Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 22:29, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early
>> days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4
>> network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B
>> to me! :-) )
>
> Woot! The benefits of working with small clients over time.

Well yes. Really, the clients of a friend of mine -- a Windows expert.
He didn't do Mac stuff; I stepped in to help with that.

> Well, if you ever put hands on another M68k, you might give it a shot. The
> key is to have an extra partition to setup with a BSD disklabel et al. If
> you have enough space (or a spare disk) it's pretty darn straightforward.
> It loads using a MacOS based loader program, so you don't have to ditch
> MacOS, either. However, the install is pretty raw (I like it, but I have a
> feeling you wouldn't).

Honestly, if I ever feel the urge to try NetBSD, it'll be on as
generic a PC as I can find.

> However, it's nowhere near as raw as, say,
> OpenBSD's installer. If you ever happen to install OpenBSD, Liam, please
> have a video camera rolling. I will be able to get all the choice British
> curse-phrases in one go that way.

I have done it in a VM. I was not at all impressed, but I did
eventually get it working.
> Also, just as an aside, your ex-roomy who told you that you weren't liking
> parts of UNIX because you weren't a dyed-in-the-wool coder (not to say you
> aren't smart or technical or can't do what you need to do with coding) was
> right. It's a programmers OS and it panders to coders and admins, others
> will be grousing about weird things they don't need and don't see a reason
> for, items being over-minimized, too spartan, or downright bizzare and not
> enough in the way of well-integrated features for users with other goals
> besides coding. Fully 100% agree with that dude, and I totally acknowledge
> that there is a rusty tetanus side of that double edged sword. That's why
> I still dabble with the darkside and play with GUI-focused OSes, too. It's
> a whole different feel. When I want to code, I plant myself in front of
> NetBSD or FreeBSD.

Indeed yes. But more than that, it's a very specific sub-family of
programming -- the all-manual, all-traditional, C-family type.

Contrast with Windows with rich IDEs and fancy autocompletion etc.,
even for C-family code.

And contrast the C culture which now rules the world with the old-time
non-C-family machines: Lisp Machines, Smalltalk boxes, the niche
Oberon family. Step outside the C mould and you find environments
which their old fans say stomped all over the C family for real
productivity.

>  When I want to record/compose a song, I break out an
> SGI, Amiga, or maybe someday a Mac (I got a fancy audio rig for my 68k
> Quadra recently).

Read /In The Beginning Was The Command Line/? It's out there for free.
You remind me of that.

>> Dear gods that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't
>> really worth the effort.
>
> Hehe, I ran MorphOS, too. It was fun for a while, but I can't really
> handle a proprietary OS on a such a small scale.

It has some potential but the niche is closing.

E.g. on the 1st/2nd gen Raspberry Pi, MorphOS or AROS would have been
great. Single CPU core, no wireless anything, small and fast. Ideal.
Linux was too big for them.

The RPi 2 was quad-core. Less of a good fit.

The RPi 3 is quad-core with onboard Wifi and Bluetooth. A poor fit for
the Amiga OSes which don't handle such things at all yet, AFAIK.

>> I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one at the time. I
>> respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC OS and that's what
>> I miss.
>
> I got one way later, too. Well past when they were new/prime. I have the
> exact same feeling. For me SGIs were the biggest lust-target because I
> actually had played with them long enough to know what I was really
> missing (and I was younger and all that happy stuff).

I understood the lust back in the day, for the awesome graphics power.
But everything has that now, and anyway, I never understood 3D and
OpenGL -- the maths is too much for me.

>> To my great surprise, the Mac could boot off the PC-formatted SSD and
>> Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss, detected both my screens, and went
>> straight online, no problems at all.
>
> In my experience using tools like "ReEFIt" make multi-booting OSX and *ix
> or BSD on a Macs way easy, but yeah, they don't need much to "justwork"
> nowadays.

I've put rEFInd on it now and it starts to boot again, but fails. I
will investigate.


> My experience with it is less than 6 months old. Without Macosgarden I'd
> have never got the chance because finding legit disk for it is *hard* if
> you want 3.1. I had all manner of weird install problems because I was
> doing it on a SCSI2SD that isn't an Apple disk so of course Disk tools was
> pissed. The disk tools under A/UX would play 

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Peter Coghlan]

> > What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line?
>
> I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones.  Here are the ones big
> enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the
> early-to-mid '80s):
>
> - No command-line editing.  (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but
>only there.)
>
> - Verbosity.
>

I've seen a lot of complaints about this over they years but I've never
really understood the problem.  I think wordier commands in a command
procedure  (VMS speak for what others might call a shell script, batch
file or an exec) are easier to understand.  When they are being typed
at a command prompt, they can be abbreviated somewhat to avoid redundant
typing although they will never be as short as in certain other operating
systems.

I guess it must irritate a lot of people though because it keeps coming up.

> 
> - Some degree of syntax straitjacket.
> 
> Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather,
> significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time.
> 
> Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too.  The principal one I
> remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this
> is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above.
>

I particularly like that items like dates/times have a standard form and
they they work exactly the same with every command (unless the programmer
just doesn't get the "VMS way" and works really hard to prevent it).

I think that dates/times were done pretty well on VMS with the exception
of a couple of blunders - not going further back than 1858 for the base
date and not having the system manage time in UTC while allowing
individual users to deal with time in whatever timezone they want to be
in.

>  
> For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well
> enough for us to get useful stuff done.  (The above
> discussion applies to DCL.  I never used MCR enough to have anything
> useful to say, positive or negative, about it.)
>

While I like the way DCL processes individual commands, I think it is a bit
weak when it comes to scripting command procedures and I would prefer to have
something that processes commands like DCL but has facilities more like IBM's
REXX for building command procedures (if that doesn't cause too much annoyance
in to those on both sides of the DEC/IBM fence...)

I never used MCR at all.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[John Forecast]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:12 PM, John Forecast  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
 On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast  wrote:
 
> ...
> I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it 
> appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was 
> implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My 
> initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading 
> DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III.
> 
I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 
 11/40’s running
RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I’m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 
 11D in the RSX
family.
>>> 
>>> I'd always heard that.  But recently I found Phase I documents, which 
>>> include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it 
>>> wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be.  
>>> (In particular, NSP works rather differently.)  And that document was for a 
>>> PDP-8 OS.
>>> 
>>  I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 
>> DECNET/8
>>  SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late 
>> addition to
>>  the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill 
>> in Feb 1977
>>  to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated 
>> Jun 1978
>>  which seems about right.
> 
> So does that mean that RTS/8 DECnet Phase I was built but not shipped?  Or 
> shipped but not supported?  The document I referred to is a full manual 
> "RTS/8 DECNET/8 User's Guide, Order No. AA-5184A-TA".  A note at the start 
> says "converted from scanned text 1-Jun-1996" and just below that "First 
> printing, February 1977".  Chapter 6 is a fairly detained description of 
> protocol message formats, which look vaguely like NSP as we know it but only 
> vaguely.
> 
I don’t know if it ever shipped. An SPD would imply that it got pretty 
far along in the
release process.

>   paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Ethan Dicks  wrote:
> with a little left over).  Our largest Unibus machine was an 11/750
> (though we had an VAX 8300 w/DWBUA, and an NMI-based VAX 8350 as our
> largest machine, both purchased for supporting our VAXBI product
> line).   I kept the 8300 and the 11/750 when the company closed down.
> Had to leave the 8350 behind.

Transposition typos... should be...

Our largest Unibus machine was an 11/750
(though we had an VAX 8300 w/DWBUA, and an NMI-based VAX 8530 as our
largest machine, both purchased for supporting our VAXBI product
line).   I kept the 8300 and the 11/750 when the company closed down.
Had to leave the 8530 behind.

The 8300 is a single 42" rack with a BA32 (the size of an 11/730) and
a 42" rack for disks and the Unibux BA-11.  The VAX 8530 was much
larger and 3-phase.

-ethan

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 12:12 PM, John Forecast  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast  wrote:
>>> 
 ...
 I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it 
 appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was 
 implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My 
 initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading 
 DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III.
 
>>> I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 
>>> 11/40’s running
>>> RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I’m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 
>>> 11D in the RSX
>>> family.
>> 
>> I'd always heard that.  But recently I found Phase I documents, which 
>> include protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it 
>> wouldn't be compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be.  
>> (In particular, NSP works rather differently.)  And that document was for a 
>> PDP-8 OS.
>> 
>   I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 
> DECNET/8
>   SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late 
> addition to
>   the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill 
> in Feb 1977
>   to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated 
> Jun 1978
>   which seems about right.

So does that mean that RTS/8 DECnet Phase I was built but not shipped?  Or 
shipped but not supported?  The document I referred to is a full manual "RTS/8 
DECNET/8 User's Guide, Order No. AA-5184A-TA".  A note at the start says 
"converted from scanned text 1-Jun-1996" and just below that "First printing, 
February 1977".  Chapter 6 is a fairly detained description of protocol message 
formats, which look vaguely like NSP as we know it but only vaguely.

paul

Re: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Jerry Kemp]

windows 95 - yea, even bill gates stated that windows 95 was the pinnacle.

ease of installation - maybe due to the fact that the bulk, if not all of us 
here are experienced users, I've never understood the belly-aching concerning 
installation.  Not for DOS/windows, not for OS/2, not for BSD, not for Linux, 
not for Solaris.  Specifically when you are giving the installer the entire disk 
for the OS as a new system install.  Just grab the disk then go.  Other 
settings, like network, even if it is dhcp, have to be added somewhere, be it 
during the install or after the fact.


OS/2 vs the windows GUI - sorry, but the best that anyone is going to be able to 
convince me on here is personal preference.  Its a GUI on top of the OS where 
end users double click icons.


Aside from the single thread input queue on early WPS, the sole advantage I ever 
saw that windows had over OS/2 was that early on, the *.ini files were text 
based on windows vs binary on OS/2.  At some point, ms followed IBM and moved to 
binary *.ini files.  I don't remember at what version.


There were nice GUI based applications (3rd party) for editing OS/2 *.ini files, 
but it was never as nice as having actual ASCII text based files.


Jerry

On 07/17/16 09:48 AM, Liam Proven wrote:


I am ambivalent. I don't particularly like it any more, but the
reasons are secondary: the poor security, the copy protection, the
poor performance because of the requirement for anti-malware, etc.

The core product was pretty good once. Windows 3.0 was a technical
triumph, Windows for Workgroups impressive, and Win95 a tour de force.
For me, Win 2K was about the peak; XP started the trend of adding
bloat, although it did have worthwhile features too.

Win95 was vastly easier to get installed & working than OS/2 2, it had
a better shell -- sorry, but it really was -- better compatibility and
better performance. No, the stability wasn't as good, but while OS/2 2
was better, NT 3.x was better than OS/2 2.x et seq.

It would be technically possible to produce a streamlined,
stripped-down Windows that was a bloody good OS, but MS lacks the
will. Shame.

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[John Forecast]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast  wrote:
>> 
>>> ...
>>> I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it 
>>> appears that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was 
>>> implemented on lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My 
>>> initial involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading 
>>> DECnet/E from Phase II to Phase III.
>>> 
>>  I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 
>> 11/40’s running
>>  RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I’m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 
>> 11D in the RSX
>>  family.
> 
> I'd always heard that.  But recently I found Phase I documents, which include 
> protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be 
> compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be.  (In particular, 
> NSP works rather differently.)  And that document was for a PDP-8 OS.
> 
I meant that RSX-11D was the only supported PDP-11 OS. The RTS/8 
DECNET/8
SPD is up on bitsavers with a date of May 1977 so it was already a late 
addition to
the Phase I development - I had joined the networking group in the Mill 
in Feb 1977
to work on Phase II. The SPDs for those Phase II products were dated 
Jun 1978
which seems about right.

> Possibly it was built but not shipped, or designed but not built.  The 
> document has the look of r a finished product manual, though.
> 
>   paul
> 
> 

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 11:06 AM, John Forecast  wrote:
> 
>> ...
>> I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears 
>> that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was implemented on 
>> lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My initial 
>> involvement with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E 
>> from Phase II to Phase III.
>> 
>   I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 
> 11/40’s running
>   RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I’m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 
> 11D in the RSX
>   family.

I'd always heard that.  But recently I found Phase I documents, which include 
protocol specifications of a sort, sufficient to tell that it wouldn't be 
compatible with Phase II and couldn't readily be made to be.  (In particular, 
NSP works rather differently.)  And that document was for a PDP-8 OS.

Possibly it was built but not shipped, or designed but not built.  The document 
has the look of r a finished product manual, though.

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[John Forecast]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 16, 2016, at 6:56 PM, Antonio Carlini  wrote:
>> 
>> ...
>> The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they were 
>> free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now).
> 
> I assume you had to pay for the cost of printing.  They could be freely 
> reproduced, though, it says so explicitly.
> 
>> There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) another 
>> for Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of
>> their switches.
> 
> Yes, and for that matter, there was a commercial non-DEC DECnet, by Stuart 
> Wecker I think -- he was involved with DDCMP way back when.
> 
That was Technology Concepts Inc, Sudbury MA. Sometime around 1984 I 
almost left
DEC to join TCI but then had a change of heart. Sun’s DECnet 
implementation was
either done by TCI or based on their code.

>> ...
>> (I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, which 
>> definitely did exist. I also
>> assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!)
> 
> I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears 
> that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was implemented on 
> lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My initial involvement 
> with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II 
> to Phase III.
> 
I worked at a customer site in Sweden which consisted of a pair of 
11/40’s running
RSX-11D and DECnet Phase I. I’m pretty sure that Phase I only ran on 
11D in the RSX
family.

John.

>   paul
> 

Re: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 20:48, Jerry Kemp  wrote:
> I guess I am glad that someone getting something positive from windows.
>
> I have never viewed it as any more than a virus distribution system with a
> poorly written GUI front end.


I am ambivalent. I don't particularly like it any more, but the
reasons are secondary: the poor security, the copy protection, the
poor performance because of the requirement for anti-malware, etc.

The core product was pretty good once. Windows 3.0 was a technical
triumph, Windows for Workgroups impressive, and Win95 a tour de force.
For me, Win 2K was about the peak; XP started the trend of adding
bloat, although it did have worthwhile features too.

Win95 was vastly easier to get installed & working than OS/2 2, it had
a better shell -- sorry, but it really was -- better compatibility and
better performance. No, the stability wasn't as good, but while OS/2 2
was better, NT 3.x was better than OS/2 2.x et seq.

