Totally agree. Unless you build the CPU (from tubes, discrete components or simple ICs), it's just like "building" a hamburger. Do you want fries with that?
Last year I loaded a 1976 version of the PL/C (Programming Language / Cornell) compiler onto a modern IBM System 390 running zVM. And it worked, perfectly, the first time. After 27 years. Take that Microsoft;-)
ESR did a cupl and corc interpreter too. Who cares? I do, many of the earlier languages like these have been lost (eg. bruin, joss) because of bit rot (Ok, so flame away).
IBM mainframe operating systems have been around since the mid 1960s and are still being supported and updated.
VM, first called CP/67, then VM/370, then VM/SP, then VM/ESA and now zVM has been around since 1967. Some such as DOS (1965?) are even older but I mentioned VM since its my favourite:-)
One of the problems with Hypercard IMHO was that it only supplied the most basic functionality and that anything else required a plugin (which if I recall correctly are called XCMDs). Granted there were and still are many fine plugins available for little or no cost, but hunting for XCMDs and keeping track of all these little things versions and little problems was a chore. Same thing happened with AppleScript OSAXen (although under OS X with AppleScript studio and a builtin interface to Unix things are much improved).
The MCM/70 used a port of York APL, a free APL for the IBM 360/370 that ran under TSO. Although the MCM/70 is almost forgotten, York APL for the 360 seems dead (no known soft or hard copies left). If however anyone had or finds a copy of York APL, please preserve it, it was a very nice APL system.
Totally agree, although most of my experience was however with Mac OS 7, 8 & 9. File data types I found were the worst, because Applescript in Mac OS 7, 8 & 9 had 3 types: alias, a file path string and the (incredibly brain-dead) Finder "file xyz of folder abc of folder def of desktop" or something. You were always having to coerce between all 3 to get anything done. I don't why they could not have just settled on one data type for files.
Also debugging was complicated by the fact that Applescript was very buggy. Mystery hangs I found were quite common prior to OS X. I'd have scripts that would work fine 30+ times in a row and then hang the OS the 31st time.
I've done a little work with Applescript in OS X; things are much much better and you can use Unix shell commands to bypass most of the broken or missing stuff (eg. the Finder in OS X is not recordable and is not anywhere as scriptable as the older Finder). It only took me one day though to find a real nasty bug: one of my script applications was crashing (in theory impossible of course; should a shell script crash the shell?) and I found that if I removed the space from the file name of the script it worked fine.
I agree with most of your points but I doubt BG really made up his Basic by looking at the Dartmouth Basic source code. The source code for Dartmouth Basic is at dtss.org and IMHO it is very difficult to understand; about one comment every 300 lines and in assembler for a GE mainframe (these machines are alleged to have a very large and complex instruction set). Most of all Dartmouth Basic was a compiler, not an interpreter.
Hello, also don't forget that a huge amount of historic software has become lost; a partial list that comes to mind for the IBM 360/370 is Algol-W, PLUTO, the source code for PL/C, York APL, and many many others. Two of the first time shared operating systems, CTSS and JOSS appear to be gone too. These systems could live on through emulation if they could be found again.
If you have old (non-copyrighted) software for the IBM 360/370 please contact the good folks at http://cbttape.org/
If you have any code post 1967 for Dartmouth Basic please check out http://dtss.org/
And if you have any influence with the University of Waterloo, ask them to open source or at least again market their old 370 products!
It would be interesting to see TrueBasic (a Basic by the original creators of Dartmouth Basic), on Linux (right now they only do Classic MacOS and Windows). They are planning an OSX port, so who knows, maybe it will make it to Linux one day. Now I have never used TrueBasic (yet), but from what I have heard its pretty capable (well, for Basic).
BTW, info (and source code!) for the original Dartmouth Basic is available at here.
I disagree. For the past while I have been doing tech support using VMWare running Windows 2000 on a Windows 2000 host. On the guest images I run a VPN client, Office, remote control software (Timbuktu or NetMeeting); works very nicely. The important thing is to have a fast host (of course) and lots of RAM on the host; I have 768MB on the host and usually 192-256MB defined for the guest. With this I can run the 2 guests I need at very good speeds. The thing you want to avoid is dual paging, that is, having both the guest and host doing VM paging, that really kills performance.
I agree, they can't pull too many tricks with this as a RealPC is returning. RealPC was as good as Virtual PC up until about release 3 or so of Virtual PC, with a little more work it could be again. This is probably why Microsoft is giving them grief; on the FWB home page they say "FWB has pushed back the release date of its Beta Version of PowerWindows (formerly SoftWindows) later this summer due to issues relating to Microsoft."
I heard that some police departments in the 70s had the license plate "853 OKG" for Jim Rockford's car (from "The Rockford Files" TV show) in their databases to detect cops running plates for their own amusement...
Slashdot Mirror
The microcomputer world is an open sewer. Always has been, always will be.
I thought Nortel Networks, which is bankrupt and almost gone now, had a class A address range (47.x.x.x). Will that not be freed up?
VM/CMS is very much alive and well, thank you. It is now known as z/VM and runs on the IBM z series mainframes ...
http://www.vm.ibm.com/
You can even run Linux in z/VM virtual machines now as well as CMS.
