The Vent and Rant Thread

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

...but I doubt I can get across that cross species relationships like that just don't work...

You're the second green MR dude hinting at stuff like that within a month's time.

I feel I should start running....

[WT Sharpe]

Geez, I wonder who the other mod was?

[cromag]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

...
And I still have the 3B1. You will pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
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Dennis

I still have one! Well, it was a 7300, but I slipped in a half-height 40MB hard drive as soon as they were affordable (by the standards of the day). So my "wedge" doesn't have a monitor pedestal. The "user agent" had a weird Y2K bug -- it went from 1999 to 19100 -- but the core UNIX was okay.

I used to turn it on for the kids to show them what a "green screen" looked like.

[Freeshadow]

Re DOS = brain-damaged: Seattle Computer Products QDOS, SCP's Quick and Dirty Operating System in 1980, later renamed to 86-DOS (predecessor of MS-DOS)

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by cromag

I still have one! Well, it was a 7300, but I slipped in a half-height 40MB hard drive as soon as they were affordable (by the standards of the day). So my "wedge" doesn't have a monitor pedestal. The "user agent" had a weird Y2K bug -- it went from 1999 to 19100 -- but the core UNIX was okay.

I used to turn it on for the kids to show them what a "green screen" looked like.

I love that year value!! Yeah, we had to check a lot of local code, for that kind of issue too.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Maybe you should upgrade it to Plan 9 and shoot it into space.

As it happens, I have a version of Plan 9 lying around. I very much doubt I could get it to build on the 3B1, however. It likely has all sorts of things the C compiler provided with Unix back then wouldn't grok.
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Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Geez, I wonder who the other mod was?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As it happens, I have a version of Plan 9 lying around. I very much doubt I could get it to build on the 3B1, however. It likely has all sorts of things the C compiler provided with Unix back then wouldn't grok.

Maybe you two should just get together and Each Make A Cat Scream Very Interesting Memes... eh... Not A Nice Occupation of your time, actually. Mumble, mumble....

Maybe I should stop now. Yeah. That'd be a smart idea.

Spoiler:

@DMcCunney: I'm assuming your avatar is actually a version of Plan 9's mascotte, parodying the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Maybe you two should just get together and Each Make A Cat Scream Very Interesting Memes... eh... Not A Nice Occupation of your time, actually. Mumble, mumble....

Maybe I should stop now. Yeah. That'd be a smart idea.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

Re DOS = brain-damaged: Seattle Computer Products QDOS, SCP's Quick and Dirty Operating System in 1980, later renamed to 86-DOS (predecessor of MS-DOS)

Yep. Microsoft acquired it from SCP when IBM asked them for an OS for the IBM PC to go along with the version of BASIC they'd supplied. SCP based QDOS on a port of CP/M, to be the OS for a line of 8086 based machines using the S-100 bus.

IBM had previously spoken to Digital Research about getting a version of CP/M for the PC, and approached MS when that failed. (The apocryphal story back when was that DR President Gary Kildall preferred to fly his plane that day rather than meet with an IBM rep. The more likely story is that DR didn't like the terms IBM offered.) DR did produce CP/M-86 later. (And, for that matter, CP/M-68K for Motorola architecture machines.)

Back in the early days, you could get MSDOS, CPM-86, or the UCSD P-System for the PC. (The P-system was used in other IBM products like the DisplayWriter dedicated word processor.) MSDOS won the OS wars on the PC.

But the heritage was why early MSDOS looked a lot like CP/M internally, and why there were quirks like ^Z as an End Of File marker. CP/M needed that because up until 3.0, CP/M didn't store the size of a file in the directory entry, and the OS needed a marker to tell it where the file ended. I spent time back when configuring various apps to not use ^Z as EOF, and not treat it as one if encountered.

MSDOS took various notions from Unix, like tree-structured directories, pipes, and I/O redirection, but implemented them differently. I spent time back when trying to set my PC us to be as much like a Unix machine as possible. There were DOS versions of common Unix utilities around as shareware or freeware, but the solution proved to be a commercial offering called the MKS Toolkit. The Toolkit was a product of Canadian Mortice Kern Systems. The were consulting engineers who wrote it for their own internal use, and released it as a product when it reached a suitable point of development. It became the "tail that wagged the dog", and became their main business.

The Toolkit implemented every Unix command that made sense under a single-user, single tasking OS. The selling point for me was an implementation of the Unix Korn Shell that had everything except asynchronous background processes (because DOS didn't do that.) Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit replaced COMMAND.COM with INIT.EXE as the boot shell in CONFIG.SYS. Init loaded and displayed a Login: prompt on the screen. Enter a userid, and INIT called LOGIN, which looked in a Unix style passwd file. If it found a match, it changed to what was specified as that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's shell. Exit the shell, and INIT was reloaded and Login: displayed again.

I had ID's that ran the MKS Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, the shareware 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, and DesqView. I could switch environments without rebooting. When I was logged into the Korn shell, you had to dig to discover you weren't on a Unix machine.