It would be technically possible to produce a streamlined,
stripped-down Windows that was a bloody good OS, but MS lacks the
will. Shame.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
> ...
> I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears 
> that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was implemented on 
> lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.

By the way: starting with Phase III, DEC adopted "one phase back" 
compatibility.  A Phase III node could talk to Phase II; a Phase IV node could 
talk to Phase III, all documented clearly in the specifications.  (Two phases 
back wasn't described or aimed for, though it is not that hard; my 
DECnet/Python does Phase IV but talks to Phase II.)

On the other hand, Phase II is not compatible with Phase I; the packet formats 
are significantly and it's clear that no attempt was made to deliver 
compatibility.  I don't know why not, or why that changed later.  (Before my 
time...)

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 16, 2016, at 6:56 PM, Antonio Carlini  wrote:
> 
> ...
> The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they were 
> free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now).

I assume you had to pay for the cost of printing.  They could be freely 
reproduced, though, it says so explicitly.

> There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) another for 
> Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of
> their switches.

Yes, and for that matter, there was a commercial non-DEC DECnet, by Stuart 
Wecker I think -- he was involved with DDCMP way back when.

> ...
> (I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, which 
> definitely did exist. I also
> assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!)

I suppose so.  Rumor had it that Phase I only existed on RSX, but it appears 
that there was a PDP-8 implementation as well.  Phase II was implemented on 
lots of DEC systems, from TOPS-10 to RT-11 to RSTS/E.  My initial involvement 
with DECnet was as the DECnet/E kernel guy, upgrading DECnet/E from Phase II to 
Phase III.

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Richard Loken]

On Sun, 17 Jul 2016, ste...@malikoff.com wrote:


In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak
under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney
Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could
have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it
was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen.


You certainly got more bang when your disk crashed.  I ran a VAX cluster 
with 15 years with shadowed DSSI drives and never had a disk corruption, I 
replaced members of shadow sets when they died but again I never had any 
issues of corruption and data loss.  Meanwhile I also lived with an array 
of Ultrix boxes and SunOS boxes where I had to clean up disk corruptions 
or do restores from tape onto new disks - usually in the middle of the 
night.  Your work is always done faster if you skip steps.


"System unstable, save often."

--
  Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS   : "...underneath those
  Athabasca University : tuques we wear, our
  Athabasca, Alberta Canada: heads are naked!"
  ** rllo...@telus.net ** :- Arthur Black

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 07/16/2016 03:21 PM, ste...@malikoff.com wrote:

> In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and
> creak under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over
> at Sydney Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked
> Unix and could have a hundred or more students logged in on the one
> machine. Whether it was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck
> out of their VAXen.

I recall that BSD was a great match for our 11/750.   Never did succeed
at getting HASP+bisync going on it though.

--Chuck

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Antonio Carlini]

On 15/07/16 14:49, Swift Griggs wrote:
All I'm saying is that the presence of multiple IP stacks looks to me 
to be unwieldy, organic, and incremental. 


VMS came with DECnet built-in (although you had to license it). If you 
wanted TCP/IP there was UCX, which you had to install separately.
The other TCP/IP stacks came from 3rd party vendors. That's why there 
were multiple implementations of TCP/IP for VMS.


DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also 
proprietary, 


The specs were (and are) freely available. (I'm not 100% sure that they 
were free-as-in-beer back then, but they are now).
There was at least one implementation for Linux and (I think ...) 
another for Solaris. cisco also supported DECnet in some of

their switches.

seldom used, 


Seldom used *now*. All the VMS systems I used commercially back then 
made use of DECnet.


and seems to mean different things to different people since it was 
developed in "phases" which bear only loose resemblance to each other 
in form & function. -Swift 


IPv4 and IPv6 are also only loosely related. At least the DECnet phases 
were sequentially numbered :-)


(I'm assuming that Phase II existed at some point before Phase III, 
which definitely did exist. I also

assume that Phase I only acquired that designation once Phase II appeared!)

Antonio


--
Antonio Carlini
arcarl...@iee.org

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[steven]

jonas said:
> VMS is an
> enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work.
> At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for
> teaching and research, not for heavy production work.

In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak
under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney
Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could
have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it
was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen.

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Grif]

Whats this "BackInTheDay" stuff ? ;-)  granted we upgraded to openvms at y2k, 
but the system  is still in production.   Ive been involved in this app since 
93, and it was mature then.  Just will not die :-(

 Original message 
From: j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu 
Date: 07/16/2016  05:55  (GMT-08:00) 
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org 
Cc: j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu 
Subject: Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes) 

    > From: Jonas

    > At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for
    > teaching and research, not for heavy production work. 

Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of
software for various Bell commercial projects.

Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it
was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ
article that describes it.

Noel

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 07/16/2016 10:34 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

> IGS?  Two colors?  Don't recognize that.  There's the 6000 console
> (DD60), very expensive, requiring a dedicated processor to feed it,
> and limited to uppercase text only plus very small amounts of
> graphics (a dot at a time, 3 microseconds per dot).

IGS (Interactive Graphics System) was the generic term for the
Digigraphic 200-series stuff.  The consoles came in various flavors, but
the best ones were the big, flat-surface jobs.

The display processor with these things was pretty large; someone once
told me that it resembled a 1700 more than anything.

A lot of fun to fool with.

--Chuck

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 9:08 PM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:
> 
> On 07/15/2016 05:47 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
>> Graphics terminals were quite rare in the early 1970s, at least at a
>> cost allowing them to be installed in the hundreds, and with
>> processing requirements low enough for that.  I remember, around the
>> same time, the Tektronix 4010.  But that was far less flexible; it
>> could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals.
> 
> Surely you remember CDC IGS from the 70s.  I loved watching the displays
> being drawn on those big radar CRT displays--one color while drawing and
> persisting in another.
> 
> They were "terminals" of a sort, no?

IGS?  Two colors?  Don't recognize that.  There's the 6000 console (DD60), very 
expensive, requiring a dedicated processor to feed it, and limited to uppercase 
text only plus very small amounts of graphics (a dot at a time, 3 microseconds 
per dot).

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Jerry Weiss]

On Jul 16, 2016, at 7:55 AM, Noel Chiappa  wrote:
> 
>> From: Jonas
> 
>> At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for
>> teaching and research, not for heavy production work. 
> 
> Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell:
> 
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
> 
> was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of
> software for various Bell commercial projects.
> 
> Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it
> was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ
> article that describes it.

I was involved in a department that had university research on one side and 
business
on the other as well in the late 70’s and 80’s.   The basic science analysis
ran on PDP-11 with UNIX variants mostly Ultrix-11, Venix and some V7.
Data acquisition was RT-11/TSX+ on LSI-11’s with custom hardware,
handlers and interfaces.  The business was PDP-11’s + RSX-11, then
VAXen and VMS.   Both sides did programing on Fortran and C.

Separate from the license issues in that era, we generally would have
not considered using the UNIX for the business side.  While we had
or could get  the technical skills to do coding for applications, the
overall support depth/response from the vendors and its operational design
was not sufficient for a small operation.  If the application, media or
OS crashed, we needed to recover quickly and not risk permanent
loss of more than a few minutes of transactions.

I recall more than a few crashes on the Unix side where the file system
and data recovery was not straightforward.  Even on then small disk
drives that used 60-250 Mbytes, fsck’ing could take over an hour.
The academics could afford to put a grad student on sorting though
the data loss and trying to recover missing data from multiple tapes.

Software development was slower under VMS, but the overall experience was 
robust.

We generally chose the tool that got the job done without too many
culture wars.  Before I let we had much of the research on NeXTSTEP
or OpenStep.  Steve definitely delivered a tool the academics could exploit
and we did so at every layer of that product.

Jerry

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Noel Chiappa]

> From: Jonas

> At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for
> teaching and research, not for heavy production work. 

Err, not quite. In the mid-70's, the PWB system at Bell:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

was being used by a community of about 1K programmers doing development of
software for various Bell commercial projects.

Yes, not accounting systems, but not "teaching and research", either. And it
was definitely production: see the uptime statistics, etc, in the BSTJ
article that describes it.

Noel

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[jonas]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote:
What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was 
incredible.



To be fair, I think you have to think about what was around when VMS 
was developed, and what DEC was competing with. VMS is an 
enterprise-grade operating system, designed for serious production work. 
At the time VMS was conceived, Unix was a university product, used for 
teaching and research, not for heavy production work. In fact those 
early versions of Unix were completely useless for that kind of 
application - too limited, unstable, and no useful security features. No 
accounting at all, no useful batch functionality, nothing but the most 
basic kind of security and protection functionality etc.


VMS was designed to compete with IBM mainframes and System/32-34-36 and 
the likes.


In the early 80s I used both VMS version 4 and 5 and Unix version 7. 
The Unix system was used for program development, the VMS system for 
program development and running accounting software. The Unix system was 
fine for program development in a lab but far too unstable and insecure 
for running accounting systems in a corporate production environment.

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Jerry Weiss]

On Jul 15, 2016, at 9:34 PM, Eric Smith  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Paul Koning  wrote:
>> I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010.  But that was
>> far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals.
> 
> The 4010 can erase just fine. The problem is that it can't do
> selective erase, only
> full-screen erase, and erasing is a slow operation.
> 
> Tektronix had other models that could do both storage and refresh
> graphics, but they were even more expensive. The refresh capabilities
> tended to be fairly limited.


The PLATO IV terminals had a 512x512 addressable pixels, local charset memory 
(Font)
and the ease and power of TUTOR to support them. It still amazes me how much
work and fun we extracted from the limited cpu, memory, storage and 
communication 
bandwidth we had.  

Oh and those keyboards.  Best damn ones I’ve ever used. 

Jerry

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Eric Smith]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Paul Koning  wrote:
> I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010.  But that was
> far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals.

The 4010 can erase just fine. The problem is that it can't do
selective erase, only
full-screen erase, and erasing is a slow operation.

Tektronix had other models that could do both storage and refresh
graphics, but they were even more expensive. The refresh capabilities
tended to be fairly limited.

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 7:35 PM, Chris Hanson  wrote:
> 
> On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
>> 
>> * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! 
> 
> Graphics terminals were a thing that existed. It wasn’t just PLATO that used 
> them.

Graphics terminals were quite rare in the early 1970s, at least at a cost 
allowing them to be installed in the hundreds, and with processing requirements 
low enough for that.  I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix 4010.  
But that was far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO 
terminals.

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Alexander Schreiber]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:08:40AM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> > DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also
> > proprietary, seldom used,
> 
> I think it is only semi-proprietary.  I've seen open documentation that
> at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was
> sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet
> and for serial lines.
> 
> However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of
> hosts it supports.  I don't remember exactly what the limit is;
> different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address
> size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large
> corporation.  (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host
> number within each area?  I'm sure someone here knows.)

*cough*

2^16 addresses for a large corp these days will just get you some howling
laughter. Depending on what the company does, it might be enough for the
desktops & their support environment, but not even remotely enough for
the datacenters ...

> Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the
> IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might
> have been a contender.  For all I know maybe they've even done that,
> but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony.

IP won over OSI *hualp* and whatever else insanity was out there because
it a) works, b) is reasonably simply to implement (yes, I know, a full up,
modern TCP/IP stack is anything but trivial, but the basics are not that
crazy) and comes with a rather low level of designed-in complexity.
Just compare SMTP and the OSI equivalent, X.400 ... yikes.
 
> But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the
> ground-up integration into the OS.

Which in modern UNIX systems is also there for TCP/IP. A modern UNIX type
OS is pretty much unthinkable without a fully integrated TCP/IP stack.

Yes, I'm aware of Coherent and their TCP/IP stack being an option, but even
in the 90s I considered this to be a bad joke.

Kind regards,
  Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."  -- Thomas A. Edison

Re: PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Chris Hanson]

On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> 
>  * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! 

Graphics terminals were a thing that existed. It wasn’t just PLATO that used 
them.

  -- Chris

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Mouse]

>> I'm not sure I agree.  The VMS command line I used sucked, but so
>> did Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways.
> What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line?

I'm sure there were many, mostly small ones.  Here are the ones big
enough for me to remember after this many years (this was in the
early-to-mid '80s):

- No command-line editing.  (Well, minimal: editing at end-of-line, but
   only there.)

- Verbosity.

- Some degree of syntax straitjacket.

Of these, verbosity is the only one not shared with - or, rather,
significantly less present in - Unix shells of the time.

Of course, it also had plenty of up sides too.  The principal one I
remember was the uniformity of syntax across disparate commands - this
is the flip side of what I called a "syntax straitjacket" above.

For the most part, like Unix shells, DCL was fine: it worked well
enough for us to get useful stuff done.  (The above
discussion applies to DCL.  I never used MCR enough to have anything
useful to say, positive or negative, about it.)

/~\ The ASCII Mouse
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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early 
> days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4 
> network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B 
> to me! :-) )

Woot! The benefits of working with small clients over time. 

> Never tried it. I only ever tried Linux on PowerPC once, and that was to 
> aid in the process of installing MorphOS on a G4 mini.

Well, if you ever put hands on another M68k, you might give it a shot. The 
key is to have an extra partition to setup with a BSD disklabel et al. If 
you have enough space (or a spare disk) it's pretty darn straightforward. 
It loads using a MacOS based loader program, so you don't have to ditch 
MacOS, either. However, the install is pretty raw (I like it, but I have a 
feeling you wouldn't). However, it's nowhere near as raw as, say, 
OpenBSD's installer. If you ever happen to install OpenBSD, Liam, please 
have a video camera rolling. I will be able to get all the choice British 
curse-phrases in one go that way.

Also, just as an aside, your ex-roomy who told you that you weren't liking 
parts of UNIX because you weren't a dyed-in-the-wool coder (not to say you 
aren't smart or technical or can't do what you need to do with coding) was 
right. It's a programmers OS and it panders to coders and admins, others 
will be grousing about weird things they don't need and don't see a reason 
for, items being over-minimized, too spartan, or downright bizzare and not 
enough in the way of well-integrated features for users with other goals 
besides coding. Fully 100% agree with that dude, and I totally acknowledge 
that there is a rusty tetanus side of that double edged sword. That's why 
I still dabble with the darkside and play with GUI-focused OSes, too. It's 
a whole different feel. When I want to code, I plant myself in front of 
NetBSD or FreeBSD. When I want to record/compose a song, I break out an 
SGI, Amiga, or maybe someday a Mac (I got a fancy audio rig for my 68k 
Quadra recently).

