Liam on Linux

How is Haiku different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:31:16 GMT

I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him, my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/

Unix is a 1960s design for minicomputers. Minicomputers are text-only standalone multiuser computers. That is why things like handling serial lines (/dev/tty -- short for TeleTYpe) are buried deep in the core of Unix, but networking and graphics aren't.

There is an absolute tonne of legacy baggage like this in Unix. All Unixes, including Linux kernel 7.0. We do not use minicomputers any more; nobody even makes them. We don't have multiuser computers any more. In fact, we have multi computers per user. Modern servers are just PCs with lots of connections from other computers not from people.

In the early 1980s the Lisa flopped because it was $10K, but the Mac did well because it was $2.5K and had a GUI and no shell. The future, woo, etc.

The Mac was black and white, 1 sound channel, no hard disk, no expansion slots, and in cutting down the Lisa, Apple discarded multitasking.

Enter the Hi-Toro Lorraine. Intended to be the ultimate games console, with a powerful full-16 bit Motorola 68000 chip (a minicomputer CPU on a single die) amazing colour graphics, multichannel stereo sound, but it could plug into a TV.

Commodore bought it, renamed it the Amiga, and tried to develop a fancy new ambitious OS, called Commodore Amiga Operating System: CAOS.

They couldn't get it to work so it was canned, and a replacement hastily cobbled together from the research OS Tripos written in BCPL and some new bits. It had a Mac-like windowing GUI, full preemptive multitasking (with no memory protection because the 68000 couldn't do that), and it fit on a single DD floppy (~880 kB) and into 512 kB (1/2 MB) of RAM.

It was a big hit and set a really high bar for expectations of what an inexpensive home computer could do. It ran rings around the Mac and could emulate a Mac with excellent compatibility.

A decade later a lot of people missed that. PCs and PC OSes were very boring by comparison. Sure, reliable, fairly good multitasking by then, dull grey UIs. Linux was a thing but it was for minicomputer fetishists only, and looked like it came from 20 years before Windows or Mac. (Which in a way it did.)

So a former Apple exec set up a company to make a modern geek's dream machine. Everything had true colour graphics and stereo sound now, so that was a given, not a selling point. It had to have a snazzy very fast very smooth GUI, it had to have excellent multitasking, screaming CPU performance because RISC chips were starting to take off. Mainstream computers struggled with >1 CPU so multiple RISC CPUs was the selling point, and amazing blindingly smooth multimedia support, because PCs and Macs could just about play one jerky grainy little video in a postage-stamp sized window in 256 grainy pixelated colours.

The BeBox was to be the mid-1990s geek's dream computer. Part of how they did it was an all-new multitasking single user OS with a very smooth built in GUI desktop, best-in-industry media support, built-in TCP/IP networking. All the cool bits of Windows NT, multitasking as good as Linux but pretty, a desktop better than Windows 95, and it threw all the multiuser stuff in the trash, all the boring server stuff in the trash, because FOSS OSes did that tedious business stuff.

It was beautiful.

It flopped.

The company pivoted to selling its OS on the other PowerPC kit vendor: on PowerMacs, with reverse-engineered drivers. It flopped. Classic MacOS was just barely good enough: crap multitasking, crap virtual memory, but loads of 1st class leading pro apps. BeOS had almost none.

So Be pivoted again. It ported its shiny new C++ OS to x86. You could buy multiprocessor x86 PCs in the late 1990s. I had one.

It was amazing on PC kit. It booted in under a tenth of the time that Windows sluggishly lurched into life. It could do blinding 3D like spinning solid shapes while movies played on their surfaces, and it did it all in software.

I reviewed it. I loved it.

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...

But it still had almost no apps and while Microsoft could not prevent OEMs installing it, it could prevent them from installing a bootloader:

https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

Be sued.

https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft...

It wasn't enough.

It pivoted into internet appliances but too late.

Me, I felt it should have done a deal with Acorn which was the only company with affordable multiprocessor ARM workstations at the time.

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html

Haiku is an all-FOSS ground-up rewrite, but with the original desktop, which was FOSS. It's a lovely mixture of the Classic MacOS Finder and the Windows 95 Explorer, with the best bits of both but none of the bad bits.

Haiku is lovely. It's got a huge amount of Linux compatibility now. That means lots of apps, fixing the one big killer problem of BeOS.

But it is much bigger and much slower. It's still 10x smaller and 10x faster than any FOSS Unix but the original could boot in 5-10 seconds to the desktop in 1999 on a Pentium 200 from a PATA hard disk. A modern PC with an SSD should load it in half a second, but Haiku still takes 10 seconds or so. Good, sure, but not as impressive as BeOS was 25 years ago.

[Repurposed from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520510 ]

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Passing thoughts on Universal Blue and their ilk...

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:20:38 GMT

It is very odd to me to watch OStree-based distros starting to take off and win recruits.

The only reason Red Hat needed to invent this very complex mechanism was because RH does not officially have a COW-snapshot capable filesystem in its enterprise distro.

A filesystem with snapshots makes software installation transactional. You take a snapshot, install some software, and if it doesn't work right, you can revert to the snapshot. (With very slightly more flexible snapshots, you can limit the snapshot to just some part of the directory tree, but this is not essential; it merely permits more flexibility.)

In other words, you are a long way toward what in database language is called ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability). It makes your software inastallation transactional: an update either happens completely (A), you can check it is valid (C) and works (I), or it can be totally reverted, and the system restored to the earlier state (D).

That's a good thing. It means you can safely automate software deployment knowing that if it goes wrong you have an Undo mechanism. Databases got this 50+ years ago; in the 21st century it's making its way to FOSS OSes.

Do this in the filesystem and it's easy. SUSE's implementation is so simple, it's basically a bunch of shell scripts, and it can be turned on and off. You can run an immutable OS, reboot for updates, and if you need, disable it, go in and fix the system, and then turn it back on again.

You don't need a COW filesystem for this. But if you have a snapshotting FS underneath, transactional software maintenance becomes an order or two of magnitude easier to achieve.

The underlying philosophies of Unix are "keep it in files" and "keep it simple". That's why it didn't even have a file-hiding mechanism -- the dot-file thing was an accidental, emergent property.

Keep it simple, keep it visible, keep it human-readable and human-fixable.

Because the more complex you make it, the more likely it is to go wrong, and some poor sap is going to have to fix it. Do not get in their way. Instead, think about them, allow for that, and help keep their life easy.

This is because SUSE leans very heavily on Btrfs and that is the critical weakness -- Btrfs is only half finished and is not robust.

But RH removed Btrfs from RHEL and Btrfs was the only GPL COW filesystem, so core infrastructure in the distro means no COW on RH. Oracle Linux has Btrfs -- the FS was developed at Oracle, after all -- and so does Alma.

(Yes I know, Fedora put it back, but the key thing is, it only uses Btrfs only for compression so that Flatpak looks less horrendously inefficient. Fedora doesn't use snapshots.)

With no COW FS, RH had to invent a way to do transactional updates without filesystem support. Result, OStree. Git, but for binaries.

(And yes, everyone developing FOSS uses Git, but almost nobody understands Git.

You know that if there's an Xkcd about it, it must be true.

Embedding something you don't understand in your OS design is a VERY BAD PLAN.)

With OStree your FS is a virtual one, it's not real, it's synthesized on the fly from a local repository. The real FS is hidden and can't be hand-edited or anything. It generates the OS filesystem tree on the fly, you see. OS-tree.

Use it just for GUI apps, that's Flatpak.

Use it for the whole OS, that's OStree. It is so mind-shreddingly complicated that you can't do package management any more, you can't touch the underlying FS. So you need a whole new set of layers on top: virtual directories on top of the main virtual directory, and some bits with extra pseudo-filesystems layered on top of that to make some bits read-write.

It's like the scene in the Wasp Factory where under the skull plate it's just writhing maggots. I recoll in horror and revulsion when I see it.

So it's deeply bizarre to read blog posts praising all the cool stuff you can do with it.

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My review of the Tadpole-RDI Ultra Book lli from 25 years ago this month

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:28:14 GMT

I came across my name in a scan of the February 2001 Personal Computer World.

Tadpole-RDI Ultra Book lli

This transportable SPARC workstation is more than just a toy for wealthy geeks

Today, thex86 PC architecture scales from PDAs to enterprise servers, and it's difficult to point to a line that separates PCs from RISC workstations and servers. Traditional delimiters - lots of storage, high-speed buses, fast processors and multi-user operating systems - are increasingly blurred. Still, differences remain in scalability and reliability.

High-end Unix systems support dozens of processors and hundreds of gigabytes of memory, and multiple machines can be clustered together to share the load. As the hardware and software are closely controlled, unlike the thousands of independent vendors of PC components, these systems can offer 99.999 per cent availability. This means downtimes of a few minutes per year and the ability to remove and replace hardware and software components while the system is in use.

This is why companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and SGI still sell these sophisticated and expensive computers. Arguably the dominant supplier is Sun, whose SPARC processor-powered systems, running Sun's Unix variant, Solaris, are popular in educational, scientific and financial markets, and run many lnternet and ecommerce servers.

The UltraBook lli is a laptop-sized transportable Sun compatible SPARC workstation with an internal battery that is claimed to last for one hour. Normally, though, you'd wire it to a network and the mains.

The base specification is impressive: 400 MHz UltraSPARC lli processor, 256 MB of RAM, integrated 10/100Base-T Ethernet, UltraWide SCSI and a 14.1 inch, 1024 x 768 TFT LCD display driven by an ATi Mach64 graphics adaptor capable of both 8-bit and 24-bit operation. There are three device bays, two of which hold a 12GB EIDE hard disk and a battery as standard. Supported options include one battery and two disk drives, or three drives and mains-only operation. Our machine had the maximum 1GB of RAM and a second 12GB drive.

There are also two CardBus slots for two Type ll or one Type III device, although Tadpole only supports certain LAN and 56K modem cards. External floppy and CD drives are available as optional extras, as is a Sun Creator3D graphics module that occupies the left rear bay. With either display, the machine supports simultaneous use of LCD and external Sun monitors - or SVGA with a supplied converter cable. Another cable provides one parallel and two serial ports.

