Re: PLATO PC floppy

[Jason T]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:12 PM, Jim Brain  wrote:
> I so wish I could find my copy of the PLATO client for the Commodore 64
> (yep, it actually existed, I did some of my Physics 107 labs on PLATO from
> my room with my C64 and my 2400 bps modem (333-1000, 217 area code, to get
> to the terminal server(?) at the home of PLATO, UIUC.

I didn't know they had dial-in for PLATO there.  Here's a 1991-era
card with two similar termserv numbers:

http://chiclassiccomp.org/docs/content/computing/UIUC/UIUC_NewAccountCard1991.pdf

I have somewhere the PLATO cartridge for Atari 8-bit but I've never
seen the C64 client.  I'd love to try to use it with cyber1.org.

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[TeoZ]

A Quadra 950 is also a decent machine if you want to fill it up with cards.

Most 840av's these days have bad motherboards from leaking capacitors and 
the plastics break if you sneeze too hard close to them.






-Original Message- 
From: N0body H0me

Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2016 1:05 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

If I had the time and money (mostly money) to do this, I
would settle for nothing less than a Quadra 840AV.  Be
prepared to spend , though; the 840 is quickly approaching
'investment grade'.

If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the
SE/30.  Once again, these are kinda pricey.



-Original Message-
From: ot...@oryx.us
Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500
To: gene...@classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back.  Even kicked off
a
thread on a Mac email list.

I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K,
so
that didn't come into my decision making.

I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory
power
house Mac that would run Classic.  I just needed to run my Mac OS apps
and games
that would never be ported to x86.

I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision.  I can boot
up
into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support.

This was what worked well for me.  I will be interested to see what you
ultimately end up choosing.

Jerry


On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote:

I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although
I'm
having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the
ultimate
representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from
Classic CMP'ers.

I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd
variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I
can
get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system
between
my current computers and the more historic versions.

In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm
intending
to use.  I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get
9.2.1 on it relatively easily.  Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I
should
be considering?  It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport
Extreme?)
although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use
Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.  Was a gigabit ethernet card ever
released with Mac OS 9 drivers?  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks
that I
can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that
worked
with classic Mac OS?

Also, I have an Asanté ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to
be
able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet.

In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I
should look to get my hands on?  What's the state of the art in classic
Mac
OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?

-Austin.




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Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[N0body H0me]

If I had the time and money (mostly money) to do this, I
would settle for nothing less than a Quadra 840AV.  Be
prepared to spend , though; the 840 is quickly approaching
'investment grade'.

If I wanted the "all in one" experience, I would get the
SE/30.  Once again, these are kinda pricey.


> -Original Message-
> From: ot...@oryx.us
> Sent: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 16:26:06 -0500
> To: gene...@classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.
> 
> I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back.  Even kicked off
> a
> thread on a Mac email list.
> 
> I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K,
> so
> that didn't come into my decision making.
> 
> I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory
> power
> house Mac that would run Classic.  I just needed to run my Mac OS apps
> and games
> that would never be ported to x86.
> 
> I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision.  I can boot
> up
> into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support.
> 
> This was what worked well for me.  I will be interested to see what you
> ultimately end up choosing.
> 
> Jerry
> 
> 
> On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
>> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although
>> I'm
>> having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the
>> ultimate
>> representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from
>> Classic CMP'ers.
>> 
>> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd
>> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I
>> can
>> get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system
>> between
>> my current computers and the more historic versions.
>> 
>> In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm
>> intending
>> to use.  I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get
>> 9.2.1 on it relatively easily.  Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I
>> should
>> be considering?  It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport
>> Extreme?)
>> although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use
>> Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.  Was a gigabit ethernet card ever
>> released with Mac OS 9 drivers?  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks
>> that I
>> can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that
>> worked
>> with classic Mac OS?
>> 
>> Also, I have an Asanté ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to
>> be
>> able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet.
>> 
>> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I
>> should look to get my hands on?  What's the state of the art in classic
>> Mac
>> OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?
>> 
>> -Austin.
>>


FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your 
desktop!
Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium

Re: PLATO PC floppy

[Chuck Guzis]

On 07/15/2016 07:29 PM, Jason T wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Chuck Guzis 
> wrote:
>> I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently)
>> PLATO client software on it probably from the mid 1980s.   Is the
>> image of this of any interest to anyone?
> 
> I vote "yes."  Will host the image, too.  What platform do you think
> it's for?