> Dear gods that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't 
> really worth the effort.

Hehe, I ran MorphOS, too. It was fun for a while, but I can't really 
handle a proprietary OS on a such a small scale. 

> I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one at the time. I 
> respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC OS and that's what 
> I miss.

I got one way later, too. Well past when they were new/prime. I have the 
exact same feeling. For me SGIs were the biggest lust-target because I 
actually had played with them long enough to know what I was really 
missing (and I was younger and all that happy stuff).

> To my great surprise, the Mac could boot off the PC-formatted SSD and 
> Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss, detected both my screens, and went 
> straight online, no problems at all.

In my experience using tools like "ReEFIt" make multi-booting OSX and *ix 
or BSD on a Macs way easy, but yeah, they don't need much to "justwork" 
nowadays.

> I *must* run up A/UX some time. :-(

My experience with it is less than 6 months old. Without Macosgarden I'd 
have never got the chance because finding legit disk for it is *hard* if 
you want 3.1. I had all manner of weird install problems because I was 
doing it on a SCSI2SD that isn't an Apple disk so of course Disk tools was 
pissed. The disk tools under A/UX would play nice, actually, but I ended 
up having to do all kinds of CLI jiggery pokery, manually creating file 
systems and what not from an emergency shell, to get A/UX to give up and 
install on the darn thing. It was damn weird (in a cool and unique way) 
once I got it working. and I dd'd off the install images and boot record 
off the MicroSD card once it had finished. I found that they more or less 
worked with Shoebill, at that point, too.

> I was a DOS master, once. Probably knew the most about it from any OS 
> I've used!

I wouldn't call myself a master, but definitely an experienced power-user. 
I did quite a bit of coding using 386|VMM and other such things with 
mostly Borland tools. 

The thing I miss most about DOS was it's "standalone" mentality. You want 
to backup your word processor ? Zip the directory. You want to backup 
Deluxe Paint IIe? Zip the directory. You want to backup Lotus 1-2-3? Zip 
the directory. 

Everyone took a really long drag from the dynamic library joint and passed 
it around in the 90's, too. I took a hit, too, and I get that there are 
many advantages to them, but the big DISadvantage is now many binaries 
become version-specific to a library that may get deprecated in subsequent 
releases. On DOS, that wasn't a problem. Just keep running the old one. 
Sure you can still compile (most) things statically or include old 
libraries, but it's seldom done, fiddly for users, and oft overlooked. I 
often lament how most apps now want "merge" with your OS not simply run on 
their own in 

Re: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Jerry Kemp]

I guess I am glad that someone getting something positive from windows.

I have never viewed it as any more than a virus distribution system with a 
poorly written GUI front end.


Jerry


On 07/15/16 12:15 PM, Liam Proven wrote:

On 15 July 2016 at 00:39, Jerry Kemp  wrote:

I still judge OS/2 to be one of the better x86 options for the early and mid
1990's.



Oh, definitely, yes. It truly was "a better DOS than DOS and a better
Windows than Windows".

Then MS moved the goalposts and improved Windows and leapfrogged it --
and IMHO, IBM never really caught up.

Which was probably sensible as throwing tens of $millions of R at it
would never had paid back.

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 19:42, Swift Griggs  wrote:
>
> I had forgot myself until I recently started messing with OS8.1 again.

Me too, until I restored a bunch of my Macs to sell them before I left the UK.

> Anecdotally, lately I've felt that 7.6 + Open Transport was a bit more
> stable than 8.1.

I'll take your word,.

> However, neither approaches "stable" by my definition.

Er, no.

> Some of the bugs I've seen have also been really nasty. For example I was
> playing with Aldus Pagemaker from way-back-when and I noticed that after
> you saved over the same file N number of times it'd become corrupt and
> unusable.

Ouch!

Reminds me of horrible compatibility glitches with OS X in the early
days. E.g. one of my clients had Blue & White G3s on a Windows NT 4
network. (Later they pensioned them off, bought G5s, and gave the B
to me! :-) )

OS X had both AppleTalk and SAMBA network clients, so it could attach
to the NT server's shares either by afp:// or smb:// URIs *and see the
same files*.

But Adobe Photoshop files had resource forks. Open them via SMB and
the app couldn't get at the resource fork and the file looked
corrupted. Save it, and it was.

You *had* to open the files from AFP drive connections -- but the app
and OS had no way to enforce this, no warnings, nothing. And trying to
teach non-techie graphical designers the difference and what to do
was, shall we say, non-trivial.

> The hardware is solid, though. When I fire up NetBSD on the machine it's
> pretty much just as stable as it is on the x86 side, just slower.

Never tried it. I only ever tried Linux on PowerPC once, and that was
to aid in the process of installing MorphOS on a G4 mini. Dear gods
that was a hell of a job, and while it was fun, it wasn't really worth
the effort. I don't have "Amiga nostalgia" because I never owned one
at the time. I respect them -- I wanted one! -- but I went with RISC
OS and that's what I miss.

Actually, I just upgraded my Mac mini with a dual drive upgrade --
SSD+HD. The drives' donor is my old Toshiba desktop-replacement
notebook, which mainly ran Linux. To my great surprise, the Mac could
boot off the PC-formatted SSD and Ubuntu loaded with no mess or fuss,
detected both my screens, and went straight online, no problems at
all.

That's my /second/ ever experience of FOSS Unix on Apple kit!

> I also
> notice that A/UX seems to be much more stable than OS8.1. For example,
> when I fire up "fetch" (an FTP client) that often crashes and locks up my
> 8.1 setup on A/UX 3.1, it still crashes a lot but A/UX doesn't lock up. It
> just kills the client process. Of course, on A/UX, I usually just use the
> CLI for such things anyhow. It was an enlightening experiment, though.

I *must* run up A/UX some time. :-(

> Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who
> wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool,
> myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets
> sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time)
> and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing
> break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut.
> :-)

I'm the opposite. :-)

> Yep. Don't forget my old friend DOS, either. Ctrl-alt-delete keys got
> quite a workout on those boxes, too.

True.

I was a DOS master, once. Probably knew the most about it from any OS I've used!

I should have considered it, but I didn't -- partly because it didn't
have a native GUI. Windows became that, in time, but not 'til the
'90s, really. GEM wasn't native and didn't live past the change to the
'286, at least in my world -- and thanks to Apple, the PC version was
crippled.

I didn't consider it because I was thinking of the home-computer GUI
OSes, but you're right, it deserved to be in there.


> However, it's travails were *nothing*
> compared to say Win98ME, which crashed 3-4 times a day for me on ALL
> machines I tried it on. That was bottom-barrel Windows, IMHO.

98, 98SE or ME? 3 different things.

I didn't like 98 but SE was better. Even ME became OK after it was updated.

Around 2002-2003 or so, I refurbed and gave away cast-off PCs from
some of my clients, giving 'em to friends and relatives who couldn't
afford a PC at that time. (Linux really wasn't ready for non-techies
yet).

If they could, I put W2K or XP on them. But I had a couple of machines
where my stock of suitable compatible RAM meant they maxed out at
80MB, 96MB or in one case 128MB. That's really not enough for Win2K,
let alone XP. (I reckon 192MB was the minimum useful RAM for them.)

So, reluctantly, I put ME on them, as the most modern OS they could run.

And with the unofficial community "service pack", a newer browser and
some FOSS apps, you know, actually, ME was not half bad. It was quick
and stable enough for use on a machine with >64MB but <=128MB of RAM.
I was impressed. Yes, at release, it was crap, but they did actually

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 07:37, Ethan Dicks  wrote:
> I think TCP networking on VMS is a bit of a bodge, but back when I
> used it every day in the 1980s, we didn't _have_ any Ethernet
> interfaces in the entire company - *everything* we did was via sync
> and async serial.  How well do you think it would go if all you had
> was SLIP and PPP?  We did a lot.  Yes, other people had high-speed
> networking and VAX clusters, etc.  We did not.  Not even our VAXen
> running UNIX.  All serial, all day.  We still got a lot done.

Same for me when I started out on Unix with Xenix in 1988 or so.
Multiport serial cards were the rule, and most of my office wasn't
connected up with Ethernet yet.

When I was on PC Pro magazine in London (1995-1996), there was an
editorial office LAN (4th floor) and a Labs LAN (basement), but they
weren't connected and neither had an Internet connection. In '96!

I was the sysadmin for both. The editorial server was a PC with NT
Server 3.51, serving both Macs (production team) and Windows PCs
(editorial team). I put in an email server and got us all Internet
email, before we had any kind of WWW connection on the desktop -- but
whereas now I'd do that with Linux, back then, it seemed way too hard
and we got a free eval copy of a commercial MS Mail to Internet mail
connection app and ran it on the server.

Looking back now, it seems ludicrous, but it wasn't then.

A few years later, probably about '97 or '98, as a freelance
consultant, I put in my 1st web proxy server for one of my clients,
doing dial-on-demand over a 56K POTS modem on the server. That seemed
very high-tech at the time! Within the next few years I put in a few
of those. Indeed I was peripherally involved in the development of
this:

http://www.mailgate.com/

... as tools like WinGate were so clunky. At the end of the '90s,
having a DoD modem on a Windows NT4 server, a proxy server for WWW
access on the workstations and simple POP3 email was sophisticated and
I put in a lot of such systems.

MailGate, combining POP3 email distribution and a proxy server in one,
was _way_ easier than a separate proxy server and email server. It was
also approximately *fifty times* cheaper than Exchange Server and
Windows Proxy Server, and easier to configure.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 07:24,   wrote:
> As a comp sci student I loved using VMS on our 11/780s at Uni, from first
> year through final year where we also had the use of a Gould PN6080 UNIX mini.
> (Aside - the Gould had one good drive, one flaky. The OS and staff accounts
> were on one, student accounts and /tmp on the other. Guess which :)
>
> On the teaching VAX, I vaguely recall one time just after the computing
> department had a new version of the OS installed, I logged in and I typed
> '&' (or something) on a line by itself and the DCL shell crashed and went
> back to login. That got patched pretty quick.
>
> Another humorous thing was certain faculties such as Statistics or Economics
> would hand out (apart from an account for each student) a common account that
> was locked into a DCL menu of for instance stats applications, that had a
> minimal quota and priveleges and anyone in the course could use to check
> terminal availability and print or submit job completions and that sort of
> thing.
>
> With these accounts it was possible to break out of the menu to the DCL shell,
> and as it was an anonymous account do (from hazy memory) something along the
> lines of EDIT/NOJOURNAL [SYS$SYSTEM]password.dat or something similar,
> and presto although you couldn't edit it or even see it, it would be held open
> and any attempt for anyone to log in anywhere would get some message that the
> password file was locked by another user. I er saw it done by a friend :)
>
> Apart from that, students would write crazy long DCL scripts that would find
> out whether their friends were logged in somewhere on campus, and that sort
> of thing. No matter that it took ages to execute and used up our meagre
> student account CPU-seconds quota and log us out! So we just logged in again 
> and
> got another few CPU seconds. The messaging command (can't recall what it was -
> phone?) was great and lots of fun to use. Of course geek guys would use it to
> send messages to girls they could see at other terminals, offering to help!
>
> I recall using EDIT/EDT and really loved it, none of our student terminals
> (Telerays?, Hazeltines, LSI, Wyse, any other cheap beaten-up terminals the Uni
> owned) ever had the mysterious GOLD key though, and it wasn't till decades 
> later I
> saw a real DEC keyboard with that key. I felt disappointed because it was 
> actually
> just yellow and not really gold at all, not even painted.
>
> Other times I used to edit my comp sci and stats assignments in line mode on 
> the
> DECwriter IIIs and Teletype 43s which most students avoided like the plague,
> preferring to use EDT in full-screen mode on a glass terminal. Being 
> comfortable
> with line mode editing was very convenient for me if I happened to arrive late
> to a terminal room when assignments were nearly due.
>
> And now I have one of those cute little baby VAXen, the smallest VAX ever
> made, a 4000 VLC from an eBay impulse purchase. I have not powered it up yet
> but someday I will and am hoping it works and has VMS on it. It might even 
> jog a
> few more fond memories (^_^)


Heh. Excellent little nostalgia trip there. My student experiences
were similar. :)

And yes, I too now have a VAXstation 4000vlc. 3 or 4 of 'em in fact.
And I've not tried powering them on yet -- I will do when I get them
over here from London. I just want 1 working one to keep and I'll eBay
the others.


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Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 22:50, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> Strengths versus Unix:
>  * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very
>early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too.
>  * Great hardware error logging that generally tells you exactly what's
>wrong (even if you have to run a turd like WSEA to get it out of a
>binary error log - same as Tru64 though).
>  * Lots of performance metrics and instrumentation of the OS's features
>  * Very solid clustering. (no, it's not incredible and unsurpassed like
>some people still say - other OSes have similar features now, but it
>took a very long time to catch up to VMS.)
>  * Some fairly nice backup features (but not as advanced as, say,
>whats in LVM2 or ZFS in some ways).
>  * Regularity. It's hard to articulate but VMS is very very "regular" and
>predictable in how it does things.
>  * Crazy stable.
>
> Downsides versus Unix:
>
>  * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too.
>Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers
>  * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box.
>Maybe VSI will fix this, and maybe they are so politically screwed up
>they will never get it off the ground. We'll see. I have an open mind.
>  * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from
>UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as
>saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I
>dearly miss.
>  * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and
>dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be
>fair).


I am no VMS expert. I used it, I liked it, I did very basic sysadmin
on VAXen, but I've never brought up a machine from bare metal, for
instance. (OK, once, kinda, on SIMH.)

But that sounds like a very fair summary, perhaps the best I've seen.

I'm hoping that VSI actually manage to rectify some of these. A modern
x86-64 port, for generic hardware, with the GUI and everything all
thrown in, *no* extra premium-charged anything, and perhaps an
enhanced POSIX environment with some FOSS tools to facilitate porting
stuff over from Linux. And it needs to be priced very very
competitively, to make it cheaper than Windows Server on VMware at the
very least.

I'm not confident of its chances, though. Apple's OS X Server was a
very solid product, keenly priced (0 cost user licences), and with
excellent functionality and admin compared to Linux -- but nobody much
used it and now it's almost forgotten, a sideline.


