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OT: bezos' 10000 year clock
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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/14/13 3:29 AM

Ah, Gateway.

"Computers from Iowa." I remember the cow-spot boxes well.

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

8/14/13 7:42 AM


quote:
2013-21=1992.

Sorry, typo. Windows didn't exist in 82.

"I mean, sure, okay, MS OS is artless. Do you seriously want an OS created by artists? Look at the anarchy of webpages... "

I'm not talking about the inner working of the OS (it applies too, but that's not the comparison I was making). I'm talking about the USER interface, and that includes installing software and minor housekeeping which all home/small-biz users NEED to do.

"So what OS do you propose instead? (earnestness)"

From user experience perspective, I prefer Mac way over Windows. As an ad hoc admin, the comparison is harder to make since Mac doesn't have as large a variety of software as Windows has.

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Sparky
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 19068
Location: PDX

8/14/13 10:20 AM

I am not even sure if DOS was around yet in 82.

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/14/13 11:25 AM

1981

MS-DOS was licensed to IBM as PC-DOS in 1981 (it had earlier been, um, well, "lifted" from QDOS, etc., etc.).

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KerryIrons
Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Posts: 3234
Location: Midland, MI

8/14/13 6:41 PM

POS

Here's an OS trivia question for you all: Did anyone (besides me) ever run the DEC POS (Personal Operating System, but yes it was a POS) on a DEC PC? Circa 1985/86. Those were the days!

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ErikS
Joined: 19 May 2005
Posts: 8337
Location: Slowing boiling over in the steamy south, Global Warming is real

8/14/13 6:48 PM

Commodore and Atari home computers and coded on those. No DOS for me.

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mag7
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 888
Location: Lake James, NC

8/14/13 7:22 PM

August of '81 I was in Boca Raton in the first class offered by IBM on the Personal Computer. It was run by a bunch of mainframe guys (in white shirts and ties of course) who thought these little machines were nothing more than toys....heck, none of us had a clue what was to come.
Had a dozen computer stores in the Carolinas in the 80's selling Apple and IBM and a few compatibles....my fav was the TI Professional followed by the HP150.

Apple briefly had a machine called the Apple /// (Apple 3) and it ran SOS - Sophisticated Operating System but the SOS acronym doomed the machine.

Some of us old timers still play early PC trivial pursuits.
Here's one question that rarely gets answered in two parts.
What were the two most popular multifunction add-on cards for the IBM PC?
I'll give you that one - Quadram Quadboard and the AST 6-pack card.
Now the hard part, who can name the six functions of those boards? No peeking.

I sold, installed, and supported literally thousands of PC's, Apple products, and 20+ years at Sun Microsystems and without hesitation say that PC's running Windoze are evil - gimme a Mac every time. Having the hardware, OS, and associated support from one company (one throat to choke) is beyond anything the PC world can offer.

OS from Microsoft (and don't call them if your distribution CD starts with OEM-), hardware from timbuktu using third party interfaces with drivers not developed by either the OS or PC hardware vendor spells trouble.

I've seen so much finger pointing in my years that it would make a clock spin backwards - :-)

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Sparky
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 19068
Location: PDX

8/14/13 10:12 PM

By mid late 80s I was running 4 modems on a DOS machine learning computers as SYSOP and Bulletin Board. Before The internet was allowed to be occupied by non UNIX creatures...

I actually dug making DOS do shit that brought it to its very limits. ;)

The real fun came with ArcNet, Tolkin Ring and Eithernet in Netware/Novell. I got out with Exchange and NT 4.0 beginnings of knocking Novell out of contention. v4.#... Containers, schemtainers... Objects, shmobjects...

But there are/were some aspects of the NOS I still think made is better, for file serving performance anyway...

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/15/13 4:28 AM

Good old days

Does anyone really want to go back?

I think the /// was doomed by what I like to call the "baby duck" problem, or these days, the "WinXP" problem: people got used to the Apple II, and didn't want to change. Which is why the /// was followed by all kinds of variations on the II (or ][. for those who recall).

Mag7, while there is much to be said for an integrated environment, (1) you have to pay for it and (2) you're stuck with what Apple has. It's true that Windows' flexibility w/r/t running on all kinds of hardware introduces some risks, but I think they're worth it. I spent 10 years developing installation software on Windows machines, and I was (and remain) impressed with the architecture.

As for multifunction cards, I don't even remember any more. But I sure remember the Hercules graphics card!

Anyone else here ever log in to CBBS-1? Or remember XMODEM and the Christenson (sp?) Protocol?

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daddy-o
Joined: 12 Apr 2004
Posts: 3307
Location: Springfield

8/15/13 6:18 AM

Do NOT go back!

The relative stability of the single-source Mac vs PC helped spur the PC parts companies and MS define their interfaces better, the HAL is the result. The old days of finger pointing are gone, as much as they are in any industry that is. Ugh, the first time I installed a plug-and-pray modem - they didn't understand the interface and MS technical writers didn't either. P&P was introduced almost 20 years ago, they better have it down.