As I said, it's probably for IBM PC/XT with CGA.   Haven't checked in
detail.

--Chuck

Anyone near San Marcos, CA with a Commodore drive cable?

[Jim Brain]

Evidently, there is a kind soul with a project this weekend lacking a 
cable (it's my fault), and I had hoped one might be available near he 
could borrow.


Jim


--
Jim Brain
br...@jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com

Re: PLATO PC floppy

[Jim Brain]

On 7/15/2016 9:29 PM, Jason T wrote:

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:

I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently) PLATO
client software on it probably from the mid 1980s.   Is the image of
this of any interest to anyone?

I vote "yes."  Will host the image, too.  What platform do you think it's for?

j


I so wish I could find my copy of the PLATO client for the Commodore 64 
(yep, it actually existed, I did some of my Physics 107 labs on PLATO 
from my room with my C64 and my 2400 bps modem (333-1000, 217 area code, 
to get to the terminal server(?) at the home of PLATO, UIUC.



Sigh, I miss that.

--
Jim Brain
br...@jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com

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

Multiflow Trace 14/300 close to being scrapped in Texas

[Evan Linwood]

Hi All,

I noticed that the Multiflow race 14/300 system listed on eBay didn't sell
recently. I don't have any personal background with these machines but it
seems they could be both significant and rare? It's been sitting on eBay but
I wasn't sure if it had slipped between the cracks somehow? I've been in
contact with the seller and he's said that he's still hoping to sell it, but
that it has to be cleared soon (and would be scrapped). I don't live in the
US, so it's not an easy one for me to work with. Is this of interest to
anyone? Cheers Evan

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/112050410557

 

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.

11/44 Console cable

[Kirk Davis]

Does anyone know off hand if a 11/83 cab kit will work as a 11/44 console? Both 
are 20 bin ribbon cable connectors - minus the baud rate select stuff of 
course. I have the 44 print set kit from bitsavers but being lazy prefer not 
making a cable if I can avoid it.

Re: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy

[Jason T]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Glen Slick  wrote:

> They are specific to that drive, which is a* Laser Magnetic Storage
> International* (LMSI) / Philips CM201 drive.

I can't imagine there are many of these caddy/tools left on the
planet.  I have exactly one.

Sounds like a good project for someone with a 3D printer and CAD
skills (not me on both counts.)

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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[jim stephens]

On 7/15/2016 12:15 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On 07/15/2016 11:52 AM, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:



P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot
image) for work takes < 1 hour.  The firmware I’m working on takes
just 2-3 seconds to build!  This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7
with SSDs.  ;-)

The problem is that while the PCs are getting faster, I'm slowing down.

One vivid memory I have of the S/360 F-level assembler is that while the
macro language was very rich, macros could take a very long time to
evaluate.  Some of the "system" macros were real doozies.

Hasp and I think Control program (??) on MVT were about a foot high.

The system programmers for our shop at University of Missouri, Rolla, 
360/50, MVT 19 thru 21 era had a hot plate, skillet, and they snacked on 
spam while waiting and working.  Made for a unique aroma to the computer 
center.



Of course, none of that compares to the card-only systems without mass
storage.

--Chuck

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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Eric Smith]

On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson  wrote:
> And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs… which these days 
> use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed!

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel CPUs.

Yes, the CPU architecture is from Intel. The hardware *system*
architecture is from the IBM PC. That's the main reason why you can
boot Windows on an x86 Mac. (And other PC operating systems.)

