Re: Digital Standard Mumps

[John Willis via cctalk]

DSM went to InterSystems Corp. during their spree of buying up every MUMPS 
implementation vendor they could get their hands on. They got DataTree (DTM), 
Micronetics (MSM), and DSM. They already had ISM. They merged ISM and features 
from the others into OpenM, which evolved into Caché, their current MUMPS 
product.

M21, GT.M, MUMPSv1, FreeM, YottaDB, and Mumps-II remain independent and current 
as of today.

I'm the station chair for the validation and testing suite for the MUMPS 
Development Committee, which is the organization responsible for the ISO and 
formerly ANSI standards for the language.

Re: OpenVMS Hobbyist & HPE vs. HP

[John Willis via cctalk]

> On Oct 7, 2017, at 10:13 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> Has anyone gotten any Hobbyist Licenses lately?  I’m trying to get them, and 
> I notice that while I’m signing up at an HPE.com website, the initial email 
> comes from an HP.com address.  So far no luck getting licenses, but they 
> might have gone to my now nonexistent Aracnet email address (aka NL:).
> 
> Zane
> 
> 
> 

I was able to successfully renew mine earlier this year. Took some time. I had 
personally hoped that the program would fall under the auspices of VSI, but I 
can understand that there would be reasons for not doing so.

Re: 5150/5151 Video Card??

[John Willis]

should work fine u got rca and vga on that card might not be colour but it
> should work
>

This board is not likely to be VGA. The card says "CGA-IV", so it's likely
a DE-9 RGB connector.
An FCC ID search reveals it to be a Chinese product, from Yangtech Electric
Co. Ltd.; the FCC action date
is September 1986.

Re: Is MS-DOS, PC DOS and DR-DOS vintage enough to count?

[John Willis]

>
> Exactly! This!
>
> All versions of W9x run in 386 protected mode, with DOS sessions in
> the 386's Virtual 8086 mode.
>
> There was no difference that I'm aware of between them.
>
> Between WfWg 3.11 and 9x, yes. Between 9x and NT, yes. But 95/98/ME, no,
> TTBOMK.
>
> If there _was_ some difference, [a] it was lept _very_ quiet, and [b],
> I want to know!
>
>
I wrote at some length about these differences at:

https://youngmumpster.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/windows-multitasking-a-historical-aside/

a few years ago.

Re: word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)

[John Willis]

>
>
> There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one --
> apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and
> was... strange.
>
>
I liked EPM under OS/2, and had to get acquainted with TEDIT for disaster
recovery of same. I believe "E" under OS/2 was just a stripped-down GUI
editor akin to MS Notepad.

Re: Keyboards and the Model M (was Re: NEC ProSpeed 386)

[John Willis]

>
>   I only use Model M keyboards.  I have one for my Linux box, one for my
> Mac, and one for the office Mac.  I have about five more sitting in the
> closet of the home office on standby, and I think I have a box of keyboards
> in storage.


I have a couple of Model M boards, and a Unix layout Unicomp clone (with
Ctrl and caps lock in the right positions).

My favorite by far though is the 5150 and XT 83-key. Much heavier, and the
sound and feel are more to my liking, as well as the left side function
keys. I really want to get an XT to PS/2 adapter and one of those boards
(model F, if memory serves), but prices are so high that other expenses
always seem to take precedence.

I was never bothered in the slightest by the small enter key or the need to
use num lock regularly.


-- 
*John P. Willis*
Coherent Logic Development LLC

M: 575.520.9542
O: 575.524.1034

chocolatejolli...@gmail.com
http://www.coherent-logic.com/

Re: Classics long overdue a Boot.

[John Willis]

>
> I've owned 3 Crimsons and 3 or 4 Onyx desksides. I wonder where they are
> now? I know one Crimson buyer drove to Virginia Beach from Atlanta GA.
>
> FWIW, everyone loves the Crimson. I like the Challenge L and Onyx deskside
> better.
>
> I know that one of my old Onyx's is in New Mexico, not sure where the
> others are these days.
>
> I gave away *four* Challenge Ls. Not sure if the one guy still uses them
> as a table end or not.
>
>
I had an opportunity to get four Origin 3000s and two Cray J-90s in the
2008-9 timeframe.
Could never arrange for transportation though, so they got away.

