from:"Liam Proven"

On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 15:51, Peter Corlett via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Adding pockets ruins the look, or something.

Yup.

They're going beyond the realm of their own previous products into
such severe minimalism it's becoming inconvenient.

I want an LED to tell me my charge/power status, message status, etc.,
thank you. I want a physical home button. I want a physical headphone
socket. If you want me to buy a £1000 tablet, then I want multiple
ports, USB and Lightning or whatever. I want to connect a keyboard and
headphones and charge it all at once, thanks.

Since I can't have that, I bought a cheapo Chinese tablet instead, for
less than the cost of a second-hand iPad of similar spec. It does the
job.

It is very pleasant that I have come to a point in my life where I can
afford nice toys like a (second-hand) Retina iMac and what was still a
high-end iPhone when I got it (also 2nd hand).

However, so many features are disappearing from the newer models that
I am not sure they're going to keep me for long...

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 15:45, Peter Corlett via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> So long as said companies don't just make yet another Android device based on 
> a
> cheap-and-nasty Mediatek SOC which requires proprietary Android-only drivers 
> to
> work well, and then make misleading claims about Linux support.

Don't all phone chipsets require Android drivers?

And on that point, so does the RasPi.

> The Gemini's keyboard was very much a take-my-money-now feature when I saw it,
> but since it was being crowdfunded on Indiegogo, the platform for stuff too
> dodgy for Kickstarter, I decided to exercise caution and wait to see what, if
> anything, would be delivered. When they finally admitted it had a Mediatek
> chipset, I lost all interest. Been there, done that, never again.

You pays your money, etc. I'm quite happy with mine. I don't use it as
a phone but for taking notes at conferences and events, for instance,
it's _superb_.

> Planet are right now crowdfunding their new "Cosmo Communicator". They have
> apparently learned nothing as it also has a Mediatek chipset, and yet they
> continue to disingenuously claim Linux support. I shall be giving this one a
> wide berth too.

On their sales volumes, I think they have to go with whatever is cheap
and customisable on the Chinese market.

One of the sad things about the ARM market is that there is no
industry standard, no baseline to aim for. There isn't even standard
firmware. Lots of devices don't have firmware at all, so every Linux
port is a bare-metal thing, starting with hardware initialisation. A
year or 2 after it goes off the market, it's junk, as nothing will
support it any more.

ARM64 is trying to impose a requirement for UEFI, I believe, but [a]
the legions of cheap kit makers don't care and just ignore it, and [b]
UEFI is horrible.

> Third time lucky, eh? Maybe they should start talking to the Raspberry Pi
> people who actually know a thing or two about getting Linux working well on
> mobile chipsets.

Via big binary BLOBs, yeah, and a weird bootloader that means that the
GPU initialises the system and (I hear) retains some degree of control
over interrupts, making it more or less impossible to run a proper
hypervisor on the things.

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

On Sun, 9 Jun 2019 at 13:49, Stefan Skoglund  wrote:
>
> I also hate my samsung a5 mobile - the stupid thing
> doesnt have something which the two ericsson mobiles i used before (and
> a nokia and i believe a samsung to) had.
>
> Namely a small led which was on all the time. A great thing when
> you need to look for the damn things while it is dark.
>
> For example in the car or in bed or out in the nature inside a tent.
>
> Stupid little things...
>
> that little led usually changed colour when the battery became low.

Agreed again. My old Mac mini had a power LED. It pulsed softly when asleep.

The iMac that has replaced it has nothing. I can't tell if it is on,
off, asleep or what.

The cost saving of this change must be too small to measure. :-)

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

On Sun, 9 Jun 2019 at 13:45, Stefan Skoglund  wrote:
>
> The economist wrote about this (
> https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/06/08/how-the-pursuit-of-leisure-drives-internet-use
> )
>
> The current situation is this:
> it is much more important for Apple and Samsung to sell overpriced
> things to consumers which then basically only will be used to play
> games, look on sport games and youtube films.

Fair point.

And in the tropics, it is more important than ever that a device is
sealed, waterproof, has no moving parts, etc. -- to keep it tough.
Cheap & replaceable are more important than convenient and repairable.

> What you used the Psion for will only sell about 4 percent of apples
> volumes last year
> The screen of the machine i write this on, stands on a sun sparcstation
> 10.
> If i had that machine running well i would be as productive writing
> reports on that one as on the asus tower which i now uses.

I know what you mean, and I agree.

I just wish a few more companies thought like Planet Computers and
tried to make devices for rich niches, rather than the cheap mass
market...

https://planetcom.squarespace.com/


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Re: SGI IRIX 6.5 Screen Savers (emulated Indy w/ 24-bit XL graphics) running in MAME

2019-06-07 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 19:58, Sophie Haskins via cctalk
 wrote:

> A while back I uploaded a few minutes of the "ElectroPaint" screensaver 
> captured from an Indy w/ a framegrabber. If that's your thing, it's here: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl3mF-wKWgg

Reminds me of William Latham's Organic Art screensaver.

http://www.nemeton.com/static/artworks/organic-art/index.html

I blogged how to get it running on Win7:

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/57510.html

I guess I should make a video or something to show it off. As Win7 is
about to be pushed off its perch, I guess this is historic stuff now
too. :-(

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-07 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 19:55, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I used my Palm(s) completely stand-alone.
> I did not "synchronize" them with PC, other than a token backup to confirm
> process.  And I never used it as a peripheral to the PC.
> I did transfer a few files back and forth between Palm and PC; for
> example, for a conference, I copied a file with the conference schedule
> to the Palm.
>
> I used the Fossil (Palm-OS) VERY briefly, in the same way.  The watchband
> on it is still new and stiff.

I am boggling. Well, perhaps this is an intercontinental difference,
or perhaps I just had it wrong. For most of the users I know, it was a
pocketable version of their Outlook calendar and address book.

> I used Atari Portfolio and Poqet a bit.  AND, when I needed to research
> and learn TSRs, I did so on them!  Poqet was MS-DOS 5.00.  Portfolio was
> imitation-DOS, but close enough that they had implemented the undocumented
> calls that TSRs used.  I wrote the [text-mode] screen capture TSR for
> XenoFont on them.  (For a while, Sybex used the screen capture and
> screen printing routines of XenoFont for all of their text-mode books.
> Then, I wrote the XenoSoft Sales Tax Genie on the Poqet.
>
> Yes, I tested everything on CGA, MDA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, 286, 386, 486,
> Pentium.  But why bother using those on 80x86 projects that were not
> performance intensive?  Nothing becomes USELESS just because there now
> exists something bigger and faster.

Well, no, of course not. That's sort of why we're all here.

I still use DOS occasionally -- usually DR-DOS or PC DOS, for me. For
some things, such as word processing, it's still fine.

But whereas I know people who use Mutt/Neomutt/Alpine, I want a GUI
for my email these days, for instance.

> I used the OQOs (XP) extensively for email and web browsing.  (Before
> Android smartphones)

I used my Nokia Communicator for that. :-) Small enough to use with 1
hand, when closed it was a decent "candybar" phone, but open, I could
read a letterbox-sized slice of an A4 PDF page comfortable.

> Until presbyopia did me in, I had no problem with tiny screens, if they
> had enough resolution.  I could read microfilm without a viewer, and could
> easily see the grain in photos.  When the ophthalmalogist asked me to read
> the smallest line on the eye chart, he had to walk over to it before he
> would believe me that it said, "Copyright Bausch and Lomb".  Now, I can't
> even read printed text without at least +2.5

:-(

I live in some fear of this, and it's why I have not had laser eye
surgery. (Adding the erroneous hyphen makes it sound much more
exciting: laser-eye surgery.)

I still have good close-up vision, at 51, but I have to hold stuff
within a few inches of my nose to do it. If/when that goes, either
LASIK or a cataract op will be high on the list

> I would hope that the keyboard for Palm would at least use Grafiti font
> for its keycaps:-)

:-o

I have 2 of them and I have to disappoint you. :-D

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-07 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 19:30, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:

> Most of the Palm users I knew, myself included, used their Palm largely
> stand alone.  Almost all of us backed up (synced) our device to our
> computers as a backup in case of device corruption.  Some of us did use
> Palm Desktop as a convenient interface (PIM) to what was on our palms.
> But the Palm was largely stand alone.
>
> I did know a few people that synced with Outlook (and other things).
>
> The person that introduced me to Palms and I did play with network based
> syncing and had it working reliably at work.

Remarkable. Well, perhaps I had it all wrong all this time!

> I found myself, along with a few other Palm users, using Graffiti on
> paper, because it was faster than traditional letters.

:-o

Shorthand, yes. But Graffiti...

I have to ask. How is your cursive/longhand?

When I sent Palm owners contact info, some protested that my contacts
were _too full_ with _too much info_ -- home and work address,
multiple phone numbers, home and work emails, birthdays,
partners/kids' names, etc.

Their devices handled it but the owners couldn't. Palm owners entered
the bare minimum of contact info, because data entry was so painful.

This was one of the virtues of having a good keyboard, of course.

I knew one chap who tried to write a novel on his Palm device, but for
most, it was kept as short as possible. I wrote many tens of thousands
of words on my Psions -- they were a primary working device.

I took my new Gemini PDA to the FOSDEM FOSS conference in Brussels
back in February. Tried using it instead of a notebook PC for
note-taking. It was _far_ better. A tenth of the size or weight, but
as fast to type on, perfectly comfortable and convenient. And enough
battery life for a weekend of use without a charge. The Psion keyboard
at least lives on and is still relevant today.

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-06 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

o a colour Mac.

Annoying music but a demo of a late-model Series 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlv1naXDYHs

Demo of the radically different, 32-bit, RISC-based, Psion 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nEBnDB79XA

Dropped the dual proprietary storage slots, replaced with 1 standard CF slot.

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-06 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

ough realtime for single-CPU phones, running the
comms stack on the same CPU as the user-facing GUI. *EVERY* other
vendor had to run a separate CPU for the networking and comms.

But in the end, the American version won out. The iPhone had a
radically simpler UI, in a single stroke obliterating Symbian and
after a few years Blackberry too.

The only survivor was Android.

https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/

... acquired by Google and repurposed for a Blackberry clone -- this:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006

https://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html

And then they saw the iPhone, pivoted again and did a very successful
iPhone knock-off, just as Windows was a successful Mac System
knock-off... after the first few versions.

Result of the eventual convergence on the American model:

We have amazingly sophisticated, high-spec smartphones and tablets,
but they have a battery life of a single day, replacing European
phones that lasted a week and PDAs that lasted a month.