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Re: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 00:39, Jerry Kemp  wrote:
> I still judge OS/2 to be one of the better x86 options for the early and mid
> 1990's.


Oh, definitely, yes. It truly was "a better DOS than DOS and a better
Windows than Windows".

Then MS moved the goalposts and improved Windows and leapfrogged it --
and IMHO, IBM never really caught up.

Which was probably sensible as throwing tens of $millions of R at it
would never had paid back.

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PLATO and learning models (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now!

I wish they'd had a few at schools I attended. I think someone on the list 
mentioned that PLATO content could be viewed on Apple hardware, too. The 
wikipedia article on it is very detailed. 

I've always liked the idea of a "full educational kit" meaning that 
someone creates a nearly comprehensive set of documents written stepwise 
from absolute beginner level to help you advance to at least a 
journeyman's level of skill with as many other self-help/self-learning 
tools thrown in as could be possibly useful. From the description, PLATO 
seems to have embraced that idea at various points depending on who was 
writing content.

Cool things about PLATO:
  * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! 
  * It could do animations in the content
  * It supported speech synthesis. Blind folks want to play too! 
  * Cool people were involved (NSF, Navy, Air Force, many scientists & 
engineers, Control Data, etc..)
  * It had a flight simulator! 
  * It punched above it's CPU power for a i8080
  * It was said to be easy to code for (TUTOR was the lang, sayeth 
wikipedia)
  * They had MUDs and other cool multi-user games, as well as "social 
media" (ie.. chat and multi-user applications). 
  * Even way back when, they had touch screens! 

I'm sad I didn't get to learn physics 101 from one! However, my instructor 
for that class happened to be awesome, so maybe I should have said Linear 
Equations or Calc II. I had foreign unintelligible mealy-mouthed cut-rate 
TAs teaching those classes. Puh. I'd have taken an PLATO terminal ANY DAY 
over those guys since their content would have presumably been in the 
Queen's clear readable English.

Nowadays you have Khan Academy (go Khan!) and other places that have some 
pretty fabulous courses and content. Not to mention big unis doing 
open-courses. I think both MIT and Stanford have them. I've downloaded 
books and materials from the MIT Open Courseware. I also like to take or 
at least skim courses on things I'm not familiar with aimed at kids. They 
make a lot fewer assumptions. 

Motivation I've got. 40 extra hours a week for classes at a brick and 
mortar school, I sadly do not have (unless I want to lose some serious 
sleep). So, anything that bootstraps my knowledge in an area in a complete 
but as-I-get-time fashion, I'm 100% on board with. I also keep old CBT 
CDROMs and instructional DVDs for various things. They might be old, but 
they often have more content or did a better job with the illustrations or 
animations than you get on the web. 

Learning is great fun to me. School, uhh, not as much. However, I know 
some people find the collaboration, a live instructor, and friends they 
make in the social atmosphere to be invaluable for their learning and 
enthusiasm (which is a learning amplifier, IMHO). I also have to admit 
that I did learn quite a bit in "labs" for classes I had, especially 
Astronomy classes. The labs were what kindled a sense of wonder in me. So, 
learning comes in a constellation of formats. I personally just like the 
ones that are self-driven the best at this point.

I wonder what takes the place of things like PLATO nowadays. Probably a 
hodge-podge of PeeCee Windows apps and Adobe Flash/AIR apps, I'd guess. 
I'm not involved in any kind of formal education at this point, so I 
wouldn't know.

-Swift

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 12:17 PM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> 
> On 15 July 2016 at 17:57, Paul Koning  wrote:
> ...
>> Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even 
>> than that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO.  To become a PLATO programmer, all 
>> you'd need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with 
>> "sit down at a terminal and follow instructions".  A logged out terminal 
>> would display "Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally 
>> everything from that point on would be described by on-line help of one kind 
>> or another.
> 
> Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now!

You can.  Check out cyber1.org -- a real PLATO system running on an emulated 
CDC Cyber.

paul

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 17:57, Paul Koning  wrote:
> Not to mention "HELP ADVANCED WOMBAT".

:-)

I spent /hours/ reading that. At first I was looking around for the
hidden camera because I was convinced someone was playing a very
sophisticated practical joke on me at work...

> Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even 
> than that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO.  To become a PLATO programmer, all 
> you'd need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with 
> "sit down at a terminal and follow instructions".  A logged out terminal 
> would display "Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally everything 
> from that point on would be described by on-line help of one kind or another.

Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now!



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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 11:47 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> 
> On 14 July 2016 at 22:43, Mouse  wrote:
>> As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what
>> is _much_ better is the documentation it contains.  DEC documentation
>> of the VMS era was _awesome_.  Even today I rarely see it equaled,
>> never mind bettered, in many ways.
> 
> 
> HELP WOMBAT

Not to mention "HELP ADVANCED WOMBAT".

Actually, if you want to see really good online help -- vastly better even than 
that of VMS -- take a look at PLATO.  To become a PLATO programmer, all you'd 
need was for the admin to hand you your login credentials along with "sit down 
at a terminal and follow instructions".  A logged out terminal would display 
"Press NEXT to begin" -- you'd do that and literally everything from that point 
on would be described by on-line help of one kind or another.

paul

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 19:34, Fred Cisin  wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>>>
>>> meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.
>>
>> Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7
>> with a sidecar for many years.
>
>
> I like BMW bikes, and even the imitations (Ural, Dnepr).

Ah yes. Now I live relatively close to Ukraine, I thought of getting
one. But the company has shut down due to the war with Russia and
they've gone up in price 10x over. :-(


> I love the Isetta, but somehow none of their cars since then appeal to me.

My mum had one. She demolished a gas station kiosk with it, then
later, drove home from work, drove into the garage... right up to the
back wall, trapping herself in the car as its door opened forwards and
it had no reverse gear. :-D She sat there for a whole day until my dad
got home from work and freed her. :-)

> I played with a NeXT briefly, before release, trying to get a printer to
> connect.  I'm not sure if I've even seen one since then.

I only had minutes on one, once, at a trade show decades back. :'(

> How many even know of a connection?

True, but does it matter?

>
> as phone/PDA software, it does OK.
> Giving iPhone competition.
> Trying to use it as a computer platform seems far-fetched.

Oh, it's being tried:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726986/remix-os-android-desktop-ces-2016

Long term, I think Google should find some way to converge ChromeOS
and Android. Having 2 different Linux-based OSes seems redundant and a
waste of effort. And there's an internal-only Linux server distro too,
I hear.

But they can afford the duplication of effort.
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Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > That said, it was easier (to me) to write full-on apps and utilities in 
> > DCL than sh or csh.
> 
> [...] Fortunately, most folks seem to 
> agree and csh is pretty niche these days. That's not to say there aren't 
> very enthusiastic users of csh, too.

*tcsh*, yes. I now find it very difficult to use vanilla csh, even though
(being a product of the University of California) that was the first shell
I ever used as an undergraduate.

> > It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL 
> > (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it).
> 
> Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in 
> a comparison involving functionality. It's not a fair fight or apples to 
> apples in my mind at all. Plus, Perl isn't a CLI interpreter (though I 
> suppose you could try it that way). DCL is. Hence, I'd compare it to shell 
> script. However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise 
> in DCL (joke!).  :-)

TMTOWTDI. (Actually having written full apps in Perl.)

ObOnTopic: I've always found DCL too damn wordy, but I appreciate its
precision. I keep a VAXstation 3100 around just to remind myself "how the
other half live."

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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 19:57, Mouse  wrote:
> Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as
> a counterexample.  Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to
> learn from it.  (Not that I think it's perfect, of course.  But I do
> think it did some things better than most of what I see today.)


Well, yes, true -- but it wasn't a personal computer OS, and it wasn't
a 1980s OS. It was a 1970s minicomputer OS; the fact that DEC later
turned those minis into personal workstations and grafted a GUI on it
doesn't change its origins. :-)


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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 22:43, Mouse  wrote:
> As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what
> is _much_ better is the documentation it contains.  DEC documentation
> of the VMS era was _awesome_.  Even today I rarely see it equaled,
> never mind bettered, in many ways.


HELP WOMBAT

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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 22:51, Jerry Kemp  wrote:
>
> I'm missing something here.  Although most did/are using the Apple supplied
> GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement.
>
> I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although mostly
> for fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for OS X/PPC.
>
> Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can pretty
> much do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix.  What OS X
> didn't ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own.

*Blink*

Really?

I did not think it was possible to boot OS X in multiuser mode
_without_ loading Aqua and the desktop. Am I wrong?

Darwin, maybe, but AFAIK Darwin isn't maintained any more, is it?

> In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3.  I was taking a
> lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language specifically, I
> found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my work.  OS/2 truly
> provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up a DOS session with my
> Assembly code and go right on working.

Interesting. I didn't do much programming on OS/2, more on plain old
DOS, but I could readily crash my OS/2 2 home PC with Fractint. Its
fancy video modes could instantly cause OS/2 to throw an exception and
halt.

> Applications are/were a long story on OS/2, that I could write volumes on,
> but in short, if you wanted to play games, DOS and later, Windows was the
> place to be.  Or the more 2000+ updated answer, on a game console.

Hmmm. I take your point. I was never a gamer and Win3 apps ran great
on OS/2 2, IME.

> OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does one
> need per OS?

:-) Variety is the spice of life?

> From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back in
> the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS (Work
> Place Shell).

Indeed. And honestly WPS was really not all that as a shell. I place
it down there with Amiga Intuition in its clunkiness. Classic MacOS,
OS X and Win9x were all slicker and more capable IMHO.

> OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 volumes.

Indeed. I've tried it. It's just as much of a PITA to install as it
was 20y ago. :-(

> In summary, back in the early 1990's, I moved to OS/2.  I didn't do it to
> get some application I needed, I moved for stability in the Wintel world.
> And for me, it did a great job.

I went from OS/2 2 to the beta of Win95, and then, later, to NT 4. At
work, I used NT 3 -- for me, 3.51 was a classic version. No fancy UI
but solid and capable. By modern standards, fast, too.

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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 23:51, Peter Coghlan  wrote:
> What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line?  I used it a lot and I
> had some issues here and there but I found it to be streets ahead of any other
> command line system I came across on anything else anywhere.
>
> (Not that I think we should doing os-wars re-enactments here.  Too many glass
> houses to start a stone throwing competition.)


This!

I learned VMS at uni in the mid-1980s. It was my first proper CLI --
before that, my computing experience consisted of ZX Spectrum, CBM PET
and very briefly TI 99/4A. All of those had BASIC in ROM, so they
weren't true command shells. The BBC Micro had a separate OS from its
BASIC and did have a sort of CLI, later more completely separated off
in RISC OS -- but I couldn't afford a BBC Micro and neither could my
school.

I still prefer the DOS/NT shell to Unix ones, to the horror, dismay
and disgust of all my Unix-using friends. The Unix shell does all
kinds of fancy stuff I never need, but it makes things I use a lot,
like wildcard renames, much harder than on CMD.EXE.

So, yes, I liked DCL and thought it was a pretty good -- if wordy --
shell. I don't suppose I remember much now but I preferred it to Unix
from my early experiences on Xenix.


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Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> Indeed.  As you've seen, I use both.  No need to be all "Commodore vs 
> Atari" about it.  ;-)

Hehe, I forgot about that. Here I am liking both of those, now too. I 
think I was playing with Hatari yesterday and eUAE last week ! 

> I mean vs ethernet-type networking.  The physical layer stuff has fewer 
> variants to worry about with Ethernet vs serial (3mbps vs 10mbps vs 
> 100mbps, and 10Base5 vs 10Base2 vs 10BaseT vs flavors of fiber as 
> opposed to all the parameters one has to match up to get any two 
> machines talking over a serial link).

OH oh oh. Then, sure! I see your points. I remember the days before CAT5 
ruled everything and you had "hubs" that didn't do autosensing very well 
etc... Yes, as you say, serial is much more simple. It also sounds like 
it's advantaged because of how closely tied to the OS that particular type 
of networking is. Ie.. what Mouse already said with more elegance.

> Sure.  Absolutely no argument.  Just pointing out that comparing DCL to 
> shell isn't exactly apples-to-apples either.  If anything, measured in 
> arbitrary units, DCL is a half-step over shell scripting and a half-step 
> below Perl (etc.) scripting.

Heh, okay, I see what you mean, then. Since I don't even know DCL that 
well, I'm totally going to take your word for it.

> Have you ever seen a string of ''' used to dereference DCL args? 
> Definitely the hardest thing about getting a working complex DCL script.

Yes! I have seen that. That's one thing that jumped out at me, too.

> I don't mean file permissions, I mean system privileges.  Some UNIX 
> filesystems have ACLs (VMS has _very_ well developed ACLs, but that's 
> not what I mean).

Ah, okay, you were talking about what I'd call "capabilities" (in Linux 
parlance) and the whole VMS kit and kaboodle. I was thinking just 
permissions.

> Want to mount a disk?  In Unix, a user is told "must be root".  In VMS, 
> you need MOUNT.

Yes, and I do wish this was the default mentality in UNIX, too. I think it 
makes more sense and gives an admin more flexibility. It's flat-out better 
in most cases.  As I said, capabilities are fairly similar, but they 
didn't come along until WAY after most UNIX variants were set in their 
ways.

-Swift

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:44 AM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s.  I was on both
>> sides, so mostly, I watched.
>
> This thread has definitely been the most civil discussion and set of
> anecdotes I've seen when folks discuss VMS and Unix in the same thread. I
> usually don't bring up VMS because I'm not that well versed in it, and
> when I make one mistake in the nomenclature or some other triviality,
> someone usually gets butthurt and tries to make a fool out of me or just
> scream bloody murder. However, folks have been nice this time, for which I
> breathe a sigh of relief.

Indeed.  As you've seen, I use both.  No need to be all "Commodore vs
Atari" about it.  ;-)

>> How well do you think it would go if all you had was SLIP and PPP?
>
> Do you mean versus some other point-to-point protocol or versus just using
> serial terminal emulation?

I mean vs ethernet-type networking.  The physical layer stuff has
fewer variants to worry about with Ethernet vs serial (3mbps vs 10mbps
vs 100mbps, and 10Base5 vs 10Base2 vs 10BaseT vs flavors of fiber as
opposed to all the parameters one has to match up to get any two
machines talking over a serial link).