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.)

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Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Mouse]

>> NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble self-hosting, and nobody knows
>> why, because it shows up only in native builds.
> Hmm, I wasn't aware of that.  I've only used it in the context of
> other platforms and variants.

I'm sure there are lots of  triples it works just
fine for.  I just don't know why  isn't one of
them.  As far as I know nobody else knows either.

>> Nobody knows [...].  (Or at least that's what I've gathered from
>> following port-vax@.)
> Aww.  That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly
> motivated VAX gods. :-)

:-)  Actually, I think it probably is - just ones short on round tuits.
I suspect that anyone with the necessary VAX/gcc/NetBSD chops to
diagnose this problem is also kickass at a number of other things,
things which (for example) pay significantly better.

>> If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying
>> to figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.
> It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't.  [...]

Thank you for the compliment!  NetBSD apparently either disagrees or
decided something else had higher priority, though.  This way I have
more time for doing my own thing, though, so it's not entirely without
a silver lining.  (Admittedly, at the moment "my own thing" is less
computery, so perhaps it's not that much of a silver lining from your
perspective - I don't know how much we overlap except for classiccmp.)

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Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Jerry Kemp]

I went thru this exercise myself a couple of years back.  Even kicked off a 
thread on a Mac email list.


I don't/didn't have any experience or background with the Mac on the 68K, so 
that didn't come into my decision making.


I ultimately decided that I didn't need the fastest/biggest/most memory power 
house Mac that would run Classic.  I just needed to run my Mac OS apps and games 
that would never be ported to x86.


I purchased a G4 cube and have been happy with that decision.  I can boot up 
into Mac OS 9.x, and also boot into OS X 10.4 with Classic support.


This was what worked well for me.  I will be interested to see what you 
ultimately end up choosing.


Jerry


On 07/15/16 02:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote:

I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although I'm
having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the ultimate
representation of the type is, so was looking for a little input from
Classic CMP'ers.

I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd
variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I can
get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system between
my current computers and the more historic versions.

In terms of hardware I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending
to use.  I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get
9.2.1 on it relatively easily.  Are there any add-in cards (PCI) I should
be considering?  It has a built in Airport Card (possibly Airport Extreme?)
although my home Wi-Fi is 802.11n or better with WPA2 so I'll just use
Ethernet to connect it to my LAN.  Was a gigabit ethernet card ever
released with Mac OS 9 drivers?  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I
can use with it, but has there ever been a SATA implementation that worked
with classic Mac OS?

Also, I have an Asanté ether bridge tucked away somewhere that I hope to be
able to use to connect some of my older Mac OS boxen without Ethernet.

In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I
should look to get my hands on?  What's the state of the art in classic Mac
OS browsing nowadays, Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?

-Austin.

Re: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy

[devin davison]

Are the caddys specific to that drive or pretty standard? I picked up a
stack of caddys recently, if you can get me a reference picture i can see
if any of them are the same.

--Devin

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Peter Coghlan 
wrote:

> >
> > Greetings
> >
> > The DEC RRD40 CD-ROM drive requires a DEC caddy to insert and remove
> CD's from
> > the drive.  Does anyone have a spare caddy they could sell/post to me?
> >
>
> Hi Brendan,
>
> I have a few but where I am is just about the furthest anyone can get from
> New
> Zealand without leaving the planet.  Let me know if you don't find any
> closer
> to you.
>
> Regards,
> Peter Coghlan.
>

Re: DEC RRD40 CD-Rom Drive caddy

[Glen Slick]

On Jul 15, 2016 10:01 AM, "devin davison"  wrote:
>
> Are the caddys specific to that drive or pretty standard? I picked up a
> stack of caddys recently, if you can get me a reference picture i can see
> if any of them are the same.
>
> --Devin

They are specific to that drive, which is a* Laser Magnetic Storage
International* (LMSI) / Philips CM201 drive.

