Agreed. One additional advantage not covered in TFA that I remember fondly from OpenStep (which feature GNUStep shares when configured for non-flattened bundles) was the ability to have one network installation of an.app that would execute on any OpenStep machine that mounted the share, regardless of the architecture (m68k, Sparc, PA-RISC, Intel, in our case). This also meant you could move a hard disk between machines of different architectures and still boot from it. For those without these needs, and needing to conserve as much disk space as possible, there was always Lipo ( http://ss64.com/osx/lipo.html ).
I have a 1953 "Sargeant" television set that still works. The tubes are a bit gassy, the picture a bit bluish-white. I quit turning it on about 8 years ago, because the conductive coating on the outside of the picture tube is coming loose, and parts of it pop off when the tube powers up. You used to be able to buy an aerosol spray to recoat the tube (made by CRC, IIRC), but I can't find it available anymore. I so want to hook it up to a digital converter box though.
McDonald's coffee, besides tasting like crap, was always INSANELY hot. I once HAD IT MELT THE GLUE holding in the base of the paper cup it was served to me in. I was driving in Chicago, had left McDonald's only a few minutes before, and picked up the cup from the console cup holder for my first sip. The bottom of the cup fell out just as I was bringing the rim of the cup to my lips, and dumped the entire, scalding, contents onto my crotch. I crossed four lanes of traffic in as many seconds, screaming the entire way, so that I could get out of the hot pool of coffee puddled in my vinyl seat. This was years before the now famous coffee lawsuit. I have much sympathy, and evidently not enough greed.
The original macs were a little difficult to get into without a 'Mac-cracker' tool, since they had a CRT inside. From the II onward, it was usually one screw to get into one. Macs are very easy to get into and very servicer-friendly.
The Commie-64 is a different story. The voltage regulators used to go on those things at regular intervals, and normally took the fuse in the external 'brick' power supply with it. This could be cut open and the fuse could be replaced, until the second case style came out. After that, they started filling the 'brick' with epoxy resin to prevent any repairs.
One thing DEC has always been very good at is emulation. Push them to port FX!32 (their 32-bit intel emulation which ran NT/intel binaries on NT/Alpha) to Linux, OpenVMS, and Tru64 instead of letting it wither as it has since NT/Alpha died.
More importantly, your assertion that VMS hasn't been 'hacked and refined' like the more open unix is totally off base.
VMS has been engineered. Unix has been hacked. There's a big difference in the quality (I admin both kinds of systems).
VMS used to come with source listings on microfiche, before most of the world had heard of 'open source' (or more importantly, free software). I think they stopped doing that around 6.0. Even so, I have a whole cabinet full of SPR's and their responses from my predecessor sitting in a file cabinet. They are fun to read through. Larry was often able to find a problem, go to the source listing and diagnose it, then send off an SPR to Digital and have it corrected. This enjoyed many of the advantages of open source, and was certainly more than you could do with a SunOS installation during the same time.
VMS is no more proprietary than OS/2, Windows 95, or anything else. And source listings are still available on CD, but cost something now ($1200 or so, I think).
I, too, wish they'd open the source, since there are those screaming for an IA64 port that could probably pull it off...
VMS: Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
VMS isn't dead, despite Gartner and the rest proselytizing that fate for the last 10 years. They've done the same thing to unix, until very recently.
VMS still has a large user base, but Compaq has seen fit to cut off their noses, keep prices through the stratosphere, and aim for the high end only, all the while selling off bits and pieces of technology to M$ as part of the 'Affinity' program. This was of course to woo NT development over to Alpha, but M$ as usual has found a way to make this useless to their 'partner' (delaying 64-bit NT on Alpha until Merced ships with 64-bit NT, denying any Alpha leadtime). Fortunately, Compaq has seen some of the light and pulled the plug, pulled their Digits off NT filesystem/clustering development, etc.
There are a number of organizations that will support VMS, though I bet you're more after commercial application support. There are still quite a few Apps available (even WordPerfect 7) but the market has declined into a lot of vertical applications (science, education, research, telecommunications, banking, utilities). Some of this is due to development cannibalization to port to NT, most of it is due to DEC and now Compaq treating VMS like it is a dirty word for the past 5 or 6 years.