The Toolkit stayed in the loop when I moved to Win 3.1, since it ran on top of DOS. Win 3.1 used Program Manager as the default shell, but you could change that in the SYSTEM.INI file. I collected an assortment of alternatives, and created MKS IDs for them. Enter one at the Login: prompt, and a script copied an appropriately edited copy of SYSTEM.INI specifying the desired shell over the master and ran Windows with the chosen shell. Worked fine.

When Win9X came around I had to drop it, but it was fun while it lasted.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Maybe you two should just get together and Each Make A Cat Scream Very Interesting Memes... eh... Not A Nice Occupation of your time, actually. Mumble, mumble....

Maybe I should stop now. Yeah. That'd be a smart idea.

It is largely possible to make EMACS look like VIM and vice versa.

But yes, stopping now would be a good idea, if only for the novelty value in this forum.

Spoiler:

@DMcCunney: I'm assuming your avatar is actually a version of Plan 9's mascotte, parodying the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space

It is indeed. Glenda the Bunny is a creation of Brooklyn cartoonist Renee French. I saw it, and said "A mascot created by an NYC artist, for a cool open source OS project that draws its name from what is arguably the worst SF film ever made. What's not to like?" and adopted it for use in places like this.

Glenda joins the Linux penguin, BSD daemon, and Go language gopher in the tiny clan of software mascots.
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Dennis

[wodin]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Yep... When Win9X came around I had to drop it, but it was fun while it lasted...
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Dennis

Wow Dennis, I though I was an old timey geek for having cut my teeth on a PDP-11 with RSTS/E and DEC BASIC-PLUS.

I bow down to you, you have me completely out classed!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by wodin

Wow Dennis, I though I was an old timey geek for having cut my teeth on a PDP-11 with RSTS/E and DEC BASIC-PLUS.

I bow down to you, you have me completely out classed!

I logged time on PDP 11s running RSTS-E and RSX-11m+.

The bank I worked for back then appeared to run one of everything ever made. My job was nebulously defined, and I interpreted it as "If it's a computer, I get to play with it". One of the things I would up doing was trying to get software written for and in use at another area of the bank up in my area. It was written in BASIC-PLUS to run on RSTS-E. The Small Systems Manager whose world included the DEC boxes couldn't officially assist, but could give me an account and have one of his operators teach me to mount a tape. That wound up with a conversation with the VP of Application Development, because the software required martrix support and the version of RSTS-E we ran wasn't genned with it. ("I gen RSTS-E, I not gen matrix support. I re-gen for you!") I also had fun tracking down the developer who wrote it and getting him in for a conversation with our Finance Director who wanted us using it.

The bank could and regularly did make mistakes that would kill smaller companies. I accumulated a list of "Things to Not Do If I'm Ever CEO of a Major Corporation".
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by issybird

It's like tea. Low tea is the late afternoon meal of dainties, watercress sandwiches, tiny cakes and so forth. High tea is a working class meal, essentially supper, with lots of stodge.

Well, it once was. These days, high tea is what used to be low tea, stylized and mannered, for those rather removed from the working class.

But lots of things have that happen to them where food is concerned. The late mystery writer Nicholas Freeling (the Inspector Van Der Valk and Henri Castang books) was a chef before turning full time to writing. He fulminated in one autobiography about a food writer in a newspaper proclaiming Turbot and Plaice as ingredients in bouillabaisse, and pointed out that it originated as a fisherman's stew, prepared from the bits and pieces of the day's catch they couldn't sell at the market. But it turned from a proper working man's dinner into a gourmet item, with attendant misconceptions, including proper ingredients.
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Dennis

[PeterT]

We almost need an I'm an old nerd thread.

My first exposure to computing was in Grade 8 and was via a 2741 terminal to IBM using APL. The next year we switched to IP Sharp and their APL environment. Skip forward a few years and we also had an IBM 5150 running APL. The next year (my final High School) we moved to an HP 9830A which used Basic, and had both a cassette tape for storage and a card reader (pencil marked, not punched).

After that it was off to University where I was exposed to Burroughs 6700 via timesharing, an IBM 360 via punched cards and LSI-11s running RT 11. Of course in first year my friends and I used the LSI 11s to enter our assignments, sent them to the 6700 and on to a high speed card punch, before feeding the card deck into the card reader on the 360. It sure made getting nicely formatted punched cards easy.

Then that summer off to a job where we had an Amdahl V6 and a Dec-10, and a conversion project was underway from MFT to MVS. I still marvel at the fact that the V6 had a whopping 8 MB of memory, and it supported most of the data processing for an international company!

Those were the days!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

This isn't an insecure, elderly client. I can kinda get that. This is a young person. An ADULT.

No, it's not an adult. It should be, but adulthood is an outgrowth of maturity, and some folks never attain it despite chronological age.

There are too many folks these days with colossal senses of entitlement resulting from parents at pains to gratify their every whim who have internalized the notion that they can have whatever it is whenever they want it simply because they want it, and who are totally lost at sea when they leave home and discover the world is not so accommodating.
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Dennis