I used to be an SCO reseller. I qualified by answering a 50 question multiple choice test on their web site.
Does anyone know if they ever changed the Open Server kernel so you don't have to recompile to change the domain name? Or add a disk drive? Or a tape drive?
How about RAID support? Is that still an "extra cost" item?
I once built a linux based dial-up router that connected to an OpenServer box on the other end. I tested it using Linux on both ends, but it didn't work connecting to OpenServer. The serial port handler was just too frellin' slow, running on a box that was twice as fast as the router.
I always give a snort when I read the PR about how much better SCO UNIX is. None of my customers run it anymore. It's just too much trouble, even compared to Windows.
You can still do this. Pick up a copy of the simh emulator, and TOPS10 from Paul Allen's web site. I set up a system at home, opened a port to telnet, and gave an old friend a nice nostalgia present.
Funny, I don't ever recall reading any studies connecting the compulsive watching of television sports while drinking beer and eating junk food as a contributor to obesity.
Or paintball as a gateway to violent behavior.
Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff.
A guy I know had a bumper sticker on his car:
"Kids who hunt, trap, and fish, don't mug little old ladies".
No, they just torture and kill defenseless little animals. Kids who play video games (or D&D) don't usually do that either.
Not sure about that. A PPV movie disappeared from my Sony SAT-T60 Direct-Tivo box after a few weeks, for no detectable reason. Nothing in the log, just gone. Maybe the functionality has been in some of the boxes all along.
If you remember it too, then I must have been close to right in my previous comment. Their time sharing OS was called "TSOS", IIRC. We used teletypes via phone lines to connect. Unlike OS/360, where everything resembled a batch job, under TSOS everything resembled an interactive session. OS/360 had "JOB cards", TSOS had "LOGIN" cards. Completely different philosophy. Working on both at the same time was amusing. The one at NYC BHE was fairly reliable. They used it to do most of their bookkeeping, payroll, etc., which was why they got so worked up when a couple of my friends found out the security was terrible and hacked it.
If this is the one I'm thinking of, RCA's machine (somewhere along the line) was called the "Spectra 70". They wrote their own OS, designed around time sharing terminal users, vs. the batch design of OS/360. The New York City Board of Higher Education had one back in the early 70's, when I was a CS student. It used the same instruction set, but the one I used had unique extensions for virtual memory, so the software wasn't cross-compatible. I think I still have a manual for it around somewhere.
OS/360 begat MVS begat OS/390 begat zOS, which is the current product for IBM mainframes (now called "zSeries"). Hitachi, Amdahl, and others made compatible hardware for a while once IBM unbundled the software, but I think the only players left in that market are IBM and a couple of emulators.
The ORIGINAL Citibank system predated the actual ATM's by a couple of years. In 1974, you got a card called a "Citicard", which was pretty much the same as a modern ATM card. Each branch had a set of little card-reading keypad devices, and you could get your account balance from them. After the novelty wore off, you realized pretty quickly that they were just about useless. It was a marketing trial balloon that eventually led to the stuff described in the article.
Oddly, as the article states, Citibank lost the edge on this technology in the following years, keeping their network private while everyone else was setting up inter-bank networks.
Years ago, I worked for a company that serviced ATM's. We did service for Docutel, Mosler, and a couple of others. Part of my job was handling the software bug reports, passing them back to the proper companies. The ones for the ATM's were always the most interesting.
In the late 70's, for example, one of the vendors had to supply a patch for ATM's installed in Illinois because customers could use an ATM at any bank branch. It seems that Illinois had a law at the time that only allowed customers to bank at the office where they had their account! Sort of defeats the whole idea.
There were numerous instances of bugs where the machine would seem to capture a card for one reason or another, but then spit it out to the next customer.
The trickiest part of the ATM mechanism was the bill dispenser. It had all kinds of sensors to make sure one and ONLY one bill was passed through at a time. For gross adjustments, they used fake money that was the right size, but regular paper. For the final adjustments, they kept several hundred dollars in real $10 and $20 bills in a big safe on the premises. The money had to be replaced every few days. The early machines couldn't handle old, wrinkled cash.
One of the things I did learn was that the security was pretty good, but only as good as we made it. We used to have card programming machines laying around our warehouse. They had locks and keys, but of course the keys were always in the locks.
