Windows/386 was a thing. It was the 386-specific version of Winows 2. It still ran on top of DOS, it just used the 386's Virtual8086 mode for better, hardware-assisted multitasking. It ran anything Windows 2 ran.
Windows 3 merged the separate 8088/8086, 80286 & 80386 versions of Windows 2 into a single combined binary, with a clever mode-switcher to pick the appropriate one, slapped the GUI, fonts & 3D-shaded widgets from from OS/2 1.2 on it... and made MS wealthy.
You're wrong, and the poster to whom you're replying was more accurate than you.
Dave Cutler was the lead architect for Windows NT, after being headhunted, along with his team leads, from DEC to MS.
He did not work on OS/2 as you claim. He was given the OS/2 v3 project, which is to say Portable OS/2. (IBM kept OS/2 v2, which was the 386 version and which got released under that name and then later had its version number incremented. OS/2 2 was 386-only and IBM's efforts to produce a version for the POWER processors failed.)
OS/2 v3 was the CPU-independent version, little more than a plan, an outline and some header files when Cutler got it. He finished it and made it work, building it on the Intel i960 CPU, codenamed the N10. But MS wanted to distance itself from the OS/2 name and trademark.
So, when the new kernel was running and stable enough, along with its POSIX subsystem, it got a Win32 subsystem, and MS attached the Windows name to it.
Windows on N10. N10 is pronounced "en-ten". They took the initials: NT.
Windows NT is the product of Dave Cutler's labours, and it takes many inspirations from VMS.
No, it's not the same OS. No, it's not directly compatible. But there is a strong connection there.
Windows NT -- and Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8 -- are the hybrid offspring of VMS and OS/2, as mated together by VMs' architect Cutler.
Pardon my vast ignorance. Which Andrew? I know dozens, I'm sure.
Re:So learn German
on
The H Shuts Down
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It is harder than you think.
I am a former editor of heise-online.co.uk, the site that became the H.
I *do* speak a little German - enough to read the headlines on the internal CMS and request translations of stuff that I thought would be interesting for English-speaking readers. Then the professionally-translated copy needed to be edited by a native English speaker - such as me or one of my colleagues - and the edited version checked over by another editor (because you cannot spot your own mistakes).
It's more labour-intensive (and thus, expensive) than you might think.
As for the site design, it's based off the German one - it's hosted on the same servers and managed through the same CMS. German people like a rather more conservative style of Web design than we are used to on the English-language Web.:-)
As a Brit, I am not 100% certain what American terms such as "high school" or "grade school" means, but I'm guessing secondary school - age range approximately 16-18.
My school introduced an 'O'-level course in that time period - I think my class might have been the 2nd or 3rd year to do it. The odd thing was that 'O' levels are the 14-16yr exams, so we were doing a more junior course while doing senior exams.
The computer department had 4 already quite elderly Commodore PET machines - I believe model 4032 ones, networked (kinda sorta) over IEEE to a CMD 4040 dual 5¼" disk drive. They later acquired a whole room full of TI99/4As, each with its own cassette recorder and 14" black & white TV set. The PETs were a much more pleasant environment than the TIs - they only got the TIs because they were very cheap. BBC Micros were the standard by then.
I did my coursework on my home computer, a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as it was more capable than the school computers. Coursework was presented on paper, not in machine-readable form, so it didn't hugely matter on what you wrote your BASIC.
The first lesson, the computer teacher - who was one of the maths teachers - told us all just how useless a Computer Studies 'O'-level would be and that we should all focus on our 'A'-levels, the exams that would secure us a place at University. About half the class walked out.
The rest were told that this was a waste of their time, that they should not do it, that it would not impart any useful skills and was only simple, "Mickey-Mouse" stuff. More walk-outs.
In the end, there were about half a dozen of us, determinedly hanging on. He proceeded to tell us not to do the course, that it was futile and pointless and a distraction that would reduce our chances of getting into Uni.
The rest walked. I stayed.
I made a deal with him. He told me the syllabus; I did it myself, in my own time, and checked in with him once a fortnight to ensure I was on the right track. He wasn't happy and advised against it, but I pressed on.
The following year, half way through my non-course, a full class series was taught, and I sat in on some of those, learning moderately arcane stuff like one's-complement and two's-complement binary arithmetic.
So I ended up tutoring myself in my spare time. I got a 'B' in the end.
The course was quite low-level - binary, octal, hex and conversions; simple programming in BASIC - the 8-bit BASICs of the time mostly did not have things like IF...THEN...ELSE or WHILE...WEND or CASE statements, let alone named procedures or support for local variables and recursion, so it was all quite rudimentary.