There is an emulator available, called Hercules ...
http://www.hercules-390.org/
And an old VM/CMS is available for free, with source ...
http://www.cbttape.org/vm6.htm
They could have gone back even further, VM/370 had a logo starting in about 1975 ...
http://kristof.willen.be/images/vm.png
and later VM/SP (1983) ...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/34/VM_mascot_-_teddy_bear.png
It is still a great system, now known as zVM.
I see Univac.com is for some outfit called "Universal Vacations and Realty" -- pathetic.
An emulated IBM 370 on VM/370. Running WATFIV. happy days.
How 'about SMSG RSCS?
smsg rscs msg sysb bsmith lunch at what time bill?
Totally agree. Unless you build the CPU (from tubes, discrete components or simple ICs), it's just like "building" a hamburger. Do you want fries with that?
Funny, I heard that Unix is a 'rip-off' and 'a slapdash clone' of Multics. Is that true?
You get CMS release 6 in the VM/370 distribution here :-)
Last year I loaded a 1976 version of the PL/C (Programming Language / Cornell) compiler onto a modern IBM System 390 running zVM. And it worked, perfectly, the first time. After 27 years. Take that Microsoft ;-)
I suspect its even older than that ... Burroughs seems to have something like this, called "tagged words" or "tagged memory" even longer ...
http://www.ajwm.net/amayer/papers/B5000.html
ESR did a cupl and corc interpreter too. Who cares? I do, many of the earlier languages like these have been lost (eg. bruin, joss) because of bit rot (Ok, so flame away).
IBM mainframe operating systems have been around since the mid 1960s and are still being supported and updated. VM, first called CP/67, then VM/370, then VM/SP, then VM/ESA and now zVM has been around since 1967. Some such as DOS (1965?) are even older but I mentioned VM since its my favourite :-)
One of the problems with Hypercard IMHO was that it only supplied the most basic functionality and that anything else required a plugin (which if I recall correctly are called XCMDs). Granted there were and still are many fine plugins available for little or no cost, but hunting for XCMDs and keeping track of all these little things versions and little problems was a chore. Same thing happened with AppleScript OSAXen (although under OS X with AppleScript studio and a builtin interface to Unix things are much improved).
The MCM/70 used a port of York APL, a free APL for the IBM 360/370 that ran under TSO. Although the MCM/70 is almost forgotten, York APL for the 360 seems dead (no known soft or hard copies left). If however anyone had or finds a copy of York APL, please preserve it, it was a very nice APL system.
Totally agree, although most of my experience was however with Mac OS 7, 8 & 9. File data types I found were the worst, because Applescript in Mac OS 7, 8 & 9 had 3 types: alias, a file path string and the (incredibly brain-dead) Finder "file xyz of folder abc of folder def of desktop" or something. You were always having to coerce between all 3 to get anything done. I don't why they could not have just settled on one data type for files.
Also debugging was complicated by the fact that Applescript was very buggy. Mystery hangs I found were quite common prior to OS X. I'd have scripts that would work fine 30+ times in a row and then hang the OS the 31st time.
I've done a little work with Applescript in OS X; things are much much better and you can use Unix shell commands to bypass most of the broken or missing stuff (eg. the Finder in OS X is not recordable and is not anywhere as scriptable as the older Finder). It only took me one day though to find a real nasty bug: one of my script applications was crashing (in theory impossible of course; should a shell script crash the shell?) and I found that if I removed the space from the file name of the script it worked fine.
All in all a very frustrating experience.
I agree with most of your points but I doubt BG really made up his Basic by looking at the Dartmouth Basic source code. The source code for Dartmouth Basic is at dtss.org and IMHO it is very difficult to understand; about one comment every 300 lines and in assembler for a GE mainframe (these machines are alleged to have a very large and complex instruction set). Most of all Dartmouth Basic was a compiler, not an interpreter.
If you have old (non-copyrighted) software for the IBM 360/370 please contact the good folks at http://cbttape.org/
If you have any code post 1967 for Dartmouth Basic please check out http://dtss.org/
And if you have any influence with the University of Waterloo, ask them to open source or at least again market their old 370 products!
Thanks!
BTW, info (and source code!) for the original Dartmouth Basic is available at here.
I disagree. For the past while I have been doing tech support using VMWare running Windows 2000 on a Windows 2000 host. On the guest images I run a VPN client, Office, remote control software (Timbuktu or NetMeeting); works very nicely. The important thing is to have a fast host (of course) and lots of RAM on the host; I have 768MB on the host and usually 192-256MB defined for the guest. With this I can run the 2 guests I need at very good speeds. The thing you want to avoid is dual paging, that is, having both the guest and host doing VM paging, that really kills performance.
I agree, they can't pull too many tricks with this as a RealPC is returning. RealPC was as good as Virtual PC up until about release 3 or so of Virtual PC, with a little more work it could be again. This is probably why Microsoft is giving them grief; on the FWB home page they say "FWB has pushed back the release date of its Beta Version of PowerWindows (formerly SoftWindows) later this summer due to issues relating to Microsoft."
I heard that some police departments in the 70s had the license plate "853 OKG" for Jim Rockford's car (from "The Rockford Files" TV show) in their databases to detect cops running plates for their own amusement ...
... sounds like somebody is reinventing Multics... again.