Years ago, I worked for a company that serviced ATM's. Each company had two model variations: "Secure", and "Insecure". The secure ones were intended for outside installation, and included a honkin-big safe that was usually bolted down to a big hunk of concrete. The money was dispensed through small holes in the safe to the attached mechanism. It was POSSIBLE to steal it, but not easy.
From the point of view of the proprietary software companies, writing code costs money. So how do they avoid spending that money? Borrow/steal/copy the code from somewhere else.
But the GPL doesn't allow code licensed under it to be borrowed/stolen/copied unless it's part of another GPL product. So it can't be truly "proprietary" then, and the company won't make as much money. If patents and secret techniques are involved, that just makes things worse.
So how do they get around this? By trying to eliminate the GPL, on the theory that code that would otherwise be under the GPL will be released under a license (like BSD) that allows the proprietary companies to use it.
Otherwise, why care? If you need some code to do something, ignore the GPL and all it's issues, and pay someone to write it.
From their point of view, code under the GPL is 'wasted' because THEY can't use it to make or save money. Other viewpoints, including the wishes of the poor guy who wrote the code DON'T MATTER! You see it all the time in interviews where CEO's are just ASTOUNDED that someone could spend months or years working on a product, and then just "give it away"!
So their logic is, "well if YOU don't want to get rich off this thing you wrote, why shouldn't WE?"
"And we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddlesome GPL!"
What the ADTI book advocates is exactly what the PSC's want: An unending source of completely free code so they can avoid employing programmers as much as possible.
30 years ago, visiting some relatives down south, I had to get some parts for my perpetually unreliable car, and talking to the guy at the store, he commented that "soon all cars will have locked hoods, and you'll need a special key to work on them".
About 5 years ago, I went back to the same town, and (as luck would have it), had to pick up some part for my nearly new Honda. The (different) guy behind the counter made the SAME COMMENT, almost word for word! I think we're about as close to that now as we were in 1975.
Not that it matters much anymore anyway. I used to do almost all my own maintenance, but my new cars are so complicated there's not much I can do, and so reliable, I don't HAVE to do much. I open the hood on my 2002 Honda about every two weeks to check the oil. I haven't opened the hood on my other one in months, except to add washer fluid. The SUV I rented recently had an automatic diagnostic system that even checked THAT stuff, along with tire pressure.
Long ago, when I became an SCO reseller (which was REAL easy and free at the time), they sent me a full set of UnixWare, complete with license. Does this mean I'm okay to run Linux even if they're right?
That doesn't look like an error message, more like a description of a problem. MVS error messages are usually succinct, but descriptive, and at least you have a manual to go look up the numeric codes.
In any case, it made perfect sense to me. Of course, I've been working with MVS for 20 odd years...
I always liked: "The program executed and execute instruction, which tried to execute another execute. Check for program instruction modification." This also makes perfect sense to me, by the way.:)
Bingo. I had a standalone Tivo that I used with cable, but when I switched to satellite, I got a DirecTivo. I still use the old one with a separate receiver, but the real beauty of the DirecTivo is that it has two tuners, so you can record two shows at once, or watch one while you record another. Last night, while "Enterprise" was on, I watched another show from the buffer, then came back to "Enterprise" about halfway in, watching from the beginning. Skipping the commercials, I caught up right around the end. My son has taken to watching two shows at once, flipping back and forth, avoiding the commercials.
For the record, I liked Tron too, and I bought the SE, but if you want a movie that really kind of almost tries to get it right, catch "Paper Man" when it runs on late night TV sometime. Everyone forgets this movie, but it has elements of "War Games" and others of that ilk, and came out in 1971! It was a TV movie, but unfortunately it never made video. I'd love to see it uncut.
I guess this explains why they gave me one about 2 weeks ago, along with a cord that's supposed to go between your TV and PC sound card. Maybe I should keep them both sealed as collectors' items.
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From an old sitcom. One of the characters imagines going back in time, and has been told that in the future there will be flying cars:
"No, in the future there won't be flying cars! We'll have powerful computers that sit on your desk and play... Solitaire!"
Wasn't it Larry Niven who suggested using Venus as a garbage dump? I think the story was "Flash Crowd".
I, for one, am heartened by how much the shuttle has come to resemble the Millenium Falcon. At least in the reliability department.
They let me shoot any billboard I don't like with my grenade launcher, and blow it to tiny pieces.
Track that!
I used to be an SCO reseller. I qualified by answering a 50 question multiple choice test on their web site.