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote:
> But it comes at a price.  NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble 
> self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native 
> builds.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I've only used it in the context of other 
platforms and variants. 

> Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the cross-compiler 
> generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle bug in the 
> compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what. (Or at least 
> that's what I've gathered from following port-vax@.)

Aww. That breaks my fantasy that the list was full of highly motivated VAX 
gods. :-)

> If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to 
> figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.

It's too bad for the NetBSD team that you aren't. You'd be a killer asset 
to any FOSS project, I'm sure. That goes 10x for one involving VAXes.

-Swift

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Austin Pass wrote:
> I'm toying with putting the "ultimate" classic Mac together, although 
> I'm having a little difficulty pinning down the definition of what the 
> ultimate representation of the type is, so was looking for a little 
> input from Classic CMP'ers.

I've recently been through that exercise with M68k Macs. I settled on the 
Quadra 700 and the Quadra/Centris 660AV. However, I think you'll hear a 
lot of people also recommend the Quadra 950 and Apple Workgroup Server 95. 
However, I realize you aren't interested and are looking at the PPC 
systems.

> I'm aware that there's a clear divide between Motorola and PowerPC CPU'd 
> variants, so I'm going to plump for a PowerPC based version so that I 
> can get access to newer hardware and use it as a kind of bridge system 
> between my current computers and the more historic versions.

I've contemplated doing a PPC rig, too. For me, I don't care much about 
hyper-expandibilty. I like the more blingy hardware. So, for me, at the 
top of the pyramid stand two systems: the G4 Cube and the 20th Anniversary 
Mac. The Cube is now cheap on fleabay. It's prime time to grab those. If 
one comes up on cheap Craigslist here in Denver, I'll probably snag it and 
warehouse it for a while. I am just not motivated enough to pay shipping 
or Ebay prices, yet.

IMHO, most of the tower systems were too "plasticy" and the desktop 
Performa-styled boxes were uglier than homemade sin.
 
> I have the original media that shipped with this, so I can get 9.2.1 on 
> it relatively easily. 

You'll want to Google MacOS PPC. Let's simply say "it's out there" and 
easy to get. Unless you just want the manuals an screen-printed discs, 
which I understand, too.

> Was a gigabit ethernet card ever released with Mac OS 9 drivers?

O, yeah. Lots of them. Check out lowendmac or the like. They have 
lists of them.

>  I have a couple of 600GB PATA disks that I can use with it, but has 
> there ever been a SATA implementation that worked with classic Mac OS?

Not sure about that, but I can tell you that there are ton of SCSI 
controllers and you can use an expensive SATA-to-SCSI bridge like the one 
sold by ACARD. I use several of those on various machines and they rock. 

> In terms of the software - any top-line utilities or System Extensions I 
> should look to get my hands on?

Yes. Get the disk utilities that allow you to use non-Apple disks. The one 
that comes to mind the fastest is Lacie Silverlining and LIDO. 

> What's the state of the art in classic Mac OS browsing nowadays, Mr 
> Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?

He will know better than me, but your best bet IMO, is either iCab or 
Clasilla, for sure. 

-Swift

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Austin Pass]

> On 15 Jul 2016, at 21:15, Al Kossow  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
>> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - 
>> would this be a safer bet?
> 
> Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with 
> gigabit ethernet (2nd gen G4?)
> 
>> Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for 
>> improved reliability in the mirror door?
> 
> Not without a rom change.
> One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr 
> memory and there
> was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable.
> 
> It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that 
> wasn't so power hungry.
> First gen MDD was bad.
> I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time.
> 
> 
> 

I didn't realise the ethernet was gigabit! We had it connected to a fairly 
undistinguished 100Mbit switch.

I have several G5's, but am at a loss as to what to do with them. If they 
supported classic Mac OS I'd have one up and running in a heartbeat.

What was the juciest AGP graphics card for the G4? Some form of GeForce?

-Austin.

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Mouse]

> Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or
> embedded systems, nowadays too.  NetBSD's ability to cross compile
> binaries for completely alien systems is just awesome.

