Likely, for the courtroom demonstration, Kildahl ran an early version of MS-DOS (or Q-DOS) contemporary to what was on the market at the time. It reeks of Urban Legend to claim that Kildahl's 'easter egg' remained buried in the binaries for version after version.
Unfortunately there are and were almost no apps for CP/M-86. I have it running on a machine in my collection. There isn't a heck of a lot to run on it.
A few modern sites have a good assortment of abandonware apps for it even today, but there never was anything like the huge Simtel FTP site that MS-DOS users can/could access. CP/M-86 was essentially a market failure. There were some good apps for it, enough to make it a powerful system in it's day. But it's laughable to compare it to the software that grew for MS-DOS.
Or, in some cases, using 'installable modular drivers' to run alongside the Linux kernel.
And, in a good number of instances these days, there are drivers that cannot be compiled into a monolythic kernel anymore, that once were. The SoundBlaster 16 driver is a good example of this.
(in this way, is Linux becoming more like MS-DOS as it evolves? )
There was a port of CP/M to the 8086 processor called 'CP/M-86.' IBM sold both OSes to run on their new PC hardware. However, CP/M-86 was significantly more expensive than DOS, and IBM was a partner with Microsoft in creating DOS (IBM sold PC- DOS which ran on IBM hardware and Microsoft sold MS-DOS that ran on the clone machines). There weren't many applications for CP/M-86 and tons of apps came out for DOS.
The relative merits of the two are complex. But CP/M-86 faded away.
It's good to see somebody else who acutally *used* CP/M commenting. Many people just make 'Microsoft copied it, it must be far superior' assumptions without any real-life experience.
I, personally, liked CP/M and even have a machine here that still runs it. I am not so deluded that I think it is 'technically superior' for some reason, to an OS that evolved after it and had much more application support.
Oh, and I have CP/M-86, too. But not a heck of a lot of apps to run on it.
Only in the same sense that OS2 ver 1.3 is a ripoff of Windows 3.0. Or is it all a ripoff of GEM, or some the other GUI stuff that Apple ran out of business by suing. (leaving only 'deep pockets' Microsoft and IBM to 'own' the x86 gui market)
When did Motif's Window Manager come out? It all looks very similar. In fact, Windows 3.x and Motif are based on the same 'Desktop' standard from IBM, that dictates things like alt-F4 to close windows, etc. etc.
I have nephews and nieces who go to a 'non-traditional' school run by a weird pentecostal church. It's an unaccredited school. My sister in law (the stupidest kid in that generation of my wife's family) is the 'High School' teacher (she's in charge of the 9-12 grade kids).
*shudder*
I don't mean this to knock down all homeschooling or alternative-school choices. But goodness gracious, some kids are RESCUED from their dull droning family life by their school. Letting their parents take FULL charge of their education is a recipie for disaster.
More parent and community control of education, on the other hand, would be a good thing. In most cases.
When I was in grade school, back in the 60's, I went to an 'experimental school' for part of it. The non-traditional curriculum featured self-directed study. This school replaced a 'regular' school, i.e. a whole neighborhood of kids were enrolled in it.
The findings were:
An elite of really bright kids excelled and got far ahead of where they would have in a regular school.
The rest of the students stagnated.
The average performance of the student body as a whole stayed about the same, because the smart kids averaged out the dullards.
It didn't last long. Parents of regular, mediocre kids won't put up with a system like that. Thar kids dint get tha educachun thay disserved.
Lots of nerds have a strong resentment toward 'the system' which is geared toward the kind of people who find books they are not forced to read boring to use your terminology. We're forced through a system where all the people around us ooze with cynicism about knowledge.
Not to mention you do not make any friends.
Whoah! You mean I don't get to be in your clique??
Well, yeah. The guy next door hasn't killed my dog, but he *could* kill my dog, infact it seems like he wants to kill my dog, even though I haven't seen or heard him every indicating he disliked my dog. He has a bug zapper out on his deck, in fact, which proves that he likes to kill things, and would probably kill my dog if he could.
So I'll just phone up the police and tell them to keep an eye on him.
Well, a friend of mine has burned up some decent ATX hardware by plugging it into Dell Power supplies.
Use at your own risk. It's clearly been demonstrated that they use the standard ATX power connector, but screw around with the pinning. And techies hold a grudge when businessmen screw them thataway. ..
Apple maintains a Darwin port on x86 because they recognize that keeping the core OS a cross-platform effort leads to better coding. It's a widely known tenent of software engineering that cross-platform coding 'forces the programmers to stay honest', i.e. keeps them from codifying the weird quirks and squeaks and bells of the target hardware. I doubt if Apple uses it as a 'threat' to make IBM nervous.