Compaq is still a PC box pusher. They don't understand that they have an OS with incredible reliability (uptimes in the range of 13-15 years have been reported) and clustering that nothing else can touch (shared everything, over multiple transports, with automatic load balancing, cluster aliases, the ability to cluster machines 100's of miles apart, etc...)
There is still a community, despite the Q's attempts to munge DECUS into a new marketing vehicle for their desktop PC's (I get offers as a member of DECUS for steep discounts on PC's with NT installed...while what I want are steep discounts on Alpha boxes with VMS or Linux). Check out the VMSNET newsgroups or COMP.OS.VMS. Very active. DECUS has managed to get Compaq to issue a 'hobbyist' VMS license and a selection of layered products. Some commercial VMS vendors are participating to offer their products under the same license. Check out Montagar Software which distributes hobbyist licenses. You have to join DECUS (free).
The 'Open' in OpenVMS was a marketroid move when VMS fully supported POSIX (6.0?). IIRC VMS had full POSIX support before any commercial Unix did. It had nothing at all to do with the move to Alpha. It was just buzzword compliance when everything deployed had to be an 'open system'. There is no difference between VMS and OpenVMS, save for the POSIX layer. That has been removed in recent versions, as the standard VMS runtime libraries now support the POSIX API's as well.
Too bad it was before your time. When I was in college, VMS was *it*. VMS is younger than Unix, mind you, but they gave steep hardware and software discounts to colleges and phenomenal support. Now, so many useful things have been dropped from the CSLG (Campus Software License Agreement) that we plan on dropping the CSLG here next year. It is no longer worth it. Compaq's high-end blinders have lead them to sell off the layered products that made managing VMS clusters so sweet (PolyCenter Scheduler, Console Manager, Performance Analyzer, etc.) Most of these were sold to Computer Associates and now run on (and require) NT. Compaq's direction is loudly ranted about on COMP.OS.VMS.
Regardless, you could learn a few things from VMS. Linux could learn a lot, structurely. VMS was _designed_ (when Olson, the engineer, was CEO) and does so many things right... Even though Compaq has butchered the site, try the OpenVMS Website to learn more. The Documentation and FAQ links are there.
Woz, you're the greatest, thanks. Thanks especially for the Apple II, the first computer I actually got to touch. I had been coding on paper for 4 years (since I was 10) before meeting my first computer in high school.
I'd also like to thank Jobs for convincing you to box it up and sell it, because I came from a poor family and wouldn't have touched one for several more years if I'd had to buy all of the parts and assemble it from the schematics. It was good to have it encased in plastic and therefore palatable to public schools.
My dad told me that he remembered the screen on the television they had when he was a kid was 'soft'. He said you could touch it and it would make the picture wobble and wave for a while (Pepto-Bismol effect is my name for it).
It must have been a water filled lens.
BTW, does anyone know where I can get CRT coating spray? I can't find anyplace locally that carries it anymore, and I've a 1951 'Sargent' television that works, except the CRT coating is starting to fall off.
But be careful. We have a >$1M software package, running against Oracle, that broke when we moved to NIS+. It parsed/etc/passwd directly instead of using getpwent and friends. Fortunately, that high price tag included source.
This was my biggest beef too. Windows 1.0 (well, 1.1 is the earliest I've used) sucked. You couldn't even overlap windows...IIRC they were either iconified or tiled. It used a lot of memory even then. I never noticed any difference with Windows 2.0...it looked like the same thing to me with a different version number. Ahh...I just had a bad flashback of 'the DOS Executive'.
Anyway, I never saw any products for it from anyone but Microsoft either...except for an early AOL thingy. It was only after MS got together with IBM on OS/2 that they were able to learn/steal enough to have a real product. Even then, on the same hardware GEM was better (I still have a copy).
Beyond the timeline liberties, they played Steve up to be a nut. Sure, he's a jerk, but so is Ellison and so is Gates. Look where they all are.
Eh? Pathworks 32 (I'm assuming client) is the bundled eXcursion PC X Server, DECNet over IP, and maybe the DECnet mail client. There's some DOS stuff in there...batches that get run at startup that can be managed remotely from a Pathworks server on a VMS system. If it is a new enough version I think there's a good terminal emulator in there too. It definitely doesn't 'run unix applications on Win32'.