Why, no, I am *not* happy about that.

The European PDAs had excellent keyboards you could type on. My Psion
5MX paid for itself in the first weekend of ownership: on a
long-distance coach with a fold-down table the size of an iPad, I
wrote 2 articles, both of which I sold and which paid for the device.

My Nokia phones had physical keyboards and very smart software for
fast text input.

Now? No keyboards at all.

No, I am not happy about that, either.

I could read the screens of my Psion and Nokia in bright sunshine.
American-design ones are slowly edging back towards that, but it's
still difficult. Daylight-readable screens have disappeared from the
market.

I'm not happy about that, either.

My Psions and Nokias had bulletproof OSes that lasted for years
without a single update, and yes, they were Internet-connected by the
last few generations. They ran in a few tens of megabytes of
nonvolatile storage.

Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need *at least* 3 or 4
apps updating every day. If I don't use one for a few weeks, it's just
like Windows -- I have to do half an hour of updates before I can use
it. The OS needs to be replaced every month or two to fix all the
flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of storage.

I am *furious* about this.

"The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me. come to me
and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons
in the multi-touch interface - whoever designed that thing is an
intuitive illusionist, I realise fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on
the screen: That's at least a class five glamour."
(Charles Stross, /The Fuller Memorandum/)

They're very shiny. They do a lot.

But I had a better *phone* and a better *PDA* 20 years ago. The whole
is much less than the sum of its parts.

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-05 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:40, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Why?  Handheld touchtone generators were very common in the
> the early 90's.  Even the late 80's.  I bought mine in Radio
> Shack.  They were often needed if your employer used an in
> house private phone network (like MMDS where I worked) or
> a phone accessed Email system (like IBM's PROFS) because
> the phone company had this habit of turning off the keypad
> on payphones after the first connection.

This may be a European thing, I don't know.

This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket
computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine
with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3

It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best.
Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian.

But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for
you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up,
looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone
-- was impressive for its time.

One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series
5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm
Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them
and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea
that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact
instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them.

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Re: Modems and external dialers.

2019-06-05 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:27, John Labovitz via cctalk
 wrote:

>
> I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you could 
> fit over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but at 
> least you didn’t have to use the rotary dial.

This was a built-in feature of the Psion range of PDAs. The address
book app could dial any number in the address book, merely by holding
it up to the phone mouthpiece.

It blew people's minds at the time (very early 1990s).

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Reddist offer: PDP-11/34a available for free in the Coachella Valley

2019-05-30 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/bunk5m/pdp1134a_available_for_free_in_the_coachella/

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Modern BLISS compiler

2019-05-27 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

This just came up on Fess Bouc. I did not know that it existed.

It's an LLVM-backed modern compiler for BLISS.

https://madisongh.github.io/blissc/

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Re: Pleas ID this IBM system....

2019-05-22 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 05:17, Mark Linimon via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 09:52:19AM -0600, Grant Taylor via cctech wrote:
> > I think Google and their YAWNs
>
> Definition, please?  Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary are no help.  A Google
> search itself is nothing but false positives.

FWIW, I had no clue either. I was hoping to work it out from context.
No joy so far.


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Re: Pleas ID this IBM system....

2019-05-21 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 20 May 2019 at 23:10, Adrian Stoness via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> anyone figured out what these were being used for in that building?

Puma, the sportswear company, I think. Related to Adidas -- I believe
the companies were run by 2 brothers who fell out.

Puma was founded in Nuremberg. You can see Puma's logo in some of the
photos and it was mentioned in the eBay ad.

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Re: OT: Gaming Gear

2019-05-16 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 16 May 2019 at 17:14, Ethan O'Toole via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Unlike a network GamerGate, it provides storage with similar performance
> to the non-gamer model but hella-cool styling and looks. Glowing LEDs, if
> you are lucky.

Confirmed. Worked example:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/03/12/the-case-of-texas-vs.-kryolord

A bit of the story:

https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/13/district-attorney-on-trial-for-building-monster-gaming-rig-with/

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Re: Network cards and Win98SE

2019-05-14 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 20:02, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> The OP wanted a way to get a computer on the network, preferably
> wireless, or wired.

No, not really. The OP was trying to get wifi working on Win98. That's
not the same thing.

You jumped to a conclusion.

Then, you declared, rudely,  the OP that they should buy something, by
repeatedly, derisively, using a name that might be meaningful to
millennial gamers, but is _not_ to a bunch of old-timer high-level
techies.

Also, your idea meant going out and spending money on something new,
when this is a community of people who you could reasonably expect to
favour the approach of doing something difficult but functional with
existing tech that they already own.

You told someone who is trying to do something on a 20-25 year old OS
in order that they can connect to a 40 year old OS, that they should
be buying a peripheral for a games console.

> The type of device I suggested

[1] You did not "suggest". You hectored, rudely.

> very early did exactly what the OP
> wanted.

[2] You did not _explain_ that. You just repeated some buzzword phrase
nobody else here knows.

> Said device took a wired connection and bridged it to the
> wireless network.  That seems very relevant to me.

[3] You didn't explain that, either.

> I suspect the conversation would have gone differently if I didn't call
> the device a "gaming adapter" and instead called it a "client ap" /
> "network bridge" / "wired to wireless converter" or just about anything
> else that didn't have the word "game" in it.

You mean if you addressed the OP and the rest of us as competent
adults instead of poking fun?

Shock horror, yeah, that might have worked better.

> I called it a "gaming adapter" — while saying "broadly" to allow room
> for interpretation / difference of opinion / etc — because that's what
> I've frequently heard them called in man different areas in the U.S.

WE ARE NOT ALL AMERICAN.

> I'm not saying that's the proper or best name.

Yeah you were.

> I was taken aback at some of the responses that I perceived as "I don't
> have anything to do with gaming and anything related gaming can't
> possibly solve my problem or fulfill my need".  This is particularly
> surprising because I'm used to the cctalk community being open minded

They are, until someone comes along and starts implying they are
stupid, which is what you did.

> I have found this conversation to be eye opening in a number of
> different ways.  I knew, but have seen confirmation in the thread, that
> different people know things as different names, and describe things
> based on what they know.  More power to them.  I've also expanded my
> working definitions of things.

Good. Have you worked out _why_ people were upset with you? Have you
worked out what you did and how not to do it again? Have you decided
to change?

Look, *I* am someone who has, justly, been told off for being rude and
dismissive here. I very much fear that I have caused people to quit
the list, and I bitterly regret that.

But I have tried hard to *learn* from that, and I do not want to do it again.

Whereas you seem to feel that you were in the right all along and
we've overreacted.

I think you should reconsider and try to use this as a learning experience.

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Re: Network cards and Win98SE

2019-05-14 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 04:54, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Maybe it's a regional term.  I've heard other people use it in multiple
> states here in the U.S.A.

Hi, welcome to ClassicCmp. This is an international list with members
in dozens of countries and dozens of native languages.

You are _not_ winning any friends here. In fact the reverse is true.

> But you did look it up, and I'm guessing you now have an idea where it
> could be used, even for things other than gaming consoles.

No, not really. Some kind of toy attachment. Not really relevant to
the discussion, AFAICS.

Please stop digging that hole you're in.

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Re: Network cards and Win98SE

2019-05-14 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 00:39, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> So you turned your laptop into a gaming adapter.

31 years in the tech industry, some 5-6 years as a hobbyist before
that, working in 4 countries in international teams in multiple
sectors from retail to the enterprise.

I have _never_ heard that term and have no idea what it means.

Don't be so glib. It looks bad on anyone.

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Re: Network cards and Win98SE

2019-05-13 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 13 May 2019 at 12:02, John Many Jars via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I just run PUTR under DosBox on a modern PC.  A pain but... easier.

Can that read/write physical media?

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Re: Possible PUTR bug?

2019-05-10 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 10 May 2019 at 17:04, Charles via cctalk  wrote:
>
> John Wilson confirmed that his program was designed to work with one floppy
> and an HDD. He says strange things happen if one tries to use two floppy
> drives instead... just as I found ;)

Aha, OK. That's odd but if that's a restriction then fair enough.

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Re: Bug in PUTR?

2019-05-10 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 10 May 2019 at 05:04, Charles via cctalk  wrote:
>
> So I made an MS-DOS boot disk and run PUTR directly on MS-DOS (instead of
> the WinXP DOS window). Unfortunately MS-DOS 6.22 can't recognize my hard
> drive since it's NTFS-formatted, so it all has to be done in floppies.

Options:

* reinstall your XP box and make it dual-boot with DOS. This is easy;
make a primary FAT16 partition, put DOS in it in the usual way, and
make an extended partition with a logical drive for XP.

* Split some space off the end of your XP hard disk, partition it as a
logical drive in an extended partition, format it with FAT16; then
you'll have hard disk space you can write from DOS.

* install NTFS drivers on your DOS boot disk.

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Re: VCF Southeast Photos

2019-05-03 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 3 May 2019 at 10:41, Aaron Jackson via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Very nice photos although I am confused by some. Some of them appear to
> be moving but a lot of stuff stays still. What is happening??

Please bottom-post on the list.

It looks to me like an Apple "live photo".

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Re: SIMH question

2019-04-24 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 at 05:08, Charles via cctalk  wrote:

> Thanks... unfortunately I'm running 64-bit Windows and just discovered PUTR
> will only run on a 32-bit (or even older) machine.

32-bit code _should_ run on 64-bit Win7/8.x/10. 16-bit code won't.

Win7 has "XP Mode", which is a free download. It is MS VirtualPC plus
a preinstalled, preactivated Win XP VM.

It is possible to download run this VM image separately and run it
under other hypervisors -- I described how here:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014/04/10/how_to_run_xp_on_new_windows/

What I dodged around is that you need a licence. Cracking it is also
an option, of course.

It just ended this month but there is also a legal hack to get another
5y of updates for XP.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/26/german_tinkerer_gets_around_xpocalypse/

Personally I used a 3rd party "distro" of XP called TinyXP (I used r9)
for years. I would not recommend this any more, TBH, but it's
possible.

The same person, "eXPerience", who made TinyXP also made a Tiny7. It
works but SP2 won't install, at which point they gave up.

You _could_ run 32-bit Win10 under VirtualBox. I've done it. It works
well, the ISO is a free download from Microsoft, and it's perfectly
usable without activation.