Where this matters is that all our modern gear was developed in an
environment where nearly everything being transported across it is
TCP/IP.  Try pushing DDCMP over the wire.  ISTR there's now some TCP
wrappers to get gear to be willing to handle these packets, but that
just adds to the complexity and frustration.  With serial DDCMP, we
just hooked up two sync serial ports up with a modem eliminator (which
provides the baud-rate clocking for both hosts) and it "just works"
(since there are few options to configure at that point).  All the
configuration is a layer or two up as you set up the logical nodes in
your network.  Entirely unlike TCP/IP and Unix networking in terms of
workflow and type/quantity.

This is not a "A is better than B" argument - it's just some
descriptions of the elements of the process and how they are
different.

>> It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL
>> (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it).
>
> Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in
> a comparison involving functionality.

Sure.  Absolutely no argument.  Just pointing out that comparing DCL
to shell isn't exactly apples-to-apples either.  If anything, measured
in arbitrary units, DCL is a half-step over shell scripting and a
half-step below Perl (etc.) scripting.

> However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise
> in DCL (joke!).  :-)

Have you ever seen a string of ''' used to dereference DCL args?
Definitely the hardest thing about getting a working complex DCL
script.

>> Much stronger.  There are dozens of privileges you can grant so someone
>> can do their job and not overstep things.  UNIX says, "all or nothing.
>> Don't screw up."
>
> Well, while I agree VMS is much stronger when we talk about it in the
> context of the 1990s. However, it's certainly not "all or nothing" even in
> older UNIX variants. There *are* 'group' and 'other' permissions, not just
> 'owner'.

I don't mean file permissions, I mean system privileges.  Some UNIX
filesystems have ACLs (VMS has _very_ well developed ACLs, but that's
not what I mean).  I mean "I am root" or "I am not root" in UNIX land
becomes, "what system object/resource do you wish to access?  Read or
write?  Do you have one of the following privileges: NETMBX, TMPMBX,
GROUP, GRPPRV, ACNT, ALLSPOOL, BUGCHK, EXQUOTA, GRPNAM, PRMCEB,
PRMGBL, PRMMBX, SHMEM,ALTPRI, AUDIT, OPER, PSWAPM, SECURITY, SYSLCK,
WORLD,DIAGNOSE, IMPORT, MOUNT, SYSGBL, VOLPRO, READALL,BYPASS, CMEXEC,
CMKRNL, DETACH, DOWNGRADE, LOG_IO, PFNMAP, PHY_IO, READALL, SETPRV,
SHARE, SYSNAM, SYSPRV, UPGRADE?

Want to mount a disk?  In Unix, a user is told "must be root".  In
VMS, you need MOUNT.  You can give someone MOUNT and none of the other
privs, meaning this user can mount disks or tapes but not necessarily
read physical memory or bypass file permissions or write to device
registers or any of the other privileged tasks.  It's not
all-or-nothing; you grant the level of access required and no more.

(http://www.mi.infn.it/~calcolo/OpenVMS/ssb71/6015/6017p014.htm#vms_privileges_tab)

>> OTOH, I learned a *lot* porting utilities and games from
>> comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games to VMS.  Some things were a lot
>> harder than others.
>
> I think the biggest stumbling block is the lack of fork() in VMS.

Yes.  That was one I just dodged.  If stuff I was porting did a
fork(), I just found something else to port instead.  The workarounds,
as you point out, are non-trivial and don't map 1:1 to what fork()
does.

-ethan

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s.  I was on both 
> sides, so mostly, I watched.

This thread has definitely been the most civil discussion and set of 
anecdotes I've seen when folks discuss VMS and Unix in the same thread. I 
usually don't bring up VMS because I'm not that well versed in it, and 
when I make one mistake in the nomenclature or some other triviality, 
someone usually gets butthurt and tries to make a fool out of me or just 
scream bloody murder. However, folks have been nice this time, for which I 
breathe a sigh of relief.

Of course there is still time for someone to troll... :-)

> I've written device drivers, system utilities, and application code for 
> both. 

>From your experience and depth on both platforms, it sounds like you have 
a well rounded perspective. I have merely hours of experience in VMS but 
years in UNIX. I've never written any device drivers outside of stubs or 
proof of concept stuff I've done in tutorials. However, I've written a lot 
of C utilities and app code and most of that was on UNIX platforms, but a 
little in DOS or on the Amiga.

> If I have choice, I'll grab something UNIXy to do my work on - I'm not 
> particular as to flavor.

I'll reach for NetBSD first, FreeBSD second, and then it's just "whatever 
will work" if those are off the table. For play, I love to work with 
obscure, obsolete, specialized, or otherwise interesting UNIX variants.

> How well do you think it would go if all you had was SLIP and PPP?

Do you mean versus some other point-to-point protocol or versus just using 
serial terminal emulation? If it's versus DECnet, I'd say that it'd go 
quite well. I've used both SLIP and PPP (and loads of others) to build 
networks with Unix boxes and/or Cisco routers. When I worked for Cisco I 
implemented a LOT of PPP links. They work great. They create a nice 
interface for you to apply ACLs, routing rules, etc.. I have zero problem 
with either. In fact, there are extensions to PPP such as multi-link and 
VJ compression that make it rock even harder. Personally, I've had 
super-wonderful experiences with the protocol. My only doubt is that if it 
was used on very old equipment it might have been too CPU or memory 
intensive versus something much more simplistic or efficient.

> All serial, all day.  We still got a lot done.

There isn't anything wrong with serial, as far as I'm concerned. It's got 
it's place and it did a great job for folks. It still does in many cases.

> That said, it was easier (to me) to write full-on apps and utilities in 
> DCL than sh or csh.

Well, I'm a C programmer, as I mentioned, as well as a UNIX zealot and I 
am pretty allergic to csh. Again, it's just a style issue, but I wish that 
Bill Joy didn't name it "csh" because it's not something I'm happy to see 
associated with C coders (folks automatically assume you want csh if 
you're a c-coder sometimes). I'll definitely take any form of Bourne shell 
(sh ksh zsh bash) before I resort to csh. Fortunately, most folks seem to 
agree and csh is pretty niche these days. That's not to say there aren't 
very enthusiastic users of csh, too.

As far as DCL goes, I'll just say this, without 'while' and 'for' I'm 
sorry, it's a PITA. As a programmer, I find shell scripting to be much 
more flexible due to more language features and sugar. Sure, you can use 
'if'-statements to cobble together a replacement for most situations, but 
it's clumsy & ugly from what I've seen.

> It would be a fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL 
> (Perl would win, but it has a lot going for it).

Feature wise, I don't see much of a comparison. Perl would trounce DCL in 
a comparison involving functionality. It's not a fair fight or apples to 
apples in my mind at all. Plus, Perl isn't a CLI interpreter (though I 
suppose you could try it that way). DCL is. Hence, I'd compare it to shell 
script. However, you don't have as many opportunities to write line-noise 
in DCL (joke!).  :-)

> The regularity and predictability of args and options is definitely a 
> strength in DCL.  Args are entire words, not letters which change from 
> app to app.

That is the big thing that DCL has going for it, if you ask me.

> Next thing - how about those args to 'dd'?  Crazy.  Now how about 
> 'tar'... etc., etc.  I use this stuff every day, but I have internalized 
> a massive amount of UNIX trivia to be able to do so.

This is always the criticism of UNIX environments versus VMS & DCL. It's 
valid, I think. I agree with you about the whacky args to 'dd', 'tar', and 
others (SysV vs BSD 'ps', I could go on and on). 

> VMS requires far less random factoid knowledge to get stuff done on the 
> command line.  There's a system command line parser, and it helps with 
> the consistency.

I've also been told that the way the help is put together in VMS tends to 
make the CLI args and switches more consistently well-documented. That's a 

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 7:49 AM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Richard Loken wrote:
>> And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64
>> since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the
>> Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix.  The candidate for
>> lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from
>> BSD4.X.
>
> It was second hand and unverified information, as I said. Perhaps I even
> misheard them and they did, in fact, say Ultrix. Let me backpedal and say
> "I heard one or more of the VMS TCP/IP stacks came from a UNIX variant". I
> don't know much about VMS, as I said. I wasn't trying to be an expert or
> ruffle anyone's feathers, that's why I added the qualifiers.

Ah Eunice. There was a project to run Unix binaries on VMS. From that
project at least two TCP/IP stacks were born: Wollongong TCP/IP and
Multinet TCP/IP. Wollongong basically bought the rights to Eunice and
made it into basically a TCP/IP product as well. The guys that did Eunice
originally went back and created Multinet which is a radically cleaned
up version with many thing rewritten for speed. Eunice started out life
from 4.1BSD and was later based on 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD. Ultrix was
also based on 4.2BSD.

UCX was a different beast... As was the package from CMU...

Warner

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:08 AM, Mouse  wrote:
> 
>> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also
>> proprietary, seldom used,
> 
> ...
> However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of
> hosts it supports.  I don't remember exactly what the limit is;
> different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address
> size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large
> corporation.  (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host
> number within each area?  I'm sure someone here knows.)

Correct.  16 bits total in Phase IV (up from 8 bits in Phase II and III).

Then again, with NAT ("hidden areas") that worked acceptably well even for the 
largest DECNet (the one at Digital).  Keep in mind that DECnet was designed as 
a network for an organization, not as an internet.

> Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the
> IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might
> have been a contender.  For all I know maybe they've even done that,
> but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony.

DECnet did increase the address space, with Phase V where the address is 
variable length up to 20 bytes.  The difficulty is that it was all based on 
OSI, with all the international standards bureaucracy that implied.  And by 
that time, TCP/IP had become a viable competitor, which was "good enough" (32 
bit addresses) and sufficiently much simpler and more nimble that it came out 
the winner.

> But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the
> ground-up integration into the OS.

Well said.

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Paul Koning]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:08 AM, Mouse  wrote:
> 
>> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also
>> proprietary, seldom used,
> 
> I think it is only semi-proprietary.  I've seen open documentation that
> at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was
> sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet
> and for serial lines.

DECnet is open in the sense that anyone can see or reprint the specs, and 
implement the protocols.  Arguably it is pretty similar to the BSD license (the 
"with attribution" variant).  And the specs were written with sufficient care 
that following them is, in general, sufficient to create an interoperable 
implementation.  For example, I implemented DDCMP for RSTS from the DDCMP spec, 
and "it just worked".  This, by the way, is quite rare in protocol specs; it 
certainly is not true for many RFCs, and for one I know of it wasn't even 
considered a worthwhile goal by the document editor!

The only ways in which DECnet is proprietary is that the development work was 
done by Digital and not others.  And the name (DECnet) was a trademark.  (Then 
again, so is "Linux".)

Actually, the "done by Digital" is true only through Phase III.  In Phase IV, 
you get Ethernet (developed by Digital, Intel, and Xerox), HDLC (developed by 
various telcos based on earlier work by IBM), and perhaps other bits.  And of 
course, in Phase V, a whole lot of the machinery is from OSI, though that was 
very much a two-way street (IS-IS came from Digital's work on Phase V routing, 
as did OSPF).  Finally, even when one organization did the detail work in a 
particular area, various algorithms and inspiration came from other sources.  
Dijkstra's algorithm is a good example, of course, but there are plenty of 
others.  (The softlink loop detection algorithm in DECdns is another example of 
a decades old algorithm put to good work in DECnet.)

paul

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Mouse]

> DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's also
> proprietary, seldom used,

I think it is only semi-proprietary.  I've seen open documentation that
at the time (I don't think I have it handy now) I thought was
sufficient to write an independent implementation, both for Ethernet
and for serial lines.

However, IIRC it also has a fairly small hard limit on the number of
hosts it supports.  I don't remember exactly what the limit is;
different memories are handing me 10, 12, and 16 bits as the address
size, but even the highest of those is sufficient for at most a large
corporation.  (Maybe it was 6 bits of area number and 10 bits of host
number within each area?  I'm sure someone here knows.)

Perhaps if DEC had enlarged the address space (somewhat a la the
IPv4->IPv6 change) and released open-source implementations, it might
have been a contender.  For all I know maybe they've even done that,
but now it's much too late to seriously challenge IP's hegemony.

But the real shining star of DECnet/VMS was not the protocols, but the
ground-up integration into the OS.

/~\ The ASCII Mouse
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Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Richard Loken wrote:
> And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64 
> since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the 
> Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix.  The candidate for 
> lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from 
> BSD4.X.

It was second hand and unverified information, as I said. Perhaps I even 
misheard them and they did, in fact, say Ultrix. Let me backpedal and say 
"I heard one or more of the VMS TCP/IP stacks came from a UNIX variant". I 
don't know much about VMS, as I said. I wasn't trying to be an expert or 
ruffle anyone's feathers, that's why I added the qualifiers.

> I think I recall credit given to Berkeley and bsd it the readable UCX 
> files in VAX/VMS Version 5 but all I have is an Alpha running OpenVMS 
> 8.2 and those file don't contain any copyright or credit notices at all.  

Well, for all I know, they wrote it from scratch. All I'm saying is that 
the presence of multiple IP stacks looks to me to be unwieldy, organic, 
and incremental. DECnet might be totally integrated and awesome, but it's 
also proprietary, seldom used, and seems to mean different things to 
different people since it was developed in "phases" which bear only loose 
resemblance to each other in form & function.

-Swift

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Huw Davies]

> On 15 Jul 2016, at 14:41, Richard Loken  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote:
> 
>>> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare,
>>> I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*.
>> 
>> If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah,
>> probably.  But there's a lot more to networking than just IP.
>> Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and
>> integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact.
> 
> And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64
> since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the
> Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix.  The candidate
> for lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from
> BSD4.X.

Let’s say UCX had some deficiencies (being polite) and was replaced with TCPIP 
Services for OpenVMS. This TCP/IP stack was based on the code from Tru64 Unix 
(aka Digital Unix aka OSF/1) and used what was known as the basket to map the 
OpenVMS API to Tru64 and vice versa.

Disclaimer: I used to work for HP and was an OpenVMS Ambassador so might be 
slightly biased

Huw Davies   | e-mail: huw.dav...@kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne| "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia| air, the sky would be painted green" 

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot.
>
> I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot
> more about it than I ever thought to learn
> ... I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big
> bruhaha back in the 1990s.

It was a huge deal in the late 80s and into the 90s.  I was on both
sides, so mostly, I watched.