Despite offering a choice of OpenWindows or CDE/Motif GUIs, Solaris feels distinctly clunky and old-fashioned compared to Linux, and we would have liked to see tools such as Perl and Samba supplied as standard. More recent versions of Solaris should fix this, and Sun plans to offer the GNOME desktop as an option in the future. The machine should also run Linux (or xBSD) happily, and this is likely to offer better peripheral support and more personal productivity applications.

This isn't a personal computer; its target market is engineers and salespeople who need to take substantial Solaris applications, from large databases to network management packages, into the field.

Compared to a conventional Sun UltralO workstation of equivalent specification, the UItra Book is about twice the price. However, Tadpole estimates that if it were carried on-site three times a month, against the cost of shipping a conventional workstation to a customer's site, an UltraBook would pay for itself in just over a year.

For such users, the UItraBook is unbeatable -- and it's also a desirable toy with serious pose factor for wealthy geeks.

At 326 x 296 x 58 mm (W x D x H), the unit is nearly 1.5 times as big as an average notebook PC. This leaves room for an excellent 97-key US-layout keyboard, although the layout is idiosyncratic, with the cursor keys above and to the right of the main block. There's a three-button touchpad and a single Sun mouse/keyboard port for external devices.

The components are good, but build quality is disappointing, with flimsy plastic protective flaps and external labelling in blurry white paint. This may be RDI's influence -- early Tadpole systems exuded quality, but this one feels more like an economy clone notebook than a £16,000 top-of-the-range machine.

There's no meaningful way to compare its performance with a PC's, though in workstation terms it has a SPECint95 score of 16.1 and SPECfp95 of 20.4. The MHz rating belies the power of the RISC processor - by comparison, a 500M Hz Pentium III returns around 20.5 and 14.2 respectively. Although Tadpole also offers Solaris 2.51 and 2.6, our machine came preloaded with Solaris 7, plus Star Office 5.2 and the HotJava browser, with Netscape 4.51 on CD. Tadpole also preloads some useful accessories for power management, suspend/ resume and hot-switchable network configuration.

DETAILS

★★★★

PRICE $24,640 (approx. £16,993)

CONTACT Tadpole-RDI 01223 428 200

www.tadpolerdi.com

PROS: Workstation-class power in a laptop; versatile expansion options

CONS: Large; heavy; fragile external parts; cheap feel

OVERALL: Alone in its class for enterprise computing on the move, although the experience doesn't quite live up to the price

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What's the point of lightweight code with modern computers?

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 22:38:08 GMT

I think there are many. Some examples: * The fastest code is the code you don't run. Smaller = faster, and we all want faster. Moore's law is over, Dennard scaling isn't affordable any more, smaller feature sizes are getting absurdly difficult and therefore expensive to fab. So if we want our computers to keep getting faster as we've got used to over the last 40-50 years then the only way to keep delivering that will be to start ruthlessly optimising, shrinking, finding more efficient ways to implement what we've got used to. Smaller systems are better for performance. * The smaller the code, the less there is to go wrong. Smaller doesn't just mean faster, it should mean simpler and cleaner too. Less to go wrong. Easier to debug. Wrappers and VMs and bytecodes and runtimes are bad: they make life easier but they are less efficient and make issues harder to troubleshoot. Part of the Unix philosophy is to embed the KISS principle. So that's performance and troubleshooting. We aren't done. * The less you run, the smaller the attack surface. Smaller code and less code means fewer APIs, fewer interfaces, less points of failure. Look at djb's decades-long policy of offering rewards to people who find holes in qmail or djbdns. Look at OpenBSD. We all need better more secure code. Smaller simpler systems built from fewer layers means more security, less attack surface, less to audit. Higher performance, and easier troubleshooting, and better security. There's 3 reasons. Practical examples... The Atom editor spawned an entire class of app: Electron apps, Javascript on Node, bundled with Chromium. Slack, Discord, VSCode: there are multiple apps used by tens to hundreds of millions of people now. Look at how vast they are. Balena Etcher is a, what, nearly 100 MB download to write an image to USB? Native apps like Rufus do it in a few megabytes. Smaller ones like USBimager do it in hundreds of kilobytes. A dd command in under 100 bytes. Now some of the people behind Atom wrote Zed. It's 10% of the size and 10x the speed, in part because it's a native Rust app. The COSMIC desktop looks like GNOME, works like GNOME Shell, but it's smaller and faster and more customisable because it's native Rust code. GNOME Shell is Javascript running on an embedded copy of Mozilla's Javascript runtime. Just like dotcoms wanted to dis-intermediate business, remove middlemen and distributors for faster sales, we could use disintermediation in our software. Fewer runtimes, better smarter compiled languages so we can trap more errors and have faster and safer compiled native code. Smaller, simpler, cleaner, fewer layers, less abstractions: these are all goods things which are desirable. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson knew this. That's why Research Unix evolved into Plan 9, which puts way more stuff through the filesystem to remove whole types of API. Everything's in a container all the time, the filesystem abstracts the network and the GUI and more. Under 10% of the syscalls of Linux, the kernel is 5MB of source, and yet it has much of Kubernetes in there. Then they went further, replaced C too, made a simpler safer language, embedded its runtime right into the kernel, and made binaries CPU-independent, and turned the entire network-aware OS into a runtime to compete with the JVM, so it could run as a browser plugin as well as a bare-metal OS. Now we have ubiquitous virtualisation so lean into it: separate domains. If your user-facing OS only runs in a VM then it doesn't need a filesystem or hardware drivers, because it won't see hardware, only virtualised facilities, so rip all that stuff out. Your container host doesn't need to have a console or manage disks. This is what we should be doing. This is what we need to do. Hack away at the code complexity. Don't add functionality, remove it. Simplify it. Enforce standards by putting them in the kernel and removing dozens of overlapping implementations. Make codebases that are smaller and readable by humans. Leave the vast bloated stuff to commercial companies and proprietary software where nobody gets to read it except LLM bots anyway.
[Adapted from an HN comment.)

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How the Linux-vs-BSD culture clash looked in the 1980s/1990s

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:09:42 GMT

(Repurposed HN comment.)

The BSD/Linux thing was there right from the start, but it was more complicated than a simple us-vs-them. The thing is that there were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.

But there were other prejudices as well.

In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.

There was no local bus yet, no IDE or EIDE, slow AT expansion bus, no processor cache, and so on -- meaning a forest of proprietary or semi-proprietary extensions and buses and special slots. This opened up a market for a vendor to port to Brand X PCs and Brand X's own weird storage and display.

Enter Interactive Corp, which tried to combat this, and worked on Unix ports for various vendors' hardware. Expensive OS for expensive machines.

And there was SCO which wasn't proud, wasn't fancy, ran on commodity kit, and didn't try to be a general purpose OS like that white lab-coat brigade expected. So SCO Xenix worked, and you could run apps on it, but in the box there was no C compiler, no networking, no X11, nothing. It was a runtime-only OS and it was still expensive.

Everyone sneered at it but it did the job. I put in a lot of it.

Then if you weren't paying, someone else was who would never see the word "Unix", there were all the vastly expensive RISC boxes with their vastly expensive expansions and vastly expensive -- well, everything. Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, loads of company would sell you rooms full of workstations, single-user minicomputers with big screens. They cost as much as a house.

Actual BSD ran on actual minicomputers that cost as much as a small street of houses and those dudes wouldn't even look at PCs.

Which left a market for enterprising vendors squeezing Unix-like things onto low end kit.

Various flavours of BSD, including BSD/OS; SCO Xenix in both 286 and 386 versions; Interactive 386ix; several vendors' own-brand licensed Unixes, including Dell, later, an official Intel one that mainly ran on Intel's own pizza-box workstations.

And all the proprietary computer vendors entered the game too. Commodore did Unix for high-end Amigas; Atari did Unix for high-end STs; Acorn did Unix for high-end Archimedes; Apple did Unix for high-end Macs, allegedly originally just to get a US military deal; etc. etc.

All these are still $1000 per instance OSes though.

Then, universally scorned, MWC Coherent, a real Unix-like OS for $99... and QNX, which was apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford.

(As a European I never saw this but it was in all the ads in all the US mags. There was a lot of "cheap" American stuff we didn't get over here, like paid-for shareware. We had metered phone calls so no BBS scene. Only rich Americans got that stuff.)

Coherent was so good that AT&T accused them of theft and sent Dennis Ritchie around to check. He came back and said, no, it's legit.

And Andy Tanenbaum's Minix, a toy for students, not for real work, but essentially free with a book.

These latter indirectly showed that you _could_ copy AT&T's holy grail and make it work, so while Richard Stallman was building all the tools but choosing the wrong kernel and sabotaging the whole thing, along came this Finnish kid with his learning exercise, and excited beardies on Usenet said that it actually worked and it was at least as good as Minix and was getting to Coherent levels.

So the point is, there was a spectrum, from legendary machines made from purest unobtainium, to ludicrously expensive x86 stuff for very specific (and ludicrously expensive models) of PC kit, to the still ludicrously expensive SCO that got no respect, to "cheap" stuff that nobody had in Europe because it had no business purpose. There was legendary free stuff in America but it only ran on room sized computers that cost as much as a lottery win, so I never saw it. "Free" as in "it's free if you're so rich it doesn't matter."

And "free" shareware that was "free" as in "the phone bill to get it will cost more than just buying a commercial version in a shiny box".

But there _was_ a spectrum, from vastly expensive to "a small business will pay for this", down to theoretical stuff in America that you could dream about... which paved the way until the point where an ordinary PC was a 32-bit machine with a memory management unit and hundreds of megs of disk and several megs of RAM, and suddenly, this Lin-Min-Gnu-ix thing was doable, if you had a beard and a checked shirt with black jeans and wore hiking boots every day.

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Once upon a time, Windows looked good

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:43:54 GMT

No, honest, it did.

Windows 2 was kinda ugly.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203

Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30

Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did.

95 improved it.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2

Tasteful greys, spot colour.

NT 4 improved that a bit more.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt40

Categorised Start menu, for instance. But nearly identical.