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The story of... PDP-1

2019-04-01 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

DEC archival docs tell the story of the genesis of the PDP-1:

https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/digital/timeline/pdp-1story.htm

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Re: Byte Magazine

2019-03-29 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 at 19:01, ben via cctalk  wrote:
> I have been trying to read the Dr Dobbs PDF scans and a few other PDF's.
> They seem to work only with the NAME BRAND pdf reader. Of course I use
> the OTHER brand.

Since you don't name names, I can't directly comment. We don't know
what OS you're running.

If you have a Mac, then you can get Adobe Reader for it.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/install-reader-dc-mac-os.html

If you run Windows, well, I favour FOSS so I use Sumatra:

https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

Failing that, there's Foxit which is relatively light:

https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/

On Linux, where I use XFCE, I favour Xreader as it has a traditional
UI rather than the modern GNOME weirdness:

https://github.com/linuxmint/xreader/

Original Adobe Acrobat Reader is still available and still works, though.

I no longer use KDE but I hear Okular is good:

https://okular.kde.org/

The reason I sometimes install the real Adobe thing on my Mac and my
Linux machines is that it seems to cope with fancy stuff such as
embedded 3D models, forms which must be filled in, stuff like that.

For just reading, I find FOSS viewers fine.

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Re: VCF/PNW Exhibit & Trip Report - The Old Calculator Museum

2019-03-28 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 22:57, Rick Bensene via cctalk
 wrote:

>
> So, that's my "trip report".

Great reading. Thanks for that!

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Re: Opening old DEC files

2019-03-22 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 21 Mar 2019 at 20:50, Curt Vendel via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I have many DEC files that I’ve recovered from old VMS backups to a PC.
>
> Many are Word-11, ALL-IN-1 WPS and VMS Mail MAI files.
>
> They don’t open well in programs like the Windows Text editors
>
> Is there a program on Windows that can open these files and recognize all of 
> the formatting and control commands so they can be properly viewed?

Wow, I bet they don't!

That's a great question. I used tools such as that myself, decades
ago, but I didn't get to keep any documents.

I've even had the issue of importing from Word 6 into Word 97 and
later. I run Word 97 even now, under WINE on Ubuntu, not because
there's anything in 97 I need -- there isn't -- but because it uses
the same file-format as versions up to 2003 (Win)/2004 (Mac). I'd
rather run an even older, lighter version such as Word 95 or Word 6
for NT, but they use an older file-format modern WPs can't import.

A late version of WordPerfect for DOS *might* do it... I have WP6.2
for DOS running on PC DOS 7.1 and it runs fine on modern hardware. I'm
not confident, though.

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Re: Old Macs available

2019-03-12 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 23:13, nospam212-cctalk--- via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> 1) Macintosh SE/30 - Appears to have some expansion card of some sort inside 
> with with a 15 pin connector and what I think was a BNC connector?

So, an Ethernet card?

I am willing to pay for the card and international shipping. You do
not specify where you are; I am in Czechia.

However I have an SE/30 and I don't need 2...

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Re: Mystery old computer & terminals on eBay UK

2019-02-27 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 27 Feb 2019 at 12:24, Jonathan Katz  wrote:
>
> Some google shows BCL=Business Computers Limited (potentially)

Foolishly I didn't read the comments first.

It's one of these:

http://www.ps8computing.co.uk/bcl.html

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Mystery old computer & terminals on eBay UK

2019-02-27 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

I don't recognise this, but I'm no expert.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113665872765

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Re: Ultimate FDC? (Was: IBM 6360 - Filesystem(ish) info?

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 at 18:08, Eric Korpela via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Don't forget hard sector CompuColor II,  GCR, and variable speed GCR.  :)

Well, yes, OK, but one step at a time.

Step 1: a generic USB floppy controller that allows 5¼" and 8" (and
other standard Shugart-interface) FDDs to be attached to USB and seen
by the OS on the system as floppy drives. That seems to be either
coming or here.

Step 2: some smart driver software for the above to enable weird disk
formats that a standard WD FDD controller could read.

Step 3: something very smart that enables weird
non-WDD-disk-controller disks (e.g. Mac 400/800 kB and Amiga disks)
that were written in fairly standard drives.

Step 4 is when you get to all the non-hard-sectored drives and so on...

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Re: OT: Phone museum seeks new owner

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 at 17:16, geneb via cctalk  wrote:

> Based on what I've read, the only possible way the GDPR could apply to a
> US company (with no EU physical presence) is if you're selling or
> marketing directly to EU citizens.

This could be but it's quite a widespread problem.

E.g.

If I go to:

https://www.nydailynews.com/

or

I get:

https://www.tribpub.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/

«
Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at
options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU
market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that
will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
»

See:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/25/tronc_chicago_tribune_la_times_gdpr_lock_out_eu_users/

TBH mostly I neither know nor care. Occasionally I click a link and
get a blanket "sorry, no" message.

Also applies to lots of Youtube videos: I just get a "video
unavailable" message.

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Re: OT: Phone museum seeks new owner

That was meant to say...

Or:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/

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Re: HDDs (Was: PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 22:00, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Yes.
> I was thinking in terms of slightly older drives than that, particularly
> 5.25"
> Getting at the slider on newer drives wouldn't be practical.

Probably not. I suspect that ITRO 90+ % of the people I work with have
never seen a 5¼" hard disk. CD-R or DVD, yes, but they're possibly
unaware that HDs used to come in that formfactor.

I've had arguments with people over the meaning of "full height" and
"half height" before, because to them, the physically biggest drive
they've ever seen, in ancient kit (to them), is a CD drive. So
logically that _must_ mean "full height" because nothing is bigger,
therefore they redefined all the terms in their heads...

> The RAMAC came out in 1956?  The platters are 24" diameter.  Each platter
> was almost 100K!  But, with 50 platters, it maxed out at almost 5MB.
> When Nikita Khruschev made a peace mission to USA, they took him on a tour
> of the RAMAC facility.  But, they wouldn't let him go to DisneyLand! (THAT
> had repercussions in the Cuban missile crisis)

11 years before I came out, then.

I've seen and played a bit with some machines with 8" floppies, but I
think that's the biggest. I never saw the VAX 11-780 I learned Fortran
on.

> You could run Xenix on an XT!

True, but I think it wasn't a lot of use for commercial multiuser
accounts systems. They were the main market for Xenix for my
employers, early in my career. My 1st job sold Tetra, mainly
TetraPlan.

Checks... huh, later bought by Sage:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/03/08/accounting_for_sages_move/

Later, I worked for places that sold other things, like SystemsUnion.
Happily a market I left long ago and have forgotten about.

> The stock IBM XT HDD controller (Xebec) had physical solder pads for drive
> type, and supported 5MB, 10MB, 15MB, and 25MB drives.  The 25 was, of
> course, best (if you could get one) and would permit a 10MB DOS partition
> dual booting with 15MB Xenix.  Was that the first "dual boot" in the
> PC world?  (or was there a CP/M-86 dual boot option once they added HDD
> support?)

DOS+ could dual-boot with PC DOS, as I recall. I think CDOS could too.
So, probably.

I'm quite glad the XT was fading away as I got into the PC business.
They were weird and constrained.

Still, not knowing about them means people working on PCs now don't
know where it came from...
> I used a lot of ST4096 drives.  Needed a second AT power supply for the
> second one.

Ha! Yes, I can believe that. IBM did under-spec the PSUs, though.

> I use 2TB 2.5" 7.5mm Seagate/Samsung drives for MP4s of movies in
> laptops and with a Seagate GoFlex-TV (media streamer with SATA slot)
> But, I finally filled 2TB
> Currently, that is the largest 7.5mm 2.5" drive available.  But SSDs are
> now available in 2TB, so when that price comes down, . . .
>
>
> Heard about the NSA Utah Data Center?
> https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
> That's a LottaBytes!

O_o

Reminds me... I should buy a few more tibs, consolidate and rearrange
some stuff.

I wonder why megs and gigs caught on, but there's no common shorthand
for terabytes?

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Re: PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

2019-02-19 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 at 22:16, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> One of the moxt common causes of a terrible ear-piercing high whine is the
> spindle contact.  Many old drives had a springy piece that rubbed against
> the end of the spindle.  Over time, it would wear a divot, polish that,
> and start to squeal.  A very light pressure on it would test that
> hypothesis.  Not enough pressure to muffle the sound, and certaianly not
> enough pressure to slow the spindle!  Or, pulling up on it, away from the
> spindle.  Some people claimed that you could just rip it off.  Don't.
> Best is to twist it very slightly sideways, so that it can start wearing a
> new divot.

It was a 3½" EIDE drive. 8GB one, I think, but might have been
smaller. I didn't want to open it to do that, although there was a
time when custom PC builders "de-lidded" hard disks and fitted them
with little acrylic windows so you could see the head move. Not sure
I'd want to trust my data to that...

> Well, there don't seem to be many 350 RAMAC disks still running.
>
> (I'm trying to decide what to use as a base to make a patio table out of a
> [crashed] RAMAC 24" platter)

Conceded.

And thank you for the reminder that I'm not old yet.

My first machine with a hard disk was my work PC in my first job: an
IBM PC-AT, with a 20 MB FS/FH 5¼" ST-506 drive, probably a Seagate
ST-4026. I added a second drive to the machine, a 15 MB one, and put
Xenix/286 on it.

A few years ago I bought a surplus 2½" 1 TB drive from a chap who'd
bought a new notebook and put an SSD in it before use. So, 2nd hand
but unused.

It cost me CzK 1000, about £30 at the time.

£30 for a terabyte. I was in a state of shock. It was so tiny, too.

I found an online capacity comparator thing.

You'd need a pile of those Seagate drives the size of a _space
shuttle_ to hold a terabyte.

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/53353.html

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Re: Speaking of sounds made by machines

2019-02-18 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sat, 16 Feb 2019 at 22:53, Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Of all machines I've used, the beloved Atari 8-bit is most vocal.  It
> has the feature of 'i/o noise' by default.  It can be disabled with a
> Poke, but every kind of io has distinctive sounds and actually
> represents the data being sent/received.  If you disable it and crank
> the volume on your TV, you can STILL hear it, but very muted.  I think
> this feature was created to conceal this fact...
>
> It isn't just the Atari8 that has this 'feature' in its muted version,
> all of the RF-TV-type machines from the 80's produce it.

Interesting, yes. I noticed that with my ZX Spectrum machines and yes,
it was interesting and occasionally useful for debugging. "No, it's
not crashed, it's deep in a loop, and hang on, I can hear that every
few seconds it's briefly going through the outer loop, so it's still
working... give it time..."