I got my start with VMS a few months before I touched UNIX - same
hardware - VAX-11/750.  I've written device drivers, system utilities,
and application code for both.  VMS was very good to me from
1984-1994, and I did a bit more with it from 1997-2003, then nothing
commercially since then.  UNIX (and by extension Linux) has been good
to me the entire time since 1985.  If I have choice, I'll grab
something UNIXy to do my work on - I'm not particular as to flavor.

> HOWEVER...
>
> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I
> wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you
> are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's
> very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are
> radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and
> others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack.

I think TCP networking on VMS is a bit of a bodge, but back when I
used it every day in the 1980s, we didn't _have_ any Ethernet
interfaces in the entire company - *everything* we did was via sync
and async serial.  How well do you think it would go if all you had
was SLIP and PPP?  We did a lot.  Yes, other people had high-speed
networking and VAX clusters, etc.  We did not.  Not even our VAXen
running UNIX.  All serial, all day.  We still got a lot done.

>> But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except
>> for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the
>> water).

I found certain aspects of DCL to be quirky, even if I did learn it
before I touched a UNIX shell.  That said, it was easier (to me) to
write full-on apps and utilities in DCL than sh or csh.  It would be a
fairer comparison to develop a complex app in Perl vs DCL (Perl would
win, but it has a lot going for it).  I even completely automated our
build process (formerly a full-time engineer's job, but as the company
shrank, we couldn't afford to have someone who was, essentially just a
build master)... source code control, pulling code based on which
product it was for, compiling it (without "make"), linking it locally,
sending the objects over to a machine running another version of VMS,
linking it there, pulling all the text objects and executables into
two tape-build repositories and cutting magtape for distribution - all
in DCL.  I literally turned a fulltime job into a script.  All you had
to type was "$ RELEASE  " and it would pull
everything, auto-increment the version number, inject it into the
code, build everything and tell you it was time to make tapes (8 hours
later!)

I'm sure it's possible to do all of that in csh, but even now, I
wouldn't want to be the one to build that.

> The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about
> how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence
> of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis
> shell scripting and that's also accurate.

The regularity and predictability of args and options is definitely a
strength in DCL.  Args are entire words, not letters which change from
app to app.  Here's a trivia question: which letters are _not_ valid
arguments to 'ls'?  I know one off the top of my head but not the
others.  Next thing - how about those args to 'dd'?  Crazy.  Now how
about 'tar'... etc., etc.  I use this stuff every day, but I have
internalized a massive amount of UNIX trivia to be able to do so.  VMS
requires far less random factoid knowledge to get stuff done on the
command line.  There's a system command line parser, and it helps with
the consistency.

VMS HELP is also awesome.  I use man pages - they are good if you
already know how things work and are just trying to remember is it
'-p' here, or '-a' or what?

> Strengths versus Unix:
>  * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very
>early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too.

Much stronger.  There are dozens of privileges you can grant so
someone can do their job and not overstep things.  UNIX says, "all or
nothing.  Don't screw up."

[ other strengths deleted for brevity ]

> Downsides versus Unix:
>
>  * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too.
>Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers

There was DECUS back in the day - a very strong source of sharable
software going back well over a decade before there was any VMS.
Consequently, there was less freeware 

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[steven]

Swift said:
> I think VMS is neat.

As a comp sci student I loved using VMS on our 11/780s at Uni, from first
year through final year where we also had the use of a Gould PN6080 UNIX mini.
(Aside - the Gould had one good drive, one flaky. The OS and staff accounts
were on one, student accounts and /tmp on the other. Guess which :)

On the teaching VAX, I vaguely recall one time just after the computing
department had a new version of the OS installed, I logged in and I typed
'&' (or something) on a line by itself and the DCL shell crashed and went
back to login. That got patched pretty quick.

Another humorous thing was certain faculties such as Statistics or Economics
would hand out (apart from an account for each student) a common account that
was locked into a DCL menu of for instance stats applications, that had a
minimal quota and priveleges and anyone in the course could use to check
terminal availability and print or submit job completions and that sort of
thing.

With these accounts it was possible to break out of the menu to the DCL shell,
and as it was an anonymous account do (from hazy memory) something along the
lines of EDIT/NOJOURNAL [SYS$SYSTEM]password.dat or something similar,
and presto although you couldn't edit it or even see it, it would be held open
and any attempt for anyone to log in anywhere would get some message that the
password file was locked by another user. I er saw it done by a friend :)

Apart from that, students would write crazy long DCL scripts that would find
out whether their friends were logged in somewhere on campus, and that sort
of thing. No matter that it took ages to execute and used up our meagre
student account CPU-seconds quota and log us out! So we just logged in again and
got another few CPU seconds. The messaging command (can't recall what it was -
phone?) was great and lots of fun to use. Of course geek guys would use it to
send messages to girls they could see at other terminals, offering to help!

I recall using EDIT/EDT and really loved it, none of our student terminals
(Telerays?, Hazeltines, LSI, Wyse, any other cheap beaten-up terminals the Uni
owned) ever had the mysterious GOLD key though, and it wasn't till decades 
later I
saw a real DEC keyboard with that key. I felt disappointed because it was 
actually
just yellow and not really gold at all, not even painted.

Other times I used to edit my comp sci and stats assignments in line mode on the
DECwriter IIIs and Teletype 43s which most students avoided like the plague,
preferring to use EDT in full-screen mode on a glass terminal. Being comfortable
with line mode editing was very convenient for me if I happened to arrive late
to a terminal room when assignments were nearly due.

And now I have one of those cute little baby VAXen, the smallest VAX ever
made, a 4000 VLC from an eBay impulse purchase. I have not powered it up yet
but someday I will and am hoping it works and has VMS on it. It might even jog a
few more fond memories (^_^)

Steve.

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Götz Hoffart]

> Am 13.07.2016 um 16:29 schrieb Eric Christopherson 
> :
> 
>> QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it
>> switched to 68K.
>> 
> 
> Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development?

Yes, 6809: http://www.folklore.org -> search for 6809.

Regards
Götz

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Richard Loken]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote:


Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare,
I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*.


If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah,
probably.  But there's a lot more to networking than just IP.
Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and
integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact.


And I don't get this notion about lifting the network code out of Tru64
since VAX/VMS had UCX (not my favourite network package) before the
Alpha and associated OSF/1, Digital Unix, Tru64 Unix.  The candidate
for lifting code would be Ultrix which got a lot of its heritage from
BSD4.X.

I think I recall credit given to Berkeley and bsd it the readable UCX
files in VAX/VMS Version 5 but all I have is an Alpha running OpenVMS 8.2
and those file don't contain any copyright or credit notices at all.  They
start off with stuff like this:

/**
*/
/* Created: 18-NOV-1997 11:24:36 by OpenVMS SDL EV1-50 */
/* Source:  22-OCT-1996 00:33:26 
DISK$UCX_BUILD2:[UCX.X42.BL21.SRC.NET]INET_USE

 */
/**
*/

--
  Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS   : "...underneath those
  Athabasca University : tuques we wear, our
  Athabasca, Alberta Canada: heads are naked!"
  ** rllo...@telus.net ** :- Arthur Black

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Mouse]

> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare,
> I wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*.

If you think of "networking" as being "IP-based networking", yeah,
probably.  But there's a lot more to networking than just IP.
Specifically, I was talking about DECnet, which was well done and
integrated from the ground up, not glued on after the fact.

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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Peter Coghlan]

>
> > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except
> > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the
> > water).
>
> I'm not sure I agree.  The VMS command line I used sucked, but so did
> Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways.
>

What is it that "sucked" about the VMS command line?  I used it a lot and I
had some issues here and there but I found it to be streets ahead of any other
command line system I came across on anything else anywhere.

(Not that I think we should doing os-wars re-enactments here.  Too many glass
houses to start a stone throwing competition.)

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.

Re: OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Jerry Kemp]

Thanks for the comments, it's always educational to get the viewpoints and 
experiences from others, on items that are "shared ground".


I didn't mean to come off like an OS/2 fanatic.  I started using OS/2 around 
1990, early 1991 at the latest, and short of Unix (I wasn't a Unix fanatic at 
the time, although I was coming up to speed), I still judge OS/2 to be one of 
the better x86 options for the early and mid 1990's.  Its a given here that you 
looked at the software you wanted to run, then purchased the appropriate 
hardware accordingly.


Thanks for the reminder on the Arca Noae, I'm sure I had read that previously, 
then just selectively chose to drop it from memory.  I haven't used OS/2, or its 
derivatives, exclusively on a day-to-day basis since probably 1997 or 1998 at 
the latest.




On 07/14/16 04:53 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:




In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3.  I was taking
a lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language
specifically, I found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my
work.  OS/2 truly provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up
a DOS session with my Assembly code and go right on working.


I had similar experiences with DOS and something called DESQview/X. I
think it was made by Quarterdeck Systems. I didn't know squat about UNIX
or XDMCP at the time, but it was still beyond awesome to me to be able to
run a DOS window and do something uber-stupid in Lattice-C or Borland and
watch it gracefully recover. So, I can emphatically understand what you
mean.


OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does
one need per OS?


Fair point, but choice is good, too.


 From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back
in the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS
(Work Place Shell).


That's inside baseball to me. I'll take your word for it.


OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2
volumes.


You probably already know, but it seems there is another one now, too,
based on ECS:

https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-lion-go/

Also FYI, just to be super-clear, I didn't mean to bash or attack OS/2. I
was just saying I'm too ignorant about it to make a judgment and IBM
burned me too much to care. However, for all I know it's super-awesome.

-Swift

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Swift Griggs once stated:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote:
> > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. 
> 
> Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot.
> 
> I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot 
> more about it than I ever thought to learn. I respect the OS a lot and I 
> agree with Mouse about parts of it still being object lessons to other 
> OSes. I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big 
> bruhaha back in the 1990s.
> 
> HOWEVER...
> 
> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I 
> wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you 
> are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's 
> very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are 
> radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and 
> others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack.

  I never did much with the networking on VMS (being a student, all I really
did with the account was a few Pascal programs for Programming 101 and
printing really large text files since I didn't want to waste the my printer
paper).  All I really have to go on is what I've read about it, and it was
probably DECnet stuff (clustering, etc) that made the network invisible.

  Yes, there are other systems out that that may have similar functionality
(QNX is one I did work with, and loved it).

> > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except 
> > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the 
> > water).
> 
> The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about 
> how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence 
> of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis 
> shell scripting and that's also accurate.

  My complaint was that for simple things (like changing a directory) it was
very verbose compared to Unix (or even MS-DOS).

  But I absolutely *love* the assembly language of the VAX.  It's a
wonderful instruction set.

  -spc (Not that I did much VAX assembly ... )

OSX, OS/2, ECS, and Blue Lion (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Jerry Kemp wrote:
> I'm missing something here.  Although most did/are using the Apple 
> supplied GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement.

Perhaps there is a way to run an X11 server without Aqua, but I don't know 
of it. However, I'm far from an OSX expert.

> I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although 
> mostly for fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for 
> OS X/PPC.

Cool. That sounds interesting. 

> Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can 
> pretty much do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix.  
> What OS X didn't ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own.

Hmm, not in my experience. IMHO, there is a metric ton of stuff missing 
from OSX. They overload their command line tools to do too much, again, 
IMO. Apple also gives you just about squat in the way of filesystem and 
volume management features that are standard on freely available UNIX 
variants like BSD and Linux. I could go on for a while about what's 
missing, but it's a style-argument only. I don't hate OSX, but I'm 
definitely not ready to view it as UNIX-with-benefits and have some very 
long and specific reasons for that. It's not just a gut impression.

> In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3.  I was taking 
> a lot of college programming classes, and in Assembly language 
> specifically, I found any number of ways to blow things up and loose my 
> work.  OS/2 truly provided a "better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up 
> a DOS session with my Assembly code and go right on working.

I had similar experiences with DOS and something called DESQview/X. I 
think it was made by Quarterdeck Systems. I didn't know squat about UNIX 
or XDMCP at the time, but it was still beyond awesome to me to be able to 
run a DOS window and do something uber-stupid in Lattice-C or Borland and 
watch it gracefully recover. So, I can emphatically understand what you 
mean.

> OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does 
> one need per OS?

Fair point, but choice is good, too.

> From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back 
> in the 1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS 
> (Work Place Shell).

That's inside baseball to me. I'll take your word for it.

> OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 
> volumes.

You probably already know, but it seems there is another one now, too, 
based on ECS:

https://www.arcanoae.com/blue-lion-go/

Also FYI, just to be super-clear, I didn't mean to bash or attack OS/2. I 
was just saying I'm too ignorant about it to make a judgment and IBM 
burned me too much to care. However, for all I know it's super-awesome.

-Swift

Re: VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Guy Dawson]

I was running a 3 node VAXcluster in the late 1980s. We had two 8550s and
an 8820 connected via a CI star coupler to two HSC70 storage controllers
and 24 RA81 drives; two upright tape (TU78s?) drives too. The drives were
connected to both HSC70s in RAID 1 pairs. We had 11 pairs, a spare and a
quorum disk for the VAXcluster.

The environment was rock solid and ran for many years. We could do rolling
VMS and application upgrades on the three nodes. A great production system.

We even had an X25 based DECnet connection between Australia where the
system was installed and the UK where our software company was based.