95/NT4 were visibly inspired by NeXTstep, IMHO the most beautiful GUI ever written.

Then it all started to go a bit wrong. The first pebbles bouncing down the mountainside presaging a vast avalanche.

Windows 98.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win98

IE4 built in so Microsoft didn't get broken up my the US DOJ. Explorer rendered local content via HTML. Ugly extra toolbars. Some floating, some embedded in the task bar. Ugly gradients and blends in window title bars.

Cheap and plastic and tacky.

But that is around the time that media and gaming PCs went mainstream, home internet use (often over dialup) went mainstream, and the alternatives died out (Amiga, ST & GEM, Arm & RISC OS) or very nearly died (classic MacOS, NeXT merger, Rhapsody).

So it's what many saw first and loved and remembered.

Result, people write entire new OSes designed in affectionate homage:

https://serenityos.org/

Look at the toolbars. Look at the textures in the title bars. This isn't Win9x, this is specifically Win98.

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/i...

Specifically:

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/h...

<- textured title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/t...

<- gradients in title bars

https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%201-x/m...

<- Windows-style colour schemes

KDE started out as a reproduction of Windows 98/98SE by a team who didn't realise that what they were looking at was WordPerfect 5.x instead of WordPerfect 4.x -- as the late great Guy Kewney put it:

"WordPerfect 4.2 was a bicycle. A great bicycle. Everyone agreed it was a great bicycle, just about the best. So what Wordperfect did was, they put together a committee, looked at the market, and said: 'what we'll do is, we'll put 11 more wheels on it'."

Win98 is Win95 festooned with pointless needless Internet widgetry because the DOJ was about to split MS into separate apps and OS companies, because MS drove Netscape into bankruptcy by bundling IE free of charge with Windows.

Strip all that junk off and what's left underneath is a better UI. But the German kids writing their "Kool Desktop Environment" didn't realise.

After that came WinME and Windows 2000, which turned down the bling a bit as the lawsuit was over, but it was only a blip.

Then came XP with its "Fischer-Price" themes.

Then Vista with gratuitous transparency everywhere because GDI.EXE had been ripped out and replaced with a compositor and that's no fun if you don't use some 3D features like see-through stuff.

Then 7 toned that down a bit and everyone love it.

Then the universally detested Win8, and then that was toned down and the Start menu put back for Win10, which is roughly what UKUI and Deepin copied in China, or Wubuntu in the West.

Then Win11, as copied by AnduinOS and a few others, which for this long-term Windows user is the worst release ever. I can't even have a vertical taskbar any more. It's abhorrent.

(Content repurposed from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910

Inspired by this:

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and )

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The more recent history of DR GEM

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:19:54 GMT

A tech blogger called Nemanja Trifunovic posted an enjoyable article called the History of the GEM Desktop Environment.

It's a nice piece -- it's very good on the early history.

It does, however, totally omit much of the later development.

When Caldera released the source code, it also released the unfinished multitasking GEM/XM version.

Another version was X/GEM on FlexOS [PDF], DR's multitasking RTOS line, and at least some forms of UNIX.

DR FlexOS eventually evolved into IBM 4680 OS.

And that evolved into IBM 4690 OS, later sold as Toshiba 4690 OS.

This supports a GUI, which I think is based on X/GEM -- as well as TCP/IP networking, app development in Java, and more. It was sold until about 10 years ago.

I don't think I've ever seen a screenshot.

There have also been interesting later FOSS developments.

On the ST platform, TOS + GEM evolved in multiple directions. Some were proprietary, such as MagiC.

A FOSS one became MiNT, which is sometimes called FreeMINT.

This became the basis of TOS 4, so "Mint is Not TOS" was redefined to mean Mint is Now TOS.

There's a complete distro of FreeMINT with the TeraDesk multitasking desktop, called AFROS. It targets a FOSS ST emulator called ARANyM.

One version is on Github.

Some very minimal firmware to emulate just enough of TOS to boot the MINT replacement OS was developed, called EmuTOS.

This eventually grew into a very complete FOSS clone of TOS+GEM. It even supports some Amiga hardware now!

There's a 4min demo on Youtube.

EmuTOS went from a stub ROM that just reproduced something analogous to the kernel of MS-DOS to a full graphical OS, using the PC GEM source code that Caldera made GPL.

So there is a lovely full circle here, where the ST version continued for years after Windows killed off the PC version, but then the PC version got open-sourced and was used to revive and modernise the ST version in the 21st century.

There's been a lot more GEM-related development in the last decade or two than you'd expect. This makes me happy.

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21st century IT is kayfabe: it's all fake, just for show

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:35:27 GMT

In response to Apple vs. Facebook is Kayfabe...

He’s right, though.

We are now at 25% of the way through C21. Most of C21 IT today is “kayfabe”: deliberately fake, to fool the audience.

SaaS: fake corporate IT services for company directors too cheap to hire competent IT staff.

The lie: it’s OK and safe to let other companies run your IT for you.

The truth: if it matters, own it, run it yourself.

Public cloud: it’s cheaper to leave your server hosting up to specialists. The lie: no it isn’t, but worse, you lose control of core key assets. The truth: you only need this for your public website, if that.

Kubernetes: you, yes you, you could be the next viral success and you need a website that scales to 10 million visitors a second. The lie: you need a microservices cluster

Citation: https://DoINeedKubernetes.com/

Javascript: now at last the dream of “write once run anywhere” is real! Everything is a web app!

The truth: all your “local” apps have a separate 200MB dependency on an old insecure copy of Chromium. How do you update them all? You don’t. You can’t. Your web apps depend on leftpad, that one dude in Nebraska from Xkcd 2347.

And of course…

AI. Computers that write their own software! Yay!

Only they don’t. It’s the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone believes it. It’s like religion: it is unacceptably rude to tell someone their god doesn’t exist. Even if the “god in the machine” is a language model.

It’s all fake all the way down. I think the last time the industry knew what it was doing was in the 20th century. Since the dotcom boom and bust, MBAs have just been winging it and hoping they don’t get called out ’til their shares vest.

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The Decade of Linux on the Desktop. You're in it.

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:38:16 GMT

Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess.

When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™ branding.

Now, by contrast:

I've spent proper time trying to get some rough estimates on Linux distro usage. Ubuntu is cagey but claims ITRO low double-digit millions of machines fetching updates. Let's say circa 20M users.

Apparently, over 95% on LTS and the vast majority on the default GNOME edition. (Poor sods.)

The others are cagier still, but Statistica and others have vaguely replicable numbers.

My estimates are:

~2x as many Ubuntu as Debian users

Between them they are about 2/3 of Linux users

All Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora derivatives are about 10% of the market.

Comparing them to Steam client numbers, Arch is much of the rest: the gap between ~75% Debian family and ~10% RH family.

In China, the government has been pushing Linux *hard* for 8-9 years. Uniontech (Deepin) is one of the biggest and last November boasted 3M paid users.

Is that all?

Kylin is also big but let's guess it's #2.

So, if, optimistically, 10% pay, then that's only 20-30M, comparable to Ubuntu in ROTW.

Maybe Kylin (also a Debian BTW, they both are) brings it to 50M.

ChromeOS is a Linux. It's Gentoo underneath. Google sells hundreds of millions. Estimated user base is 200-300M and probably a lot more.

Chromebooks outsold Macs (by $ not units, so 10x over) in the US by 2017 and worldwide by 2020.

Which means there are, ballpark, order of magnitude scale, 10x as many ChromeOS users as all other Linuxes put together.

The year of Linux came 5-6 years ago.

But it's the _wrong kind_ of Linux so the Penguinisti didn't even notice.

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If only DESQview/X had been launched when Quarterdeck starting talking about it

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:30:32 GMT

A response to an HN comment...

The PC press had rumours of Quarterdeck's successor to DESQview, Desqview/X, from around 1987-1988.

That is roughly when I entered the computer industry.

Dv/X was remarkable tech, and if it had shipped earlier could have changed the course of the industry. Sadly, it came too late. Dv/X was rumoured then, but the state of the art was OS/2 1.1, released late 1988 and the first version of OS/2 with a GUI.

Dv/X was not released until about 5Y later... 1992. That's the same year as Windows 3.1, but critically, Windows 3.0 was in 1990, 2 years earlier.

Windows 3.0 was a result of the flop of OS/2 1.x.

OS/2 1.x was a new 16-bit multitasking networking kernel -- but that meant new drivers.

MS discarded the radical new OS, it discarded networking completely (until later), and moved the multitasking into the GUI layer, allowing Win3 to run on top of the single-tasking MS-DOS kernel. That meant excellent compatibility: it ran on almost anything, can it could run almost all DOS apps, and multitask them. And thanks to a brilliant skunkworks project, mostly by one man, David Weise, assisted by Murray Sargent, it combined 3 separate products (Windows 2, Windows/286 and Windows/386) into a single product that ran on all 3 types of PC and took good advantage of all of them. I wrote about its development here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/18/how_windows_got_to_v3...

It also did bring in some of the GUI design from OS/2 1.1, mainly from 1.2, and 1.3 -- the Program Manager and File Manager UI, the proportional fonts, the fake-3D controls, some of the Control Panel, and so on. It kept the best user-facing parts and threw away the fancy invisible stuff underneath which was problematic.

Result: smash hit, redefined the PC market, and when Dv/X arrived it was doomed: too late, same as OS/2 2.0, which came out the same year as Dv/X.

If Dv/X had come out in the late 1980s, before Windows 3, it could have changed the way the PC industry went.

Dv/X combined the good bits of DOS, 386 memory management and multitasking, Unix networking and Unix GUIs into an interesting value proposition: network your DOS PCs with Unix boxes over Unix standards, get remote access to powerful Unix apps, and if vendors wanted, it enabled ports of Unix apps to this new multitasking networked DOS.

In the '80s that could have been a contender. Soon afterwards it was followed by Linux and the BSDs, which made that Unix stuff free and ran on the same kit. That would have been a great combination -- Dv/X PCs talking to BSD or Linux servers, when those Unix boxes didn't really have useful GUIs yet.