> In theory, I
> think you could snoop the actual data, Tempest-like, using some radio
> gear.

I think it's been done.

> In the 90's I got the hpfs386 driver out of a warp server pack and hung
> it on my warp 4 client.  I LOVED hearing it hit the drive at boot.  Boy
> howdy what a performance increase that gave.

Yes, exactly! :-D

There were busmastering drivers for both Win95/98 and for NT4.

On Win9x they made no particular difference, because the "kernel" was
single-threaded and so couldn't overlap anything else with disk I/O.
You got a very small benefit from DMA being a smidgen faster than PIO
and that was it.

But on NT, even on a uniprocessor, when it offloaded disk I/O onto the
Intel Triton 84230 PIIX disk controller, the kernel could get on with
doing other stuff while waiting for disk accesses to complete. Boot up
got tens of seconds quicker, and more to the point, the machine
remained responsive when under heavy disk load. E.g. even if it was
thrashing you had a chance of killing the offending process, which you
didn't without the DMA drivers.

But no system builder installed them by default. Possibly because then
the disk wouldn't boot on different IDE hardware -- bear in mind this
was before Windows activation, so an install could just be duped onto
another machine. But if the other machine didn't have Triton chipset,
it wouldn't boot.

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Re: PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

2019-02-18 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sat, 16 Feb 2019 at 01:43, Peter Coghlan via cctalk
 wrote:
>   Days turned into weeks, weeks into months and months into
> years.  It continued to occasionally make the same ghastly noises that
> never should be heard coming from a hard disk but with absolutely no sign
> of any errors being logged or damage to data whatsoever.  The noises seem
> to be associated with seek activity because I have never heard them when
> the disk is just spinning but otherwise idle.  I eventually retired it
> and replaced it with a much larger one, purely because I ran out of
> space on it.  Any thoughts on what might be happening with it?

Ha!

Well that is the thing, of course. I had that with one old IDE disk,
too. It made a terrible ear-piercing high whine that I associate with
a failing disk... but it passed every diagnostic I could throw at it,
so I used it for non-critical stuff and in testbed machines.

For about 4 or 5 *years*. It was one reason to run machines with the
case covers on, to muffle the noise. But it ran faultlessly for years.
I think in the end I sold it on to someone, with a warning of course.
That's how I dispose of all kit -- pass it on to a new owner. I try
never to scrap or recycle anything at all.

That's the problem with rule-of-thumb diagnoses. Sometimes they fail.
But more often, things fail with no warning, so it's still useful.

This is why I disregard everyone's accounts of hard disk brands they
won't touch. I did PC tech support for ~25 years. I've seen every make
of hard drive ever fail randomly, and I've seen every make of hard
drive ever work flawlessly for years even when vilely abused.

My experience is extensive enough that _anyone's_ justifications of
why they won't use Brand X disks get ignored, because if I took them,
I would not use _any_brand of disk. Everyone who's been around a bit
has a horror story and the intersection in the Venn diagram, while
small, excludes all vendors ever.

I've never seen any one make that is significantly worse than any other.

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Re: a timer for the PC - screen tme for the kids

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 20:31, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> In these discouraging times, that brings hope for the next generation.
>
> They will learn programming skills,

On that note, this non-retro little computer really pleases me.

https://basicengine.org/

It's a modern version of a 1980s home micro. $10 if you build it from
one-off bits. Less in bulk.

32-bit RISC chip -- actually a wifi controller -- with a super fast
BASIC interpreter, complete with structured programming and sprite
commands and so on.

The display is a DRAM chip that happens to be able to generate an
analog monitor signal.

Amazing little gadget. I have a PCB and plan to try to build one.

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Re: IBM 3174 C 6.4 Microcode Disks?

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 19:27, Paul Berger via cctalk
 wrote:

> Knowledge Center refers to it as IBM i, but it is not the name of a
> system it is just the name of another OS that runs on IBM Power systems
> and can even be vitalized on a system with other OSes.

IBM moved the AS/400 onto POWER processors. The TIMI (sp?) firmware
made this doable and binaries were portable from the old hardware. The
OS was renamed i5/OS.

Later they replaced the proprietary POWER hardware with generic POWER
servers, and they renamed the OS to IBM i.

IBM supports 3 OSes on POWER servers now: AIX, Linux and IBM i.

Silly name, though.

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Re: a timer for the PC - screen tme for the kids

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 16:46, Dave Wade via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> The "simplest"  is to create a logon event that's does "shutdown /t nn
> /s" where "n" is the number of seconds of play time.

No, honestly, there are much easier ways.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/set-time-limits-windows-10


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Re: a timer for the PC - screen tme for the kids

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 08:17, Randy Dawson via cctalk
 wrote:

> My idea was initially do this in hardware, with a timer, and a solid state 
> relay to gate the AC to the PC.

Sounds like a good way for a regularly-trashed boot disk filesystem to me, TBH.

> Has anybody seen this, before I re-invent the wheel?

I believe something like it is a built-in feature of Win10.

But of course that almost certainly means there are well-documented
hacks and workarounds.

Getting built-in is the reason that $DAYJOB-3 killed its
kid-monitoring-and-restricting product line.

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Re: PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 14:59, Paul Koning  wrote:
>
> Speaking of sounds made by machines, there is a famous security paper from a 
> few years ago in which researchers read the encryption keys out of 
> smartphones by listening to the sounds made by the device while it was 
> execution the crypto algorithms.

... wow.

> These hardware wizard stories remind me of a legendary repair wizard, 
> non-computer industrial devices I think.  He was called in to fix a tricky 
> problem at the customer site.  Studied it for a while, took out a small 
> hammer, whacked the device at some spot, and reported "fixed".  He then sent 
> in a bill for $500.
>
> Customer challenged that with a demand to itemize the work.  The itemized 
> bill came back like this:
>
> 1. Applying impact to the device: $5
> 2. Knowing where and how to apply the impact: $495

110 years old, and still apt.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

I first encountered it in the form of one of the AI Koans. I guess
these are probably familiar to all here, but in case:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~wiseman/humor/ai-koans.html

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Re: PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 04:34, Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> The install would start and then bomb at a certain point every time.  I
> decided to work the machine hard and then pull the board and give a
> good SNIFF.

Got a nose for a hardware fault, eh? ;-)

And some of my younger colleagues thought it was strange that I could
predict hard disk failures from the running noises they made, and
later than that, whether WinNT's bus-mastering DMA-mode disk
controller device driver was installed from the sound of the disk
accesses while the machine booted.

BTW, Jeff, Gmail bottom-quotes just fine. I'm using the web interface
right now. Just hit Ctrl-A, trim as needed and move the cursor. Yes,
it's a pain on mobile, so I try not to answer on mobiles!

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Re: Vintage-computing relevant IOBCC entry

2019-01-17 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 16 Jan 2019 at 22:37, John Klos via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> > /* You are not expected to understand this. */
> >
> > https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html
>
> Unsurprisingly, the original 1984 submission still compiles and runs as
> expected on a VAX running NetBSD 8 with gcc 5.5.0 :)
>
> https://www.ioccc.org/1984/mullender/hint.html

As is right, proper, faintly alarming, and additionally justifies one
of the core plot ideas of Vernor Vinge's novel /A Deepness in the
Sky/. :-D

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Enjoyable blog post about a retro writing tool: the Amstrad NC100

2019-01-15 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

https://tantobieinternettattler.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-amstrad-nc100-portable-perfection.html

I have one of these myself -- my piece about it (and some its kin) is
here... https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/11/10/portable_writing_tool/

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Re: Vintage-computing relevant IOBCC entry

2019-01-09 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 12:20, Bill Degnan  wrote:
>
> Wow, thorough.

Isn't it? :-o

> I attempted to port the same version of unix to an rl02 disk pack and to run 
> on an actual 11/40. I was able to get ir to boot up to the # prompt but my 
> system does not have a working EIS card to proceed any further.

*Wow*. My hat is off to you.

So, FTAOD -- this entrant to the 25th obfuscated C contest celebrates
the 50th anniversary of C.

It includes a PDP-7 emulator, running the first available known
snapshot of T Unix. Then, *inside* that, it includes a PDP-11
emulator -- yes, that's right, a PDP-11 emulator for the PDP-7 -- and
on that, it runs Unix v6, on which it can run the first ever
obfuscated C contest winner.

I found it quite astonishing.

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Re: Bogus "account hacked" message

2019-01-09 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 03:56, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I've heard quit a bit about that scam, but I haven't gotten that one.

Ditto on both.

> The really sad part is that I'm not doing anything that I could be
> blackmailed about.
> THAT is depressing.

Oh dear. Now I am feeling slightly depressed too.

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Vintage-computing relevant IOBCC entry

2019-01-09 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

/* You are not expected to understand this. */

https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html

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Re: VueSCAN

On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 at 22:11, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 20 Dec 2018 at 02:39, Ali via cctalk  wrote:
> >>  I wonder if there were ever any TWAIN drivers for Win 3.x.
>
> Yes, but I think that you needed WIN32S installed.

Ah, could be.

> But few pay any attention to any technology without an interesting name.

Well, quite.

> And of those who do and the rest, never the twain shall meet.

I think we've all missed that twain now.

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Re: Want/Available list

On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 04:51, Eric Christopherson via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> OK, so it's down *to* the bunker or down *in* the bunker. I'm just asking
> because of my language geekery. I still don't know, though, whether "down
> the bunker" without a preposition is idiomatic in some dialect of English I
> don't speak fluently.

You do not specify what *your* native dialect is, so it's hard to say.

In much of the UK, probably most, yes, "down the /x/" is idiomatic.

"I was talking to this bloke down the pub..."
"There's a great offer down the computer market on Tottenham Court Road..."
"I was down the gym last night and I saw..."

It means "at the", roughly, I'd say.

"Down the bunker" parses fine for me.

> I just know some UK English speakers pronounce "down
> to the/down at the" ALMOST the same as "down the", but I believe there's
> still a glottal stop in the former but not the latter.

Not that I am aware of, no.

However, Yorkshire and Lancashire English tend to reduce the definite
article to a prefixed /t/ sound, e.g. "t'pub".

See the unofficial Yorkshire national anthem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Ilkla_Moor_Baht_%27at

"Baht 'at" means "bar t'hat". "Bar" as in "all bar one" -- "without"
or "except". In other words, the singer was on Ilkley Moor without his
hat.