Pathworks server is really pretty nice...think Samba with a decent management interface, since that is essentially what it is...SMB (well, LanMan) protocol file and print services from VMS. Combined with cluster aliases and a VMS cluster, you've got pretty bulletproof file services. Lizzy Borden could take an axe and sink it deep into your Vax, and the rest of the cluster would keep your users from ever knowing.:-)
You definitely got your $4 worth though, considering how expensive PC X servers are.
I'm not sure what ever happened with DesqView/X. It was a remarkebly good product...I don't recall what transport it used but it definitely wasn't IP. I recall using it over a 2MB LANtastic network. Of course, the Desqview layers were beneath that too...it was supposed to be able to find spare CPU cycles on other machines on your network and would selectively run applications on those other machines. Sounded cool, but I never had a chance to test it.
It is worth noting that there is now an (unsupported) patch to get VMS 7.2 going on the once 'NT only' Multia workstation. This had been rumoured to be floating around at Digital for a long time...but DEC was so far up MS's...err, well, anyway.
Compaq has (sorta) corrected this problem. They were kind enough to provide VMS for hobbyists for free and recently extended that to the most recent version (7.2) and to Alpha, and to most of the layered products (DEC Compilers! Yay!) Unfortunately they still want ridiculous sums if you want to use it for business.
http://www.openvms.digital.com/hobby.html
There are links on there to the Montagar site, and from there you should be able to find media kits and the driver patches if you're at all interested. There are also 2 or 3 commercial products from other manufacturers participating in the hobbyist licensing...I highly recommend Multinet as a TCP/IP stack. Derived from BSD/Tahoe...very nice management tools.
I collect old computers, and while I don't have any Apple IIs, I do have an Apple III. Unfortunately, I have *no software* for it. If anyone knows where I can obtain any software for it (even just the OS) I'd appreciate it. I also have a MIPS workstation in the same boat (MIPS branded, down to the MIPS mouse).
I have a (full?) set of Apple II manuals still in shrink wrap if anyone is interested. Also a full shelf of documentation on the AT&T 6300 down to schematics and BIOS source dump if anyone needs the info...
I sent an article about this to Rob a couple of months ago and it never appeared...I'm glad to see that it now has.
I've thought a lot about this since then, and I believe that this can ultimately become a threat to OSS development in the US. If the government makes this law to 'protect the rights' of the software industry it will eventually see fit to make the 'technology' a requirement of exported software. This would enable the US to disable software used by its enemies, as well as totally prevent the use of US-authored software with strong encryption outside the US.
OSS, by definition, couldn't meet such a requirement and would become illegal to export.
Apple can't release the GUI portions under a free license since they don't hold copyright on large portions of it...Display Postscript. There's some NeXT-specific code in there (interceptor, and some compositing operations) but most belongs to Adobe. Adobe refuses to even license DPS for YellowBox on NT. IMHO there are nefarious reasons for this.
Instead, Apple is developing Quartz, which is a derivative of Adobe PDF with the compositing stuff thrown in, as well as anti-aliasing and the like which were not part of DPS. I'd assert that this code will also not belong entirely to Apple, and will therefore never be opened until Adobe itself is forced to open code.
This is the primary argument I have for corporations to endorse open code. In no other business that I can think of can a company pull the rug out from a (potential) industry simply by withdrawing a product. If Ford decides to stop selling cars with electronic ignition systems, your existing Ford will keep on running (well, as well as any other Ford). Adobe pulled DPS, which forced DEC to drop it on their products, and will eventually force Sun, IBM, and others to as well. Anything that depends on it (luckily, not much) will die with it next time you upgrade your commercial X server. DEC has done the same with Pathworks/Mac (VMS File Services for Macintosh) on V7.2. You upgrade, your Mac file services are no longer supported. This stinks.