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[John Willis]

>
>
> The problem is that type #2 here covers most people, and sadly, the
> ivory towers of the industry & academia do not accept that certain
> languages or language features are actually widely-liked or attractive
> to people because they do not fit with the prevailing wisdom. So,
> although, for instance, TP & later Delphi demonstrated that the Pascal
> family can be appealing, practical, and a desirable choice; and the
> Oberon OS proves that the Pascal family can be used to build an
> entire, practical, useful and widely-used (in its niche) OS from the
> metal up.
>
>
Let's not forget that the bulk of the Apple Lisa operating system and
at least large parts of the original Macintosh system software were also
implemented in Pascal (though IIRC hand-translated into 68k assembly
language), which was a pretty big mainstream success for proving
Pascal as suitable for developing systems software.

Re: History [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[John Willis]

>
>
>> What IS known as FidoNet (1:138/142 here. :) ) and it's still a political
> shit-show, mostly due to people from Zone 2. *sigh*
>
>
Why, hello, 1:138/142! 1:305/1 here!

Re: shell accounts [was RE: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[John Willis]

On Thursday, April 21, 2016, Tony Aiuto <tony.ai...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 1:45 PM, John Willis <chocolatejolli...@gmail.com
> <javascript:;>>
> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > > That's another thing I remember and miss from those days... your
> > average
> > > > ISP would provide NNTP and UNIX shell accounts, as well as a few megs
> > of
> > > > space to put up a personal web site in ~/public_html.
> > >
> > > I still read Usenet newsgroups via GNUS under Emacs on my shell account
> > on
> > > Panix, an ISP located in Manhattan, and have a small web site hosted
> > there
> > > as well:
> > >
> > >http://www.panix.com/~alderson/index.html
> > >
> > > Some things are too important to relegate to a web browser.
> >
>
> Actually, I don't get this discussion at all. I had a panix account years
> ago.About the same time I ran a FULL suite of servers in my basement, DNS,
> STMP, HTTP & mailman. Then I realized that was just because I *could*,
> rather than I needed to or because it served any interesting historical
> purpose. I switched it all to outsourced services and never looked back.


Good for you? I enjoy doing those things, and don't see what would give you
a reason to belittle someone who enjoys doing something else.


>
> The bottom line is that what i really care about is the beauty of old
> hardware and the elegance of software that had to run in that limited
> environment. The speed/cost/accuracy tradeoff is the essence of software
> engineering. If I read information about it with Lynx rather than a modern
> browser, I only penalize myself. I reduce my bandwidth for some abstract
> notion of "purity".


I don't think anyone suggested anything like this... I use a number of
highly modern machines every day.


>
> Look at it this way. Archeologists care about history, but they are smart
> enough to realize they don't have to write their papers in charcoal on cave
> walls. Do not conflate the subject matter with the medium to talk about it.


So retro internet is less valid as a focus of hobbyist enthusiasm than
retro computers? I enjoy both, as well as modern computing.

I love ancient hardware, and I will use the best tools I have available to
> talk about it. Limiting myself to shell accounts and elm as a mail reader
> misses the point. We *live* in 2016. We talk about 1970. Using technology
> from 1990 is neither historically accurate, nor useful.


How is it historically inaccurate for me to use 1990s technology to relive
the times when I was first getting into computers to begin with? Again, I
enjoy it, so you have no right to be a jerk and judge me for it...


>
>
> >
> > > Rich
> > >
> >
> > This gives me a thought: I run a similar (but likely much smaller) ISP in
> > my neighborhood.
> > ISPs like Panix and my own ChivaNet should come up with some common
> > branding
> > indicating that we support traditional Internet values and services. Some
> > way for enthusiasts
> > who really care about "the Internet as it was meant to be" to separate
> the
> > wheat from the
> > chaff, and be smarter about bandwidth shopping.
> >
>


-- 
*John P. Willis*
Coherent Logic Development LLC

M: 575.520.9542
O: 575.524.1034

chocolatejolli...@gmail.com
http://www.coherent-logic.com/

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[John Willis]

>
> Yep.  I miss that too.  I used to run such an ISP in the 90's and we did
> exactly as you say.  We also ran a finger servers everywhere (and no, not
> one with a bunch of security problems).  People used to use that in cool
> ways, too (bots, cool services, vending machine interfaces, etc..).
>
>
I loved being able to do finger @host and then use talk to chat with other
people. IMNSHO, the real promise of the Internet as envisioned by Cerf,
Postel, et. al. was in the purity of the end-to-end networking connectivity,
where your personal machine is a node equal in stature to minis, mid,
and mainframes also participating: i.e., you have a real, meaningful address
that can not only reach, but be reached. Of course, the prevalence of
dial-up
connectivity in those days somewhat precluded this, but with a shell
account,
you could get close. Once broadband took off, with always-on connectivity,
this should have been mitigated--but alas, IPv4 depletion and that demonic
invention called NAT screwed it up all over again. Of course, if class A
and B
address blocks weren't handed out like candy to children in the early days,
IPv4 might have lasted longer. But that's a whole other discussion.