I took a step back in time 2y later, studying FORTRAN at Uni as part of a Biology BSc. Got a First in that, but never used the language - the little bit of stats and so on, I did on my Spectrum.
> Sadly no one I know, even vintage sci-fi buffs, have ever read anything he ever wrote.
If someone claims to be into classic SF & they've not read Simak, they're a liar. He is an essential writer, one of the greats. Unsung, yes, underappreciated, definitely, but not/that/obscure.
So you've clearly never used code written on, say, an Apple Newton or an iPad, or possibly even a PalmOS machine - all systems where the user (for which, read "programmer") has no access to the filesystem or there IS no filesystem.
You need to get out more. Learn about how much you don't know before you start confidently making statements about the world.
This is the first person in any discussion of Unity who's said what I too felt. I spent ages fiddling with and customising GNOME 2 to try to get it working as smoothly as I can do in 2min with [*whispers*] Windows. Unity has just blown this away. Minimal tweaking and it works just fine.
I really do not understand people who are flexible enough to move away from majority, default-choice commercial OSs to a minority FOSS OS such as Linux and then have a nervous breakdown because the desktop changes a bit!
Unity is a/lot/ more like GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is. GNOME 2 is dead, same as KDE 3.x (and Trinity) are dead. Staying with them isn't an option.
And Unity does actually work pretty well. It replicates all the important functionality from GNOME 2, Mac OS X and, yes, even Windows. No, not everything I'd like is there, but everything I/need/ to get my work done is.
GNOME 3, from a fairly brief try, is far more disruptive - but it's pretty and there were some elements of it I liked. When it's an option on Ubuntu, I will give it a proper try.
The big fat extended battery is one of the things I miss from my HTC Universal from before it got stolen.
640*480 VGA screen, touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard - albeit a lousy one - 3G, SDHC, IRDA, Wifi, Bluetooth, 2 cameras, one for video, one for photos - that phone had nearly everything. And with the 4.8Ah battery I had, not only did the camera still work and so on, but it ran for a whole long weekend of heavy use on a single charge. I could leave home for work Friday morning, go away for a weekend, and it'd still be going when I got back to the office on Monday morning to charge it. OK, so, it was fat with the big battery and no longer fitted in its case - but totally worth it.
The only snags were the disastrous keyboard - poor layout, but app keys for the various bundled programs in the main alpha block, so if you didn't quite hit the space bar, you left your current app in mid-sentence and entered the web browser or something - and the fact that it ran Windows Mobile. Which is utterly horrid.
My current Nokia E90 does more and has a better keyboard, but it has no touchscreen, can't charge over USB, lacks a standard headphone socket and if I use it hard its battery is dead in 5-6hr. If I use my wonderful media phone as an MP3 player or radio all day, and navigate using its GPS, before sunset it's dead - and I can't charge it without the special Nokia charger. Old ones don't work, they changed the connector size.
If I tether it to my notebook it works fine as a 3.5G modem - but its battery is dead in 2-3hr of use.
Not only Wolfenstein - which arguably was the origin of the engine of Doom - but other significant milestones are missing.
Firstly, Jez San's "Starglider", marketed by Rainbird. Possibly the first 3D game for home computers. ("Battlezone" ran on dedicated vector-graphics hardware.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starglider
David Braben's "Lander" and later the full game "Zarch" for Acorn's Archimedes were AFAIK the first/solid/ rendered 3D graphics on home computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch
These seem to me to be worthy of a mention, at least an opening paragraph. So, probably, is Maze War (1973!) - just limited box-drawing, but a display of 3D and a widely-used technique. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War
It's not some royal proclamation that can never be violated.
If you get sweaty, shower. (If you don't get sweaty, you're not doing it right.) If it starts to rain or whatever after you leave, shower. If there is no shower in the office, find a nearby health club or something and shower there. Probably still cheaper than the costs of motor transport.
If the weather is really inclement or dangerous, *then* you use a vehicle. There's nothing that says that normally doing one prevents the other.
And if you feel ill, then you probably aren't going to work anyway.
I worked a 7pm - 7am shift for 9 months last year, too. I lived 10 miles from my work, which was in the centre of London, one of the largest cities with some of the most congested traffic in the world.
I got on my bike.
With a month or so of practice, I could equal the time spent on the train - about 45min each way. If you get reasonably skilled, a bicycle can make better time in urban traffic than a car. It burns a thousand plus calories a day, and not only gets you fit, it saves money, as well.
If you're particularly overweight or unfit, try a recumbent. They are massively more ergonomic as well as vastly more aerodynamic to ride.