Windows 3 offered a different deal: it combined the good bits of DOS, OS/2 1.x's GUI, and Windows 2.x into a whole that ran on anything and could run old DOS apps and new GUI apps, side by side.

Networking didn't follow until Windows for Workgroups which followed Windows 3.1. Only businesses wanted that, so MS postponed it. Good move.

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I am so sick and tired of "AI"

Tue, 20 May 2025 18:24:45 GMT

Spent much of today getting a Live AROS USB key working, which wasn't trivial... it needed a USB 3 key, which I had to go and buy specially.

But after that... I am so tired. I want to write about new stuff in software, but there feels to be no area not contaminated with "AI".

I get the depressing feeling that computing is just being eaten up by bloody "AI". Virtually every press release I've seen this week has been AI. Mozilla adopts new AI search engine. Red Hat releases RHEL 10 with built in AI chat bot to help clueless PFYs admin the thing. Windows bloody Notepad has AI built in. AI in Google Docs. AI boosters in my mentions telling me and my friends that AI is helping them read antique books or whatever.

Is there anywhere outside of retrocomputing that doesn't have AI in it?

The emperor has no clothes. LLM bots are not artificial and they are not intelligent. Not at all, not even a little bit, not even if you redefine the words "artificial" or "intelligent".

"AI" is not "AI". The liars and the shills redefined what people used to mean by "AI" as "AGI", artificial _general_ intelligence, so they could market their stupid plagiarism bots as AI.

AGI is not real. It doesn't exist. It will probably never exist. Hell, at the rate humanity is going, we won't be able to build new computers any more by 2050 and the survivors at the poles will be nostalgic for electricity.

AI is a scam. It's a hoax. It's fake news. There is no AI, and what is being sold as AI is such an incredibly poor fake that it is profoundly disheartening that so many people are so stupid to be deceived into thinking it is AI.

The blockchain is a scam. Everything to do with it is a scam.

Alternative medicine is a scam. All of it. There is no such thing. If it's called "alternative" that means it's been proved not to work.

All religions are scams. No exceptions.

People have made billions from selling scams for my whole lifetime.

Meanwhile, other scams, like plastics being recyclable -- they aren't, it's a lie -- or biofuels -- also a lie -- mean our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. We are killing the planetary ecosphere that keeps us alive with plastic and pollution from burning stuff. We have to stop burning everything, stop cutting down trees, and stop making all forms of single-use products. No more jet planes. No more private cars. No more foreign holidays. We can't afford it.

And with all that we are almost certainly still doomed.

But I kind of want to see my industry go first, if all it's got now is AI.

Snag is, I need a job. I have Ada to pay for.

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My little USB-DOS project

Tue, 20 May 2025 14:42:12 GMT

Since I know there are some folks who read this but may not read my Register stuff.

It's here:

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

I added a "Buy me a coffee" tip jar effort. :-)

I am considering updates. Robert Sawyer was kind enough to send a list of suggestions and I should act on them.

I have also received requests for PC-Write. Copies are still out there.

Any other writer-oriented apps that anyone would like to see, or other functionalty?

I discovered the Reg editors did sneak in a mention on the end of this at the start of the year:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/

I wrote up how I built it later:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/26/dos_distraction_free_writing/

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On becoming living history

Sat, 03 May 2025 10:42:43 GMT

It is one of the oddest things in computing that stuff to me, as a big kid of heading for 60 years old but who still feels quite young and enjoys learning and exploring, that the early history of Linux – a development that came along mid-career for me – and indeed Unix, which was taking shape when I was a child, is mysterious lost ancient history now to those working in the field.

It’s not that long ago. It’s well within living memory for lots of us who are still working with it in full time employment. Want to know why this command has that weird switch? Then go look up who wrote it and ask him. (And sadly yes there’s a good chance it’s a “him”.)

Want to know why Windows command switches are one symbol and Unix ones another? Go look at the OSes the guys who wrote them ran before. They are a 2min Google away and emulators are FOSS. Just try them and you can see what they learned from.

This stuff isn’t hieroglyphics. It’s not carved on the walls of tombs deep underground.

The reason that we have Snap and Flatpak and AppImage and macOS .app is all stuff that happened since I started my first job. I was there. So were thousands of others. I watched it take shape.

But now, I write about how and why and I get shouted at by people who weren’t even born yet. It’s very odd.

To me it looks like a lot of people spend thousands of developer-hours flailing away trying to rewrite stuff that I deployed in production in my 30s and they have no idea how it’s supposed to work or what they’re trying to do. They’re failing to copy a bad copy of a poor imitation.

Want to know how KDE 6 should have been? Run Windows 95 in VirtualBox and see how the original worked! But no, instead, the team flops and flails adding 86 more wheels to a bicycle and then they wonder why people choose a poor-quality knock-off of a 2007 iPhone designed by people who don’t know why the iPhone works like that.

I am, for clarity, talking about GNOME >3. And the iPhone runs a cut down version of Mac OS X Tiger’s “Dashboard” as its main UI.

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How come Linux replaced Unix? What happened to proprietary Unix?

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 17:33:47 GMT

The personal histories involved are highly relevant and they are one of the things that get forgotten in boring grey corporate histories.

Bill Gates didn't get lucky: he got a leg up from mum & dad, and was nasty and rapacious and fast, and clawed his way to industry dominance. On the way he climbed over Gary Kildall of Digital Research and largely obliterated DR.

Ray Noorda of Novell was the big boss of the flourishing Mormon software industry of Utah. (Another big Utah company was WordPerfect.)

Several of them were in the Canopy Group:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canopy_Group

Ray Noorda owned the whole lot, via NFT Ventures Inc., which stood for "Noorda Family Trust".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Noorda

Caldera acquired the Unix business from SCO, as my current employers reported a quarter of a century ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2000/08/02/caldera_goes_unix_with_sco/

Noorda managed to surf Gates's and Microsoft's wave. Novell made servers, with their own proprietary OS, and workstations, with their own OS, and the network. As Microsoft s/w on IBM-compatible PCs became dominant, Novell strategically killed off first its workstations and pivoted to cards for PCs and clients for DOS. Then it ported its server OS to PC servers, and killed its server hardware. Then it was strong and secure and safe for a while, growing fat on the booming PC business.

But Noorda knew damned well that Gates resented anyone else making good money of DOS systems. In the late 1980s, when DR no longer mattered, MS screwed IBM because IBM fumbled OS/2. MS got lucky with Windows 3.

MS help screw DEC and headhunted DEC's head OS man Dave Cutler and his core team and gave him the leftovers of the IBM divorce: "Portable OS/2", the CPU-independent version. Cutler turned Portable OS/2 into what he had planned to turn DEC VMS into: a cross-platform Unix killer. It ended up being renamed "OS/2 NT" and then "Windows NT".

Noorda knew it was just a matter of time 'til MS had a Netware-killer. He was right. So, he figured 2 things would help Novell adapt: embrace the TCP/IP network standard, and Unix.

And Novell had cash.

So, Novell bought Unix and did a slightly Netwarified Unix: UnixWare.

He also spied that the free Unix clone Linux would be big and he spun off a side-business to make a Linux-based Windows killer, codenamed "Corsair" -- a fast-moving pirate ship.

Corsair became Caldera and Caldera OpenLinux. The early version was expensive and had a proprietary desktop, but it also had a licensed version of SUN WABI). Before WINE worked, Caldera OpenLinux could run Windows apps.

Caldera also bought the rump of DR so it also had a good solid DOS as well: DR-DOS.

Then Caldera were the first corporate Linux to adopt the new FOSS desktop, KDE. I got a copy of Caldera OpenLinux with KDE from them. Without a commercial desktop it was both cheaper and better than the earlier version. WABI couldn't run much but it could run the core apps of MS Office, which was what mattered.

So, low end workstation, Novell DOS; high end workstation, Caldera OpenLinux (able to connect to Novell servers, and run DOS and Windows apps); legacy servers, Netware; new open-standards app servers, UnixWare.

Every level of the MS stack, Novell had an alternative. Server, network protocol, network client/server, low end workstation, high end workstation.

Well, it didn't work out. Commercial Unix was dying; UnixWare flopped. Linux was killing it. So Caldera snapped up the dying PC Unix vendor, SCO, and renamed itself "SCO Group", and now that its corporate ally, the also-Noorda-owned-and-backed Novell owned the Unix source code, SCO Group tried to kill Linux by showing it was based on stolen Unix code, and later when that failed, that it contained stolen Unix code.

Caldera decided DOS wasn't worth having and open sourced it. (I have a physical copy from them.) Lots of people were interested. It realised DOS was still worth money, reverse course and made the next version non-FOSS again. It also offered me a job. I said no. I like drinking beer. Utah is dry.

The whole sorry saga of the SCO Group and the Unix lawsuits was because Ray Noorda wanted to outdo Bill Gates.

Sadly Noorda got Alzheimer's. The managers who took over tried to back away, but bits of Noorda's extended empire started attacking things which other bits had been trying to exploit. It also shows the danger and power of names.

Now the vague recollection in the industry seems to be "SCO was bad".

No: SCO were good guys and SCO Xenix was great. It wasn't even x86-only: an early version ran on the Apple Lisa, alongside 2 others.

The SCO Group went evil. SCO was fine. SCO != SCO Group.

Caldera was an attempt to bring Linux up to a level where it could compete with Windows, and it was a good product. It was the first desktop Linux I ran as my main desktop OS for a while.

Only one company both owned and sold a UNIX™ and had invested heavily in Linux and had the money to fight the SCO Group: IBM.

IBM set its lawyers on the SCO Group lawsuit and it collapsed.

Xinuos salvaged the tiny residual revenues to be had from the SCO and Novell Unixware product lines.

Who owns the Unix source code? Microfocus, because it owns Novell.

Who sells actual Unix? Xinuos.

Who owns the trademark? The Open Group. "POSIX" (a name coined by Richard Stallman) became UNIX™.

Who owns Bell Labs? AT&T spin off Lucent, later bought by Alcatel, later bought by Nokia.

Was Linux stolen? No.

Does anyone care now? No.

Did anyone ever care? No, only Ray Noorda with a determined attempt to out-Microsoft Microsoft, which failed.

