On Sat, 9 Jan 1999 dpeschel(a)u.washington.edu wrote:
> became. If they had just ripped off a better OS, that might have been nice
> as well. Something with long file names, or multitasking, or whatever.
> And OSs of the time DID have long file names. I don't know about
> multitasking (maybe OS/9 or FLEX were around when DOS was born?).
Interestingly, there were a number of attempts over the years to make a
better OS than DOS. An example is TSX-Lite, a multitasking, 32-bit version
of DOS that was shareware last time I looked. It had the right ideas but
worked very poorly. Caldera DR-DOS supposedly has multitasking but it
hardly works. OS/2 is very resource-intensive, worse than Windows 95.
Which makes me wonder; maybe something good could have been done before
Linux came about, but everyone was too lazy?
----------------------------------------------------
Max Eskin | kurtkilgor(a)bigfoot.com | AOL: kurtkilgor
Anyone in the US or APO/FPO in need of a good working Tandy CM-5 CGA
color monitor? $10 plus shipping and it's yours. It's not really heavy,
about 18 or so in weight. Good condition and all cables attached.
I live in zip 40144 in case someone needs to speculate the shipping
using the parcel calulator at http://www.usps.com/
Okay, okay, so a DECstation 5000/125 isn't very "vintage". But I did manage
to save one from certain death from my grad school (Carnegie Mellon), and it
has a nice big 21" monitor, two big 5 1/4" SCSI drives (each around 1/2 a
GB)... and no bootable OS.
It used to run Mach (I was on the Mach project at CMU), but I'd really like
to run VMS on the thing.
Does anyone know how/where/if I can get VMS loaded onto this guy?
Thanks all,
- Joe
Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> trashed my theory with:
> For the same reason some (many?) people here like their Commodore 64's &
> VIC-20's. _Personally_, I have no use for them (save a couple from the
> dumpster, but not even powered 'em up -- will be up for trade fodder soon)
> but for a lot of people on this list, they were their first computer.
> Sentimentality goes a *long* way on this list (which is his reason for
> owning the computer you don't want, BTW). Believe me, many folks are just
> as turned off by my RS/Tandys & Ataris & whatnot... but that's o.k. too.
Ya-but...
Look, just like everything else, there's "old good" and "old shit". Lots
of mediocre music was written two hundred years ago, which is why I refuse
to acknowledge "classical" music as a genre than has any inherent value in
defining the music. Just because it's old, it isn't by definition good.
Thus, I don't recognize anything particularly interesting in machines that
were badly-designed landfill-before-their-time any more than I do in mass-
market machines like the Radio Shacks and Ataris you mentioned. I see a
historical preserve (such as this) as being one better dominated by systems
that were examples of true innovation, and those tend to be the ones below
the radar of the consumer market. Do I have a problem with people who want
to fill their garages with original chiclet-keyboard-and-internal-cassette
Commodore PET 2001s? Hell, no. Enjoy 'em; start your own list dedicated
to 'em; stay outa my receding hair. I came here to find someone as serious
as me who can help me program 1702s.
This thread was about Compucolors. I ran a service bench when they first
came out, maintained them, and they were living, breathing junk. That
notwithstanding, I held onto a board set and a bunch of parts for many
years in hope of making it into my first machine with a color display.
When I discovered old SGIs, you can only guess how fast the Compucolor
parts hit the dumpster that they so richly deserved.
> Hang in there, find the delete key, and I guarantee you you *will* learn a
> lot while being on this list. I have.
Wish it was that easy, old son. On an average day I get about 200 pieces
of "real" (ie non-list) mail. That's why I insist on receiving ANY list
via digest - I can't afford to have a single list double the number of
messages I receive per day. So reading a 4500-line, 150-message digest is
a considerable amount of work, and not one that the "delete" key helps with.
Of course I want to learn. But not at the expense of endless dreary
discussions in the overpriced-collector-scum vein, or dreary Merka vs.
Euro drooling. I'm in Canadia - I'd have to throw rocks at both sides.
Jonathan
Victor the Cleaner said...
|
|classiccmp-historical
|classiccmp-technical
|classiccmp-overblown_prices_collector_scum_die_die_die
|classiccmp-more_about_television_licensing_really
That's only the beginning.
classiccmp-make-money-fast
classiccmp-bill-gates-sucks
classiccmp-bill-gates-rulez
classiccmp-religious-arguments
The list really isn't that high volume. I've seen
much worse. But mailing lists are why God invented
the "D" key.
-Miles
Doug Yowza <yowza(a)yowza.com> intoned:
> Oh sure, just drop on in and casually mention your MCS-4, the most
> desirable SBC on the planet. Do you need docs? Hans P. might know where
> to find them. And Hans F. has a few SC/MP SBC's. And we all have
> handheld PDP-8's, so the Intersil is dull stuff. :-)
Gee, wasn't just looking to brag or anything... I've actually been curious
rare the Intel is. I'd be interested in knowing how many are out there.