This t' prefix is jocularly used for the Internet, for instance: "t'Internet".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%27internet

Those who do not understand the reference reduce this to the
meaningless "tinternet".

As certain successive consonants without an intervening vowel sound
are uncommon in English, those who don't know what this "t'" sound
means can fail to distinguish it. Compare with the Hindi (I yhink)
words "bindi" and "bhindi". The former is a forehead adornment. The
latter is the vegetable, okra. Many Indian restaurants serve bhindi
bhaji, but because Anglophones mostly can't pronounce /b/ followed by
/h/, if you ask for "bindi baji" instead of "bhindi bhaji" you do not
get a forehead jewel shaped like an okra pod.

So you could say "I'm going down t'bunker" and to the untrained ear it
would sound like "down the bunker".

But I doubt this is what was meant.

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Re: Want/Available list

On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 02:59, Zane Healy via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Websites are a huge inconvenience or imposition, email lists are not.

Agreed.

However, for a lot of younger people and those to whom "email" just
means "MS Outlook", it's hard work. They do not understand
complexities such as filtering, rules, quoting, signatures etc. For
them, web fora are easier. Personally, I find web fora almost totally
unusable and treat them as a last resort.

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Re: VueSCAN

On Thu, 20 Dec 2018 at 02:39, Ali via cctalk  wrote:

>  I wonder if there were ever any TWAIN drivers for Win 3.x.

This is stretching my powers of recollection -- and in my world, back
then, if you could afford (and wanted) a scanner, you used a Mac --
but I think so, yes.

We are all aware of what that acronym means, yes?

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Re: More old stuff incoming

2018-12-29 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 18:52, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> On 12/19/2018 10:45 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> > 80186?
>
> I really thought it was 8x86 where the x was 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4.

:-o

No no, never.

But there was the i860 and i960 as well, remember. And the iAPX-432.

There's more to life than x86.

> I think IBM had some special things that were modifications.  Supposedly
> my model 70 is a special 386 instruction set that has some hybrid CPU in
> it.  I don't remember the specifics.  IBM was fab'ing chips at the time
> and had licenses to Intel's IP.  So they created a 386 that was somehow
> more than / different from a 386. Maybe it was a crippled 486 that only
> had the bus of the 386.  I don't recall.

SLC series? 386SLC & 486SLC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_386SLC

I think IBM also rebadged or fabbed these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_Cx486SLC


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Re: More old stuff incoming

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 18:23, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> On 12/19/2018 09:05 AM, xcvb via cctalk wrote:
> > Tho ive seldom posted but have always read this list i cannot resist -
> > somewhere stored away in my piles of stuff I have an IBM Model 30 I
> > believe that has an 8 bit isa bus and an 80186 cpu.
>
> I am somewhat surprised to learn that any commercially available general
> purpose computer had an 8186 CPU.

80186?

> I would love some confirmation on the CPU.  (I'll look it up in a bit.)

"xcvb" is wrong. It's an 8086.

>  I've only seen it in purpose built
> equipment.  The last one I saw was in a mobile X-Ray or CT machine in
> the late '90s.

The BBC Master had a '186:

http://www.cowsarenotpurple.co.uk/bbccomputer/master512/index.html

http://www.cowsarenotpurple.co.uk/bbccomputer/master512/tube.html

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Master512.html

There was an RM Nimbus too.

https://www.thenimbus.co.uk/range-of-nimbus-computers/PC-186

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1011=1


> That would mean that IBM PS/2s had every major class of x86 CPU between
> the 8086 (or was it 8088, which is still in the 8x86 family) and the
> Pentium.

They didn't.

8088, 8086, 80286, 80386DX, then 80386SX, 80486, Pentium.

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Re: More old stuff incoming

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 13:35, Bill Degnan  wrote:
>
> 486 / early pentium computers have their own support challenges, both 
> hardware and software.  The skills differ from the XT era PC clones and such.

Yup.

> This is definitely a vintage era of it's own, I call the GUI era to 
> differentiate it from the WWW era that followed it.

I like that distinction.

>  The broader GUI vintage includes all Windows/MAC, Amiga, NeXT, SGI desktops 
> made for home use,

Whoah whoah whoah, what?

SGI made home computers?!

> desktop publishing, mouse-driven applications, LAN comms, and before 
> widespread Internet communications.  The GUI era would have its origins in 
> the 70's but it's heyday would be 1985-95.

Yep, sounds about right.

> To that end, there are some tough to find GUI era items that were trash 10 
> years ago that get a lot of $$ on Ebay now.  Color adapter for NeXT, certain 
> Soundblaster cards for thr 486 PC, first gen Pentium 60/66 machines, Working 
> / complete and functioning Novell network demos, BE boxes, MAC Ivory systems, 
> etc.

Yes indeed.

I recycled stuff  in 2014 when I was leaving the country that's now
sellable -- and I did sell everything I possibly could.

5¼" HD floppy drives -- if Fred will spare me, PC-AT style 1.2 MB
drives -- fetched $30--$40 each, and I had at least half a dozen of
'em.



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Re: More old stuff incoming

On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 12:51, Peter Corlett via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Realistically, computers made before around 2010 *are* antiques: something
> where the main value is due to its age rather than its utility.

Mostly, yup.

When my laptop gave me some problems, start of 2017, I fired up my old
~3GHz Core 2 Extreme box, my one-time Hackintosh, maxed out with 8GB
of RAM and a quick-ish 1TB hard disk.

I installed Win10 and got it fully updated.

It took 25min to open the Word document I was working on.

Nearly half an hour. OK, yes, a nearly 1GB Word doc, but *still*.

So I bought a newer laptop, a used Thinkpad X220, for £150. It opened
the doc in about 3min.

There has been quite a lot of progress, and even a high-end decade-old
PC is very low-end now, whatever the specs suggest.

OTOH, it does have a floppy drive, which is why I keep it around.

> The lack of intimate knowledge of machines from before one was born is not
> surprising. You only learn it to that depth if it was current kit in your
> youth. So us GenXers know rather more about 1980s Sinclair and Acorn machines
> than is healthy, and earlier kit is a orange-and-wood-grain mystery.

Absolutely. No disagreement there at all.

But because the kit is mysterious to them, they're willing to spend
money to get it and explore it.

Same as people are now actively seeking late-era fast 486s and early
Pentium-era boxes, for Win9x gaming. A lot of games didn't make the
transition to the NT-based Windows era, and for them, period kit is
the best way to play them.

I personally think it's barking but then I am not much of a gamer.

> Are you feeling old yet?

Nah, I'm used to it.
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Re: More old stuff incoming

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 22:42, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I think PS/2s range from 286 - (very few) Pentium.  I don't /think/
> there were any 8086 / 8088 PS/2s, but I could be mistaken.

As "system_glitch" said, there were.

The original model 30 was an 8086, and not even a great one -- it
didn't have true VGA, for instance.

http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/7492.htm

It was also available in a small-form-factor all-in-one case as the Model 25:

http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/ps2model25.htm

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1=1183

Easily mistaken for a PS/1. That got me a lot of abuse on Twitter recently.

Then there was the Model 30-286, a sort of mucked-about PC-AT.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2585/IBM-PS-2-Model-30-286/

And from our own Tezza:

https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/ps2-286-30.htm

They're sort of not "real" PS/2s because they have the AT bus, not
MicroChannel. I think the 30-286 could run OS/2 though.

The same case (or very nearly) was reused for the Model 55SX. I
actually have one of these.

https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/ibm-ps2-model-55sx/

It's a "true" PS/2 with MCA. I hope to get an old version of OS/2 2 or
3 going on mine some time.

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Re: More old stuff incoming

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 22:08, Zane Healy via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Cindy, I’m curious, is there really a market for 8086/88, 286, and 386 
> computers?  What are folks using them for?

Judging from the FB "Vintage" Computer Club, yes, a small one.

For millennial-age geeks, pre-32-bit computers are antiques. They
_might_ just barely remember back to Win9x. So for them, a DOS machine
is a voyage of discovery into some of the more arcane pages of
history. The idea of computers or OSes that can't boot from CD blows
minds. For them, only elderly historical kit has 3½" floppy drives.

So yes, there is a little bit of demand, I reckon. Not highly
commercial, though.

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Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 at 21:57, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Definitions tend to be RIGID, but completely arbitrary.
> "MEGAPIXEL" is nice, but enough to EXCLUDE 1024 x 800 ?

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

> "First": The author is unaware of anything prior, or all prior instances
> were in some way uninteresting and unacceptable for the author's use.  eg.
> "Apple2 was the first personal computer", "first book typed on a word
> processor", etc.

A fair cop.

> "Workstation": Any location where an oppressed worker is compelled to
> toil.

Ouch. I have one of those.

> "Multimedia": Two or more Kodak Carousel projectors with a soundtrack.
> (college "DEFINITION", not "example"!, from half a century ago)

Heh.

> One day, our otherwise very dignified department chair came running into
> the student computer lab (3 dozen 386SX generic PCs), yelling "We're
> getting SUNS! We're getting SUNS!  The loading dock just told me that
> there are three big boxes labelled 'Multimedia Workstation'!". Later that
> day, two of the three boxes arrived (the third had been pilfered by an
> administrator).  They were fancy wheeled computer desks for the demo
> machines in our classrooms, to replace the vintage 5150 rolling
> standup presentation carts that had been the right height (projector
> should be taller than desk) and lockable.

Oh, the humanity...

I must admit, at the time, I liked the "3M" definition. It's also a
nod to the famed 3M corporation, which was one of the first I met to
successfully pretty much completely obscure what the three Ems
actually stood for, so diversified was its business that it was no
longer anything to do with its actual name.

So conflating 3 entirely unrelated Ems together, and the facetious
ETLA-style *fourth* Em, was, ISTM, a facetious reference to this.

It seemed like a laudable goal at the time.

Now, we all have them, and we've totally squandered that power. It is to weep.

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Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 at 19:55, Josh Dersch  wrote:
>
> The Sun-1 absolutely had a framebuffer and a display and was not a text-only 
> machine, it did 1024x800 at 1bpp, had a mouse, the whole deal.
>
> See the picture in this article, for example: 
> https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sun-Microsystems-Inc

FWIW, no pic for me in that article.

But yes, I skim-read the wikipedia page and got the wrong impression.
I've already confessed and apologised in this thread.