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Why FOSS OSes often don't have power management as good as proprietary ones

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 08:31:20 GMT

(Especially Haiku.)

It may seem odd but it's not.

Haiku is a recreation of a late-1990s OS. News for you: in the 1990s and until then, computers didn't do power management.

The US government had to institute a whole big programme to get companies to add power management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star

Aggressive power management is only a thing because silicon vendors lie to their customers. Yes, seriously.

From the mid-1970s for about 30 years, adding more transistors meant computers got faster. CPUs went from 4-bit to 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit, then there was a pause while they gained onboard memory management (Intel 80386/Motorola 68030 generation) then scalar execution and onboard hardware floating point (80486/68040 generation), then onboard L1 cache (Pentium), then superscalar execution and near-board L2 cache (Pentium II), then onboard L2 (Pentium III), then they ran out of ideas to spend CPU transistors on, so the transistor budget went on RAM instead, meaning we needed 64-bit CPUs to track it.

The Pentium 4 was an attempt to crank this as high as it would go by running as fast as possible and accepting a low IPC (instructions per clock). It was nicknamed the fanheater. So Intel US pivoted to Intel Israel's low-power laptop chip with aggressive power management. Voilà, the Core and then Core 2 series.

Then, circa 2006-2007, big problem. 64-bit chips had loads of cache on board, they were superscalar, decomposing x86 instructions into micro ops, resequencing them for optimal execution with branch prediction, they had media and 3D extensions like MMX2, SSE, SSE2, they were 64-bit with lots of RAM, and there was nowhere to spend the increasing transistor budget.

Result, multicore. Duplicate everything. Tell the punters it's twice as fast. It isn't. Very few things are parallel.

With an SMP-aware OS, like NT or BeOS or Haiku, 2 cores make things a bit more responsive but no faster.

Then came 3 and 4 cores, and onboard GPUs, and then heterogenous cores, with "efficiency" and "performance" cores... but none of this makes your software run faster. It's marketing.

You can't run all the components of a modern CPU at once. It would burn itself out in seconds. Most of the chip is turned off most of the time, and there's an onboard management core running its own OS, invisible to user code, to handle this.

Silicon vendors are selling us stuff we can't use. If you turned it all on at once, instant self-destruction. We spend money on transistors that must spend 99% of the time turned off. It's called "dark silicon" and it's what we pay for.

In real life, chips stopped getting Moore's Law speed increases 20 years ago. That's when we stopped getting twice the performance every 18 months.

All the aggressive power management and sleep modes are to help inadequate cooling systems stop CPUs instantly incinerating themselves. Hibernation is to disguise how slowly multi-gigabyte OSes boot. You can't see the slow boot if it doesn't boot so often.

For 20 years the CPU and GPU vendors have been selling us transistors we can't use. Power management is the excuse.

Update your firmware early and often. Get a nice fast SSD. Shut it down when you're not using it: it reboots fast.

Enjoy a fast responsive OS that doesn't try to play the Win/Lin/Mac game of "write more code to use the fancy accelerators and hope things go faster".

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Fun with the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (and an unexpected OpenBSD link)

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:17:50 GMT

The Zaurus SL-5500 was an early, tiny, Linux pocket computer-cum-PDA. I had one. Two, in fact. They got stolen from my house. :-(

It had a CF card slot, so you could even remove your storage card and insert a CF Wifi card instead, and have mobile Internet in your pocket, 20 years ago!

But if you did, you got a free extra with a wifi adaptor – a battery life of about 15-20 minutes.

It was clever, but totally useless. With the wifi card in, you couldn’t have external storage any more, so there was very little room left.

I had to check: https://uk.pcmag.com/first-looks/30821/sharp-zaurus-sl-5500

64MB RAM, 16MB flash, and a 320x240 screen. Or rather 240x320 as it was portrait.

The sheer amount of thought and planning that went into the Linux-based Zaurus was shown by the fact that the tiny physical keyboard had no pipe symbol. Bit of a snag on an xNix machine, that.

Both mine were 2nd hand, given to me by techie mates who’d played with them and got bored and moved on. I'm told others got better battery life on Wifi. Maybe their tiny batteries were already on the way out or something.

Fun side-note #1: I do not remember the battery pack looking like this one, though. I feel sure I would have noticed.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battery-Zaurus-SL-5500-900mAh-Li-ion/dp/B007K0DRIU

Fun side-note #2: both came with Sharp’s original OS, version 1.0. I had an interesting time experimenting with alternative OS builds, new ROMs etc. Things did get a lot better, or at least less bad, after the first release. But the friend who gave me my first unit swore up and down that he’d update the ROM. I can’t see any possible mechanism for flash memory to just revert to earlier contents on its own, though.

With replacement OS images you had to decide how to partition the device’s tiny amount of storage: some as read-only for the OS, some as read-write, some as swap, etc. The allocations were fixed and if you got it wrong you had to nuke and reload.

This would have been much easier if the device had some form of logical volume management, and dynamically-changeable volume sizes.

Which is a thought I also had repeatedly around 2023-2024 when experimenting with OpenBSD. It uses an exceptionally complex partitioning layout, and if you forcibly simplify it, you (1) run up against the limitations of its horribly primitive partitioning tool and (2) reduce the OS’s security.

I have got just barely competent enough with OpenBSD that between writing this in early 2022 and writing this in late 2024, two and a half years later, I went from “struggling mightily just to get it running at all in a VM” to “able with only some whimpering and cursing to get it dual-booting on bare metal with XP64, NetBSD, and 2 Linux distros.”

But it’s still a horrible horrible experience and some form of LVM would make matters massively easier.

Which is odd because I avoid Linux LVM as much as possible. I find it a massive pain when you don’t need it. However, you need it for Linux full-disk encryption, and one previous employer of mine insisted upon that.

In other words: I really dislike LVM, and I am annoyed by Linux gratuitously insisting on it in situations where it should not strictly speaking be needed – but in other OSes and other situations, I have really wanted it, but it wasn’t available.

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Basic MS-DOS memory management for beginners

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:04:25 GMT

From a Reddit post.

A very brief rundown:

If you are using Microsoft tools, you need to load the 386 memory manager, emm386.exe, in your CONFIG.SYS file.
But, to do that, you need to load the XMS manager, HIMEM.SYS, first.
So your CONFIG.SYS should begin with the lines:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
DOS=HIGH,UMB

4. That's the easy bit. Now you have to find free Upper Memory Blocks to tell EMM386 to use.

5. Do a clean boot with F5 or F8 -- telling it not to process CONFIG.SYS or run AUTOEXEC.BAT. Alternatively boot from a DOS floppy that doesn't have them.

6. Run the Microsoft Diagnostics, MSD.EXE, or a similar tool such as Quartdeck Manifest. Look at the memory usage between 640kB and 1MB. Note, the numbers are in hexadecimal.

7. Look for unused blocks that are not ROM or I/O. Write down the address ranges.

8. An example: if you do not use monochrome VGA you can use the mono VGA memory area: 0xB000-0xB7FF.

9. One by one, tell EMM386 to use these. First choose if you want EMS (Expanded Memory Services) or not. It is useful for DOS apps, but not for Windows apps.

10. If you do, you need to tell it:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM

And set aside 64kB for a page frame, for example by putting this on the end of the line:

FRAME=E0000

Or, tell it not to use one:

FRAME=none

11. Or disable EMS:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

12. Important Add these parameters one at a time, and reboot and test, every single time, without exception.

13. Once you told it which you want now you need to tell it the RAM blocks to use, e.g.

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM FRAME=none I=B000-B7FF

Again, reboot every time to check. Any single letter wrong can stop the PC booting. Lots of testing is vital. Every time, run MSD and look at what is in use or is not in use. Make lots of notes, on paper.

14. If you find EMM386 is trying to use a block that it mustn't you can eXclude it:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM X=B000-B7FF

The more blocks you can add, the better.

15. After this -- a few hours' work -- now you can try to populate your new UMBs.

16. Device drivers: do this by prefixing lines in CONFIG.SYS with DEVICEHIGH instead of DEVICE.

Change:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS

To:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS

17. Try every driver, one by one, rebooting every time.

18. Now move on to loadable Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs. Prefix lines that run a program in AUTOEXEC.BAT with LH, which is short for LOADHIGH.

Replace:

MOUSE

With:

LH MOUSE

Use MSD and the MEM command -- MEM /c /p -- to identify all your TSRs, note their sizes, and load them all high.

This is a day or two's work for a novice. I could do it in only an hour or two and typically get 625kB or more base memory free, and I made good money from this hard-won skill.

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DOS live USB image with tools for writers

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 20:59:19 GMT

I finally got round to publishing a version 1.0 of my long-running hobby project: a bootable DOS live USB image with tools for writers, providing a distraction-free writing environment.

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

This is very rushed and the instructions are incomplete. Only FAT16 for now; FAT32 coming real soon now.

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Why are hobbyist 21st century 8-bit computers so constrained?

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:54:59 GMT

I learned about a new DIY machine to me, the Cody Computer.

It looks kind of fun, but once again, it does make me wonder why it’s so constrained. Extremely low-res graphics, for instance. TBH I would have sneered at this for being low-end when I was about 13 years old. (Shortly before I got my first computer, a 48K ZX Spectrum.)

Why isn’t anyone trying to make an easy home-build high-end eight-bit? Something that really pushes the envelope right out there – the sort of dream machine I wanted by about the middle of the 1980s.

In 1987 I owned an Amstrad PCW9512:

4MHz Z80A
512 kB RAM, so 64kB CP/M 3 TPA plus something over 400kB RAMdisc as drive M:
720 x 256 monochrome screen resolution, 90 x 30 characters in text mode

Later in 1989 I bought an MGT SAM Coupé:

6MHz Z80B
256 kB RAM
256 x 192 or 512 x 192 graphics, with 1/2/4 bits per pixel

Both had graphics easily outdone by the MSX 2 and later Z80 machines, but those had a dedicated GPU. That might be a reach but then given the limits of a 64 kB memory map, maybe a good one.