I personally haven't agreed to the APSL, since I have no hardware that it will (yet) run on. I have browsed the DarwinLinux directories though and have found that there are i386 directories and even some EISA driver code out there. I think Apple has provided the Intel stuff, it is just broken and out of sync right now. Someone will no doubt get it going on Intel soon. I hope that their effort pays off for both Apple and their customers better than any of them could have expected...this would represent the best possible turn of events as it will build pressure inside and out of Apple to open more code.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that the lack of GUI on Darwin represents fertile ground for some of the interesting GUI projects that have been in the works. Maybe the Berlin people would be interested? A native DGS would be nice for GNUStep... Hmmm. Some unclaimed territory...
There are plenty of ISO standards (most still in the works, but quite old) related to letting systems exchange data via EDI. STEP comes to mind (product data exchange) as a possibility.
Another candidate I'd think would be PICS ( the child-protections stuff ). Didn't that have metadata that controlled what your browser displayed, and what it didn't (based on who you were)? Anybody know when PICS was first specified? IIRC it was 95'ish, sometime just before the CDA.
What about ODBC? The metadata on the client describes how to connect to a data source, there's arbitration involved in what methods to use to update each other...hmmm.
What a keen observation! I had not considered this, but I have to agree now that I have. I was in the strange position of being accepted by a few at both ends of the spectrum (cheerleader crowd and the welding shop guys), so I still know many of these people over a decade later. Two of the cheerleaders I was friends with are now teachers (one high school math, the other elementary school) and several of the 'rich jocks' are lawyers, others are coaches. Interesting.
(As for being accepted, I was just lucky, I was a good artist and painted and drew pictures for several girls in elementary school, just as a friendly gesture. Later, 3 of these became the 'popular girls', and they were actually quite nice as people. As for the welding shop guys, well, I could fix _anything_. I'd also spent the first 5 years of elementary school fighting my way to school and back. I could hold my own in any fight, and had gained the respect of some of the 'big' guys.;-) )
The VMS guys have been used to this kind of FUD for a while. They call it 'BenchMarketing', which I think is a clever term.
:^)
I think 'logging' is marketese for 'Auditing'
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 1
In which case, the complaint would be justified.
Solaris has auditing and ACL's for 'Trusted Solaris', though I have not (yet) used it. This is how one obtains B1 security for Solaris.
VMS has done auditing correctly for a long time. It has made my job much, much easier.
Click here for Sec urity Event Classes that can be audited/alarmed. (It wouldn't hurt to read the whole Security auditing section. The ANALYZE/AUDIT tool is very nice.)
It is also good to have hardware-level events logged. A couple of years ago I had a VAX crash. I simply did ANALYZE/ERROR/SINCE=TODAY and found out I had a SIMM that was having ECC/parity errors. Since it logged the bank of memory with the failure I knew exactly which SIMM. I called the DEC service guy, he came out, and we switched it out during lunch. No one noticed.
This is interesting. Never knew that. I did know that altruistic authors used to assign copyrights to orphanages, but never knew why. For instance, 'Peter Pan' was assigned copyright to some orphanage.
Well, I haven't looked at any of the code yet, and do not intend to until there is a definitive answer to due skepticism. However, I'd like to point out that Darwin is *not* 'MacOS'. Darwin is an 'improved' Mach + the BSD layers, + NetInfo and SoundKit, and the Objective C runtime. Tevanian is the guy who designed Mach in the first place, and apparently he has learned a few things over the years since, and incorporated some good ideas from abandoned Copland kernels. I'd like to see an improved Mach. I'd like to see it on Intel (and other) hardware. Also interesting is the Objective C runtime. Past posts on gnu.gnustep.discuss indicate that the Apple/NeXT ObjC runtime is much faster than the GNU implementation. The GNUStep Kits however actually seem to be faster, given the same runtime, than the Apple/NeXT ones. If it is safe to use their runtime improvements for the betterment of Gnu ObjC, I'd like to see that done. Those are my interests. Also, I hope the old Motorola '030 and '040 code is still around, 'cause I'd like to see if Darwin could run on my old NeXT cube(s). --Rubinstien
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Agreed. One additional advantage not covered in TFA that I remember fondly from OpenStep (which feature GNUStep shares when configured for non-flattened bundles) was the ability to have one network installation of an .app that would execute on any OpenStep machine that mounted the share, regardless of the architecture (m68k, Sparc, PA-RISC, Intel, in our case). This also meant you could move a hard disk between machines of different architectures and still boot from it. For those without these needs, and needing to conserve as much disk space as possible, there was always Lipo ( http://ss64.com/osx/lipo.html ).