I want to be able to stream media from a Windows (it has to be Windows for other school work) server
This is a weird set of arbitrary requirements. Is it really worthy of an interesting Ask Slashdot question? The questioner just describes a machine with a directory full of files that can be mounted by other machines.
Get an old Pentium II machine. Put Linux on it. Install and configure Samba. Or click on 'sharing' and share the folder the files are in.
. ..then the next hacker with broadband could say: Gimme all the source code (a requirement of the GPL) and make install, make, cut.iso and torrent the whole thing from his website. Then, how many copies of the MS-Linux Operating System do you think they could sell if there was an legal iso on the net?
You just described the reason some people give for why Red Hat can never make any money.
But Red Hat does make some money. There are people, and businesses, who will not want to install a third-hand copy of 'Microsoft Linux' because it doesn't have the trust behind it that a 'Microsoft Linux' direct from Redmond, with the fancy Hologram CD, does.
This is all very hypothetical, though. You spun out pretty wildly in the end with your whole 'Microsoft Will Die' scenario. Perhaps you're correct. It's not for us to decide.
They'd have to release the MS-Linux (I feel icky just saying that) in the GPL, and that would just chafe them big time.
This is incorrect. Microsoft would be forced to release some of their software under the GPL, but much of the 'good stuff' would ride at the application layer.
Microsoft is very good at adapting to the business conditions in their market. It's wrong to assume they would dogmatically refuse to touch the 'GPL' just because. They currently have GPL'd products, and have been distributing the GNU C Compiler commercially for years.
Until the Xserve came out, Apple wasn't even in the server business.
Apple has 'dipped their toe' in the server business, in various ways and fashions, over the history of the company. There is even Apple hardware from the mid beige-box era that has the word Server in the model name right on the box. And they have/had their own port of Unix, A/UX.
Going way back, a lot of SE/30 machines were purchased to fulfill various 'server' functions.
Or even just a small Linux partition to dual-boot into.
Or a small Linux partition, plus an unfetterd second Windows partition. Lilo is a useful bootloader, and can 'make' partitions on a system boot 'Windows' that Windows itself doesn't comprehend (this may not be as easy as it used to be, back when I had Slackware 3.4 and a whole handful of different DOS and Windows partitions on a single system)
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Likely, for the courtroom demonstration, Kildahl ran an early version of MS-DOS (or Q-DOS) contemporary to what was on the market at the time. It reeks of Urban Legend to claim that Kildahl's 'easter egg' remained buried in the binaries for version after version.
Unfortunately there are and were almost no apps for CP/M-86. I have it running on a machine in my collection. There isn't a heck of a lot to run on it.
A few modern sites have a good assortment of abandonware apps for it even today, but there never was anything like the huge Simtel FTP site that MS-DOS users can/could access. CP/M-86 was essentially a market failure. There were some good apps for it, enough to make it a powerful system in it's day. But it's laughable to compare it to the software that grew for MS-DOS.
Or, in some cases, using 'installable modular drivers' to run alongside the Linux kernel.
And, in a good number of instances these days, there are drivers that cannot be compiled into a monolythic kernel anymore, that once were. The SoundBlaster 16 driver is a good example of this.
(in this way, is Linux becoming more like MS-DOS as it evolves? )
There was a port of CP/M to the 8086 processor called 'CP/M-86.' IBM sold both OSes to run on their new PC hardware. However, CP/M-86 was significantly more expensive than DOS, and IBM was a partner with Microsoft in creating DOS (IBM sold PC-
DOS which ran on IBM hardware and Microsoft sold MS-DOS that ran on the clone machines). There weren't many applications for CP/M-86 and tons of apps came out for DOS.
The relative merits of the two are complex. But CP/M-86 faded away.
It's good to see somebody else who acutally *used* CP/M commenting. Many people just make 'Microsoft copied it, it must be far superior' assumptions without any real-life experience.
I, personally, liked CP/M and even have a machine here that still runs it. I am not so deluded that I think it is 'technically superior' for some reason, to an OS that evolved after it and had much more application support.
Oh, and I have CP/M-86, too. But not a heck of a lot of apps to run on it.
Only in the same sense that OS2 ver 1.3 is a ripoff of Windows 3.0. Or is it all a ripoff of GEM, or some the other GUI stuff that Apple ran out of business by suing. (leaving only 'deep pockets' Microsoft and IBM to 'own' the x86 gui market)
When did Motif's Window Manager come out? It all looks very similar. In fact, Windows 3.x and Motif are based on the same 'Desktop' standard from IBM, that dictates things like alt-F4 to close windows, etc. etc.
You're correct that I mistakenly was talking about copyright.
On the patent matter- if BSD is in infringement, likely so are MacOs, Windows, and various other pieces of software.
It's, as they say, a fishing expedition.
Well, the fact that all the 'infringing code' was cleaned out of the Free/Net/OpenBSD codebase years ago helps quite a bit.
