone (which from 1983 to 1986 was basically Compaq). The clone wars really didn't take off until after Pheonix started distributing their BIOS.
As has been mentioned several times before, it is Linux that has NFS problems, not Solaris. Apparently NFS on the *BSD's work just fine with NFS on Solaris.
Criticizing Sun because Linux NFS doesn't work right would be exactly the same thing as criticizing Linux because it isn't fully comaptible with the Linux runtime environment (lxrun, Janus) on Solaris.
Again, it wasn't created for FOSS. Microsoft created SMB. Do you credit them for bring it to FOSS in Samba? No.
FWIW, Sun did a much better job of documenting NFS than Microsoft did with SMB. It did help that some thought was given to the design of NFS, rather than the accretion of guano that was par for SMB development (That's SMB not Samba).
As for free tools, the performance of code compiled by GCC is usually below the performance of code compiled with commercial compilers. OTOH, GCC is much more portable than any commercial compiler.
As for security, NFS is built on top of RPC, secure RPC and you have secured NFS. Sun's latest implementation of RPC does include a collection of security features.
I've heard (actually read...) a lot of rude noises about NFS on Linux.
Circuit Cellar is still alive and well.
If Make is broader based technology than Circuit Cellar, they may have a chance. Back in the 60's, rags like PopSci, PopMech, MexIllustrated had a very hands on approach (Pop Sci even had some electronics construction projects).
Your article did not come across as being negative about GCC.
Other rags from that era: Microsystems, Interface Age, first 10 years of Byte (Circuit Cellar is still a decent rag).