--Rubinstien
Agreed. I just bought it (again) on CD a few days ago, then ripped it to iTunes. Excellent album all of the way through.
I have a 1953 "Sargeant" television set that still works. The tubes are a bit gassy, the picture a bit bluish-white. I quit turning it on about 8 years ago, because the conductive coating on the outside of the picture tube is coming loose, and parts of it pop off when the tube powers up. You used to be able to buy an aerosol spray to recoat the tube (made by CRC, IIRC), but I can't find it available anymore. I so want to hook it up to a digital converter box though.
McDonald's coffee, besides tasting like crap, was always INSANELY hot. I once HAD IT MELT THE GLUE holding in the base of the paper cup it was served to me in. I was driving in Chicago, had left McDonald's only a few minutes before, and picked up the cup from the console cup holder for my first sip. The bottom of the cup fell out just as I was bringing the rim of the cup to my lips, and dumped the entire, scalding, contents onto my crotch. I crossed four lanes of traffic in as many seconds, screaming the entire way, so that I could get out of the hot pool of coffee puddled in my vinyl seat. This was years before the now famous coffee lawsuit. I have much sympathy, and evidently not enough greed.
Yes, my skin peeled.
The original macs were a little difficult to get into without a 'Mac-cracker' tool, since they had a CRT inside. From the II onward, it was usually one screw to get into one. Macs are very easy to get into and very servicer-friendly.
The Commie-64 is a different story. The voltage regulators used to go on those things at regular intervals, and normally took the fuse in the external 'brick' power supply with it. This could be cut open and the fuse could be replaced, until the second case style came out. After that, they started filling the 'brick' with epoxy resin to prevent any repairs.
I used to hate Commodore for that reason alone.
--Rubinstien
One thing DEC has always been very good at is
emulation. Push them to port FX!32 (their 32-bit
intel emulation which ran NT/intel binaries on
NT/Alpha) to Linux, OpenVMS, and Tru64 instead of
letting it wither as it has since NT/Alpha died.
To answer your question, No.
More importantly, your assertion that VMS hasn't been 'hacked and refined' like the more open unix is totally off base.
VMS has been engineered. Unix has been hacked. There's a big difference in the quality (I admin both kinds of systems).
VMS used to come with source listings on microfiche, before most of the world had heard of 'open source' (or more importantly, free software). I think they stopped doing that around 6.0. Even so, I have a whole cabinet full of SPR's and their responses from my predecessor sitting in a file cabinet. They are fun to read through. Larry was often able to find a problem, go to the source listing and diagnose it, then send off an SPR to Digital and have it corrected. This enjoyed many of the advantages of open source, and was certainly more than you could do with a SunOS installation during the same time.
VMS is no more proprietary than OS/2, Windows 95, or anything else. And source listings are still available on CD, but cost something now ($1200 or so, I think).
I, too, wish they'd open the source, since there are those screaming for an IA64 port that could probably pull it off...
--Rubinstien
VMS: Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
VMS isn't dead, despite Gartner and the rest proselytizing that fate for the last 10 years. They've done the same thing to unix, until very recently.
VMS still has a large user base, but Compaq has seen fit to cut off their noses, keep prices through the stratosphere, and aim for the high end only, all the while selling off bits and pieces of technology to M$ as part of the 'Affinity' program. This was of course to woo NT development over to Alpha, but M$ as usual has found a way to make this useless to their 'partner' (delaying 64-bit NT on Alpha until Merced ships with 64-bit NT, denying any Alpha leadtime). Fortunately, Compaq has seen some of the light and pulled the plug, pulled their Digits off NT filesystem/clustering development, etc.
There are a number of organizations that will support VMS, though I bet you're more after commercial application support. There are still quite a few Apps available (even WordPerfect 7) but the market has declined into a lot of vertical applications (science, education, research, telecommunications, banking, utilities). Some of this is due to development cannibalization to port to NT, most of it is due to DEC and now Compaq treating VMS like it is a dirty word for the past 5 or 6 years.