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Re: SunOS 2.4 Exploit

It's a bit late, isn't it?
On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 at 19:30, Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk
 wrote:

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Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 at 15:13, allison via cctech  wrote:

> During my days at DEC in the later 80s the definition of workstation was
> 1MIPS processing power,
> 1M pixels, Desktop or desk side (fairly compact).  Graphics and
> processing power were high
> and lots of ram and sufficient local disk as well.  Most of the machines
> were RISC based,
> Sun (sparc), MIPS, or ARM powered.

Reminiscent of NeXT's "3M computer":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

1 megapixel, 1 megabyte, 1 MIPS.

ISTM that the Sun-1 fails the megapixel requirement, but on further
reading, e.g. 
http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/computer-graphics-music-and-art/15/218/615
, only narrowly.

I think I scanned the Wikipedia article too quickly this morning...

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Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 at 12:44, Tony Duell  wrote:
>
> I don't think anyone is questioning that it's a workstation, and that it was
> made by Sun.
>
> I think the problem is over 'first' and that a Sun-2 is not going to be the
> 'first' model.

Ah! Excellent point. I have to admit, I was totally unfamiliar with
the very early Sun products. I was happy with my little ZX Spectrum
back then, and being about 14, wasn't paying much attention to the
world of academic Unix usage. :-)

Looking up the SUN-1, I see that it lacked a graphics adapter, and was
a text-only machine. I didn't know that. That alone means that it's
not really what I think of when I think of a Sun workstation: no
windowing system means that for me it's not really a workstation.

But as a single-user Unix machine, yes, it unquestionably qualifies,
and I need to redefine my terms and my thinking a little...

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Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 23:12, Chris Hanson  wrote:
>
> It’s a Sun-2 so it’s not really arguable whether it’s the first ever Sun 
> workstation: It’s not.

Not my claim; the author of the video's. Take it up with him, if
you're on the Rescue List.

But I am mildly curious what your definition of a Sun workstation is,
if it excludes a 680x0 machine with Unix and a big monochome bitmap
display...

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Fwd: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise on Sun2 disk install)

2018-12-05 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

I thought folk might enjoy this short-ish (~12min) Youtube video
showing startup of arguably the first ever Sun workstation, from a
contemporaneous SunOS... I did.

Permission obtained before x-posting, naturally.

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-- Forwarded message -
From: Walter Belgers 
Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2018 at 12:34
Subject: Re: [rescue] Sun2/120 SunOS 3.2 suntools movie (was: advise
on Sun2 disk install)
To: The Rescue List 


Hi,

Another update in case you are interested:

I rescued a keyboard and mouse to go with the Sun2. I also installed SunOS 3.2
on disk. I took a different route: I installed FreeBSD, installed tme on top
of that and using the information at
https://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/
<https://people.csail.mit.edu/fredette/tme/>,
http://www.heeltoe.com/index.php?n=Retro.Sun2
<http://www.heeltoe.com/index.php?n=Retro.Sun2> and
http://typewritten.org/Projects/Sun/8-4841.html
<http://typewritten.org/Projects/Sun/8-4841.html> I installed SunOS 3.2 from
virtual tapes onto a virtual harddrive. I then copied the virtual drive to a
real drive and hooked it up. I could then boot SunOS 3.2!

I then took the one TTL monitor I have (for the 2/50) and hooked it up to a
bwtwo. At first it did not work, apparently it must be in a specific slot. I
added 1MB as well, so the cage is fully populated. That extra MB is used by
the btwo. The monitor still worked and I was able to run the graphical
windowing system.

I had the system on the internet for a couple of hours yesterday, some people
logged in remotely and it still felt surprisingly fast. Only when you start
hammering the disk it is slow (SCSI-1 is slower than ESDI drives I read).

I made a movie of the box, it can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/CoAYs0Uc7As
<https://youtu.be/CoAYs0Uc7As>

Cheers,
Walter.
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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-12-04 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sat, 1 Dec 2018 at 02:00, Maciej W. Rozycki  wrote:

>  Be assured there were enough IBM PC clones running DOS around from 1989
> onwards for this stuff to matter,

OK, fair enough. Thanks for the info!

> and hardly anyone switched to MS Windows
> before version 95 (running Windows 3.0 with the ubiquitous HGC-compatible
> graphics adapters was sort of fun anyway, and I am not sure if Windows 3.1
> even supported it; maybe with extra drivers).

It did. Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lOGPQQlxT8

Screenshot:

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2016/12/windows-30-multimedia-edition-early.html

The difficult bit was Windows 3.0 on an 8088/8086 with VGA, I believe.
The VGA driver contained 80286 instructions because MS didn't imagine
anyone would want Win3 on such old PCs.

(This again shows that MS didn't believe Win3 would be such a big hit,
giving the lie to all the pro-OS/2 anti-MS conspiracy theories...

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2011/06/01/windows-3-0/
)

To run Win3 on an 8086 in VGA mode, you had to replace the CPU with an
NEC V20 or V30, as I heard it and faintly recall...

The driver did later get patched to work:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?35593-Windows-3-0-VGA-color-driver-for-8088-XT

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-12-04 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Tue, 4 Dec 2018 at 15:02, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk
 wrote:

>  I don't know if the unreal mode has been retained in the x86 architecture
> to this day; as I noted above it was not officially supported.  But then
> some originally undocumented x86 features, such as the second byte of AAD
> and AAM instructions actually being an immediate argument that could have
> a value different from 10, have become standardised at one point.

I know, and was surprised that, v86 mode isn't supported in x86-64.

This caused major problems for the developers of DOSEMU.


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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-28 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

cessor-style document, with control codes,
formatting, font and page layout features, etc.

#5 Number 4, plus embedded objects, graphics. I'm thinking PDF or the
like as my model.

Try to collapse all these into one and you're doomed.

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-28 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 28 Nov 2018 at 08:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> He also created the Canon Cat.
>
> His idea of a user interface included that the program should KNOW
> (assume) what the user wanted to do.

One of my heroes.

I've never used a Cat or his other software UIs, but the demos I've
seen are enough to make me wonder at how much we have lost already,
and secondarily, if it would be possible to code up a Raskin-style
editor in Emacs.

It's about the only editor I know that's smart enough and programmable
enough. Unfortunately, I also find it horrible to use and don't know
how to do this.

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-27 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 15:21, Guy Dunphy via cctalk
 wrote:

> Defects in the ASCII code table. This was a great improvement at the time, 
> but fails to implement several utterly essential concepts. The lack of these 
> concepts in the character coding scheme underlying virtually all information 
> processing since the 1960s, was unfortunate. Just one (of many) bad 
> consequences has been the proliferation of 'patch-up' text coding schemes 
> such as proprietry document formats (MS Word for eg), postscript, pdf, html 
> (and its even more nutty academia-gone-mad variants like XML), UTF-8, unicode 
> and so on.

This is fascinating stuff and I am very interested to see how it comes
out, but I think there is a problem here which I wanted to highlight.

The thing is this. You seem to be discussing what you perceive as
_general_ defects in ASCII, but they are I think not _general_
defects. They are specific to your purpose, and I don't know what that
is exactly, but I have a feeling it is not a general overall universal
goal.

Just consider what "A.S.C.I.I." stands for.

[1] it's American. Yes it has lots of issues internationally, but it
does the job well for American English. As a native English speaker I
rue the absence of £ but the fact that Americans as so unfamiliar with
the symbol that they even appropriate its name for the unrelated #
which already had a perfectly good name of its own, but ASCII is
American and Americans don't use £. Fine.

[2] The "I.I." bit. Historical accidents aside, vestigial traces of
specific obsolete hardware implementations, it's _not a markup
language_. Its function is unrelated to those of HTML or XML or
anything like that. It's for "information interchange". That means
from computer or program to other computer or program. It's an
encoding and that's all. We needed a standard one. We got it. It has
flaws, many flaws, but it worked.

No it doesn't contain æ and å and ä and ø and ö. That's a problem for
Scandinavians.

It doesn't contain š and č and ṡ and ý (among others) and that's a
problem for Roman-alphabet-using Slavs.

Even broadening the discussion to 8-bit ANSI...

It does have a very poor way of encoding é and à and so on, which
indicates the relative importance of Latin-language users in the
Americas, compared to Slavs and so on.

But markup languages, formatting, control signalling, all that sort of
stuff is a separate discussion to encoding standards.

Attempt to bring them into encoding systems and the problem explodes
in complexity and becomes insoluble.

Additionally, it also makes a bit of a mockery of OSes focussed on raw
text streams, such as Unix, and whereas I am no great lover of Unix,
it does provide me with a job, and less headaches than Windows.

So, overall, all I wanted to say was: identify the problem domain
specifically and how to separate that from over, *overlapping* domains
before attacking ASCII for weaknesses that are not actually weaknesses
at all but indeed strengths for a lot of its use-cases.

Saying that,  I'd really like to read more about this project. It
looks like it peripherally intersects with one of my own big ones.

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-27 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 23:39, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove
 wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 03:44, Liam Proven via cctalk
>  wrote:
> > If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're alphabets, so it's a letter.
> >
> Correct, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic are alphabets, so each
> letter/character can be a consonant or vowel.
>
> > I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe they're alphabets too.
> >
> Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Punic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, et cetera are
> abjads, meaning that each character represents a consonant sound,
> vowel sounds are either derived from context and knowledge of the
> language, or can be added in via diacritics.
>
> Devanagari and Thai (and Tibetan, Khmer, Sudanese, Balinese...) are
> abugidas, where each character is a consonant-vowel pair, with the
> "base" character being one particular vowel sound, and alternates
> being indicated by modifications (example in Devanagari: "क" is "ka",
> while "कि" is "ki"; another example using Canadian Aboriginal
> Syllabics "ᕓ" is "vai" whereas "ᕗ" is "vu").
>
> > I don't know anything about any Asian scripts except a tiny bit of
> > Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
> > "character" is probably most common.
> >
> Japanese actually uses three different scripts. Chinese characters
> (the kanji script of Japanese, and the hanja script of Korean) are
> logograms.
>
> Japanese also has two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana where
> each character represents a specific consonant vowel pair.
>
> Korean hangul (or if you happen to be from the DPRK, chosŏn'gŭl) is a
> mix of alphabet and syllabary, where individual characters consist of
> sub parts stacked in a specific pattern. Stealing Wikipedia's example,
> "kkulbeol" is written as "꿀벌", not the individual parts "ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ".
>
>
> And now for even more fun, Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform (which
> started with Sumerian, and then used by the Assyrians/Babylonians and
> others) are a delightful mix of logographic, syllabic and alphabetic
> characters. Because while China loathes you, Babylon has a truly deep
> hatred of you and wishes to revel in your suffering.

