On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 17:51, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I had a Unix machine at home before I got the XT clone. I was Tech > Support Manager for a small Unix systems house that resold AT&T kit > when AT&T was in the computer business, and an AT&T 3B1 joined the > family. [...]
I have heard of the 3B1, 3B2 etc., but never actually seen hardware. The anti-monopoly breakup of "Ma Bell" was about the time I entered secondary school. Over in the British Isles, AT&T were a very minor, little-known foreign company with no real influence and I am not sure that they sold hardware at all. The European computer industry very much went its own way in the 1980s and American companies were just one among many vendors. Commodore and Atari were significant, but Tandy (Radio Shack) were not. I never was a TRS-anything outside of shop display units in Tandy stores. I think they were just too expensive. Similarly I read articles praising Apple for the first sub-US$1000 home computer, but since that was twice the price of a used car, they were way too expensive for the UK market and I don't think I personally knew anyone with an Apple home computer. Sinclair Research with its sub-GB£100 home computers made the splash here. These machines were affordable to ordinary families, costing just a month or two of disposable income. Apple computers cost most of a year's disposable income. > As of DOS 2.X, > MS adopted a hierarchical file system, tree structured directories, > I/O redirection and other Unix concepts, but implemented thyem very > differently.) True. MS did have a dual-OS strategy at one point: Xenix for the high end, DOS for the low end, but it never panned out. There's a lot of disinformation about why they picked the forward slash for switches and the backslash for directories. The truth is that it was from DEC TOPS-10 and nothing to do with CP/M. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-backslash-as-path-separator/ > After looking at an assortment of freeware and shareware versions of > Unix commands, I bought a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit. [...] Heard of it. Never saw it. I work for a Linux vendor, and I've been using xNix since 1988 and SCO Xenix 286, but I've never been a fan of xNix. Mainly because I am not a programmer and I never liked C. Did you ever look at Coherent? For the time it was the most impressive xNix for PC-compatibles. It's open source now. > [...] When I was booted into the Korn > shell, you had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on an Honest-to > $DEITY Unix machine. (And I was able to craft an equivalent of the > Unix lp print spooler using the DOS print command and Korn shell > scripts and aliases.) Very impressive! > Right. You were in the UK. I'm aware of the stuff you ran, but never > have a chance to play with it here. Yup. It goes both ways. PCs never caught on over here until Amstrad made the first affordable clones -- the PC 1512 and PC 1640. These were about 1986 or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512 They were something like ¼ of the price of American clones such as Compaq, which meant that these were expensive business computers. Amstrads were just about affordable as quite expensive home computers. My Archimedes came out a year later and was so much faster than an Amstrad that it could run a PC Emulator entirely in software and still give usable performance. I ran tools like QuickBASIC on mine, and did real work on it. It had about the performance of a 2-3MHz 8088, but with a *very* fast hard disk (as the Acorn OS was caching it underneath). So a 1987 Acorn was in the region of 20-30× faster than a 1986 PC clone. And yet Acorn failed and the PC thrived. It's all about the apps and always was. Acorn's CPU, the ARM, is of course now the best-selling CPU in the world, the basis of the new "Apple Silicon" Macs and Microsoft is still trying to get Windows to run *well* on it. > Er, the OS might actually reside on ROM chips, but I assume there was > at least some RAM usage when calling OS functions. The OS might be in > ROM, but OS routines would need scratch space in RAM. Oh, yes, absolutely. But it meant that a 1MB machine was entirely usable and you got _most_ of that meg for your own apps. You could even have a RAMdisk in part of that 1MB and still have a usable amount of space. > (And the DR DOS variant of DOS originated from requests by Digital > Research customers for a ROMmable DOS. MS had not seperated code > space and data space, so MSDOS c0uld not be put in ROM. DR DOS could.) I did not know that! I knew it was ROMmable but not that this was the genesis of DR DOS. Thanks! > I have OS/2 here, but never got to install it on anything. OS/2 was > technically superior to Win3.1, and could still be found in kiosk > applications not that long back. I had OS/2 Warp on a specialized > telephony server at an employer. It was a black box. It just ran. > If it hung, reboot it. I never had to dig into OS/2 itself. It was and is horrific to install. (I have not tried Arca Noæ Blue Lion but I do have eComStation and it's a nightmare to try to install.) But in 1992-1994 or so, it was so far in advance of Windows in actual use that it was embarrassing. > I had 8MB on the 386 running Win3.1, watched my Unix machine run > rings around it, and looked at Redmond, WA, and said "What are you > *doing*?" I still say that on occasion. Well, quite! > There are bigger, faster boxes out there. A friend who is an > architect at an ISP talks about machines using nVME being "wicked > fast". So they are, but you get a machine specced to use it with it > pre-installed. Everything I've seen says "Good luck on trying to > upgrade to it after the fact on older kit." Agreed. > The fascinating bit for me is that the distinction between RAM and > disk is steadily blurring. Things like nVME make it possible to have > what works like RAM but is non-volatile storage whose content will > survive a reboot. > > We are just scratching the surface here. I agree. Actually this was the subject of a talk I delivered at the FOSDEM conference last month, which was a follow-up to my talk at FOSDEM 2020. They may interest folk here. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/77065.html (2020 talk, slides, video etc. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/69099.html -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
