On Jan 5, 2020, at 7:02 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Sun *did* do a full port of OpenStep to Solaris, but while I know
> people who saw it, I am not sure if it got a full commercial release.
Not quite! Sun was a participant in creating the OpenStep standard (the NS class prefix stands for ?NeXT/Sun?) and *created their own implementation* of OpenStep for Solaris. (Just as GNUstep is an independent implementation of the OpenStep spec under the FSF umbrella, and OPENSTEP/Mach and OPENSTEP/Enterprise were NeXT?s implementations.)
OpenStep Solaris was released, both the user and developer environment, and you should be able to find them today and install them on Solaris 2.5 or later. I think OpenStep will run on everything through Solaris 7 or Solaris 8, but at some point it stopped working because it required Display PostScript in the window server.
> Sun also bought a number of NeXTstep software houses, including
> Lighthouse, but didn't release the code.
Indeed, that was post-OpenStep; they weren?t buying companies like Lighthouse to get a suite of applications for OpenStep Solaris, they were buying them to port their stuff to Java (since Java was based rather heavily on Objective-C, and some aspects of the Java frameworks? designs on OpenStep).
? Chris
Re:
> Subject: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes
> ...
> Palo Alto Fry?s closing <
> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-locations-Frys-Electronics-…>
> .
>
Wow, how important little words are!
The URL for the SFGate article is misleadingly
"...Bay-Area-locations-Frys-Electronics-closed"
... which is wrong.
The CCtalk thread is
"One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes"
The original SFGate article's title (click on link above to see) is:
"One of Bay Area's few Fry's Electronics stores closes"
Each means something different. ("one of...last" is more dire than "one of
...few").
Isn't English interesting?
Keep that in mind while reading political reporting, too :)
Stan
On Jan 5, 2020, at 2:30 PM, Guy Sotomayor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> ?It did seem for a while that a lot of things were based on Mach, but
>>
>> very few seemed to make it to market. NeXTstep and OSF/1, the only
>> version of which to ship AFAIK was DEC OSF/1 AXP, later Digital UNIX,
>> later Tru64.
>
> Yes, a lot of things were based on Mach. One OS that you're forgetting
> is OS X. That is based upon Mach 2.5.
Nope, Mac OS X 10.0 was significantly upgraded and based on Mach 4 and BSD 4.4 content (via FreeBSD among other sources). It was NeXT that never got beyond Mach 2.5 and BSD 4.2. (I know, distinction without a difference, but this is an issue of historicity.)
I think only some of the changes from Mach 2.5?3?4 made it into Mac OS X Server 1.0 (aka Rhapsody) so maybe that?s what you?re remembering.
>> MkLinux didn't get very far, either, did it?
>>
>
> I think that was the original Linux port for PPC.
It was the original Linux port for NuBus PowerPC Macs at least. It was never really intended to ?get very far? in the first place, it was more of an experimental system that a few people at Apple threw together and managed to allow the release of to the public.
MkLinux was interesting for two reasons: It documented the NuBus PowerMac hardware such that others could port their OSes to it, and it enabled some direct performance comparisons of things like running the kernel in a Mach task versus running it colocated with the microkernel (and thus turning all of its IPCs into function calls). Turns out running the kernel as an independent Mach task cost 10-15% overhead, which was significant on a system with a clock under 100MHz. Keep in mind too that this was in the early Linux 2.x days where Linux ?threads? were implemented via fork()?
I don?t recall if anyone ever did any ?multi-server? experiments with it like were done at CMU, where the monolithic kernel were broken up into multiple cooperating tasks by responsibility. It would have been interesting to see whether the overhead stayed relatively constant, grew, or shrank, and how division of responsibility affected that.
? Chris
On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:56 AM, Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Does Talingent Pink sound familiar? OS/2 was ported to powerPC, and so
> was Netware iirc. The field was quite busy with hopeful Microsoft
> killers. OS/2 was to be morphed into a cross-platform o/s, to wean
> folks from dos/x86..... Then PPC kills the x86 and we all get a decent
> os. That was the plan anyway. I never saw OS2 for PPC or Netware for
> OS/2, thought I know both to have shipped.
Pink was the C++ operating system project at Apple that became Taligent. I know a couple of people who did a developer kitchen for Pink pre-Taligent, and I also know a number of folks who worked on the Taligent system and tools?and have personally seen a demo of the Taligent Application Environment running on AIX.
I?ve even seen a CD set for Taligent Application Environment (TalAE) 1.0 on AIX, and I have a beta developer and user documentation set. Unfortunately my understanding is that the CD sets given to employees to commemorate shipping TalAE were all *blank*?the rumor I?ve heard is that IBM considered it too valuable to give them the actual software that they had worked for years on. (Maybe there were tax implications because of what IBM valued the license at, and the fact that it would have to be considered compensation?)
Taligent itself was only one component of IBM?s Workplace/OS strategy, which was a plan to rebase everything atop Mach so you could run AIX and OS/2 and Taligent all at once on the same hardware without quite using virtual machines for it all. The idea is that Apple would do pretty much the same with Copland and Taligent atop NuKernel rather than Mach.
It would be really great to actually get the shipping Taligent environment and tools archived somewhere. While only bits and pieces of it are still in use?for example, ICU?a lot of important and influential work was done as part of the project. For example, the design of most of the unit testing frameworks today actually comes from *Taligent*, since Kent Beck wrote SUnit to re-create it in Smalltalk, and JUnit and OCUnit were based on SUnit?s design and everything else derived from JUnit?
? Chris
All,
have not yet brought myself to throw away this big box of SCO software. Last call, though.
I?ll pay media rate to get it to you in the US, just let me know that you want it and where to ship it. If you are abroad, email me and we can split postage, depending on total price.
SCO OpenServer (TM)
Development System
Documentation Package
Version 5.0
Part Number: 505-000-101
Model Number: MC105-UX00-5.0
Order Number: 87873506
Big Aqua-colored bocx that says, SCO: It?s Business Critical,. It?s SCO.
- Mark
210-522-6025 office
210-379-4635 cell
>
> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2020 08:57:40 -0500
> From: David Gesswein <djg at pdp8online.com>
> Subject: DEC flat cables
>
> Has anyone found a good method for repairing the DEC flat cables?
> The ones with flat wires with plastic laminated to each side. The glue
> holding the plastic on fails and you end up with two sheets of plastic and
> loose wires.
>
For low speed signals. I just replaced the flexprint with modern ribbon
cable. Seems to work just fine.
--
Michael Thompson
Does anyone have a spare internal or external SCSI cable for the IBM RS/6000 Model 320 with the IBM MCA SCSI-1 card (3-1)? For those who don?t know/remember, this card uses a pair of edge connectors (like MFM/ESDI) rather than an IDC connector to connect to its internal two-drop cable, and its external connector is a **sixty-pin** higher-density Centronics connector.
I can make an IDC cable adapter pretty easily but if anyone knows where to acquire working original cables, that?d be preferable to my relative lack of mechanical skill.
-- Chris