A daily commute of 15-20 miles each way is perfectly doable and it will transform your life.
It's also a great way to wake up at the start of the day. Beats the hell out of caffeine.
DLC is already a standard IT industry term, and for actual knowledgeable people who know about computing -- as opposed to semi-literate games weenies -- it means Data Link Control, which is a network protocol used by IBM SNA mainframes and peripherals and HP LaserJet printers, JetDirect print servers and other network-attached printers. It is also a layer in the OSI 7-layer network model.
What it doesn't mean is "downloadable content", because "download" is a single word.
> x86 code runs natively on 90% of the processors out there.
Er, no, it doesn't. X86 is a minority, for all that it totally dominates the desktop. The most widespread CPU architecture in the world, in terms of total units, is ARM, by a large margin. They sell/billions/ of the things each year. Don't believe me, go look it up.
I'm in a similar state of mind, but happily, I have no wife & no kids, just a house.
I've changed over to being a contractor, with the result of increasing my income 4x - 5x over. My plan is to save up, pay off all my debts and go travelling. After a few years of that, maybe I'll know where I want to be. Maybe not.
I plan to work my way: either doing IT, or working as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).
One important detail you don't mention is where you live. The Western developed nations are expensive. There are many places which are not, for instance the Pacific Rim and Latin America, but which offer a high quality of life. Uruguay, for instance, is a quite developed country but much cheaper than North America.
Consider keeping your career but changing your country and indeed language.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not really.
Windows/386 was a thing. It was the 386-specific version of Winows 2. It still ran on top of DOS, it just used the 386's Virtual8086 mode for better, hardware-assisted multitasking. It ran anything Windows 2 ran.
Windows 3 merged the separate 8088/8086, 80286 & 80386 versions of Windows 2 into a single combined binary, with a clever mode-switcher to pick the appropriate one, slapped the GUI, fonts & 3D-shaded widgets from from OS/2 1.2 on it... and made MS wealthy.
They don't know any better. Pesky kids.
If you want a Free Software compatible laptop and you're willing to pay, it's hard to do better than Purism.
https://puri.sm/
If that's too rich - and they are expensive - then get the best ThinkPad you can afford.
Hear, hear!
I came to work with MS-DOS after CP/M, which followed VAX-VMS at uni. :-)
#greybeard
You're wrong, and the poster to whom you're replying was more accurate than you.
Dave Cutler was the lead architect for Windows NT, after being headhunted, along with his team leads, from DEC to MS.
He did not work on OS/2 as you claim. He was given the OS/2 v3 project, which is to say Portable OS/2. (IBM kept OS/2 v2, which was the 386 version and which got released under that name and then later had its version number incremented. OS/2 2 was 386-only and IBM's efforts to produce a version for the POWER processors failed.)
OS/2 v3 was the CPU-independent version, little more than a plan, an outline and some header files when Cutler got it. He finished it and made it work, building it on the Intel i960 CPU, codenamed the N10. But MS wanted to distance itself from the OS/2 name and trademark.
So, when the new kernel was running and stable enough, along with its POSIX subsystem, it got a Win32 subsystem, and MS attached the Windows name to it.
Windows on N10. N10 is pronounced "en-ten". They took the initials: NT.
Windows NT is the product of Dave Cutler's labours, and it takes many inspirations from VMS.
No, it's not the same OS. No, it's not directly compatible. But there is a strong connection there.
Windows NT -- and Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8 -- are the hybrid offspring of VMS and OS/2, as mated together by VMs' architect Cutler.
As per this incisive blog post from the end of last year (i.e. just under a fortnight ago):
http://alexgaynor.net/2013/dec/30/about-python-3/
This.
But the QNX ones look quite good - if only they made them with a decent landscape format keyboard.
The ultimate smartphone formfactor was the Nokia Communicator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator
If someone made one of those again, I'd buy it whatever OS it ran... Android, Sailfish Jolla, Tizen, Blackberry 10, even Windows Phone.
> I remember thinking -- how are you ever going to
> type a message without keys? Well...
Wait, wait, I know this one.
"Slowly, and with difficulty," amirite?
Pardon my vast ignorance. Which Andrew? I know dozens, I'm sure.
It is harder than you think.
I am a former editor of heise-online.co.uk, the site that became the H.
I *do* speak a little German - enough to read the headlines on the internal CMS and request translations of stuff that I thought would be interesting for English-speaking readers. Then the professionally-translated copy needed to be edited by a native English speaker - such as me or one of my colleagues - and the edited version checked over by another editor (because you cannot spot your own mistakes).
It's more labour-intensive (and thus, expensive) than you might think.