Does anyone know if they ever changed the Open Server kernel so you don't have to recompile to change the domain name? Or add a disk drive? Or a tape drive?
How about RAID support? Is that still an "extra cost" item?
I once built a linux based dial-up router that connected to an OpenServer box on the other end. I tested it using Linux on both ends, but it didn't work connecting to OpenServer. The serial port handler was just too frellin' slow, running on a box that was twice as fast as the router.
I always give a snort when I read the PR about how much better SCO UNIX is. None of my customers run it anymore. It's just too much trouble, even compared to Windows.
You can still do this. Pick up a copy of the simh emulator, and TOPS10 from Paul Allen's web site. I set up a system at home, opened a port to telnet, and gave an old friend a nice nostalgia present.
Funny, I don't ever recall reading any studies connecting the compulsive watching of television sports while drinking beer and eating junk food as a contributor to obesity.
Or paintball as a gateway to violent behavior.
Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff.
A guy I know had a bumper sticker on his car:
"Kids who hunt, trap, and fish, don't mug little old ladies".
No, they just torture and kill defenseless little animals. Kids who play video games (or D&D) don't usually do that either.
Hear Hear! Although I'm seriously tempted by those new trains that you can control individually on the same layout without kludging.
I still have a set too. Not only fun, but supposedly good for aerating the lawn (in very small areas).
Those killer robots from the movie Runaway
Not sure about that. A PPV movie disappeared from my Sony SAT-T60 Direct-Tivo box after a few weeks, for no detectable reason. Nothing in the log, just gone. Maybe the functionality has been in some of the boxes all along.
If you remember it too, then I must have been close to right in my previous comment. Their time sharing OS was called "TSOS", IIRC. We used teletypes via phone lines to connect. Unlike OS/360, where everything resembled a batch job, under TSOS everything resembled an interactive session. OS/360 had "JOB cards", TSOS had "LOGIN" cards. Completely different philosophy. Working on both at the same time was amusing. The one at NYC BHE was fairly reliable. They used it to do most of their bookkeeping, payroll, etc., which was why they got so worked up when a couple of my friends found out the security was terrible and hacked it.
If this is the one I'm thinking of, RCA's machine (somewhere along the line) was called the "Spectra 70". They wrote their own OS, designed around time sharing terminal users, vs. the batch design of OS/360. The New York City Board of Higher Education had one back in the early 70's, when I was a CS student. It used the same instruction set, but the one I used had unique extensions for virtual memory, so the software wasn't cross-compatible. I think I still have a manual for it around somewhere.
OS/360 begat MVS begat OS/390 begat zOS, which is the current product for IBM mainframes (now called "zSeries"). Hitachi, Amdahl, and others made compatible hardware for a while once IBM unbundled the software, but I think the only players left in that market are IBM and a couple of emulators.
The ORIGINAL Citibank system predated the actual ATM's by a couple of years. In 1974, you got a card called a "Citicard", which was pretty much the same as a modern ATM card. Each branch had a set of little card-reading keypad devices, and you could get your account balance from them. After the novelty wore off, you realized pretty quickly that they were just about useless. It was a marketing trial balloon that eventually led to the stuff described in the article.
Oddly, as the article states, Citibank lost the edge on this technology in the following years, keeping their network private while everyone else was setting up inter-bank networks.
Years ago, I worked for a company that serviced ATM's. We did service for Docutel, Mosler, and a couple of others. Part of my job was handling the software bug reports, passing them back to the proper companies. The ones for the ATM's were always the most interesting.
In the late 70's, for example, one of the vendors had to supply a patch for ATM's installed in Illinois because customers could use an ATM at any bank branch. It seems that Illinois had a law at the time that only allowed customers to bank at the office where they had their account! Sort of defeats the whole idea.
There were numerous instances of bugs where the machine would seem to capture a card for one reason or another, but then spit it out to the next customer.
The trickiest part of the ATM mechanism was the bill dispenser. It had all kinds of sensors to make sure one and ONLY one bill was passed through at a time. For gross adjustments, they used fake money that was the right size, but regular paper. For the final adjustments, they kept several hundred dollars in real $10 and $20 bills in a big safe on the premises. The money had to be replaced every few days. The early machines couldn't handle old, wrinkled cash.
One of the things I did learn was that the security was pretty good, but only as good as we made it. We used to have card programming machines laying around our warehouse. They had locks and keys, but of course the keys were always in the locks.