On 14 July 2016 at 21:50, Swift Griggs  wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote:
> > What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible.
>
> Big Fat Disclaimer: I know very little about VMS. I'm a UNIX zealot.
>
> I work with a lot of VMS experts and being around them has taught me a lot
> more about it than I ever thought to learn. I respect the OS a lot and I
> agree with Mouse about parts of it still being object lessons to other
> OSes. I don't see any point in "UNIX vs VMS" which I gather was a big
> bruhaha back in the 1990s.
>
> HOWEVER...
>
> Personally, given the mess of MultiNet, TCP/IP Services, and TCPWare, I
> wouldn't make that statement about networking *at all*. However, maybe you
> are talking about DECnet. I don't know much about DECnet except that it's
> very proprietary and it's got a bunch of "phases" (versions) that are
> radically different. Some are super-simple and not even routable, and
> others are almost as nasty as an OSI protocol stack.
>
> When using TCP/IP related tools they all seem like basic-functionality
> ports from the Unix side (but stable and usable nonetheless). Plus, IIRC,
> some of the code came right outta Tru64 / OSF1 in the 90's. That's what
> some of the VMS guys told me, anyhow.
>
> > But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except
> > for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the
> > water).
>
> The DCL command line is very foreign to me. I've seen people rave about
> how regular and predictable things are in DCL, and I've seen some evidence
> of that. I've also seen some spot-on criticisms of DCL scripting vis-a-vis
> shell scripting and that's also accurate.
>
> As far as the help system goes, it's got that regularity I mentioned. It's
> very predictable to get help for a given switch or command argument.
> However, versus a modern FreeBSD box? The man pages are MUCH better in my
> opinion that DCL help. They are more detailed with sections of help that's
> usually not even available in the DCL help.
>
> As a UNIX guy who doesn't hate VMS at all (I think it's cool) my basic
> impression is this:
>
> Strengths versus Unix:
>  * More granular authentication/authorization system built in from very
>early days I'm told. "capabilities" style access control, too.
>  * Great hardware error logging that generally tells you exactly what's
>wrong (even if you have to run a turd like WSEA to get it out of a
>binary error log - same as Tru64 though).
>  * Lots of performance metrics and instrumentation of the OS's features
>  * Very solid clustering. (no, it's not incredible and unsurpassed like
>some people still say - other OSes have similar features now, but it
>took a very long time to catch up to VMS.)
>  * Some fairly nice backup features (but not as advanced as, say,
>whats in LVM2 or ZFS in some ways).
>  * Regularity. It's hard to articulate but VMS is very very "regular" and
>predictable in how it does things.
>  * Crazy stable.
>
> Downsides versus Unix:
>
>  * There is a lot of software ported to VMS, but a lot still missing too.
>Open source projects often lag by years. It's all volunteers
>  * No x86 support, you gotta find a VAX, Alpha, or Integrity/IA64 box.
>Maybe VSI will fix this, and maybe they are so politically screwed up
>they will never get it off the ground. We'll see. I have an open mind.
>  * DCL is very very weird to a UNIX user and I miss tons of features from
>UNIX. I say "weird" but when it comes to scripting, I'd go as far as
>saying "weak". I mean, no "while", no "for", and lots of other things I
>dearly miss.
>  * No source code for the masses and licenses out the yazoo. It nickel and
>dimes you for every feature (but so does Tru64 and many others to be
>fair).
>
> If you are a VMS bigot and you take offense at any of this, please go easy
> on me. I'm just giving my impressions, not stating any of this as absolute
> truth or law. I'm certainly not trying to bust on VMS. I think VMS is
> neat.
>
> -Swift
>
>


-- 
4.4 > 5.4

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Jerry Kemp]

On 07/14/16 12:42 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:



Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who
wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool,
myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets
sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time)
and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing
break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut.
:-)




I'm missing something here.  Although most did/are using the Apple supplied 
GUI/Aqua, it wasn't a requirement.


I have/run OpenWindows (compiled for OS X/PPC), and also, although mostly for 
fun, have a copy of the Mosaic web browser, also compiled for OS X/PPC.


Aside from the Netinfo directory server, from a basic level, you can pretty much 
do & run anything you would on Solaris, Unix, *BSD or Lunix.  What OS X didn't 
ship with wasn't too hard to compile on my own.





-up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2.


I've spent all of about five minutes with OS/2. After working for IBM for
years, and watching that drama just soured me on touching it. I might have
liked it, though. Who knows? It just didn't have hardly any software I
cared about and I had 100% certainty that IBM would screw it up.



In defense of OS/2, I went from straight DOS to OS/2 1.3.  I was taking a lot of 
college programming classes, and in Assembly language specifically, I found any 
number of ways to blow things up and loose my work.  OS/2 truly provided a 
"better DOS than DOS", and I could blow up a DOS session with my Assembly code 
and go right on working.


Applications are/were a long story on OS/2, that I could write volumes on, but 
in short, if you wanted to play games, DOS and later, Windows was the place to 
be.  Or the more 2000+ updated answer, on a game console.


OTOH, how many word processors/spreadsheets/presentation programs does one need 
per OS?


From a technical perspective, the only big problem I had with OS/2, back in the 
1990's, was the single thread input queue on the new OOUI, WPS (Work Place Shell).


OS/2 is now sold under the name "eComStation" and boots from JFS2 volumes.

In summary, back in the early 1990's, I moved to OS/2.  I didn't do it to get 
some application I needed, I moved for stability in the Wintel world.  And for 
me, it did a great job.


Jerry

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Mouse]

>> [...] VMS [...]
> What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was
> incredible.

For its time, certainly.  Even today, there are a few things a DECnet
stack does better than an IP stack.

> But having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except
> for the help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the
> water).

I'm not sure I agree.  The VMS command line I used sucked, but so did
Unix shells of the time, and in many of the same ways.

As for VMS HELP, I don't think the tool is all that much better; what
is _much_ better is the documentation it contains.  DEC documentation
of the VMS era was _awesome_.  Even today I rarely see it equaled,
never mind bettered, in many ways.

/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
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Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Mouse once stated:
> >> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly
> >> unstable: [...]
> 
> Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as
> a counterexample.  Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to
> learn from it.  (Not that I think it's perfect, of course.  But I do
> think it did some things better than most of what I see today.)

  What I've read about VMS makes me think the networking was incredible. But
having used VMS (as a student), the command line *sucked* (except for the
help facility---that blows the Unix man command out of the water).

  -spc

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Mouse]

>> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly
>> unstable: [...]

Personally - I went through my larval phase under it - I'd cite VMS as
a counterexample.  Even today I think a lot of OSes would do well to
learn from it.  (Not that I think it's perfect, of course.  But I do
think it did some things better than most of what I see today.)

/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
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/ \ Email!   7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> That was one of the things people didn't talk about in the classic days. 
> I supported classic MacOS Macs up until the early noughties. They were 
> horribly unstable.

I had forgot myself until I recently started messing with OS8.1 again. 
Anecdotally, lately I've felt that 7.6 + Open Transport was a bit more 
stable than 8.1. However, neither approaches "stable" by my definition. 
Some of the bugs I've seen have also been really nasty. For example I was 
playing with Aldus Pagemaker from way-back-when and I noticed that after 
you saved over the same file N number of times it'd become corrupt and 
unusable.

The hardware is solid, though. When I fire up NetBSD on the machine it's 
pretty much just as stable as it is on the x86 side, just slower. I also 
notice that A/UX seems to be much more stable than OS8.1. For example, 
when I fire up "fetch" (an FTP client) that often crashes and locks up my 
8.1 setup on A/UX 3.1, it still crashes a lot but A/UX doesn't lock up. It 
just kills the client process. Of course, on A/UX, I usually just use the 
CLI for such things anyhow. It was an enlightening experiment, though.

> I embraced OS X early on, but some people hung on as long as possible, 
> and others disliked OS X so much they switched to Windows.

Hmm. I didn't run into anyone who was a dyed-in-the-wool Apple fan who 
wasn't over-the-moon excited about OSX. I thought it was pretty cool, 
myself. However, on freeware UNIX variants I'm the guy who often just gets 
sick of having graphics at all (even though I use Fluxbox 90% of the time) 
and drops down to the framebuffer console for a while for a refreshing 
break. :-) So, OSX was too "slick" for me. I (mostly) like my UNIX uncut. 
:-)

For some reason, I don't have the same hangups on non-UNIX OSs. It's 
because my biases are weaker outside of UNIX boxen.

> All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly unstable: 
> Windows 3.x, and indeed 9x; Amiga OS; ST GEM; Acorn RISC OS. None had 
> proper memory protection, few had preemptive multitasking or didn't do 
> it well.

Yep. Don't forget my old friend DOS, either. Ctrl-alt-delete keys got 
quite a workout on those boxes, too. However, it's travails were *nothing* 
compared to say Win98ME, which crashed 3-4 times a day for me on ALL 
machines I tried it on. That was bottom-barrel Windows, IMHO.

> -up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2.

I've spent all of about five minutes with OS/2. After working for IBM for 
years, and watching that drama just soured me on touching it. I might have 
liked it, though. Who knows? It just didn't have hardly any software I 
cared about and I had 100% certainty that IBM would screw it up.

> 1980s for me. The expensive kit I couldn't afford were things like the 
> Apple ][ and BBC Micro, or even a fully-tricked-out C64.

Glad it wasn't just me.  :-)

> > Plus, back in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, 
> > and they were *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off.
> Well, they had reason. In their time they were /incredibly/ radical 
> computers.

It's a fair point, but something that gets my back up faster than just 
about anything computing-related is unvarnished elitism by spoiled rich 
kids. Ie.. people who think it's not what you know or what you can do with 
what you have - it's only what you own. Ugh.

> Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7 
> with a sidecar for many years.

That actually sounds pretty fun and much harder to visualize that at a PTA 
meeting. :-)

> GNOME 2 was all right. Best desktop of its time.

XFCE was a close second for a while and is still going pretty strong. If I 
wanted an "integrated desktop environment" these days (which I don't) I'd 
probably reach for that. 

> GNOME 3's main role seems to be inspiring replacements for itself and 
> providing some foundations for them. ;-)

Ha! I would agree wholeheartedly. 

> I think it's arguably happened, actually, in the form of your next 
> paragraph.

It has. I agree. The numbers of Android devices are mind-boggling. These 
wasteoids running into water fountains while texting *are* Linux users, 
but I'm not sure they really represent anything but consumers and the full 
implications of that are yet to be seen.

Woman falls into fountain while texting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66L1o-uES0

People here spend *insane* amounts of time on them. In my eyes, 
Smartphones are the new TV. Another opiate of the masses.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/informate-report-social-media-smartphone-use/

> > Who knows, maybe Android will become that.
> Nah, not with Chrome OS etc. around.

Didn't Sergei Brin say they'd probably get merged? I seem to remember 
that, but who knows. I don't think I've even seen ChromeOS. The idea of a 
"cloud OS" is utterly repugnant to me on being-pwned-by-big-brother 
basis. I won't touch that crap. That's one of many reasons why I 

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:

meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.

Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7
with a sidecar for many years.


I like BMW bikes, and even the imitations (Ural, Dnepr).
I love the Isetta, but somehow none of their cars since then appeal to me.

I played with a NeXT briefly, before release, trying to get a printer to 
connect.  I'm not sure if I've even seen one since then.




Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize
Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer
even resembling UNIX, much.


How many even know of a connection?


Who knows, maybe Android will become that.


as phone/PDA software, it does OK.
Giving iPhone competition.
Trying to use it as a computer platform seems far-fetched.

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 12 July 2016 at 20:06, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like
>> Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus
>> were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like.
>
> That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1
> on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-)

That was one of the things people didn't talk about in the classic
days. I supported classic MacOS Macs up until the early noughties.
They were horribly unstable. I embraced OS X early on, but some people
hung on as long as possible, and others disliked OS X so much they
switched to Windows.

All the now-nostalgicized-over '80s OSes were pretty horribly
unstable: Windows 3.x, and indeed 9x; Amiga OS; ST GEM; Acorn RISC OS.
None had proper memory protection, few had preemptive multitasking or
didn't do it well.

It's why I switched to Windows NT 3.1 back in '93 and liked it. I did
actually used to like Windows, an NT was a proper, solid, grown
-up OS. In my experience, more stable than OS/2 >=2.

> IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while.

Exactly.

> I never could get
> that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo
> kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for
> sale recently:
>
> http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html
>
> I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is.

Wow! That's great value! If only I were on the same continent!

> However, like most
> hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the
> day".

True.

> In the 90's I was a student, mostly.

1980s for me. The expensive kit I couldn't afford were things like the
Apple ][ and BBC Micro, or even a fully-tricked-out C64.

Later the Amiga, ST and Mac. By the time I had some money, 2nd hand
Acorn Archimedes were available for  There was no-freakin-way I was
> going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at
> least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs.

Yes they were. Part of a non-compete agreement between Steve Jobs &
Apple Computer, you see.

> Plus, back
> in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were
> *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off.

Well, they had reason. In their time they were /incredibly/ radical computers.

> It's a bit like BMW
> owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their
> sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car
> leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA
> meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.

Wouldn't know. I don't do cars. I like BMW bikes, though. Had an R80/7
with a sidecar for many years.

> GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish
> them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally.

Interesting. I think it's a hugely big deal, but it's too late, sadly.

> It's
> interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX
> heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's
> still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms
> of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and
> backing-ideas.

It's a million-to-one shot, I reckon.

And similar comments to those re ReactOS and MS lawyers apply.

> I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy
> on my part), honestly.

Me too!

> Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated
> hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute
> working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never
> liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods
> in the early days).

GNOME 2 was all right. Best desktop of its time.

GNOME 3's main role seems to be inspiring replacements for itself and
providing some foundations for them. ;-)

> Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world
> domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how
> low we have to set the bar to snag them.

I think it's arguably happened, actually, in the form of your next paragraph.

> Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize
> Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer
> even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is
> normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows,
> Ubuntu is trying.

Well quite.

> Who knows, maybe Android will become that.

Nah, not with Chrome OS etc. around.

> I'll catch
> the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soo many of the apps
> are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the
> scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus"
> free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or 

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 13 July 2016 at 07:39, Chris Hanson  wrote:
> (How do you think it was possible for there to be multiple OS releases for 
> the Mac after the first Mac 128 shipped? They didn’t tell people to crack 
> open their systems and install new ROMs…)


Apple didn't, no. But Commodore, Atari and Acorn did. :-)

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Eric Christopherson once stated:
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Chris Hanson 
> wrote:
> 
> > QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it
> > switched to 68K.
> >
> 
> Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development?

  Yes.  The project was originally managed by Jef Raskin and he started it
iwth the 6809.  Once Jobs took the project over, it switched to the 68000.

  -spc

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Eric Christopherson]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:39 AM, Chris Hanson 
wrote:

> QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it
> switched to 68K.
>

Was there a pre-68K period in Mac development?


-- 
Eric Christopherson

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Chris Hanson]

On Jul 12, 2016, at 1:00 PM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> 
> That was the ROM code, right? I'm curious about that, myself. I guess that 
> it can all be software emulated.

ROM is software.

> I suppose they could have created some 
> kind of software mechanism to capture those calls and redirect them to a 
> library which re-implemented them.

You mean like using a dispatching system based on some sort of trap mechanism 
to call into the OS?

(How do you think it was possible for there to be multiple OS releases for the 
Mac after the first Mac 128 shipped? They didn’t tell people to crack open 
their systems and install new ROMs…)

> I'm guessing the same would be needed 
> for Quickdraw calls, but perhaps those weren't around in the 6.x days? I 
> dunno.

Huh?