Um. Yes. Thank you for that. Very informative, interesting, and I did
actually know most of it already but maybe others didn't.

The thing is that it's not actually very germane to the question I was
addressing, which was "what do you call the individual units in
different scripts?" I.e. "letter" vs "glyph" vs "character" vs
"ideogram" vs "grapheme", etc... :-)

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Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-26 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 12:17, ED SHARPE via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> seems only the  very old   mail programs  do not adapt  to all character sets?

Maybe so, Ed, but it's basic good manners to both (a) not make your
emails unnecessarily difficult for others to read, and (b) respect the
etiquette of the forum that you're posting in.

You do neither.

So, for instance, in your message to which I am replying, you:
#1 top-post, against general mailing-list etiquette
#2 fail to capitalise the sentence, against basic English rules
#3 insert unnecessary double-spaces into "the very", "old mail",
"programs do", and "adapt to".

*And*

#4 _You_ appear to have some "very old mail program" (to use your own
phrase) because it is screwing up your posting _and_ screwing up
double spaces.

So it is you causing the problems here, I'm sorry to say.

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-26 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Mon, 26 Nov 2018 at 01:00, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> If they are not seen as separate letters, then do their meaning's
> change?  Or is the different accent more for pronunciation?

No, mainly, it changes alphabetical order and it makes asking questions tricky.

I see š as an s-with-a-haček and if I forget the haček, I may
pronounce it as an s; š = ``sh'' in English. ``č'' = "ch" in English.

But that isn't how Czechs think. It's as impossible to misread or
mispronounce Š as S as it would be a nonsense to mispronounced ``T''
as ``M'' in English, so people find it very hard to guess what I mean.
To me, the diacritic modifies a letter, and in a word with 4 or 5
diacritics, they pile up in my head, I overload and may drop one or 2
of them. That renders the world as babel in Czech.

(I chose T/M because, incredibly to me, hand-written T in Russian is
written as M. Mind you, handwritten almost everything in Russian
becomes mMmmmMMmm. I can read printed Cyrillic but I find
handwritten stuff impossible.)

> I assume that they have different meanings (if that applies to letters)
> and are uses as different as "A" and "q".

Yes.

> > Czech is like that. Š and Č and Ž and many more that my Mac can't
> > readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form
> > in the alphabet.
>
> ~twitch~

Yep. The Scandinavians have just 3 extras.

Czech has about a dozen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

42 letters (!).

> I don't even know how to properly describe something that visually looks
> like letters (glyphs?) to me, but may be an imprecise simplification on
> my part.

If it's in Roman, Cyrillic, or Greek, they're alphabets, so it's a letter.

I can't read Arabic or Hebrew but I believe they're alphabets too.

I don't know anything about any Asian scripts except a tiny bit of
Japanese and Chinese, and they get called different things, but
"character" is probably most common.

> I had to zoom my font to see enough detail in Křižíkova, but it does
> look like things came through just like you describe.  (They even made
> it through my shell script that I use to re-flow text in replies.)

Good!

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-25 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sun, 25 Nov 2018 at 23:42, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:

> I bet you see all sorts of things that I'm ignorant of.

It's been enlightening!

Some I was ready for.

E.g. In French or Spanish, both of which I can speak to some extent,
letters  like á or ó are not seen as separate letters: French would
call them a-acute, an a with an acute accent. Ç is a c with a cedilla.
Etc.

But in Swedish/Norwegian/Danish -- I speak basic Norwegian and
rudimentary Swedish -- ø and å and ä and so on are not a or o with
accents on: they are _different letters_ that come at the end of the
alphabet.

Czech is like that. Š and Č and Ž and many more that my Mac can't
readily type are _extra letters_ which come after the unmodified form
in the alphabet.

Without them, you can't write correct Czech. It's worse than writing
English without the letter E.

Usually you can guess but not always.

Byt means flat, apartment; b y-acute t means the verb "to be".

You can probably work that out, but you can't always. A restaurant
menu would be hopelessly corrupted as both "raw" and "with cheese" are
quite likely.

> > For example, right now, I am in my office in Křižíkova. I can't
> > type that name correctly without Unicode characters, because the ANSI
> > character set doesn't contain enough letters for Czech.
>
> Intriguing.  Is there an old MS-DOS Code Page (or comparable technique)
> that does encompass the necessary characters?

Don't know. But I suspect there weren't many PCs here before the
Velvet Revolution in 1989. Democracy came around the time of Windows
3.0 so there may not have been much of a commerical drive.

> Would you please provide an example?

Sure, my office street name:  Křižíkova

> (I'm curious if my email client
> will display things properly.)

K, r haček, i, z haček, i acute, k o v a.

A hacek is like an upside down circumflex: ^

Also known as a caron.

> Oh my.  I had no idea that accent characters made such a difference. But
> I consider that to be my personal ignorance living in the U.S.A.  I do
> NOT think it's anybody's fault by my own.  I'll defend others if someone
> tries to say that their native / local regional norm is the problem.

Oh yes. It's quite a minefield.

Czech keyboards have so many extra letters, the *numbers* are on shift
combinations!

> I will say that I think everybody has their own individual prerogative
> to filter email as they see fit.  They just need to know that they are
> doing and own the fact that they might be causing unintentional harm.
>
> P.S.  Resending from the correct email address.  —  A recent Thunderbird
> update broke the Correct-Identity add-on.  :-(

Well yes.

I believe Mr Corlett here rejects all mail from gmail.com -- except mine... ;-)

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-23 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 18:54, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Turn off trashing mails with Unicode in Subject and see if this solves
> a problem?

*Loud laughter in the office*

Well _played_, sir!


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Re: What is this?

2018-11-23 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 01:49, Donald via cctalk  wrote:
>
> Don't think it is IBM.  Apparently high temp ICs due to the heat sink
> housing. No idea what it is.
>
> http://www.myimagecollection/part

No idea, because that's not a valid URL -- it has no TLD -- and you
can't send attachments to the list.

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Re: Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

2018-11-23 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 at 01:55, Guy Dunphy via cctalk
 wrote:

> Also I have it configured to
> dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. 
> Avoids a lot of time-wasting.

That's English-language cultural snobbery. I'm a native Anglophone but
I live in a non-English speaking country, Czechia.

For example, right now, I am in my office in Křižíkova. I can't type
that name correctly without Unicode characters, because the ANSI
character set doesn't contain enough letters for Czech. It can cope
with some Western European letters needed for Spanish, French etc.,
but not even enough for the Norwegian letter ``ø''. So I can type the
name of the district of Prague I'm in -- Karlín -- and you'll probably
see that, but the street name, I am guessing not.

"Krizikova" is usually close enough but it's not correct. Those
letters are important. E.g. "sýrové" means cheesy, but "syrové" means
raw. That's a significant difference. It matters to me and I'm not
even Czech and don't speak it particularly well...

So if you tried to mail me something at work -- the address I normally
use, for instance for the Alphasmart Dana Wireless on the way to to me
from Baltimore right now -- and you get a reply saying "package for
[streetname] undeliverable" in the subject -- you'd just reject it.

That's basically discriminating against people who don't speak your
language, and in my book, that's not OK.

> Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough.

Look, we haven't even been able to get him to quote correctly, so I
suspect changing his typing habits is right out!

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Re: [EXTERNAL] VCF PNW 2019: Exhibitors needed!

2018-11-21 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 02:57, Michael Brutman via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Emulators do great things, but they can't replace the visceral
> experience of touching real old working hardware.  Take the example
> the sound of a modem making a 1200 bps connection, or the grinding
> noise of a floppy drive zero-track seeking at bootup.  Or how
> inconvenient it is to shuffle floppy disks around.  Or the slightly
> out of focus look of a CRT monitor.  (If you focused one area, you put
> another area out of focus ...)

I agree... but with an exception that came as a slight surprise to me
when I first encountered it.

I learned VMS and Fortran on a VAX 11-780 cluster in the mid-1980s. I
used the computers daily for 3 years, but I never once saw them. They
were hidden away in a back room, tended, I used to imagine, by
operators in white lab coats, probably with very neat hair and heavy
black-rimmed spectacles.

So the first time that I used an emulated VAX over a serial line from
a real DEC terminal, I was struck by how the experience was 100%
faithful to the original.

P.S. Please bottom-post, will you?

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Re: Font for DEC indicator panels

2018-11-13 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Tue, 13 Nov 2018 at 17:12, Jon Elson via cctalk
 wrote:

> Well, how DID they make panels?

Letraset? :-)

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Re: Did anyone see Vintage Tech Hunters on Discovery Canada yet?

2018-11-08 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 18:18, Electronics Plus via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> In my experience, games written for CGA and 80286 do not do well on modern 
> equipment.

This is why DOSBox exists.

https://www.dosbox.com/

It's a DOS PC emulator for modern PCs, mainly for playing old games.

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Re: modern stuff

2018-10-29 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 at 14:56, emanuel stiebler via cctalk
 wrote:

> the i860 found at least a little niche on graphics boards, so somehow
> not a complete failure ;-)

And of course it was the N-Ten CPU on the Microsoft Dazzle
motherboard. The main product developed on that mobo was codenamed
after the CPU -- "NT"...

https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-server/windows-server-2003-road-gold-part-one-early-years

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Re: SUN keyboard for grabs

2018-10-29 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 at 18:59, Diane Bruce via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> I am tossing a pile of old PC keyboards but found one SUN type C keyboard.
> It's missing a few keys :-( but might interest anyone needing spare parts.

Get 'em on eBay. Don't  underestimate the zeal of keyboard collectors.



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Re: Object-oriented OS [was: Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen]

2018-10-29 Thread Liam Proven via cctalk

On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 at 05:33, Tomasz Rola  wrote:

I found this post incoherent and very hard to follow. I will therefore
limit myself to commenting to the responses direct to me.

OK, apart from:

> Ok guys, just to make things clearer, here are two pages from wiki:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_operating_system

This is perhaps the single worst article I've seen on Wikipedia.
Poorly written, technically ignorant, mostly nonsense.

> Plus, some kind of system programming language - I had no idea what
> Smalltalk was and I still have no idea but I might have swallowed
> that.

Right, then go learn a bit about it. You need that to understand this
subject properly, I submit.

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 04:14:34PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:

> Very true, but if someone promises and does not deliver, who is he?

[1] A marketing person?
[2] Behaving in a 100% normal way for the IT industry?

> And nobody makes a small print saying "this is just marketing
> material, so do not count on it". If I cannot count on it, why waste
> my time?