Another aspirational machine was the BBC Micro: a expandable, modular OS called MOS; an excellent BASIC, BBC BASIC, with structured flow, named procedures, with local variables, enabling recursive programming, and inline assembly language so if you graduated to machine-code you could just enter and edit it in the BASIC line editor. (Which was weird, but powerful – for instance, 2 independent cursors, one source and one destination, eliminating the whole “clipboard” concept.) Resolution-independent graphics, and graphics modes that cheerfully used most of the RAM, leaving exploitation as an exercise for the developer. Which they rose to magnificently.

The BBC Micro supported dual processors over the Tube interface, so one 6502 could run the OS, the DOS, and the framebuffer, using most of its 64 kB, and Hi-BASIC could run on the 2nd 6502 (or Z80!) processor, therefore having most of 64 kB to itself.

In a 21st century 8-bit, I want something that comfortably exceeds a 1980s 8-bit, let alone a 1990s 8-bit.

(And yes, there were new 8-bit machines in the 1990s, such as the Amstrad CPC Plus range, or MSX Turbo R.)

So my wish list would include…

At least 80-column legible text, ideally more. We can forget analog TVs and CRT limitations now. Aim to exceed VGA resolutions. 256 colours in some low resolutions but a high mono resolution is handy too.
Lots of RAM with some bank-switching mechanism, plus mechanisms to make this useful to BASIC programmers not just machine code developers. A RAMdisc is easy. Beta BASIC on the ZX Spectrum 128 lets BASIC declare arrays kept in the RAMdisc, so while a BASIC program is limited to under 30 kB of RAM, it can manipulate 100-odd kB of data in arrays. That’s a simple, clever hack.
A really world-class BASIC with structured programming support.
A fast processor (double-digit megahertz doesn’t seem too much to ask).
Some provision for 3rd party OSes. There are some impressive ones out there now, such as SymbOS, Contiki, and Fuzix. GEOS is open source now, too.

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Plan 9 is a bicycle

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 13:58:30 GMT

Someone on Reddit asked how easy it was to do "simple stuff" on 9front.

This is not a Linux distribution. It is an experimental research OS.

Look, all Linux distros are the same kernel with different tools slapped on top. Mostly the GNU tools and a bunch of other stuff. Linux is one operating system.

Linux is a GPL implementation of a simple monolithic 1970s Unix kernel. All the BSDs are BSD-licensed implementations of a simple monolithic 1970s Unix kernel.

Taking a high-level view they are different implementations of the same design.

So it's very easy to port the same apps to all of them. All run Firefox and Thunderbird and LibreOffice. They are slightly different flavours of a single design.

They are all just Unixes.

Solaris and AIX and HP/UX are the same design. All just Unixes.

Now we get to outliers. Some break up the kernel into different programs that work together. This is called a microkernel design. Mac OS X/macOS, Minix 3, QNX, CoyotOS, keyKOS. Still pretty much Unixes but weird ones.

The big names among them, like macOS, still run the same apps. Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.

Still UNIX.

9front is a distro of Plan 9. Plan 9 is NOT a Unix.

A small team -- originally 2 guys, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, designed Unix and C.

It caught on. Lots of people built versions of it. Some of them changed the design a bit. Doesn't really matter. It is all just Unix.

It takes the core design and adds a million layers of junk on top, implemented by well-meaning people who just had jobs to do and get stuff working, so now it's huge and vastly complex... but it's just Unix.

It's an ancient tradition to compare computers to vehicles. Unix is a car. Lots of people make cars. It's surprisingly hard to define what a "car" is but it's a box on wheels, probably with a roof (but maybe not), probably with windows (but maybe not), on wheels (probably 4, maybe 3, could be 6) with an engine.

All Unixes are types of car. You can't take the gearbox of a Ford and just bolt it into a Honda. Won't fit. But you can take a Ford and take a Honda and put 4 people in it and drive it on the same road to the same shop and buy stuff and carry it home.

Windows is... not a car, but it's close. Let's say it's a bus. Still a box on wheels, still carries people (but lots of them.) You can buy a bus to yourself and drive to the shops, with 40 friends instead of 4, but you wouldn't want to. It's big and slow and hard to drive and expensive. But you could do.

Plan 9 is not Unix. Plan 9 is what the guys who invented Unix did next.

Plan 9 is not a car.

You are only thinking of cars. We are not talking about cars any more.

Plan 9 is, say, a bicycle. (I know, bicycles came before cars. Sue me, it's a metaphor not a history lecture.)

It still has wheels. It still goes places. You can sit on it, and ride it, and go hundreds of miles. You can go to the shops and do your shopping and take it home, but no, 4 of you can't. You can't put the shopping in the boot. It doesn't have a boot. You need a backpack or panniers.

Stop thinking of cars. We have left car-land behind. There are a hundred other types of "things that have wheels and go" that aren't cars. There are motorbikes and roller skates and skateboards and go-karts and racing cars and unicycles and roller blades and cross-country-skiing roller-trainers and wheely shoes and loads more.

You're asking what kind of car a bicycle is. It isn't.

> I'm just wondering how easy it would be to load this on a cheap laptop and get up and running.

It's doable. A few hours work maybe.

> Does it require a lot of tweaking to get simple things working?

You do not define "simple things". But downthread you do.

You will never usefully browse the web on 9front. It doesn't really have a web browser. There are some kinda sorta things that do 1% of what a mainstream web browser does but you won't like them.

It doesn't really have "apps". Nobody ever wrote any. (With rounding errors. There is a tiny bit of 3rd party software, but you won't recognise anything.)

Plan 9 is a bicycle. It can take you places but you can't drive it if you only know how to drive cars. Never mind that it has a manual gear shift and there are 27 gears in 2 different gearing systems and no clutch and you need to memorise all the combinations you need to climb a hill and speed along the flat.

Also, you know, you need to pedal.

There's no engine.

"I want to write Markdown text and print it to a laser printer."

Right, well, you'll need to find a dozen separate tools, learn how to work them, and learn how to link them together... Or, you'll need to write your own.

Plan 9 is not the end point of the story, either.

Plan 9 was a step on the road to Inferno. Inferno is not a car and it's not a bicycle. It is, in extremely vague and general terms, a cross between an operating system, and Java, and the JVM. All in one.

It's... a pedal-powered aeroplane. You can't ride it to the shops but it is in its way even more amazing than a bicycle... it can fly.

What you call "simple stuff" is car stuff. You can't do it. It is not as "simple" as you think it is.

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Raw Computer Power (with apologies to Guy Kewney)

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:28:07 GMT

First Unix box I ever touched, in my first job, here on the Isle of Man 36Y ago.

It was a demo machine, but my employers, CSL Delta, never sold any AFAIK. It sat there, running but unused, all day every day. Our one had a mono text display on it, and no graphics ability that I know of.

I played around, I wrote "Hello, world!" in C and compiled it and it took me a while to find that the result wasn't called "hello" or "hello.exe" or anything but "a.out".

If I had the knowledge then, I'd have written a Mandelbrot generator or something and had it sit there cranking them out -- but I was not skilled enough. It was not networked to our office network, but it had a synchronous modem allowing it to access some IBM online service which we used to look up tech support info.

Synchronous modem comms, or serial comms, are very different indeed to the familiar Unix asynchronous serial comms used on RS-232 connections for terminals and things. Sync comms are a mainframe thing, more than a microcomputer thing.

https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Asynchronous_vs_Sy...

That modem was a very specialised bit of kit that cost more than a whole PC -- when PCs cost many thousands each -- and it couldn't talk to anything else except remote IBM mainframes, basically.

The RT/PC felt more powerful than a high-end IBM PC compatible of the time, but only marginally. It had a bit of the feeling of Windows NT about 6-7 years later: when you were typing away and you did something demanding, the hard disk cranked up and you could hear, and even feel the vibrations, that the machine was working hard, but it stayed responding to you the same as ever. It's a bit hard to describe because all modern OSes work like this, but it was not normal in the 1980s.

Then, OSes didn't multitask or they did it badly, and things like hard disk controllers of the time took over the CPU completely when reading or writing. So on MS-DOS, or PC-DOS or OS/2 1.x or DR Concurrent DOS, when you typed commands or interacted with programs, the computer responded right away as fast as it could. But if you gave a command that made the machine work hard, like asked for a print preview or a spell-check of a multi-page document, or sorted a spreadsheet of thousands of rows, or asked it to draw a graph from hundreds of points of data, the computer locked up on you. The hard disks span up, you heard the read/write heads chattering away as it worked, but it was no longer listening to you and anything you pressed or typed was lost. Or, worse, buffered, and when it was done, then it tried to do those commands, and quite possibly did something very much not what you wanted, like deleted loads of work.

(Decades later something similar happened with cooling fans, and now that's going away too. But with hearing the fans spin up, there's a hysteresis: it takes time, and tens of billions of CPU cycles, for the CPU to heat up, so the fans come on later, and maybe stay on for a while after it's done. A PC locking up as the hard disk went crazy was immediate.)

The RT/PC was a Unix box. It didn't do that. No idea how much RAM or disk ours had: maybe 4MB if that, perhaps 100-200MB disk. A lot for 1988! But if I did, say,

cd / ls -laR

... then it would sit there for several minutes with the HDD chuntering away, listing files to screen... but what was remarkable was that you could switch to another virtual console and it stayed perfectly responsive as if nothing were happening. That hard disk was SCSI of course, so it didn't use loads of CPU under heavy disk load.

The machine always felt a little slower, a little less responsive than DOS, but it never slowed down even when working hard. You had the feeling of sitting behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce with some massive engine there, but pulling a massive weight, so it didn't accelerate or brake fast, but could just keep accelerating slowly and steadily 'til you ran out of road... and you'd make an impressively large crater.

We sold a lot of IBM PS/2 machines with Xenix, and it was a Unix too and felt the same... but limited by the puny I/O buses of even high-end 1980s IBM PS/2 kit, so it sssslllloooowwwweeeedddd way down doing that big directory listing.

Whereas contemporary PC OSes responded quicker but just locked up when working hard. This included Windows 2, 3.x, 95, 98 and ME, and also OS/2 1.x, 2.x, and Warp. The kernels did not support multithreading and background I/O very well, so it didn't matter that the hardware didn't either.