Years ago, I worked for a company that serviced ATM's. Each company had two model variations: "Secure", and "Insecure". The secure ones were intended for outside installation, and included a honkin-big safe that was usually bolted down to a big hunk of concrete. The money was dispensed through small holes in the safe to the attached mechanism. It was POSSIBLE to steal it, but not easy.
Look, the bottom line is this:
From the point of view of the proprietary software companies, writing code costs money. So how do they avoid spending that money? Borrow/steal/copy the code from somewhere else.
But the GPL doesn't allow code licensed under it to be borrowed/stolen/copied unless it's part of another GPL product. So it can't be truly "proprietary" then, and the company won't make as much money. If patents and secret techniques are involved, that just makes things worse.
So how do they get around this? By trying to eliminate the GPL, on the theory that code that would otherwise be under the GPL will be released under a license (like BSD) that allows the proprietary companies to use it.
Otherwise, why care? If you need some code to do something, ignore the GPL and all it's issues, and pay someone to write it.
From their point of view, code under the GPL is 'wasted' because THEY can't use it to make or save money. Other viewpoints, including the wishes of the poor guy who wrote the code DON'T MATTER! You see it all the time in interviews where CEO's are just ASTOUNDED that someone could spend months or years working on a product, and then just "give it away"!
So their logic is, "well if YOU don't want to get rich off this thing you wrote, why shouldn't WE?"
"And we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddlesome GPL!"
What the ADTI book advocates is exactly what the PSC's want: An unending source of completely free code so they can avoid employing programmers as much as possible.
30 years ago, visiting some relatives down south, I had to get some parts for my perpetually unreliable car, and talking to the guy at the store, he commented that "soon all cars will have locked hoods, and you'll need a special key to work on them".
About 5 years ago, I went back to the same town, and (as luck would have it), had to pick up some part for my nearly new Honda. The (different) guy behind the counter made the SAME COMMENT, almost word for word! I think we're about as close to that now as we were in 1975.
Not that it matters much anymore anyway. I used to do almost all my own maintenance, but my new cars are so complicated there's not much I can do, and so reliable, I don't HAVE to do much. I open the hood on my 2002 Honda about every two weeks to check the oil. I haven't opened the hood on my other one in months, except to add washer fluid. The SUV I rented recently had an automatic diagnostic system that even checked THAT stuff, along with tire pressure.
Long ago, when I became an SCO reseller (which was REAL easy and free at the time), they sent me a full set of UnixWare, complete with license. Does this mean I'm okay to run Linux even if they're right?
That doesn't look like an error message, more like a description of a problem. MVS error messages are usually succinct, but descriptive, and at least you have a manual to go look up the numeric codes.
:)
In any case, it made perfect sense to me. Of course, I've been working with MVS for 20 odd years...
I always liked: "The program executed and execute instruction, which tried to execute another execute. Check for program instruction modification." This also makes perfect sense to me, by the way.
Bingo. I had a standalone Tivo that I used with cable, but when I switched to satellite, I got a DirecTivo. I still use the old one with a separate receiver, but the real beauty of the DirecTivo is that it has two tuners, so you can record two shows at once, or watch one while you record another. Last night, while "Enterprise" was on, I watched another show from the buffer, then came back to "Enterprise" about halfway in, watching from the beginning. Skipping the commercials, I caught up right around the end. My son has taken to watching two shows at once, flipping back and forth, avoiding the commercials.
It's probably just as well nobody remembers this piece of crap, but it's out there. Should give you an idea what we're in for.
For the record, I liked Tron too, and I bought the SE, but if you want a movie that really kind of almost tries to get it right, catch "Paper Man" when it runs on late night TV sometime. Everyone forgets this movie, but it has elements of "War Games" and others of that ilk, and came out in 1971! It was a TV movie, but unfortunately it never made video. I'd love to see it uncut.
Worked with an Operating System called "Disk Management Facility" (DMF)
Currently work with a product called "Performance Essentials", which for some reason is abbreviated as P.E.S.S.T.
And years ago, someone told me about a system called "Fully Automated Instrument Landing System" (FAILS). Probably not true, but amusing.
I guess this explains why they gave me one about 2 weeks ago, along with a cord that's supposed to go between your TV and PC sound card. Maybe I should keep them both sealed as collectors' items.