Compaq is still a PC box pusher. They don't understand that they have an OS with incredible reliability (uptimes in the range of 13-15 years have been reported) and clustering that nothing else can touch (shared everything, over multiple transports, with automatic load balancing, cluster aliases, the ability to cluster machines 100's of miles apart, etc...)
There is still a community, despite the Q's attempts to munge DECUS into a new marketing vehicle for their desktop PC's (I get offers as a member of DECUS for steep discounts on PC's with NT installed...while what I want are steep discounts on Alpha boxes with VMS or Linux). Check out the VMSNET newsgroups or COMP.OS.VMS. Very active. DECUS has managed to get Compaq to issue a 'hobbyist' VMS license and a selection of layered products. Some commercial VMS vendors are participating to offer their products under the same license. Check out Montagar Software which distributes hobbyist licenses. You have to join DECUS (free).
The 'Open' in OpenVMS was a marketroid move when VMS fully supported POSIX (6.0?). IIRC VMS had full POSIX support before any commercial Unix did. It had nothing at all to do with the move to Alpha. It was just buzzword compliance when everything deployed had to be an 'open system'. There is no difference between VMS and OpenVMS, save for the POSIX layer. That has been removed in recent versions, as the standard VMS runtime libraries now support the POSIX API's as well.
Too bad it was before your time. When I was in college, VMS was *it*. VMS is younger than Unix, mind you, but they gave steep hardware and software discounts to colleges and phenomenal support. Now, so many useful things have been dropped from the CSLG (Campus Software License Agreement) that we plan on dropping the CSLG here next year. It is no longer worth it. Compaq's high-end blinders have lead them to sell off the layered products that made managing VMS clusters so sweet (PolyCenter Scheduler, Console Manager, Performance Analyzer, etc.) Most of these were sold to Computer Associates and now run on (and require) NT. Compaq's direction is loudly ranted about on COMP.OS.VMS.
Regardless, you could learn a few things from VMS. Linux could learn a lot, structurely. VMS was _designed_ (when Olson, the engineer, was CEO) and does so many things right... Even though Compaq has butchered the site, try the OpenVMS Website to learn more. The Documentation and FAQ links are there.
--Rubinstien
Woz, you're the greatest, thanks. Thanks especially for the Apple II, the first computer I actually got to touch. I had been coding on paper for 4 years (since I was 10) before meeting my first computer in high school.
I'd also like to thank Jobs for convincing you to box it up and sell it, because I came from a poor family and wouldn't have touched one for several more years if I'd had to buy all of the parts and assemble it from the schematics. It was good to have it encased in plastic and therefore palatable to public schools.
Best Wishes, and thanks again.
My dad told me that he remembered the screen
on the television they had when he was a kid
was 'soft'. He said you could touch it and
it would make the picture wobble and wave for
a while (Pepto-Bismol effect is my name for it).
It must have been a water filled lens.
BTW, does anyone know where I can get CRT coating spray? I can't find anyplace locally that carries it anymore, and I've a 1951 'Sargent' television
that works, except the CRT coating is starting to
fall off.
Thanks.
But be careful. We have a >$1M software package, /etc/passwd directly instead
running against Oracle, that broke when we moved
to NIS+. It parsed
of using getpwent and friends. Fortunately, that
high price tag included source.
This was my biggest beef too. Windows 1.0 (well, 1.1 is the earliest I've used) sucked. You couldn't even overlap windows...IIRC they were either iconified or tiled. It used a lot of memory even then. I never noticed any difference with Windows 2.0...it looked like the same thing to me with a different version number. Ahh...I just had a bad flashback of 'the DOS Executive'.
Anyway, I never saw any products for it from anyone but Microsoft either...except for an early AOL thingy. It was only after MS got together with IBM on OS/2 that they were able to learn/steal enough to have a real product. Even then, on the same hardware GEM was better (I still have a copy).
Beyond the timeline liberties, they played Steve up to be a nut. Sure, he's a jerk, but so is Ellison and so is Gates. Look where they all are.
