The one that had real potential in my mind was Quarterdecks' DeskView/X.
A multitasking environment integrated with Microsoft Windows that let people with 386 boxes run Windows, DOS, and had an X-server built into it to let them also run X apps over the wire.
A friend of mine was running X apps that way on the machines in his lab, from home over a 9600 baud modem link in the early 90's. It's a cool, cool environment and people could use it even today to make use of cheap older hardware as X terminals where they need Windows (3.1) capabilities as well.
I've been looking for a copy of A/UX for some time, but it seems like most of the people into A/UX are copyright zealots. There's an A/UX site where somebody writes of how A/UX 1.0 seems to have disappeared entirely 'but at least copyright was respected.'
Furthermore, EEPROMs are little tiny things, generally in an 8 pin package, and you read and write to them serially. They're usually fairly small in size, too, i.e. 32 bytes or 4K bytes. Flash chips sit in a memory map with address/data busses like conventional memory. And they're big, i.e. 512K bytes or megabytes in size.
Dunno why, but PC clones are showing up by the skid at auction lately. Recently there were Pentium II 400 MHz machines that it turns out can accept a PIII chip. I had the option of buying about a dozen of them for $15 each a few months ago and only bought two. Which I've since regretted.
I think in big organizations with tax-supplied budgets the admin people are lazy and would rather just shuffle in new machines than try to upgrade them to run the latest bloat from Redmond.
I tried putting a 4GB hard drive in my SE/30 and it didn't like it for some reason. The drive worked fine in a newer Mac, i.e. in my 7300/200 machine. There's some sort of limit on that machine that I never figured out. It has a 2 gig drive, though, and a monstrous 32MB of RAM. That's a LOT in a dinkyscreen Mac.
Here in Rural Indiana the trash haulers happily take away anything that I put on the curb. That includes monsters like big 21" SGI video monitors, and piles and piles and PILES of stripped Macintosh chassis. For $15 a month, no less.
I bought a skid with 15 PowerMacs on it last Wednesday at auction for $15. It had:
(4) 7300/200 boxes (200 MHz PPC 604e) (3) 7300/180 boxes (180 MHz PPC 604e) (2) 7600/133 boxes (133 MHz PPC 604) (2) 7600/120 boxes (120 MHz PPC 604) (1) Mac IIfx that has National Instrument data acq cards in it that are RARE and worth a fortune. (1) Beige G3
None of these machines were 'stripped' though a few didn't have any memory in them. There were also a half dozen 7200/100 boxes that I stripped before even bringing them in the house. They're not worth dealing with but have parts common to the others, which I'll have no trouble selling on eBay. And a Centris 310 that I'm probably going to keep around because I have a strange liking for some of the 68040 machines (as long as they don't have 68LC040 chips in them, which is a crime against nature!)
Dinkyscreen Macs aren't that common at auction anymore but I grab them when I can. I bought a Classic last fall for $5 that I was able to pass along to somebody for $85. I dislike the Classic because it's an anti-evolutionary step after the superior SE/30.
My favorite Mac is my SE/30, though the Beige G3 Minitower that I've been using lately is pretty nice (and cost me $10).
Translation: this country occasionally becomes as authoritarian and police-controlled as the system the terrorists want to put in place.
The solution, you know, is to get into the system and make sure that they're friendly, democratic police and security forces. However, it's more recreational to stand on the ouside with placards and chant.
And the pity is that the small-c conservatives get shouted down in the Republican party. The whole goal of that branch of conservativsm is to take away the power of government. The 'silent majority' you speak of would have their voice in said 'movement' although sadly once a 'cut back government' type gets elected, he seems to always find new things he wants government to do.
I bought three Mac G3's on Wednesday. For $10 each. At auction. In Sun hardware, I bought a stack of Ultra 1's awhile back, for $12.50 each. At auction.
This isn't the dot.bomb era anymore, when we can all dump 'big bucks' in neat toys. There are neat toys for cheap, anyway. If you consider Ultra 1's and G3's to be neat toys. (I do)
There's a new design methodology, where the quality is built in at the front end of the design, that calls for less product testing, and more 'quality-system' going into the design to start with. You look at your process, and your methods, and come out with design iterations with testing built in. Then you don't have to have techs in receiving doing AQL testing on each lot of components/assemblies as they come in the door and on their way to packing/shipping. It's all part of that 'quality initiative' buzzword forest that steamrolled through the engineering profession in the 90's. And it's worked out pretty good.
The point is: throwing a product out into the wild and soliciting bug fixes is NOT necessarily the best method of development. Contrary to some people's religion.
You can get Solaris for free, for non-commercial use only. And only on single-processor machines, which they broadly define to mean 'any machine where it isn't possible to put multiple processors in the box.' That effectively limits you to, as the fastest system, an Ultra 1 or a SparcStation 5.
I was exploring NetBSD on PREP (PowerPC Reference Platform) awhile back. The machine I had was an RS/6000 PPC box. It's cool that the port exists, but I found there were 2-5 posts on the mailing list per month, on busy months.
I miss the days when UIDs here weren't displayed like some sort of 'status symbol' after one's name.
Yes, been around here much earlier than when that change happened. I think it happened because of the old 'Bruce Perens fake' trolls that were happening for a time.
"Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified, by the way..."
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The one that had real potential in my mind was Quarterdecks' DeskView/X.
A multitasking environment integrated with Microsoft Windows that let people with 386 boxes run Windows, DOS, and had an X-server built into it to let them also run X apps over the wire.
A friend of mine was running X apps that way on the machines in his lab, from home over a 9600 baud modem link in the early 90's. It's a cool, cool environment and people could use it even today to make use of cheap older hardware as X terminals where they need Windows (3.1) capabilities as well.