But it comes at a price.  NetBSD/vax, for example, has trouble
self-hosting, and nobody knows why, because it shows up only in native
builds.  Nobody knows whether there's a subtle bug in the
cross-compiler generating a broken native compiler, or there's a subtle
bug in the compiler that shows up only in native VAX builds, or what.
(Or at least that's what I've gathered from following port-vax@.)

If I were still following NetBSD I'd be taking a real VAX and trying to
figure out when things went south, doing all the builds native.

/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!   7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[r.stricklin]

Anecdotally, this may be the case. I ran my dual 1.25 MDD for six or seven 
years without a single hardware failure. It's probably still fine, but I 
haven't tried to turn it on since I upgraded to a Mac Pro (geez, eight years 
ago).

ok
bear.

-- 
Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 13:15, Al Kossow  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
>> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - 
>> would this be a safer bet?
> 
> Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with 
> gigabit ethernet (2nd gen G4?)
> 
>> Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for 
>> improved reliability in the mirror door?
> 
> Not without a rom change.
> One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr 
> memory and there
> was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable.
> 
> It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that 
> wasn't so power hungry.
> First gen MDD was bad.
> I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time.
> 
> 
> 

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[geneb]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:


On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb  wrote:

Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of what was lost and it's a
horror show. :(



While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I
wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and
DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources.

I don't believe that for a second.  I bet Some jackass manager decided it 
wasn't worth anything and binned it without telling anyone.



DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very interesting FOSS OS. It
so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with
built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy.


Well interesting if nothing else. :)

g.

--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
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Some people collect things for a hobby.  Geeks collect hobbies.

ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Tapley, Mark]

On Jul 15, 2016, at 2:03 PM, Austin Pass  wrote:

….
> Mr Kaiser - is Clasilla still maintained?
….

Yup:

http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

Have not used it, but I am up-to-date on a G3 (iMac) and a G4 
(PowerBook) with TenFourFox and use them regularly. 

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

Depending on your PowerPC and choice of OS, that might be attractive. 
Either can still run OS9 applications.
- Mark

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote:
> P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot 
> image) for work takes < 1 hour.  The firmware I?m working on takes just 
> 2-3 seconds to build!  This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with 
> SSDs.  ;-)

Also, cross-compilers are so f'ing wonderful for targeting old or embedded 
systems, nowadays too. NetBSD's ability to cross compile binaries for 
completely alien systems is just awesome.

-Swift

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: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Al Kossow]

On 7/15/16 12:58 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
> I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - 
> would this be a safer bet?
> 

Yes, that or a slightly faster one. I like the ones where we went with gigabit 
ethernet (2nd gen G4?)

> Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for 
> improved reliability in the mirror door?
> 

Not without a rom change.
One of the big problems was this was the first machine with tightly tuned ddr 
memory and there
was a lot of magic performed to get it reliable.

It's been a while, if it's 1.25, this may have been a next generation G4 that 
wasn't so power hungry.
First gen MDD was bad.
I was off of G4 and working on bringing up G5 by that time.

Re: Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Austin Pass]

I have a "pinstripe" grey G4 PowerMac with (if memory serves) a 400Mhz CPU - 
would this be a safer bet?

Is there any way to underclock the 1.25Ghz CPU's in the mirror door for 
improved reliability in the mirror door?

We used the MD PowerMac as an OS X 10.3 server running Macintosh Manager 
catering for two suites of eMacs and iMacs running 9.2.1 "back in the day", and 
I don't recall it being overly unreliable.

-Austin.

