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Operatings Systems: reminiscences

Blue Mountain said:
I'm going to recommend she learn Inkscape , which apparently is a decent alternative to Draw and works on Windows. And there are lots of open source photo enhancing programs for Windows out there, which is all she was using Photoshop for.
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OT: Try LibreOffice Draw, depending on what she needs. Inkscape is, AFIK, primarily for producing SVGs; LibreOffice Draw is a generic drawing program.
 
catsmate said:
abaddon said:
Anyone recall the Santa Cruz Operation?
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Unfortunately.
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I hope you're not confusing the Santa Cruz Operation (makers of multiple acceptable niche Unix variants) with The SCO Group (patent and copyright trolls that tried to sue Linux out of existence, a renamed Caldera International funded by Microsoft). The latter did constantly refer to themselves as simply "SCO" in court documents (thus causing a similar misnaming by news outlets) for the likely purpose of connecting themselves to the former's legacy, in spite of no actual connection, so such confusion is understandable.
 
grmcdorman said:
OT: Try LibreOffice Draw, depending on what she needs. Inkscape is, AFIK, primarily for producing SVGs; LibreOffice Draw is a generic drawing program.
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Thanks. I'm leaning toward Inkscape because apparently it can import CDR files directly, which LibreOffice Draw can't. My friend has a large collection of CDR files she'd like to be able to work with. Alternatively, she could use Inkscape for import from CDR and export to a format LibreOfffice Draw can use, but that complicates the workflow.
 
psionl0 said:
Why would anybody do that? MS-BASIC v2.0 was THE operating system for the C64. Once you learned all of the POKE commands, you had all you needed.
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You had to learn DOS if you wanted to do anything serious with the disk drives. The D stands for disk.

Commodore DOS was unusual in that it resided on the disk drive itself and you used it by opening a channel on the IEEE interface or serial interface and sending commands to it using the print# command.
 
CORed said:
If you know what you are doing, you can fix damn near anything on a Linux or UNIX system if you can get a shell (command prompt) and a text editor working. Not that those fixes are necessarily obvious or easy, but the GUI for Linux is not as deeply embedded in the OS as it is for Windows, and most of the configuration lives in text files. In fact, it is not unusual for admins to not even bother to installing a GUI on servers.
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Yep. I know a bunch of Linux guys - one of them set this box up for me. But when it broke, I was utterly clueless. The last time I worked in a command line was DOS.

Blue Mountain said:
Do you know how many years ago that was? Linux has come a long way since 2010.
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It was 2018.

I worked in an office once where we had a large and powerful rare-earth magnet, with a label on it that read "unformat.exe".

I once pinned a floppy disk to the side of a metal cabinet with it and left it there for six months. After prying it off, I put the disk into a computer and it was 100% readable.
 
jeremyp said:
You had to learn DOS if you wanted to do anything serious with the disk drives. The D stands for disk.

Commodore DOS was unusual in that it resided on the disk drive itself and you used it by opening a channel on the IEEE interface or serial interface and sending commands to it using the print# command.
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I didn't interpret that as being about the 1541 drive.

I found the commands primitive yet powerful - the exact opposite of GUI.
 
Blue Mountain said:
Speaking of DOS, anyone here use 4DOS, QEdit, PC-Write, or TSE (The Semware Editor)?
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There was an internal-to-IBM editor called (iirc) E that was available on internal forums that eventually became the editor shipped with OS/2. It was one of the editors that the very day after IBM announced its new measure of programmer productivity would kloc had new profiles that generated shedloads of code. Calls to APIs blossomed with all the optional and default values appearing as if by magic in the code. Xedit for VM was the other one.
 
My memory is getting hazy but my MSc project was coded in Prolog (that I'm certain of) running on Ultrix on a VAX (it was certainly UNIX in some shape or form). The dissertation itself was written in vi and formatted with nroff and troff, which gives you some idea of my vintage.
 
I recall that the "operating system" for my first computer occupied 256 bytes (bytes, not kilobytes or megabytes) of ROM. It booted up the computer and provided a monitor allowing you to enter and run a program through a hexadecimal keyboard. The computer had 1K of RAM.

My second computer had 2K of ROM and a whopping 4K of RAM (of which just 2K was available for programs). When I upgraded to 16K (14K available!) I had a hard time believing I could ever find a use for that much memory.
 
Among the first computers I worked on after college was the MicroVAX. We supported a battlefield simulation used to train commanders. When we hosted an exercise, hundreds of MicroVAXes were networked together in a huge building on a Navy base. About 10 years ago at a trade show, I saw the same software running on a laptop.

Edit: Oh, that wasn't on the topic of operating systems. .Okay ... At the time of one of the huge exercises involving hundreds of MicroVAXes and hundred of operators and trainees, VMS on the MicroVAX had a bug. If you overran the keyboard buffer, the computer would crash. During the big exercise, a Colonel or General came in to see it. He dropped a notebook on a desk and it landed on the corner of a MicroVAX's keyboard. After a few seconds that computer crashed bring down the whole game. It took hours to recover back to the previous checkpoint.
 
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Are you trying to give me PTSD? I was a systems programmer on an MVS 370/XA system. There were two schools of thought back in the day. One was that you didn't run your sever into the ground and always had spare capacity so that throughput and reliability were good. The other was that you maxed it out so that you get maximum return on the the dollar. I worked for a place with the latter philosophy. So there was always something that wasn't going as well as people wanted it to.


We got a fancy "email" system installed on the mainframe, that worked on a 3270 terminal. Of course someone had to send out an email to the General Manager asking him "just who do you think you are", and copy in everyone else.



There was no way of working out who sent it.
 
a_unique_person said:
We got a fancy "email" system installed on the mainframe, that worked on a 3270 terminal. Of course someone had to send out an email to the General Manager asking him "just who do you think you are", and copy in everyone else.

There was no way of working out who sent it.
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If it was PROFS on VM/CMS that was a train wreck. OfficeVision wasn't much better.
 
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