You need to develop much stronger bullsh1t filters.

> No objection, except "everybody copied". I have seen those copies,
> including Gnomes and KDEs (up to about 2014, when I gave up trying)
> and considered them increasingly dysfunctional.

So? I didn't say they were _good_ copies. I made no judgement of quality at all.

>  The only thing that
> was better than original Windows GUI was stability (but after
> Windows2000 this one improved a lot, IMHO).

The NT family was always far more stable, not starting with W2K.

> And I was able to use
> virtual desktops and they did not suck (while I tried few virtual
> desktops on Win95 and they sucked like black hole and then some).

Win10 finally has working ones.

> What do I care if other people voluntarily push screwdrivers
> through the random body cavities of their own? Hey, sounds like golden
> opportunity for sharp hardware shop.

I do not see the relevance of this unpleasant image.

> This should be a responce to your message in this other thread, but I
> am not sure if I have this many time, so, as you claimed that Windows
> wrote a new book of UI or something:
>
>  :: Interface Hall of Shame / - Windows95 -
> http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/msoft.htm

Some of these are valid points. Some are quibbling about details. Some
display a serious lack of understanding of real ordinary people and
how they interact with computers. Some show a deep lack of
understanding of history -- bear in mind this was a v4 product, after
many point-releases too.

So, to pick an important example, for instance, it displays
apparently-complete ignorance of the Win3 model of "MDI" -- multiple
document inheritance -- which was an important design principle of
Windows 3.x and OS/2 1.x and which MS started to systematically
eliminate in Win9x and IBM started to eliminate in OS/2 2.x.

This is a big, important concept and I don't even see it _mentioned_.

Some are just cheap shots.

I don't consider it overall to be particularly interesting or incisive.

You are free to if you wish, of course.

> And yet I choose to use Linux harder, just because it did job, whereas
> Windows could not (unless I wanted unreliable computer, and I cannot
> use unreliable when reliable is available or I get flaming mad).

Fine. Good for you. So? What does this say about the UIs of the OSes?

> As a side note, I do not claim Linux is oh so the bestest of them
> all. It just can do things I consider important while Windows could
> not (every time I try using it in serious manner, after about hour my
> index finger wants to fall off from constant mouse stimulation). And
> some time ago Linux started accumulating certain fringe elements, so a
> jump to another platform is necessary.

All OSes suck. Some suck slightly more than others. Some, e.g. BeOS or
EPOC, slightly less.

> I am amazed too. Apparently you do with Windows something else than I
> would, and if it works for you, I am cool.

I don't use it at all if I can avoid it.

However, I did spend about 25y supporting it.

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Re: Desktop Metaphor

r easier by reconfiguring Xfce or LXDE, so I don't
know why they bothered. It seems to me to offer no benefits or
improvements. It's just a bit of a different spin on GNOME 3, making
it slightly more Mac-like, without being Mac-like enough to interest
me. :-)

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 at 00:31, Jim Manley via cctalk
 wrote:

> It's the sort of stuff marked
> with "COMPANY PROPRIETARY" watermarks that, if you try to scan or run it
> through a photocopier, produces black output due to opto-molecular chemical
> overlays.

Oh dear. Let me guess -- do you also worry about chemtrails and
fluoride in the water?

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 20:12, Jim Manley via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> Wrong.  Apple has been using self-customized, optimized-for their-hardware
> supersets of the VNC protocol (which is X based)

Not true.

VNC isn't X-based.
And Apple supports it, sure, but as an accessory thing. VNC also works
fine on Windows, and there's no X.11 in Windows.

Jim, you seem awfully convinced of this stuff, but as others are
telling you, you have it almost all wrong. :-(

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

dows world and only reluctantly
works with Windows-style hardware and software.

So Linux has also absorbed Windows-style desktops, eschewing the older
generation of non-Windows-influenced Linux desktops.

Come to think of it, most Linux users I know are Windows converts.
Very few are Mac converts -- once you go Mac, you can't go back,
apparently.

Old Unix hands praise BSD's "conceptual uniformity" and the way it
"feels more integrated" in ways that are completely imperceptible to
Linux folk.

Since my formative IT experiences were outside of the Unix world --
CP/M, VAX/VMS, Acorn RISC OS and finally OS/2 -- I come from a
different tradition and I'm still not really comfortable in Unixland.

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 20:01, Alan Perry via cctalk
 wrote:

> Excuse me, but I work for Oracle on Solaris (primarily on USB code) and
> it is not EOL. Oracle just released Solaris 11.4 and the next release is
> being worked on.

Oh! Well, I'm very glad to hear it.

But the news has not spread -- cf.

http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3160176/hardware/game-over-for-solaris-and-sparc.html

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3222707/data-center/the-sun-sets-on-solaris-and-sparc.html

https://siliconangle.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-signal-end-life-sparc-solaris-products/

https://www.itprotoday.com/software-development/new-oracle-layoffs-probably-signal-end-line-solaris


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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 19:48, Fred Cisin via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> "The simplistic style is partly explained by the fact that its editors,
> having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back
> of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few foot
> notes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly torturous
> Galactic Copyright Laws. Its interesting to note that a later and wilier
> editor sent the book backwards in time, through a temporal warp, and then
> successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the
> same laws."-HHGTTG

Speaking as a former president of the official Douglas Adams fanclub,
I am deeply honoured by the comparison. :-D

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 19:05, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> On 10/23/2018 10:47 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> > This may be an unfortunate mismatch of English idioms.
>
> Fair.
>
> > "Out there", to me, means "current, available/on sale/in use now, in
> > active use and/or maintenance".
>
> I'm fairly sure that Solaris and AIX both continue to ship C.D.E.  ;-)

Solaris is EOL and is no longer in development. However, Solaris 11
switched to GNOME 2, nearly a decade ago.

AFAIK neither Oracle nor IBM make workstations any more, only headless
servers, so it's rather academic.

> Hence why I prefer to be excruciatingly clear.

I generally try, at least with my professional hat on.

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Re: Desktop Metaphor

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 19:12, ben  wrote:
>
> On 10/23/2018 4:33 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> > On Mon, 22 Oct 2018 at 21:19, ben via cctalk  wrote:
> >
> >> Try and find a printed page size PDF
> >> reader, or one a tad smaller. Reading a PDF on a KINDLE DOES NOT WORK.
> >
> > I suggest you look at the Kindle DX.
> >
> > I bought one. I got it 2nd hand, from the USA, via eBay.
> >
>
> I piced up a used 9.7 inch Onyx Boox off ebay.
> I live in CANADA so got the useless AMAZON -- no selecton, massive
> shipping charges, and no products sold from CANADA.

I do use Amazon, but I live in the Czech Republic. There's no Czech
Amazon either (although the company has a big office here.)

But I don't buy ebooks, at all, from anyone, so I don't care.

I use Calibre to sync stuff to/from my Kindle DX, or just mount it as
a filesystem and copy it in manually.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

> When I was looking for a new reader, all I could find was the 6" crap
> on the web, thus my kindle statement. Until they bring back the DX
> I still feel we are stuck with crappy low priced readers and windows 95
> windows.

I found a PDF that reliably caused my Kindle DX to reboot the moment I
opened it.

So I bought a cheap Chinese tablet (a Chuwi Hi9 Air) and now I mostly use that.

> Where do you get them? I know of Bitsavers but that is all.

Lots of places -- there are many. Scribd is one. Direct downloads, mostly.

> PS: WIRTH still has his stuff around for GUI system.
> https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/

Yes, that's on there. :-)

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Re: Desktop Metaphor

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 18:59, Paul Berger via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> This is my issue with a lot of Linux distros they seem to try to hard to
> look and work like mac or like windows while I would rather have them
> look and work like the xwindows I knew and loved.  One of my biggest
> aggravations is cut and paste I would very much rather it worked more
> like it used to on X.

If you want it old-style, build it old-style.

Install the minimal or server version of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora,
whatever you want, then install X.org and your window manager of
choice.

This is how I have been experimentally assembling GNUstep desktops for
years now.

My favourite minimalist no "desktop" /per se/ distro is Crunchbang --
you might want to look at BunsenLabs or Crunchbang++.

Another comparable option is Tiny Core Linux, but I haven't tried it myself.

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Re: Desktop Metaphor

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 17:58, Jon Elson  wrote:

> ARRGhhh!  I HATE Unity!  I have switched all my Ubuntu
> systems to gnome-classic, which suits me fine.
> (You have to hack the theme xml file to make the borders
> wide enough to grab and stretch.)
> I lasted about 4 hours with Unity.  I am a spatial thinker,
> I want all my icons and toolbar icons to STAY PUT, I grab
> them by position, not by searing for the picture (icon) I
> want to select.

I am not trying to impose my choices on anyone.

I liked Unity. It was simple, quick, clear and effective.

I find GNOME 3 to be frustrating to the level of shouting incoherently
at my computer within half an hour. Ditto KDE (any version >1.x).
Others like them.

Chacun à son goût.

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 17:49, Grant Taylor via cctalk
 wrote:
>
> On 10/23/2018 04:41 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> > It's pointless to compare environments from _before_ Win95 as a way of
> > saying that Win95 didn't influence them!
>
> Your statement that I replied to is:
>
> *Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95.
>
> That "every" includes desktops before Windows 95.

This may be an unfortunate mismatch of English idioms.

"Out there", to me, means "current, available/on sale/in use now, in
active use and/or maintenance".

That notwithstanding, I have to say, I still think it's ludicrous to
imply that anything _before_ Win95 could have drawn upon it, even if
making a negative statement.

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Re: Desktop Metaphor

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 13:11, Geoffrey Oltmans  wrote:
>
> I’ll throw in my two cents to say that I’ve used a fair number of GUIs over 
> the years both commercially available and FOSS, and I’d say that Windows 95’s 
> UI blew the doors off of anything I’d used up that point in terms of 
> usability. Nobody IMO can fairly compare it with the previously available X 
> based desktops. The Mac was good, the Amiga was good, but there was a lot 
> more flexibility in how Win95 operated, and that’s probably why  (along with 
> familiarity) that it has been so oft copied up to this point (Mac OS X’s UI 
> notwithstanding, which is also quite good).

I'd go with that, actually, yes.

My personal favourite in recent years was Ubuntu's Unity, which is a
better Mac OS X than Mac OS X (IMHO).

But the fact that I like it and am comfy with it doesn't mean that I
don't want to see people trying to do something different...

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Re: Microsoft-Paul Allen