Sent from my iPhone

> On 15 Jul 2016, at 20:29, Al Kossow  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 7/15/16 12:03 PM, Austin Pass wrote:
>> I have a lovely mirror-door G4 PowerMac I'm intending
>> to use.
> 
> bad idea.
> 
> Mirror door G4's were the least reliable machines we released.
> Too many compromises getting to a GHz, esp WRT noise and heat.
> 
> I personally like Beige G3's, or mid-life G4's for differing reasons.
> 
> And I use a Wallstreet daily (last portable with ADB and SCSI).
> 

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 11:30 AM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:
> 
> On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> 
>> We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old
>> ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.
> 
> Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the
> mid-80s when he was working for Cray.   I was grousing about the time
> spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining
> the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those
> parts needing it).  Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and
> confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial
> recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable.
> 
> Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated
> STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long.
> 

When I first started working on the IBM S/23, a complete build took a week
(yes, 7 days…if we were lucky).  Debugging and fixing was mostly keeping
a notebook of patches to applied to the previous build.  “fixes” were first
developed by patch and then actual source changes were made.  We usually
spent a day just patching the “fixes” when a new build was released because
what we had to do in a patch vs the real change were often different.

Eventually someone wrote a cross build environment for the Series/1 and the
build went down to overnight (yea!).

You may ask “It was IBM why didn’t you use the S/370 mainframes?”.  It was
accounting.  We could “buy” equipment (Series/1 and the like) and it was a
capitol expense.  We were billed (at a ridiculous rate as I recall) for 
Mainframe
time out of the department expense budget.  The expense budget was very
closely monitored.  The capitol budget not so much.

Kids have it so much easier now.  ;-)

P.S. A full build for the board I work on (OS and creating the boot image) for
work takes < 1 hour.  The firmware I’m working on takes just 2-3 seconds to
build!  This is on a PC with a 3.2GHz Skylake i7 with SSDs.  ;-)

TTFN - Guy

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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Chuck Guzis]

On 07/15/2016 11:10 AM, Liam Proven wrote:

> We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old
> ones, because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.

Reminds me of a conversation that I had with Greg Mansfield back in the
mid-80s when he was working for Cray.   I was grousing about the time
spent recompiling the BSD kernel on a VAX 11/750, even when streamlining
the process through partial recompilation (i.e. compiling only those
parts needing it).  Greg was working with, IIRC, UniCOS at the time and
confided that on an X/MP he didn't bother with partial
recompilation--there was no practical time savings realizable.

Flash back to 1975 when recompiling the STAR OS kernel on a dedicated
STAR 1B took all night--assuming that the machine stayed up that long.

--Chuck

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Jul 15, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM 
>> POWER RISC processor line. 
> 
> I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight 
> around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their 
> OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a 
> mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have 
> seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for 
> some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of 
> POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with 
> framebuffers).
> 
> @#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way.

Yep.  Damned them.  It’s a real pain having to figure out how to allocate
development resources within a budget.  That whole profit thing gets in
the way of all the cool stuff!

TTFN - Guy

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb  wrote:
> Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of what was lost and it's a
> horror show. :(


While it springs to mind -- the other things that were lost that I
wish had got open-sourced were Quarterdeck's QEMM, DesqView and
DesqView/X. Symantec lost the sources.

DR-DOS with DesqView/X would have been a very interesting FOSS OS. It
so nearly happened but it came just too late. A multitasking DOS with
built-in TCP/IP and X.11 would have been very handy.

Later, DR-DOS even got VFAT-compatible Long Filename support. That
would have really helped DVX -- one of the problems with it that I
read about was the need to mangle X.11 font filenames in an
incompatible way, so that they'd fit into 8.3 characters.



-- 
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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 19:39, Swift Griggs  wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>> But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM
>> POWER RISC processor line.
>
> I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight
> around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their
> OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a
> mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have
> seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for
> some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of
> POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with
> framebuffers).
>
> @#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in
> the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of
> Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things
> would have been different.
>
> Of course then something like this might have happened:
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france


Absolutely. Next did license out NextStep -- Sun licensed it and had
it working on Solaris, but never sold it. I don't recall if IBM did.

At least in that era, Apple and IBM missed a trick -- even if IBM was
the sole licensee, then OS X Server on IBM server kit would have
validated and legitimised OS X Server and might have given it a
chance.