It's been very throughly worked through.
No, there's a 32 bit version of Windows that isn't a ripoff of OS/2's WPS. It's called Windows NT 3.51.
I have nephews and nieces who go to a 'non-traditional' school run by a weird pentecostal church. It's an unaccredited school. My sister in law (the stupidest kid in that generation of my wife's family) is the 'High School' teacher (she's in charge of the 9-12 grade kids).
*shudder*
I don't mean this to knock down all homeschooling or alternative-school choices. But goodness gracious, some kids are RESCUED from their dull droning family life by their school. Letting their parents take FULL charge of their education is a recipie for disaster.
More parent and community control of education, on the other hand, would be a good thing. In most cases.
The findings were:
An elite of really bright kids excelled and got far ahead of where they would have in a regular school.
The rest of the students stagnated.
The average performance of the student body as a whole stayed about the same, because the smart kids averaged out the dullards.
It didn't last long. Parents of regular, mediocre kids won't put up with a system like that. Thar kids dint get tha educachun thay disserved.
Lots of nerds have a strong resentment toward 'the system' which is geared toward the kind of people who find books they are not forced to read boring to use your terminology. We're forced through a system where all the people around us ooze with cynicism about knowledge.
Not to mention you do not make any friends.
Whoah! You mean I don't get to be in your clique??
Back Orifice can also be a useful administration tool.
Should it go unannounced that it's on the system of people who explicitly wanted and installed a software package to identify possible spyware?
Well, yeah. The guy next door hasn't killed my dog, but he *could* kill my dog, infact it seems like he wants to kill my dog, even though I haven't seen or heard him every indicating he disliked my dog. He has a bug zapper out on his deck, in fact, which proves that he likes to kill things, and would probably kill my dog if he could.
So I'll just phone up the police and tell them to keep an eye on him.
Unless it was tightly targeted at Firefox, i.e. designed to NOT break lots of other programs.
In which case there would be an overwhelming case to be made against Microsoft. So it won't happen.
Jef Raskin has passed away.
Well, a friend of mine has burned up some decent ATX hardware by plugging it into Dell Power supplies.
.
Use at your own risk. It's clearly been demonstrated that they use the standard ATX power connector, but screw around with the pinning. And techies hold a grudge when businessmen screw them thataway. .
Apple maintains a Darwin port on x86 because they recognize that keeping the core OS a cross-platform effort leads to better coding. It's a widely known tenent of software engineering that cross-platform coding 'forces the programmers to stay honest', i.e. keeps them from codifying the weird quirks and squeaks and bells of the target hardware. I doubt if Apple uses it as a 'threat' to make IBM nervous.
I want to be able to stream media from a Windows (it has to be Windows for other school work) server
This is a weird set of arbitrary requirements. Is it really worthy of an interesting Ask Slashdot question? The questioner just describes a machine with a directory full of files that can be mounted by other machines.
Get an old Pentium II machine. Put Linux on it. Install and configure Samba. Or click on 'sharing' and share the folder the files are in.
I don't get why this is an interesting question.
You just described the reason some people give for why Red Hat can never make any money.
But Red Hat does make some money. There are people, and businesses, who will not want to install a third-hand copy of 'Microsoft Linux' because it doesn't have the trust behind it that a 'Microsoft Linux' direct from Redmond, with the fancy Hologram CD, does.
This is all very hypothetical, though. You spun out pretty wildly in the end with your whole 'Microsoft Will Die' scenario. Perhaps you're correct. It's not for us to decide.
They'd have to release the MS-Linux (I feel icky just saying that) in the GPL, and that would just chafe them big time.
This is incorrect. Microsoft would be forced to release some of their software under the GPL, but much of the 'good stuff' would ride at the application layer.
Microsoft is very good at adapting to the business conditions in their market. It's wrong to assume they would dogmatically refuse to touch the 'GPL' just because. They currently have GPL'd products, and have been distributing the GNU C Compiler commercially for years.
Until the Xserve came out, Apple wasn't even in the server business.
Apple has 'dipped their toe' in the server business, in various ways and fashions, over the history of the company. There is even Apple hardware from the mid beige-box era that has the word Server in the model name right on the box. And they have/had their own port of Unix, A/UX.
Going way back, a lot of SE/30 machines were purchased to fulfill various 'server' functions.
Apple has historically not included a keyboard or mouse in a Mac Desktop purchase.
Or even just a small Linux partition to dual-boot into.
Or a small Linux partition, plus an unfetterd second Windows partition. Lilo is a useful bootloader, and can 'make' partitions on a system boot 'Windows' that Windows itself doesn't comprehend (this may not be as easy as it used to be, back when I had Slackware 3.4 and a whole handful of different DOS and Windows partitions on a single system)