Today the hardware is so well defined a movement like Linux has a fighting chance.

Today's video card's GPU are designed to take the workload off the CPU so completely that some branches of supercomputers rely on a CPU/GPU core ratio approaching 1. The first time I did video production on an SLI machine there was hardly time for coffee!

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/15/13 7:25 AM

History and HAL

For those who don't recognize the term other than as the computer from 2001, HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer. In the bad old days of DOS and Windows on top of DOS, some software bypassed the computer's BIOS ("Basic Input/Output System) and talked directly to the hardware. Hercules graphics cards did this, for example, and by bypassing the BIOS, improved graphics performance so much that they were considered "best of breed." However, bypassing the BIOS, particularly on a machine that's trying to do multiple things at the same time (this started early, in the days of Borland's SideKick), is a recipe for disaster.

Windows NT (NT = New Technology), which was a whole new operating system and not, Like Win3 and Win95, an interface living on top of DOS, introduced the first generation of HAL on the PC, which essentially locked the hardware away from the software. As a simple example, if you want to talk to the printer, you talk to a piece of system software called a printer that supplies printer functions; this in turn talks to a driver or drivers (usually, but not always, supplied by the printer manufacturer) to translate the instructions from the software (e.g., Firefox) into what the user wants (e.g., a printed page, or an Adobe acrobat file).

HAL is at the heart of plug and play. This is what allows you to attach nearly any printer to nearly any Windows machine and have it work, just like that. Or to attach nearly any display, or keyboard, or mouse, or storage device, etc. One of the reasons (not the only one) that Windows is a large operating system is that drivers for most common peripherals are included, so you can just plug and play.

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

8/15/13 7:44 AM

I don't know much about Mac OS's inner working and its development history. But I do know much of the "progress" on Windows OS was really borrowed from mini's, when the chief archetect of VMS got hire away from DEC to develoep a true OS for the then hobby machine ("personal computer") starting to take on actual work load. That was WinNT, which was remarkably similar to VMS in archetecture!

In that regard, the heritage of PC is not that different from Bezos 10000 year clock, it was first developed as a hobby machine!

(unlike the mainframe and mini's, which were I believe developed with a clear business/military function in mind)

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/15/13 10:30 AM

Hmmm

April, I wasn't aware that part of the VMS team was involved in the Windows NT design, but investigation shows you're right. In any event, what came out of that project was significantly different from VMS (which BTW, unless I'm mistaken, didn't use a HAL).

I worked with VMS for a number of years in the early '90s (we had a VAX cluster at the college where I taught), and absolutely hated every minute of it. Of course, this was after my exposure to UNIX, from which (I suspect) the MS-DOS developers borrowed file system terminology and technology, and CP/M 80, which I ran on a Kaypro in my office. We also had DEC PCs on campus (the ones with the flip-over disk drive), but I couldn't find a single person who used them.

The VMS file system, while useable, was one of the single most unfriendly things I have ever encountered. The VMS-based editors we had then weren't much better--I was ultimately able to install a limited version of EMACS onto the VAX we were using, and that made life a lot better.

Of course, all of this is but the blink of an eye in terms of the Long Now project!

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April
Joined: 13 Dec 2003
Posts: 6593
Location: Westchester/NYC

8/15/13 11:26 AM

Andy, I have a very different sentiment regarding VMS vs UNIX vs. DOS.

VMS as an OS is the most stable I've ever seen. You simply can't crash it, even when calling low level system functions. That of course, has to do with DEC deciding NOT to give user the rope to hang themselves. The file system technology was bloated and clunky but nonethelss is functional.

Unix has the nicest file system technology. And it's concept of treating all devices as a "file" is simplicity at its best! However, early flavor of Unix left the kernal level open to non-privileged users to bring down the whole box without trying. Resulting in constant crashing of unix boxes!

VMS command, unlike unix command, are more related to real world use of words rather than some randomly thought up words ('biff' anyone?) And I happened to LOVE the VMS EDT editor. I even did some LISP programming to make emacs to take EDT keystrokes! (I made my living for quite a few years porting VMS software to UNIX so am intimately familiar with both OS)

DOS first borrowed from unix but then got re-invented by "Kernal VMS". It got some much needed stability but also git a lot of the bloating that was then considered the trademark of VMS.

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Sparky
Joined: 08 Dec 2003
Posts: 19068
Location: PDX

8/15/13 1:40 PM

Here is a good laugh for the network folks. The hospital I did the bulk of my consulting for pre y2k got an upgrade on the side of the network i did not do.

They put in an Dec Alpha box with 2 disk arrays. Only to run VMS on it. So $125k box and a NOS that did not even support the STF/Raid hardware the main cost of the box afforded. Funny how that works...

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Andy M-S
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Hamden (greater New Haven) CT

8/15/13 5:27 PM

MVS never crashed either.

Didn't mean I had to like it. I did know people who acquired WYLBUR editors for the PCs...

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