Then Windows NT 4.0 came along, and it did. Suddenly the hardware mattered. But if you had a Pentium 1 machine, with an Intel Triton chipset on the motherboard, there was an innocent looking driver floppy in the box. On that was a busmastering DMA driver for the Intel PIIX EIDE controller. Install it on Win9x and it could see a CD-ROM on the PATA bus. Handy but not world-shattering.

Install it on an NT machine and once the kernel booted, the sound of the hard disk changed because the kernel was now using busmastering to load stuff from disk into RAM. As the machine booted the mouse pointer kept moving smoothly, with no jerkiness. When the login screen appeared it blinked onto the screen and you could press Ctrl-Alt-Del and start typing and your username appeared slowly but smoothly. The stars representing your password, the same.

It suddenly had that "massive computer power being used to keep the machine responsive" feeling of an RT/PC the decade before. Like that PIIX driver had made the machine's £100 cheapo IDE disk into a £400 SCSI disk.

comments

Outliner notes

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 10:47:49 GMT

Word is a nightmare.

«

RT ColiegeStudent on Twitter

using microsoft word

*moves an image 1 mm to the left*

all text and images shift. 4 new pages appear. in the distance, sirens.

But there's still a lot of power in that festering ball of 1980s code.

In 6 weeks in 2016, I drafted, wrote, illustrated, laid out and submitted a ~330 page technical maintenance manual for a 3D printer, solo, entirely in MS Word from start to finish. I began in Word 97 & finished it in Word 2003, 95% of the time running under WINE on Linux... and 90% of the time, using it in Outline Mode, which is a *vastly* powerful writer's tool which the FOSS word has nothing even vaguely comparable to.

But as a novice... Yeah, what the tweet said. It's a timeless classic IMHO.

Some Emacs folks told me Org-mode is just as good as an outliner. I've tried it. This was my response.

Org mode compared to Word 2003 Outline View is roughly MS-DOS Edlin compared to Emacs. It's a tiny fragmentary partial implementation of 1% of the functionality, done badly, with a terrible *terrible* UI.

No exaggeration, no hyperbole, and there's a reason I specifically said 2003 and nothing later.

I've been building and running xNix boxes since 1988. I have often tried both Vi and Emacs over nearly 4 decades. I am unusual in terms of old Unix hands: I cordially detest both of them.

The reason I cite Word 2003 is that that's the last version with the old menu and toolbar UI. Everything later has a "ribbon" and I find it unusable.

Today, the web-app/Android/iOS versions of Word do not have Outline View, no. Only the rich local app versions do.

But no, org-mode is not a better richer alternative; it is vastly inferior, to the point of being almost a parody.

It's really not. I tried it, and I found it a slightly sad crippled little thing that might be OK for managing my to-do list.

Hidden behind Emacs' *awful* 1970s UI which I would personally burn in a fire rather than ever use.

So, no, I don't think it's a very useful or capable outliner from what I have seen. Logseq has a better one.

To extend my earlier comparison:

Org-mode to Word's Outline View is Edlin to Emacs.

Logseq to Outline View is MS-DOS 5 EDIT to Emacs: it's a capable full-screen text editor that I know and like and which works fine. It's not very powerful but what it does, it does fine.

Is Org-mode aimed at something else? Maybe, yes. I don't know who or what it's aimed at, so I can't really say.

Word Outline Mode is the last surviving 1980s outliner, an entire category of app that's disappeared.

http://outliners.com/default.html

It's a good one but it was once one among many. It is, for me, *THE* killer feature of MS Word, and the only thing I keep WINE on my computers for.

It's a prose writer's tool, for writing long-form documents in a human language.

Emacs is a programmer's editor for writing program code in programming languages.

So, no, they are not the same thing, but the superficial similarity confuses people.

I must pick a fairly small example as I'm not very familiar with Emacs.

In Outline Mode, a paragraph's level in the hierarchy is tied with its paragraph style. Most people don't know how to use Word's style sheets, but think of HTML. Word has 9 heading levels, like H1...H9 on the Web, plus Body Text, which is always the lowest level.

As you promote or demote a paragraph, its style automatically changes to match.

(This has the side effect that you can see the level from the style. If that bothered you, in old versions you could turn off showing the formatting.)

As you move a block of hierarchical text around the outline all its levels automatically adopt the correct styles for their current location.

This means that when I wrote a manual in it, I did *no formatting by hand* at all. The text of the entire document is *automatically* formatted according to whether it's a chapter heading, or section, or subsection, or subsubsection, etc.

When you're done Word can automatically generate a table of contents, or an index, or both, that picks up all those section headings. Both assign page numbers "live", so if you move, add or delete any section, the ToC and index update immediately with the new positions and page numbers.

I say a small example as most professional writers don't deal with the formatting at all. That's the job of someone else in a different department.

Or, in technical writing, this is the job of some program. It's the sort of thing that Linux folks get very excited about LaTeX and LyX, or for which documentarians praise DocBook or DITA, but I've used both of those and they need a*vast* amount of manual labour -- and *very* complex tooling.

XML etc are also *extremely* fragile. One punctuation mark in the wrong place and 50 pages of formatting is broken or goes haywire. I've spent days troubleshooting one misplaced `:`. It's horrible.

Word can do all this automatically, and most people *don't even know the function is there.* It's like driving an articulated lorry as a personal car and never noticing that it can carry 40 tonnes of cargo! Worse still, people attach a trailer and roofrack and load them up with stuff... *because they don't know their vehicle can carry 10 cars already* as a built in feature.

I could take a sub sub section of a chapter and promote it to a chapter in its own right, and adjust the formatting of 100 pages, in about 6 or 8 keystrokes. That will also rebuild the index and redo the table of contents, automatically, for me.

All this can be entirely keyboard driven, or entirely mouse driven, according to the user's preference. Or any mixture of both, of course. I'm a keyboard warrior myself. I can live entirely without a pointing device and it barely slows me down.

You can with a couple of clicks collapse the whole book to just chapter headings, or just those and subheadings, or just all the headings and no body text... Any of 9 levels, as you choose. You can hide all the lower levels, restructure the whole thing, and then show them again. You can adjust formatting by adjusting indents in the overview, and then expand it again to see what happened and if it's what you want.

You could go crazy... zoom out to the top level, add a few new headings, indent under the new headings, and suddenly in a few clicks, your 1 big book is now 2 or 3 or 4 smaller books, each with its own set of chapters, headings, sub headings, sub sub headings etc. Each can have its own table of contents and index, all automatically generated and updated and formatted.

I'm an xNix guy, mainly. I try to avoid Windows as much as possible, but the early years of my career were supporting DOS and then Windows. There is good stuff there, and credit where it's due.

(MS Office on macOS also does this, but the keyboard UI is much clunkier.)

Outliners were just an everyday tool once. MS just built a good one into Word, way back in the DOS era. Word for DOS can do all this stuff too and it did it in like 200kB of RAM in 1988!

Integrating it into a word processor makes sense, but they were standalone apps.

It's not radical tech. This is really old, basic stuff. But somehow in the switch to GUIs on the PC, they got lost in the transition.

And no, LibreOffice/Abiword/CalligraWords has nothing even resembling this.

There are 2 types of outliner: intrinsic and extrinsic, also known as 1-pane or 2-pane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner#Layout

There are multiple 2-pane outliners that are FOSS.

But they are tools for organising info, and are almost totally useless for writers.

There are almost no intrinsic outliners in the FOSS world. I've been looking for years. The only one I know is LoqSeq, but it is just for note-taking and it does none of the formatting/indexing/ToC stuff I mentioned. It does handle Markdown but with zero integration with the outline structure.

So it's like going from Emacs to Notepad. All the clever stuff is gone, but you can still edit plain text.

comments

Inferno notes

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 10:37:29 GMT

Plan 9 is Unix but more so. You write code in C and compile it to a native binary and run it as a process. All processes are in containers all the time, and nothing is outside the containers. Everything is virtualised, even the filesystem, and everything really is a file. Windows on screen are files. Computers are files. Disks are files. Any computer on the network can load a program from any other computer on the network (subject to permissions of course), run it on another computer, and display it on a third. The whole network is one giant computer.

You could use a slower workstation and farm out rendering complicated web pages to nearby faster machines, but see it on your screen.

But it's Unix. A binary is still a binary. So if you have a slow Arm64 machine, like a Raspberry Pi 3 (Plan 9 runs great on Raspberry Pis), you can't run your browser on a nearby workstation PC because that's x86-64. Arm binaries can't run on x86, and x86 binaries can't run on Arm.

Wasm (**W**eb **AS**se**M**bly) is a low-level bytecode that can run on any OS on any processor so long as it has a Wasm runtime. Wasm is derived from asm.js which was an earlier effort to write compilers that could target the Javascript runtime inside web browsers, while saving the time it takes to put Javscript through a just-in-time compiler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly

eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filters) is a language for configuring firewall rules, that's been extended into a general programming language. It runs inside the Linux kernel: you write programs that run _as part of the kernel_ (not as apps in userspace) and can change how the kernel works on the fly. The same eBPF code runs inside any Linux kernel on any architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBPF

Going back 30 years, Java runs compiled binary code on any CPU because code is compiled to JVM bytecode instead of CPU machine code... But you need a JVM on your OS to run it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

All these are bolted on to another OS, usually Linux.

But the concept works better if integrated right into the OS. That's what Taos did.

https://wiki.c2.com/?TaoIntentOs

Programs are compiled for a virtual CPU that never existed, called VP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Processor

They are translated from that to whatever processor you're running on as they're loaded from disk into RAM. So *the same binaries* run natively on any CPU. X86-32, x86-64, Arm, Risc-V, doesn't matter.

Very powerful. It was nearly the basis of the next-gen Amiga.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/deplayer/august2001.html

But it was a whole new OS and a quite weird OS at that. Taos 1 was very skeletal and limited. Taos 2, renamed Int**e**nt (yes, with the bold), was much more complete but didn't get far before the company went under.

Inferno was a rival to Java and the JVM, around the time Java appeared.