QuickDraw was almost literally the first code running on the Mac once it 
switched to 68K.

  -- Chris

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Chris Hanson]

On Jul 12, 2016, at 9:25 AM, Cameron Kaiser  wrote:
> 
> I'm really interested to
> see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under these circumstances,

There’s nothing particularly special about the Mac Toolbox and Operating System 
per se. Pretty much anyone could have attempted to develop a clean-room 
workalike using the “Inside Macintosh” books:

- Implement each API described in the book to have the behavior described in 
the books,
- Dispatching each one using the A-trap and taking parameters in the registers 
described in the books,
- And affecting the globals as described in the books.

Through System 6 there were only a few hundred and they were very 
well-understood, and even things like trap patching were (relatively) well 
managed by developers of large scale commercial apps because they had to work 
on everything from a Mac 512Ke to a Mac IIfx with tons of RAM and disk and 
multiple displays under MultiFinder or A/UX.

Many companies actually developed portable workalikes to the System 6 APIs in 
order to port their applications from one platform to another. QuarkXPress even 
used to provide a Toolbox-workalike API as part of their Windows plug-in SDK.

The real killer was System 7, which doubled or tripled the number of available 
APIs via the system, and did so with thorough integration and compatibility. 
Then there was the PowerPC transition and System 7.1.2. And then the API set 
grew enormously again with System 7.5… There was no way someone like NuTek 
could have kept up.

There were companies that developed later Mac API compatibility suites. One of 
them was Altura, the same people who provided the Quick Help application that 
all of the MacOS programming docs switched to (in lieu of Symantec’s THINK 
Reference); they provided an API suite that you could use to port to Windows or 
UNIX and they had at least a minimally working version for OPENSTEP after Apple 
bought NeXT and before Apple announced Carbon.

And of course Apple itself had a Mac API compatibility suite that was part of 
QuickTime for Windows. I know of companies that used it to actually port Mac 
applications to Windows, because it was fairly complete and licensing QuickTime 
for Windows for a commercial product wasn’t a hassle.

  -- Chris

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, s...@hoffart.de wrote:
> > No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig.
> Executor is no emulator, and it does not seem that NuTek was/had one, 
> too. It is just a (more or less) compatible clone of APIs. In principle 
> as System 7 was one of System 6 - also not fully compatible.

Quite right. I should have been more clear about both rather than use the 
term "emulator" which I already knew was pretty loaded with expectations. 
However, my point was only that if Executor could do it, so could someone 
like Nutek. However, from reading about the hardware, it sounds like it 
had an actual '030 in there. 

> > Ask the ReactOS team,
> Yes, that?s a similar effort ?

Well, WINE is probably a closer analog to Executor than ReactOS. However, 
again the point wasn't to define "emulation" but to say that 
re-implementing an OS isn't easy and has a spotty history of results. 
That's all. I agree with you that it's not impossible to do right. Just 
hard.

> And I disagree ? it *can* be done: rewriting an OS from scratch, 
> implementing a given set of APIs, and have some success. It?s been done 
> several times e.g. with compatible UNIX implementations.

I understand. I've used many such API-rigs myself under both NetBSD and 
Linux.

> One of it is close to total domination of the UNIX market, although it 
> is not a certified UNIX and came lte to the UNIX market: Linux.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here: binary emulation, POSIX 
compliance, Single UNIX Specification, iBCS emulation, etc... Personally, 
I've seen NetBSD "emulate" (for lack of a better term) a lot more 
commercial UNIX systems than Linux ever has. I've also had a lot more luck 
cross-compiling to other OSs which has some overlap with the whole 
API-emulation topic. However, in some of those cases you need to fetch 
libraries from the original dist to make it work right and that's probably 
"cheating" to most people who want to get froggy about the "emulation" 
term.

> Or MagiC from Andreas Kromke et al.: a full replacement for Atari TOS 
> (BIOS; XBIOS, GEMDOS, VDI, AES). It?s been quite popular on the Atari ST 
> in Germany.

It sounds interesting. I'm familiar with Firebee and MiNT, though this 
sounds a tad different. I'm not expert on STs, but I think they are neat. 
I'll have to check it out.

-Swift

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[sub]

> Swift Griggs :
> 
> On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a 
>> Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties.
> 
> Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods 
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew 
> that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted 
> to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly 
> baby, but I wanted to see it anyway).
> […]


> No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig.

Executor is no emulator, and it does not seem that NuTek was/had one, too. It 
is just a (more or less) compatible clone of APIs. In principle as System 7 was 
one of System 6 - also not fully compatible.

> Ask the ReactOS 
> team,

Yes, that’s a similar effort …

And I disagree – it *can* be done: rewriting an OS from scratch, implementing a 
given set of APIs, and have some success. It’s been done several times e.g. 
with compatible UNIX implementations. One of it is close to total domination of 
the UNIX market, although it is not a certified UNIX and came lte to the 
UNIX market: Linux.

Or MagiC from Andreas Kromke et al.: a full replacement for Atari TOS (BIOS; 
XBIOS, GEMDOS, VDI, AES). It’s been quite popular on the Atari ST in Germany.

Regards
Götz
-- 
http://www.3rz.org

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> I'm really interested to see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under 
> these circumstances, [...]

That was the ROM code, right? I'm curious about that, myself. I guess that 
it can all be software emulated. I suppose they could have created some 
kind of software mechanism to capture those calls and redirect them to a 
library which re-implemented them. I'm guessing the same would be needed 
for Quickdraw calls, but perhaps those weren't around in the 6.x days? I 
dunno.

> but no one seems to know if any actually got sold. Did they?

I've never seen one in the wild. The picture looks like an early NEC 
workstation to me. It's sad that they never made it work to any major 
degree. The more the merrier, I say. 

-Swift

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Eric Christopherson]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:

> Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and
> almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple
> of LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a
> GNUstep-based Linux distro.
>

I assume you mean a distro that has GNUstep as its default UI the way
Unity, GNOME, KDE, MINT, Cinammon, etc. do in various distros. Actually, in
the early 2000s there were at least two embryonic distros I knew of:
LinuxSTEP and Simply GNUstep.

I followed LS a little closely for a while, but I don't remember much about
the approach it took. I'm not sure it ever got so far as to really include
GUI apps. I seem to remember that it took a less FHS-centric approach to
directory layout, but it was probably less radical than things like the
Bogolinux layout and more like the NeXT one. I definitely remember though
that they didn't want to just through a GNUstep skin on the day's
equivalent of Ubuntu (IIRC the distro was rolled independently of any other
distro, except maybe Linux From Scratch, if that counts).

Simply GNUstep I really don't know anything about.

There just have never been very many GUI apps using GNUstep. In my
experience, too, the actual experience of using them has been quite buggy,
except for a few smaller apps (smaller = fewer features; I guess that means
less to get wrong). Plus the interaction of GNUstep's GUI framework itself
was, at least at the time, very dependent on the WindowMaker window
manager, which was pretty much a separate product with its own set of
problems (e.g. it's written in plain C using libraries that sort of
mimicked the NeXT look and feel much the way GNUstep's own AppKit does, but
with *no code shared* between the two).

I just recently switched backed to WindowMaker and a mix & match of xterm,
Firefox, Chrome, and the occasional Gtk+/GNOME or Qt/KDE app. I'd like
something "pure" like an all-GNUstep system, but it's just not happening.

-- 
Eric Christopherson

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Ian Finder]

TL;DL

On Tuesday, July 12, 2016, Swift Griggs  wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> > I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like
> > Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus
> > were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like.
>
> That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1
> on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-)
>
> > Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and
> > almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple of
> > LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a
> > GNUstep-based Linux distro.
>
> IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while. I never could get
> that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo
> kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for
> sale recently:
>
> http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html
>
> I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is. However, like most
> hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the
> day". In the 90's I was a student, mostly. There was no-freakin-way I was
> going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at
> least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs. Plus, back
> in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were
> *super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. It's a bit like BMW
> owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their
> sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car
> leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA
> meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.
>
> GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish
> them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally. It's
> interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX
> heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's
> still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms
> of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and
> backing-ideas. I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy
> on my part), honestly. Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated
> hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute
> working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never
> liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods
> in the early days). Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world
> domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how
> low we have to set the bar to snag them.
>
> Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize
> Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer
> even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is
> normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows,
> Ubuntu is trying.  Who knows, maybe Android will become that. I'll catch
> the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soo many of the apps
> are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the
> scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus"
> free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or "malware" as it suits
> them (ie.. corporate sponsors say it's safe? Oh, ohkay then, we don't
> mind if you steal an address book, log keystrokes, or secretly GPS track
> folks - just don't replicate). The countermeasures for these issues seem
> to me to be weak and ineffective, so far.
>
> I'm not sure I'll ever be able to trust commercial OS's or software at
> this point, no matter how much bling they cop. I still carry my Philips
> Xenium phone running Symbian (and lasting about 20 days before needing a
> charge). Tastes great, and less filling.
>
> I'd love to see a commercial phone OS project start with the mentality of
> the OpenBSD project. I'd be willing to try something like that! Features
> like totally secure defaults, zero trust for basically anyone or anything,
> secure OS protections that are difficult to override by silly apps, etc..
> would be welcome.
>
> > I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded
> > and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows
> > apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving
> > nothing but a smoking stain on the ground.
>
> I have absolutely zero doubt that you are quite correct. If it took
> .01% bit of market share away from them, they'd have a nuclear
> freak-out and figure out a way to hybridize ninjas with their corporate
> lawyers and send them out riding elephant sharks for vengeance. What would
> be hilarious (but again fantasy) is if ReactOS had a breakthrough in terms
> of 

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like 
> Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus 
> were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like.

That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1 
on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-)

> Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and 
> almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple of 
> LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a 
> GNUstep-based Linux distro.

IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while. I never could get 
that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo 
kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for 
sale recently:

http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html

I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is. However, like most 
hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the 
day". In the 90's I was a student, mostly. There was no-freakin-way I was 
going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at 
least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs. Plus, back 
in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were 
*super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. It's a bit like BMW 
owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their 
sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car 
leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA 
meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.

GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish 
them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally. It's 
interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX 
heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's 
still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms 
of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and 
backing-ideas. I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy 
on my part), honestly. Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated 
hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute 
working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never 
liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods 
in the early days). Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world 
domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how 
low we have to set the bar to snag them.

Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize 
Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer 
even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is 
normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows, 
Ubuntu is trying.  Who knows, maybe Android will become that. I'll catch 
the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soo many of the apps 
are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the 
scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus" 
free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or "malware" as it suits 
them (ie.. corporate sponsors say it's safe? Oh, ohkay then, we don't 
mind if you steal an address book, log keystrokes, or secretly GPS track 
folks - just don't replicate). The countermeasures for these issues seem 
to me to be weak and ineffective, so far.

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to trust commercial OS's or software at 
this point, no matter how much bling they cop. I still carry my Philips 
Xenium phone running Symbian (and lasting about 20 days before needing a 
charge). Tastes great, and less filling.

I'd love to see a commercial phone OS project start with the mentality of 
the OpenBSD project. I'd be willing to try something like that! Features 
like totally secure defaults, zero trust for basically anyone or anything, 
secure OS protections that are difficult to override by silly apps, etc.. 
would be welcome.

> I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded 
> and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows 
> apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving 
> nothing but a smoking stain on the ground.

I have absolutely zero doubt that you are quite correct. If it took 
.01% bit of market share away from them, they'd have a nuclear 
freak-out and figure out a way to hybridize ninjas with their corporate 
lawyers and send them out riding elephant sharks for vengeance. What would 
be hilarious (but again fantasy) is if ReactOS had a breakthrough in terms 
of functionality that got them very close (say 99% or better compat). Then 
if they sat on it for a while, getting it right before subsequently 
release it the genie would be out of the 

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

On 12 July 2016 at 18:10, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew
> that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted
> to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly
> baby, but I wanted to see it anyway).

I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit
like Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window
menus were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like.

Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and
almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple
of LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a
GNUstep-based Linux distro.

> Hehe, I like the summary on everymac.com:
>
> " If anything, NuTek proved that uncontrolled 'cloning' of the Macintosh
> would result in the same type of compatibility problems familiar to the
> Wintel world. "
>
> No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. Ask the ReactOS
> team, the WINE & CrossOver guys, or the half dozen MS Exchange clones that
> try to keep up with MAPI. The put a lot of honest effort into it, and the
> results are still... meh.

I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded
and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows
apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving
nothing but a smoking stain on the ground.

Saying that, I'm amazed at how well WINE works these days. On the
machine I'm typing on (an elderly Thinkpad X200 running 64-bit
Ubuntu), MS Word 97 is my go-to wordprocessor. It's considerably
faster than the latest LibreOffice running natively, and it has never
ever crashed on me on this machine.

I've been occasionally using this combo for years and it wasn't this
stable before.

Genuinely impressive.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a 
> > Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties.
> 
> Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods 
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew 
> that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted 
> to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly 
> baby, but I wanted to see it anyway).

It seems like it limited itself largely to System 6 apps, which if 
MultiFinder weren't running, *could* (I say *could*) provide a passable
approximation of the GUI for well-behaved apps. I'm really interested to
see how they reimplemented the Toolbox under these circumstances, but
no one seems to know if any actually got sold. Did they?

-- 
 personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com
-- Please dispose of this message in the usual manner. -- Mission: Impossible -

Re: NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a 
> Motif-based, clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties.

Bizzaro-world. It's like Executor on steriods 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29) . I never knew 
that there was such a beast. I couldn't even find a screenshot. I wanted 
to see how the blend of MacOS and MOTIF looked (that's going to be an ugly 
baby, but I wanted to see it anyway).

Hehe, I like the summary on everymac.com:

" If anything, NuTek proved that uncontrolled 'cloning' of the Macintosh 
would result in the same type of compatibility problems familiar to the 
Wintel world. "

No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig. Ask the ReactOS 
team, the WINE & CrossOver guys, or the half dozen MS Exchange clones that 
try to keep up with MAPI. The put a lot of honest effort into it, and the 
results are still... meh.

-Swift

NuTek Mac comes

[Liam Proven]

Low End Mac looks into the history of the effort to produce a Motif-based,
clean-room Mac compatible computer in the early nineties.

http://lowendmac.com/2016/nutek-mac-clones/

-- 
Sent from my phone - please pardon brevity & typos.