IPv6 _should_ fix this, but trusting the telcos and tier 1 providers to not
screw
up the transition is tantamount to an ardent belief in bigfoot, the Loch
Ness
monster, and cold fusion.

IMO, bandwidth should be bandwidth: it's none of the ISP's business which
direction it goes in or what I'm using it for (as long as it's legal). This
is why
I pay in excess of $300/month for a T1 line and a /27, as well as ADSL with
a /28 (from a local provider that doesn't care if I run "servers" or not).

I actually run a small neighborhood ISP that provides such a service, in
that
it's enthusiast-friendly, provides end-to-end connectivity, provides shell
accounts,
a gopher server, a (text-only) USENET feed, has finger and talk enabled on
the
various old servers (SunOS, HP-UX, Solaris, 4.2BSD, etc.). I also block
video
content, Facebook, and all the rather cancerous bandwidth drains of the
modern
commercial Internet.

I also miss: gopher, archie, veronica, and WAIS


> 
>
> The simple fact is that most folks are too apathetic and ignorant to care
> about such things anymore.  The Internet is a large, but still textbook
> case of what happens when you let business-weasels in on something good.
> They "monetize" it and turn it into a combination strip-mall, casino,
> theatre, porn-shop.  Of course, the Internet wouldn't be what it is
> without said weasels, (certainly not as large) but I think I'd be pretty
> okay with that.  I'd be okay without 80% of Internet traffic being video,
> too.  I guess that makes me a curmudgeon (but I've always hated TV and I
> resent the forces trying to morph the Internet into on-demand cable
> television). Yea yeah, I know I'm just peeing in the wind to say it, but
> there it is.
>
>
The downward spiral after the commercialization of the Internet was
precipitous
and alarmingly rapid: the vapidity of online exchanges quickly reached fever
pitch as more and more blockheads flooded the network. Prior to that, the
sense
of community and mutual trust was astonishing. We didn't have to worry about
security nearly as much, since most of us were incredibly grateful to have
access
to such a resource in the first place.

I remember when computers used to come with a programming manual and
> schematics for the machine, too.  Even mid-level stereo equipment would
> often come with schematics.  That's because those folks (the generation
> before me, I'm a gen-X unit) had a significant population of people who
> cared about such things and could run a soldering iron.
>
>
Yep. And the programming manual would come with (gasp) BIOS source listings.
I remember even printers coming with a reference for all their escape
sequences, and
often royalty-free sample code in some combination of assembly language,
BASIC,
and Pascal. Sometimes C. Now, you get a kindergarten-level fold-out poster
showing you where to plug in the keyboard. Even serious programming tools
have
more text in the license agreement than they do in the printed docs.



> Just like there didn't used to be any such thing as Computer Science.
> Ie.. you learned electrical engineering (ie..  how the darn chips
> themselves worked, first) or some other technical discipline then applied
> that to computing.  Now, most colleges want to teach you Java and call you
> a computer scientist.  We get college grads all the time and I'm shocked
> to see how little they've actually been taught relating to computing.
> They are marginally more useful than high school kids and that's only
> because they don't show up quite as late for work.
>

Heh... I dropped out of college because of this trend. My so-called "data
structures" course was in reality just "Modula-2 Programming 101". I found
that I
was better served by buying old textbooks and studying on my own time, and
getting

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[John Willis]

>
> > It wouldn't be until 1994 that the university allowed access to the
> public
> > internet directly through SLIP or PPP.
>
> My college was very restrictive that way, too.  I figured out how to get
> "slirp" working because there wasn't anyway to get a working PPP or SLIP
> connection for me from there. The things we did to get connected to the net
> in those days...


I think I remember slirp... didn't that somewhat emulate a SLIP link
through a
shell account?

That's another thing I remember and miss from those days... your average ISP
would provide NNTP and UNIX shell accounts, as well as a few megs of space
to put up a personal web site in ~/public_html.


> -Swift
>

Re: strangest systems I've sent email from

[John Willis]

My first experiences with internet mail would have to qualify as the
weirdest.