I'm okay on docs, but there's missing silicon, including the monitor proms.
Help!
Jonathan
On Sat, 9 Jan 1999 yowza(a)yowza.com wrote:
> Amiga to have happened in 1975, but if Bill Gates had stayed home and
> Linus Torvalds had been born a little earlier, man what a cool world we'd
> have today, 25 years later.
To tell you the truth, if Bill Gates had stayed home and Linus Torvalds
had never been born, we would have been even better off. I'm using Linux
right now, so I have Linus to thank. But then, I'm using a crappy Compaq
laptop which would never have been made (or made but not this crappy) if
not for Bill Gates. Linux is a solution to a problem that should not have
come about in the first place. I'd much rather be using some version of
the Dynabook, or an Amiga, or something totally different.
----------------------------------------------------
Max Eskin | kurtkilgor(a)bigfoot.com | AOL: kurtkilgor
In a message dated 1/9/99 8:06:42 AM EST, gram(a)cnct.com writes:
<<
By the way, whover was making the threat to someone else, I'd love
to have an RT myself. Second best keyboard ever made.
-- >>
i finally got my RT going after an individual from the RT newsgroup sent me a
keyboard since mine didnt come with one when i got it for $10. Seems to be a
standard corporate IBM buckling spring keyboard like i use everyday, except
the keyboard connector is shaped like the PCjr model! a standard keyboard
could probably be hacked to fit an RT. it seems the machine wont boot all the
way without the keyboard. now my RT boots AIX 2.1.2 i think and although i can
login as root thanks to the password taped to the side of the machine when i
got it, i have no idea what it can do. anyone know the location of some kind
of AIX tutorial. I found a
dos<->AIX command ref on the net, and although i did find a AIX FAQ, it's over
my head. I need something a little simpler.
>You guessed it the COSMAC Elf! And IIRC, the article was "Build a COSMAC
>Elf for Less than $100"
>Anyone got the issue date?
August 1976 "for about $80"
CDP1802
64K addressable
On chip DMA
16X16 matrix of registers
Flexible I/O
Francois
>
>--Chuck
>
D. Peschel said...
|
|What _I_ want to know is the relationship between OSF/1, a.k.a. Digital
|UNIX, and AIX. The manual entry for stanza(4) on our DEC system is the same
|as OSF/1 1.0, and it's SO badly written that only IBM could have done it.
|Plus stanzas are an IBM-ism anyway. I bet the entry is pretty much the same
|on AIX systems, too. (I just checked and our AIX doesn't have it. So I
|don't know -- it's just a guess.)
DEC first seriously attacked the UNIX market with Ultrix, which
was almost a pure BSD port. Over time they added a bunch of stuff
to it. They had a few really cool things, like they dxdiff, easily
the best GUI-based diff I've used.
Then along came OSF, a hodgepodge of UNIX vendors scared of the
idea of Sun and AT&T getting together and taking over the world.
So they put together OSF/1. This included people from a whole
mess of computer vendors, but DEC and IBM wre probably the biggest
contributors. The reference platform was a DECStation ?000 (I
forget which one).
By the time OSF/1 actually came out, it was obvious that it was
a fair example of design by committee, and the AT&T/Sun alliance
had pretty well faded away. So DEC, for who knows what reason,
oter than that they had the goods, decided to swap Ultrix out and
OSF/1 in. And everyone else went back to whatever they had been
doing before - AIX, HP/UX, whatever.
OSF actually did some cool stuff, but they had some real problems,
too. I was working at SecureWare, who was doing the security stuff
for OSF/1, and I remember new sandbox drops every day, and bugs
that had been fixed reappearing over and over in their original
form, and just general mayhem.
My favorite part, though, was when we built the kernel and X11
fully debugged, to track down a really nasty problem. Just booting
the OS ate up 70 or 80 MB of the 128MB in our DECStation, and
adding X11 on the hi-res screen ate up the rest of the RAM and a
fair bit of swap space. Then I tried to log in, which took almost
an hour exactly, beating the snot out of the disk drive, until it
finally came up - having used over 100MB of swap space. Starting
a Motif app ate the rest of our 256MB of swap space over the course
of two hours or so, at which time the system just rolled over and
stuck its little feet up in the air.
We never found the bug.
Three or four builds later, it was gone, somehow. Nobody at
OSF knew where it came from, where it went, or why. Oh, well.
My desktop machine at the time was the last of the Tektronix
68K-based systems running a BSD variant. It was slower than
their ill-fated 88K systems, but those ran SVR4, and mine was
fast enoug for me. It was a spiffy machine for the time. Of
course, I was just glad I wasn't running A/UX on really slow
Apples like most of my co-workers!
-Miles