There was also Novell's Portable Netware on POWER -- I even saw a demo
of it running. Never released or sold. :-(



-- 
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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Liam Proven]

On 15 July 2016 at 19:38, geneb  wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>
>> Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g.
>> many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that
>> couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced:
>> DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly.
>>
> Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the archive
> in Monterey, CA flooded.  Somewhere around here I've got an inventory of
> what was lost and it's a horror show. :(

A... I would both like to see that, and not to see it, IYSWIM.

> All the GEM stuff that could be found was released - including ViewMAX.

Ahh yes. I remember the enhanced versions of that. If you recall, we
were both on the DeltaSoft FreeGEM list, gods, nearly 2 decades ago
now. (!)

>> Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS,
>> took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo.
>>
> ...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS.  The kernel & command.com sources were
> released and then it was canceled.  I contacted them a number of years ago
> about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to basically had a
> melt down over it.  You'd have though I was asking if it was ok if I
> slow-cooked one of his children.

I recall.

I have one copy of the source-code CD for DR-DOS. I should put up on
Bittorrent somewhere!

> I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get all this stuff released - it was
> bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the
> project.

:-(

> For grins I set up a build environment today on a virtual machine - an
> i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes.  It takes
> 2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :)  In 1996 it took a 200Mhz
> Pentium 2 hours for the same task.

We don't appreciate how much faster modern PCs are than the old ones,
because modern PC OSes are so appallingly slow and bloated.

Running BeOS on a 200MHz Pentium 1 showed the potential of the
hardware like nothing else I've ever seen on x86.

It was as snappy and responsive as RISC OS was on the early
Archimedes. This is IMHO the definitive review of them, and it is well
worth a read:

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimedes.pdf

I vividly remember reading it as a 19YO student...

"The hard disk in the A500 is most noticeable for its ferociously
rapid access speed. It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise,
in the time it takes to blink an eye. The reason for this speed is
that the disk is run with no interleaving of sectors. On an IBM XT,
for example, the disk rotates about six times between each read to
give the puny CPU time to digest; Archimedes eliminates this dead time
as the ARM processor can suck stuff off the disk as fast as it can
rotate."

"It felt like the fastest computer I have ever used, by a considerable margin".

... and the amazement of being able to afford one a few years later.

It's by Dick Pountain who later became a colleague and friend.

Also see 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/

As radical a computer as the Amiga, and far more influential -- it's
the origin of the ARM chip and that is _everywhere_ now.

But the OS, although not architecturally radical, was radical in other
ways: live window dragging! Universal real-time font antialiasing!

It felt like the fastest thing ever, as Dick said.

Well, the only OS that's felt like that since, for me, was BeOS.

I'd _love_ a modern BeOS on a modern multiprocessor PC. But nothing
like it exists any more, and Haiku is nothing like as snappy.

If I were a billionaire, I'd buy Access (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_(company) ), give the BeOS
sources to the Haiku guys and sponsor them to update it. All it really
needs today is a built-in hypervisor -- then you could run something
bloated like Linux in a VM to get a modern browser etc. while some
native ones were developed or ported.


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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.

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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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the IBM 
> POWER RISC processor line. 

I always thought it was a shame that both IBM and Apple were so tight 
around the pucker strings and never were more comfortable sharing their 
OS's back and forth. I would have welcomed running AIX on more than a a 
mere handful of the PPCs that could do it. I would have also liked to have 
seen MacOS 9.x and 10.0-10.4 (or whatever the PPC span was) available for 
some bits of IBM hardware, and especially the IBM IntelliStation line of 
POWER5 systems such as the Power 285 (but also RS/6000s with 
framebuffers).

@#$@#ing business-weasels got in the way. Maybe if I was older and back in 
the day I could have organized a joint children of IBMers vs children of 
Apple bigwigs polo & tennis tournament at a shared country club, things 
would have been different.