Eh? Pathworks 32 (I'm assuming client) is the bundled eXcursion PC X Server, DECNet over IP, and maybe the DECnet mail client. There's some DOS stuff in there...batches that get run at startup that can be managed remotely from a Pathworks server on a VMS system. If it is a new enough version I think there's a good terminal emulator in there too. It definitely doesn't 'run unix applications on Win32'.
:-)
Pathworks server is really pretty nice...think Samba with a decent management interface, since that is essentially what it is...SMB (well, LanMan) protocol file and print services from VMS. Combined with cluster aliases and a VMS cluster, you've got pretty bulletproof file services. Lizzy Borden could take an axe and sink it deep into your Vax, and the rest of the cluster would keep your users from ever knowing.
You definitely got your $4 worth though, considering how expensive PC X servers are.
I'm not sure what ever happened with DesqView/X. It was a remarkebly good product...I don't recall what transport it used but it definitely wasn't IP. I recall using it over a 2MB LANtastic network. Of course, the Desqview layers were beneath that too...it was supposed to be able to find spare CPU cycles on other machines on your network and would selectively run applications on
those other machines. Sounded cool, but I never had a chance to test it.
--Rubinstien
It is worth noting that there is now an (unsupported) patch to get VMS 7.2 going on the once 'NT only' Multia workstation. This had been rumoured to be floating around at Digital for a long time...but DEC was so far up MS's...err, well, anyway.
...very nice management tools.
Compaq has (sorta) corrected this problem. They were kind enough to provide VMS for hobbyists for free and recently extended that to the most recent version (7.2) and to Alpha, and to most of the layered products (DEC Compilers! Yay!) Unfortunately they still want ridiculous sums if you want to use it for business.
http://www.openvms.digital.com/hobby.html
There are links on there to the Montagar site, and from there you should be able to find media kits and the driver patches if you're at all interested. There are also 2 or 3 commercial products from other manufacturers participating in the hobbyist licensing...I highly recommend Multinet as a TCP/IP stack. Derived from BSD/Tahoe
--Rubinstien
I collect old computers, and while I don't have any Apple IIs, I do have an Apple III. Unfortunately, I have *no software* for it. If anyone knows where I can obtain any software for it (even just the OS) I'd appreciate it. I also have a MIPS workstation in the same boat (MIPS branded, down to the MIPS mouse).
I have a (full?) set of Apple II manuals still in shrink wrap if anyone is interested. Also a full shelf of documentation on the AT&T 6300 down to schematics and BIOS source dump if anyone needs the info...
--Rubinstien
I sent an article about this to Rob a couple of
months ago and it never appeared...I'm glad to see that it now has.
I've thought a lot about this since then, and I
believe that this can ultimately become a threat to OSS development in the US. If the government
makes this law to 'protect the rights' of the
software industry it will eventually see fit to
make the 'technology' a requirement of exported software. This would enable the US to disable
software used by its enemies, as well as totally prevent the use of US-authored software with strong encryption outside the US.
OSS, by definition, couldn't meet such a requirement and would become illegal to export.
Hmmm,
Apple can't release the GUI portions under a free license since they don't hold copyright on large portions of it...Display Postscript. There's some NeXT-specific code in there (interceptor, and some compositing operations) but most belongs to Adobe. Adobe refuses to even license DPS for YellowBox on NT. IMHO there are nefarious reasons for this.
Instead, Apple is developing Quartz, which is a derivative of Adobe PDF with the compositing stuff thrown in, as well as anti-aliasing and the like which were not part of DPS. I'd assert that this code will also not belong entirely to Apple, and will therefore never be opened until Adobe itself is forced to open code.
This is the primary argument I have for corporations to endorse open code. In no other business that I can think of can a company pull the rug out from a (potential) industry simply by withdrawing a product. If Ford decides to stop selling cars with electronic ignition systems, your existing Ford will keep on running (well, as well as any other Ford). Adobe pulled DPS, which forced DEC to drop it on their products, and will eventually force Sun, IBM, and others to as well. Anything that depends on it (luckily, not much) will die with it next time you upgrade your commercial X server. DEC has done the same with Pathworks/Mac (VMS File Services for Macintosh) on V7.2. You upgrade, your Mac file services are no longer supported. This stinks.