As for the site design, it's based off the German one - it's hosted on the same servers and managed through the same CMS. German people like a rather more conservative style of Web design than we are used to on the English-language Web. :-)
Something like 15 years on Slashdot, and finally a story of mine makes the front page. Woo. :Â)
As a Brit, I am not 100% certain what American terms such as "high school" or "grade school" means, but I'm guessing secondary school - age range approximately 16-18.
My school introduced an 'O'-level course in that time period - I think my class might have been the 2nd or 3rd year to do it. The odd thing was that 'O' levels are the 14-16yr exams, so we were doing a more junior course while doing senior exams.
The computer department had 4 already quite elderly Commodore PET machines - I believe model 4032 ones, networked (kinda sorta) over IEEE to a CMD 4040 dual 5¼" disk drive. They later acquired a whole room full of TI99/4As, each with its own cassette recorder and 14" black & white TV set. The PETs were a much more pleasant environment than the TIs - they only got the TIs because they were very cheap. BBC Micros were the standard by then.
I did my coursework on my home computer, a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as it was more capable than the school computers. Coursework was presented on paper, not in machine-readable form, so it didn't hugely matter on what you wrote your BASIC.
The first lesson, the computer teacher - who was one of the maths teachers - told us all just how useless a Computer Studies 'O'-level would be and that we should all focus on our 'A'-levels, the exams that would secure us a place at University. About half the class walked out.
The rest were told that this was a waste of their time, that they should not do it, that it would not impart any useful skills and was only simple, "Mickey-Mouse" stuff. More walk-outs.
In the end, there were about half a dozen of us, determinedly hanging on. He proceeded to tell us not to do the course, that it was futile and pointless and a distraction that would reduce our chances of getting into Uni.
The rest walked. I stayed.
I made a deal with him. He told me the syllabus; I did it myself, in my own time, and checked in with him once a fortnight to ensure I was on the right track. He wasn't happy and advised against it, but I pressed on.
The following year, half way through my non-course, a full class series was taught, and I sat in on some of those, learning moderately arcane stuff like one's-complement and two's-complement binary arithmetic.
So I ended up tutoring myself in my spare time. I got a 'B' in the end.
The course was quite low-level - binary, octal, hex and conversions; simple programming in BASIC - the 8-bit BASICs of the time mostly did not have things like IF...THEN...ELSE or WHILE...WEND or CASE statements, let alone named procedures or support for local variables and recursion, so it was all quite rudimentary.
I took a step back in time 2y later, studying FORTRAN at Uni as part of a Biology BSc. Got a First in that, but never used the language - the little bit of stats and so on, I did on my Spectrum.
Fewer added special effects and so on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssg0jDbLCew
> Sadly no one I know, even vintage sci-fi buffs, have ever read anything he ever wrote.
If someone claims to be into classic SF & they've not read Simak, they're a liar. He is an essential writer, one of the greats. Unsung, yes, underappreciated, definitely, but not /that /obscure.
Swine! That comment is *far too* insightful.
So you've clearly never used code written on, say, an Apple Newton or an iPad, or possibly even a PalmOS machine - all systems where the user (for which, read "programmer") has no access to the filesystem or there IS no filesystem.
You need to get out more. Learn about how much you don't know before you start confidently making statements about the world.
This is the first person in any discussion of Unity who's said what I too felt. I spent ages fiddling with and customising GNOME 2 to try to get it working as smoothly as I can do in 2min with [*whispers*] Windows. Unity has just blown this away. Minimal tweaking and it works just fine.
I really do not understand people who are flexible enough to move away from majority, default-choice commercial OSs to a minority FOSS OS such as Linux and then have a nervous breakdown because the desktop changes a bit!
Unity is a /lot/ more like GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is. GNOME 2 is dead, same as KDE 3.x (and Trinity) are dead. Staying with them isn't an option.
And Unity does actually work pretty well. It replicates all the important functionality from GNOME 2, Mac OS X and, yes, even Windows. No, not everything I'd like is there, but everything I /need/ to get my work done is.
GNOME 3, from a fairly brief try, is far more disruptive - but it's pretty and there were some elements of it I liked. When it's an option on Ubuntu, I will give it a proper try.
Bugger the video formats, where are the transcripts?
I could either spend half a day watching them or 5-10 min reading. You guys may have all day; I don't.
We can expect the first biological package to hit Kilimanjaro soon... right after Iapetus turns black and Hyperion disappears.
(Hint for the terminally unhip.)
The big fat extended battery is one of the things I miss from my HTC Universal from before it got stolen.