Of course then something like this might have happened:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/10/tennis.france

-Swift

Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[geneb]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:


Caldera didn't inherit source code for *all* the old DR products, e.g.
many of the apps, but it looked at what it had got, and the bits that
couldn't realistically be sold commercially any more, it open-sourced:
DR-DOS and PC GEM, mainly.

Caldera didn't get the sources because much of it was lost when the 
archive in Monterey, CA flooded.  Somewhere around here I've got an 
inventory of what was lost and it's a horror show. :(


All the GEM stuff that could be found was released - including ViewMAX.


Then it discovered that actually there was still interest in DR-DOS,
took it back in-house again and span off that division as Lineo.

...before fully open-sourcing DR-DOS.  The kernel & command.com sources 
were released and then it was canceled.  I contacted them a number of 
years ago about getting the rest released and the weasel I talked to 
basically had a melt down over it.  You'd have though I was asking if it 
was ok if I slow-cooked one of his children.


I worked with Roger Gross in '96/'97 to get all this stuff released - it 
was bitterly disappointing when Caldera pulled the rug out from under the 
project.


For grins I set up a build environment today on a virtual machine - an
i7-4790K @ 4.0Ghz can build the whole distribution in 20 minutes.  It 
takes 2-3 minutes to build out the disk images. :)  In 1996 it took a 
200Mhz Pentium 2 hours for the same task.


g.
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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: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 20:50, Chuck Guzis  wrote:
>
> Everyone seems to forget about the work-alikes, such as TPM for the
> Epson QX-80.

True. And there was Pro DOS for the SAM Coupé:
http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/

ZCN for the Amstrad NC series:
https://www.ncus.org.uk/fnov00.htm

And probably others.

> GEM for the Atari ST is essntially a clone of MS-DOS functionality for
> the 68K with a graphics enhancement tacked on.  Yet I've never heard any
> accusations that DRI "pirated" MS-DOS.

Not GEM as such -- it's the GUI layer. But ST GEM ran on a kernel
called GEMDOS, which was a sort of hybrid of CP/M-68K and DR-DOS: a
68000 kernel but with MS-DOS like API compatibility.

Written by DR and licensed from them by Atari.

So, a better comparison would be DR-DOS. I think nobody ever claimed
that DR stole MS-DOS source code, though. It was clean-room
reverse-engineered, and had some different internal data structures,
which manifested in a (very very few) compatibility problems.

However, the accusation is that MS -- or SCP -- did actually use CP/M
source code in creating QDOS.

It's not that QDOS' design was copied from CP/M, which it was --
that's already been admitted. It's that QDOS contained appropriated
CP/M source from DR.


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Re: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 20:47, Chris Hanson  wrote:
> And interestingly, these days IBM is a huge user of Macs… which these days 
> use a derivative of the system architecture that IBM developed!


The PC CPU was from Intel, not IBM. Macs now use Intel CPUs.

But in the now-gone PowerPC era, yes, Macs used a derivative of the
IBM POWER RISC processor line.

So, no, not "these days", but from 1994-2006.

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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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Re: Reproduction micros

[Liam Proven]

On 14 July 2016 at 21:03, ben  wrote:
> * Lets add a brain dead cpu and run DOS.

Oh, come on, for the time, it was OK.

DOS compatibility looked like it'd be a selling point, although it
didn't actually prove to be a big one AIUI.

The A2000 came out in '87, the same year as the 68030, so including
that wasn't really viable. They probably should have used a 68020
(released 1984) but the performance and functionality gains over the
68000 were not that significant, I believe. And I think exploiting
some of them would have broken binary compatibility in AmigaOS.




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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

PLATO PC floppy

[Chuck Guzis]

Anent PLATO discussions, that reminds me:

I discovered that I have a 360K (DSDD) floppy with (apparently) PLATO
client software on it probably from the mid 1980s.   Is the image of
this of any interest to anyone?

--Chuck

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."

-- 
 personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com
-- He who Laughs, Lasts. --

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
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!   7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

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"