My family gained access to the internet in 1988. We'd dial into the NMSU
terminal server (my mother was a professor there) and connect from the
terminal server to an S/390 running VM/ESA and do an IPL CMS to get to a
reasonable shell that afforded access to e-mail, the XEDIT editor, and the
Charlotte web browser. The challenge was that for the first few years, we
didn't know we needed a 3270 emulator, so CMS would go into a strange mode
that only somewhat worked... If you made a mistake in typing, you had to
start all over. But, I ultimately figured out how to get a SLIP connection
going from the terminal server and use a proper TN3270 client to access the
mainframe instead of ProComm Plus. It wouldn't be until 1994 that the
university allowed access to the public internet directly through SLIP or
PPP.

I want to set up a VM environment on Hercules to relive those times, now
that I am light years more competent.


-- 
*John P. Willis*
Coherent Logic Development LLC

M: 575.520.9542
O: 575.524.1034

chocolatejolli...@gmail.com
http://www.coherent-logic.com/

Re: 'motherboard' etymology

[John Willis]

>
> Computers existed way before 1980, and had many boards plugged into
> wire-wrapped backplanes or motherboards.I'm guessing the terminology
> was company-specific.  IBM had their own name for EVERYTHING, for
> instance.  They did NOT use the term motherboard, as far as I know.  The
> SMS systems like 709x, 1401, etc. had totally passive backplanes.  The SLT
> systems (System/360, 1130/1800, etc.) had passive backplanes, but the local
> interconnect was done mostly with etched traces on multilayer PC boards,
> which also distributed power to the cards.  They just called these
> backplane sections "boards" and the SLT circuit boards that plugged into
> them were "cards".  Not sure where I first saw the term motherboard, or if
> it really implied it had substantial active circuitry on it.
>
>
FWIW, the IBM term for "motherboard" was "planar", at least in the era of
the PC, PC/XT, PC/AT, etc.
The first computer to which I had access was my father's 5150 in
approximately 1984; I remember the
machine came with dual floppy drives and a 64K system planar with an Intel
8088. At some point, a
technician came out and put in a different planar with 256K on-board, added
an additional 256K via
expansion board, and configured it with a 30MB half-height Winchester drive
and controller. This second
planar had an AMD D8088 at the same 4.77MHz speed as the original.

Having this machine handed down to me in about 1991 sparked my interest in
programming; many hours
of BASICA silliness and PC-DOS batch file frustration followed.

Re: What to Do with a PS/2?

[John Willis]

Warp 3 requires a 386SX with 4MB at minimum. Connect will work with a 386
and 8 to 12MB RAM, depending on what LAN services you choose to run.

Here is a link to an IBM Redbook on the subject, covering all of this in
great detail.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg244552.pdf

No version of OS/2 supplied by IBM has an "El Torito" bootable installation
disc. LOADDSKF should be able to write the installation floppy and disk 1
as required for all versions of the system. I have never successfully done
this on my Sabrent USB floppy, nor any other raw image transfer, due to the
controller issues mentioned earlier in this thread.

Hope this helps.




-- 
*John P. Willis*
Coherent Logic Development LLC

M: 575.520.9542
O: 575.524.1034

chocolatejolli...@gmail.com
http://www.coherent-logic.com/

Re: OpenVMS Alpha V7.3

[John Willis]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 7:53 AM, william degnan billdeg...@gmail.com
wrote:

 related question - I was not able to make a bootable/readable image from
 the ISO I have 7.3, although it might have been a bad source.  Is there a
 best way/ best software to make a usable 7.3 install CD that will work in
 an Alpha?   Just curious as to why I was not able to make it work.  I make
 CD's all of the time from ISO, but maybe I need to do more research on the
 subject as far as size and set up go for an Alpha-bootable CD, or CDRW type
 I need to use, etc.   I'd offer my ISO, but I don't know if it's good.
 Bill


Your Alpha system may not support reading burned CDs at all. I know mine
doesn't.

Re: VAX-11/750 registry (Was: Reviving a VAX-11/750)

[John Willis]

What control store does it have?

   I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.  Are you asking for the
 microcode revision?  That would also apply to pretty much all VAXes.


Probably referring to the L0005 CPU Control Store vs. L0008 Patchable
Control Store. There's also a few types of L0008 (-YA, -YB, and -YC, IIRC),
distinguished mostly by whether or not they contain any writable control
store.


jpw