My Mattel Aquarius home computer plugs into a TV, too.
I've been looking for a copy of A/UX for some time, but it seems like most of the people into A/UX are copyright zealots. There's an A/UX site where somebody writes of how A/UX 1.0 seems to have disappeared entirely 'but at least copyright was respected.'
Well, as long as we're correcting folks here:
You mushed your categories together some.
There are three differnet things where you made it sound like there are two:
EPROMs -UV erasable.
EEPROMS -electrically erasable.
Flash -electrically erasable as well.
EEPROMs are not 'Flash'.
Furthermore, EEPROMs are little tiny things, generally in an 8 pin package, and you read and write to them serially. They're usually fairly small in size, too, i.e. 32 bytes or 4K bytes. Flash chips sit in a memory map with address/data busses like conventional memory. And they're big, i.e. 512K bytes or megabytes in size.
Dunno why, but PC clones are showing up by the skid at auction lately. Recently there were Pentium II 400 MHz machines that it turns out can accept a PIII chip. I had the option of buying about a dozen of them for $15 each a few months ago and only bought two. Which I've since regretted.
I think in big organizations with tax-supplied budgets the admin people are lazy and would rather just shuffle in new machines than try to upgrade them to run the latest bloat from Redmond.
I tried putting a 4GB hard drive in my SE/30 and it didn't like it for some reason. The drive worked fine in a newer Mac, i.e. in my 7300/200 machine. There's some sort of limit on that machine that I never figured out. It has a 2 gig drive, though, and a monstrous 32MB of RAM. That's a LOT in a dinkyscreen Mac.
Here in Rural Indiana the trash haulers happily take away anything that I put on the curb. That includes monsters like big 21" SGI video monitors, and piles and piles and PILES of stripped Macintosh chassis. For $15 a month, no less.
I bought a skid with 15 PowerMacs on it last Wednesday at auction for $15. It had:
(4) 7300/200 boxes (200 MHz PPC 604e)
(3) 7300/180 boxes (180 MHz PPC 604e)
(2) 7600/133 boxes (133 MHz PPC 604)
(2) 7600/120 boxes (120 MHz PPC 604)
(1) Mac IIfx that has National Instrument data acq cards in it that are RARE and worth a fortune.
(1) Beige G3
None of these machines were 'stripped' though a few didn't have any memory in them. There were also a half dozen 7200/100 boxes that I stripped before even bringing them in the house. They're not worth dealing with but have parts common to the others, which I'll have no trouble selling on eBay. And a Centris 310 that I'm probably going to keep around because I have a strange liking for some of the 68040 machines (as long as they don't have 68LC040 chips in them, which is a crime against nature!)
Dinkyscreen Macs aren't that common at auction anymore but I grab them when I can. I bought a Classic last fall for $5 that I was able to pass along to somebody for $85. I dislike the Classic because it's an anti-evolutionary step after the superior SE/30.
My favorite Mac is my SE/30, though the Beige G3 Minitower that I've been using lately is pretty nice (and cost me $10).
This country has a bleak future indeed :-(
Translation: this country occasionally becomes as authoritarian and police-controlled as the system the terrorists want to put in place.
The solution, you know, is to get into the system and make sure that they're friendly, democratic police and security forces. However, it's more recreational to stand on the ouside with placards and chant.
And the pity is that the small-c conservatives get shouted down in the Republican party. The whole goal of that branch of conservativsm is to take away the power of government. The 'silent majority' you speak of would have their voice in said 'movement' although sadly once a 'cut back government' type gets elected, he seems to always find new things he wants government to do.
I bought three Mac G3's on Wednesday. For $10 each. At auction. In Sun hardware, I bought a stack of Ultra 1's awhile back, for $12.50 each. At auction.
This isn't the dot.bomb era anymore, when we can all dump 'big bucks' in neat toys. There are neat toys for cheap, anyway. If you consider Ultra 1's and G3's to be neat toys. (I do)
There's a new design methodology, where the quality is built in at the front end of the design, that calls for less product testing, and more 'quality-system' going into the design to start with. You look at your process, and your methods, and come out with design iterations with testing built in. Then you don't have to have techs in receiving doing AQL testing on each lot of components/assemblies as they come in the door and on their way to packing/shipping. It's all part of that 'quality initiative' buzzword forest that steamrolled through the engineering profession in the 90's. And it's worked out pretty good.
The point is: throwing a product out into the wild and soliciting bug fixes is NOT necessarily the best method of development. Contrary to some people's religion.
Embarass? Who the f. cares? You didn't get the point in the grandparent comment, did you? It's a preening, prancing ego trip thing.
The second is more free, because s/he doesn't place artificial barriers out there preventing him/her from working at a job.
But you pose it in a ridiculous way.
You can get Solaris for free, for non-commercial use only. And only on single-processor machines, which they broadly define to mean 'any machine where it isn't possible to put multiple processors in the box.' That effectively limits you to, as the fastest system, an Ultra 1 or a SparcStation 5.
I was exploring NetBSD on PREP (PowerPC Reference Platform) awhile back. The machine I had was an RS/6000 PPC box. It's cool that the port exists, but I found there were 2-5 posts on the mailing list per month, on busy months.
I've now sold the RS/6000 box.
NetBSD on Sparc or Mac68K is a bigger crowd.
I miss the days when UIDs here weren't displayed like some sort of 'status symbol' after one's name.
Yes, been around here much earlier than when that change happened. I think it happened because of the old 'Bruce Perens fake' trolls that were happening for a time.
"Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified, by the way..."