I personally haven't agreed to the APSL, since I have no hardware that it will (yet) run on. I have browsed the DarwinLinux directories though and have found that there are i386 directories and even some EISA driver code out there. I think Apple has provided the Intel stuff, it is just broken and out of sync right now. Someone will no doubt get it going on Intel soon. I hope that their effort pays off for both Apple and their customers better than any of them could have expected...this would represent the best possible turn of events as it will build pressure inside and out of Apple to open more code.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that the lack of GUI on Darwin represents fertile ground for some of the interesting GUI projects that have been in the works. Maybe the Berlin people would be interested? A native DGS would be nice for GNUStep... Hmmm. Some unclaimed territory...
There are plenty of ISO standards (most still in the works, but quite old) related to letting systems exchange data via EDI. STEP comes to mind (product data exchange) as a possibility.
Another candidate I'd think would be PICS ( the child-protections stuff ). Didn't that have metadata that controlled what your browser displayed, and what it didn't (based on who you were)? Anybody know when PICS was first specified? IIRC it was 95'ish, sometime just before the CDA.
What about ODBC? The metadata on the client describes how to connect to a data source, there's arbitration involved in what methods to use to update each other...hmmm.
Thoughts?
What a keen observation! I had not considered this, but I have to agree now that I have. I
;-) )
was in the strange position of being accepted
by a few at both ends of the spectrum (cheerleader crowd and the welding shop guys), so I still know
many of these people over a decade later. Two of the cheerleaders I was friends with are now teachers (one high school math, the other elementary school) and several of the 'rich jocks' are lawyers, others are coaches. Interesting.
(As for being accepted, I was just lucky, I was a good artist and painted and drew pictures for several girls in elementary school, just as a friendly gesture. Later, 3 of these became the 'popular girls', and they were actually quite nice as people. As for the welding shop guys, well, I could fix _anything_. I'd also spent the first 5 years of elementary school fighting my way to school and back. I could hold my own in any fight, and had gained the respect of some of the 'big' guys.
The VMS guys have been used to this kind of FUD for a while. They call it 'BenchMarketing', which I think is a clever term.
:^)
In which case, the complaint would be justified.
Solaris has auditing and ACL's for 'Trusted Solaris', though I have not (yet) used it. This is how one obtains B1 security for Solaris.
VMS has done auditing correctly for a long time. It has made my job much, much easier.
Click here for Sec urity Event Classes that can be audited/alarmed. (It wouldn't hurt to read the whole Security auditing section. The ANALYZE/AUDIT tool is very nice.)
It is also good to have hardware-level events logged. A couple of years ago I had a VAX crash. I simply did ANALYZE/ERROR/SINCE=TODAY and found out I had a SIMM that was having ECC/parity errors. Since it logged the bank of memory with the failure I knew exactly which SIMM. I called the DEC service guy, he came out, and we switched it out during lunch. No one noticed.
Yes, Linux could use these things.
This is interesting. Never knew that. I did know that altruistic authors used to assign copyrights to orphanages, but never knew why. For instance, 'Peter Pan' was assigned copyright to some orphanage.
Hmmm. Learn something every day.
Well, I haven't looked at any of the code yet, and do not intend to until there is a definitive answer to due skepticism. However, I'd like to point out that Darwin is *not* 'MacOS'. Darwin is an 'improved' Mach + the BSD layers, + NetInfo and SoundKit, and the Objective C runtime. Tevanian is the guy who designed Mach in the first place, and apparently he has learned a few things over the years since, and incorporated some good ideas from abandoned Copland kernels. I'd like to see an improved Mach. I'd like to see it on Intel (and other) hardware. Also interesting is the Objective C runtime. Past posts on gnu.gnustep.discuss indicate that the Apple/NeXT ObjC runtime is much faster than the GNU implementation. The GNUStep Kits however actually seem to be faster, given the same runtime, than the Apple/NeXT ones. If it is safe to use their runtime improvements for the betterment of Gnu ObjC, I'd like to see that done. Those are my interests. Also, I hope the old Motorola '030 and '040 code is still around, 'cause I'd like to see if Darwin could run on my old NeXT cube(s). --Rubinstien