640*480 VGA screen, touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard - albeit a lousy one - 3G, SDHC, IRDA, Wifi, Bluetooth, 2 cameras, one for video, one for photos - that phone had nearly everything. And with the 4.8Ah battery I had, not only did the camera still work and so on, but it ran for a whole long weekend of heavy use on a single charge. I could leave home for work Friday morning, go away for a weekend, and it'd still be going when I got back to the office on Monday morning to charge it. OK, so, it was fat with the big battery and no longer fitted in its case - but totally worth it.
The only snags were the disastrous keyboard - poor layout, but app keys for the various bundled programs in the main alpha block, so if you didn't quite hit the space bar, you left your current app in mid-sentence and entered the web browser or something - and the fact that it ran Windows Mobile. Which is utterly horrid.
My current Nokia E90 does more and has a better keyboard, but it has no touchscreen, can't charge over USB, lacks a standard headphone socket and if I use it hard its battery is dead in 5-6hr. If I use my wonderful media phone as an MP3 player or radio all day, and navigate using its GPS, before sunset it's dead - and I can't charge it without the special Nokia charger. Old ones don't work, they changed the connector size.
If I tether it to my notebook it works fine as a 3.5G modem - but its battery is dead in 2-3hr of use.
And no extended ones are available.
It's so stupid it's tragic.
Not only Wolfenstein - which arguably was the origin of the engine of Doom - but other significant milestones are missing.
Firstly, Jez San's "Starglider", marketed by Rainbird. Possibly the first 3D game for home computers. ("Battlezone" ran on dedicated vector-graphics hardware.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starglider
David Braben's "Lander" and later the full game "Zarch" for Acorn's Archimedes were AFAIK the first /solid/ rendered 3D graphics on home computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch
Of course, Braben's Elite was the first computer game to use any 3D at all - Starglider was /all/ in 3D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(computer_game)
These seem to me to be worthy of a mention, at least an opening paragraph. So, probably, is Maze War (1973!) - just limited box-drawing, but a display of 3D and a widely-used technique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War
It doubtless inspired 3D Monster Maze from 1981 on the ZX81, a machine which didn't even have graphics as such:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze
3D Ant Attack from 1983, which also provided the engine for Zombie Zombie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack
It's not some royal proclamation that can never be violated.
If you get sweaty, shower. (If you don't get sweaty, you're not doing it right.) If it starts to rain or whatever after you leave, shower. If there is no shower in the office, find a nearby health club or something and shower there. Probably still cheaper than the costs of motor transport.
If the weather is really inclement or dangerous, *then* you use a vehicle. There's nothing that says that normally doing one prevents the other.
And if you feel ill, then you probably aren't going to work anyway.
These are red herrings.
I worked a 7pm - 7am shift for 9 months last year, too. I lived 10 miles from my work, which was in the centre of London, one of the largest cities with some of the most congested traffic in the world.
I got on my bike.
With a month or so of practice, I could equal the time spent on the train - about 45min each way. If you get reasonably skilled, a bicycle can make better time in urban traffic than a car. It burns a thousand plus calories a day, and not only gets you fit, it saves money, as well.
If you're particularly overweight or unfit, try a recumbent. They are massively more ergonomic as well as vastly more aerodynamic to ride.
A daily commute of 15-20 miles each way is perfectly doable and it will transform your life.
It's also a great way to wake up at the start of the day. Beats the hell out of caffeine.
DLC is already a standard IT industry term, and for actual knowledgeable people who know about computing -- as opposed to semi-literate games weenies -- it means Data Link Control, which is a network protocol used by IBM SNA mainframes and peripherals and HP LaserJet printers, JetDirect print servers and other network-attached printers. It is also a layer in the OSI 7-layer network model.
What it doesn't mean is "downloadable content", because "download" is a single word.
So whoever came up with this needs a slap.
> x86 code runs natively on 90% of the processors out there.
Er, no, it doesn't. X86 is a minority, for all that it totally dominates the desktop. The most widespread CPU architecture in the world, in terms of total units, is ARM, by a large margin. They sell /billions/ of the things each year. Don't believe me, go look it up.
I'm in a similar state of mind, but happily, I have no wife & no kids, just a house.
I've changed over to being a contractor, with the result of increasing my income 4x - 5x over. My plan is to save up, pay off all my debts and go travelling. After a few years of that, maybe I'll know where I want to be. Maybe not.
I plan to work my way: either doing IT, or working as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).
One important detail you don't mention is where you live. The Western developed nations are expensive. There are many places which are not, for instance the Pacific Rim and Latin America, but which offer a high quality of life. Uruguay, for instance, is a quite developed country but much cheaper than North America.
Consider keeping your career but changing your country and indeed language.