It's Plan 9, but with a virtual processor runtime built right into the kernel. All processes are written in a safer descendant of C called Limbo (it's a direct ancestor of GoLang) and compiled to bytecode that executes in the kernel's VM, which is called Dis.

Any and all binaries run on all types of CPU. There is no "native code" any more. The same compiled program runs on x86, on Risc-V, on Arm. It no longer matters. Run all of them together on a single computer.

Running on a RasPi, all your bookmarks and settings are there? No worries, run Firefox on the headless 32-core EPYC box in the next building, displaying on your Retina tablet, but save on the Pi. Or save on your Risc-V laptop's SSD next to your bed. So long as they're all running Inferno, it's all the same. One giant filesystem and all computers run the same binaries.

By the way, it's like 1% of the size of Linux with Wasm, and simpler too.

comments

Chris da Kiwi's personal history of computers

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:47:20 GMT

This is Chris's "Some thoughts on Computers" – the final, edited form.

The basic design of computers hasn't changed much since the mechanical one, the Difference Engine, invented by Charles Babbage in 1822 – but not built until 1991.

Ada Lovelace was the mathematical genius who saw the value in Babbage’s work, but it was Alan Turing who invented computer science, and the ENIAC in 1945 was arguably the first electronic general-purpose digital computer. It filled a room. The Micral N was the world's first “personal computer,” in 1973.

Since then, the basic design has changed little, other than to become smaller, faster, and on occasions, less useful.

The current trend to lighter, smaller gadget-style toys – like cell phones, watches, headsets of various types, and other consumer toys – is an indication that the industry has fallen into the clutches of mainstream profiteering, with very little real innovation now at all.

I was recently looking for a new computer for my wife and headed into one of the main laptop suppliers only to be met with row upon row of identical machines, at various price points arrived at by that mysterious breed known as "marketers". In fact, the only difference in the plastic on display was how much drive space had the engineers fitted in, and how much RAM did they have. Was the case a pretty colour, that appealed to the latest 10-year-old-girl, or a rugged he-man, who was hoping to make the school whatever team? In other words, rows of blah.

Where was the excitement of the early Radio Shack "do-it-yourself" range: the Sinclair ZX80, the Commodore 8-bits (PET and VIC-20),which ran the CPM operating system, (one of my favorites) later followed by the C64? What has happened to all the excitement and innovation? My answer is simple: the great big clobbering machine known as "Big Tech".

Intel released its first 8080 processor in 1972 and later followed up with variations on a theme, eventually leading to the 80286, the 80386, the 80486 (getting useful), and so on. All of these variations needed an operating system which basically was a variation of MS-DOS, believed to have been based on QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased. Or alternatively the newer, FOSS, FreeDOS.

Games started to appear, and some of them were quite good. But the main driver of the computer was software.

In particular, word-processors and spreadsheets.

At the time, my lost computer soul had found a niche in CP/M, which on looking back was a lovely little operating system – but quietly disappeared into the badlands of marketing.

Lost and lonely I wandered the computerverse until I hooked up with Sanyo – itself now long gone the way of the velociraptor and other lost prehistoric species.

The Sanyo bought build quality, the so-called "lotus card" to make it fully compatible with the IBM PC, and later, an RGB colour monitor and a 10 meg hard drive. The basic model was still two 5¼" floppy drives, which they pushed up to 720kB, and later the 3.½" 1.25MB floppy drives. Ahead of its time, it too went the way of the dinosaur.

These led to the Sanyo AT-286, which became a mainstay, along with the Commodore 64. A pharmaceutical company had developed a software system for pharmacies that included stock control, ordering, and sales systems. I vaguely remember that machine and software bundle was about NZ$ 15,000, which was far too rich for most. Although I sold many of them over my time.

Then the computer landscape began to level out, as the component manufacturers began to settle on the IBM PC-AT as a compatible, open-market model of computer that met the Intel and DOS standards. Thus, the gradual slide into 10000 versions of mediocrity.

The consumer demand was for bigger and more powerful machines, whereas the industry wanted to make more profits. A conflict to which the basic computer scientists hardly seemed to give a thought.

I was reminded of Carl Jung's dictum that “greed would destroy the West.”

A thousand firms sprang up, all selling the same little boxes, whilst the marketing voices kept trumpeting the bigger/better/greater theme… and the costs kept coming down, as businesses became able to afford these machines, and head offices began to control their outlying branches through the mighty computer.

I headed overseas, to escape the bedlam, and found a spot in New Guinea – only to be overrun by a mainframe which was to be administered from Australia, and was going to run my branch – for which I was responsible, but without having any control.

Which side of the fence was I going to land on? The question was soon answered by the Tropical Diseases Institute in Darwin, which diagnosed dengue fever… and so I returned to NZ.

For months I battled this recurring malady, until I was strong enough to attend a few hardware and programming courses at the local Polytechnic, eventually setting up my own small computer business, building up 386 machines for resale, followed by 486 and eventually a Texas Instrument laptop agency. Which was about 1992 from my now fragile memory. I also dabbled with the Kaypro as a personal beast and it was fun but not as flexible as the Sanyo AT I was using.

The Texas Instruments laptop ran well enough and I remember playing Doom on it, but it had little battery life, and although rechargeable, they needed to be charged every two or three hours. At least the WiFi worked pretty consistently, and for the road warrior, gave a point of distinction.

Then the famous 686 arrived, and by the use of various technologies, RAM began to climb up to 256MB, and in some machines 512MB.

Was innovation happening? No – just more marketing changes. As in, some machines came bundled with software, printers or other peripherals, such as modems, scanners, or even dot matrix printers.

As we ended the 20th century, we bought bigger and more powerful machines. The desktop was being chased by the laptop, until I stood in my favorite computer wholesaler staring at a long row of shiny boxes that were basically all the same, wondering which one my wife would like… knowing that it would have to connect to the so-called "internet", and in doing so, make all sorts of decisions inevitable. As to securing a basically insecure system which would require third part programs of dubious quality and cost.

Eventually I chose a smaller Asus, with 16GB of main RAM and an NVIDIA card, and retreating to my cottage, collapsed in despair. Fifty years of computing and wasted innovation left her with a black box that, when she opened, it said “HELLO” against a big blue background that promised the world – but only offered more of the same. As in, a constant trickle of hackers, viruses, Trojans and barely anything useful – but now included several new perversions called chat-bot or “AI”.

I retired to my room in defeat.

We have had incremental developments, until we have today's latest chips from Intel and AMD based on the 64-bit architecture first introduced around April 2003.

So where is the 128-bit architecture – or the 256 or the 512-bit?

What would happen if we got really innovative? I still remember Bill Gates saying "Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM." And yet, it is common now to buy machines with 8 or 16 or 32GB of RAM, because the poor quality of operating systems fills the memory with badly codded garbage that causes memory leaks, stack-overflow errors and other memory issues.

Then there is Unix which I started using at my courses in Christchurch polytechnic. A Dec 10 from memory which also introduced me to the famous or infamous BOFH.

I spent many happy hours chuckling over the BOF’s exploits. Then came awareness of the twin geniuses: Richard Stallman, and from Linus Torvalds, GNU/Linux. A solid, basic series of operating systems, and programs by various vendors, that simply do what they are asked, and do it well.

I wonder where all this could head, if computer manufacturers climbed onboard and developed, for example, a laptop with an HDMI screen, a rugged case with a removable battery, a decent sound system, with a good-quality keyboard, backlight with per-key colour selection. Enough RAM slots to boost the main memory up to say 256GB, and video RAM to 64GB, allowing high speed draws to the screen output.

Throw away the useless touch pads, and gimmicks like second mini screens built in to the chassis. With the advent of Bluetooth mice, they are no longer needed. Instead, include an 8TB NV Me drive, then include a decent set of controllable fans and heat pipes that actually kept the internal temperatures down, so as to not stress the RAM and processors.

I am sure this could be done, given that some manufacturers, such as Tuxedo, are already showing some innovation in this area.

Will it happen? I doubt it. The clobbering machine will strike again.

- - - - -

Having found that I could not purchase a suitable machine for my needs, I wandered throughout the computerverse until I discovered in a friends small computer business an Asus ROG Windows 7 model, in about 2004. It was able to have a RAM upgrade, which I duly carried out, with 2 × 8GB sodim ram plus 4GB of SDDR2 video RAM, and 2×500GB WD 7200RPM spinning rust hard drives. This was beginning to look more like a computer. Over the time I used it, I was able to replace the spinning-rust drives with 500GB Samsung SSDs, and as larger sticks of RAM became available, increased that to the limit as well. I ran that machine, which was Linux-compatible, throwing away the BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death – Ed.] of Microsoft Windows, and putting one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu with GNOME on it. It was computing heaven: everything just worked, and I dragged that poor beast around the world with me.

While in San Diego, I attended Scripps University and lectured on cot death for three months as a guest lecturer.

Scripps at the time was involved with IBM in developing a line-of-sight optical network, which worked brilliantly on campus. It was confined to a couple of experimental computer labs, but you had to keep your fingers off the mouse or keyboard, or your machine would overload with web pages if browsing. I believe it never made it into the world of computers for ordinary users, as the machines of the day could not keep up.

There was also talk around the labs of so-called quantum computing, which had been talked about since the 1960s on and off, but some developments appeared in 1968.

The whole idea sounds great – if it could be made to work at a practicable user level. But in the back of my mind, I had a suspicion that these ideas would just hinder investment and development of what was now a standard of motherboards and BIOS-based systems. Meanwhile, my Tux machine just did what was asked of it.

Thank you, Ian and Debra Murdoch, who developed the Debian version of Linux – on which Ubuntu was based.

I dragged that poor Asus around the Americas, both North and South, refurbishing it as I went. I found Fry's, the major technology shop in San Diego, where I could purchase portable hard drives and so on at a fraction of the cost of elsewhere in the world as well as just about any computer peripheral dreamed of. This shop was a techs heaven so to speak. And totally addictive to some on like me.

Eventually, I arrived in Canada, where I had a speaking engagement at Calgary University – which also had a strong Tux club – and I spent some time happily looking at a few other distros. Distrowatch had been founded about 2001, which made it easy to keep up with Linux news, new versions of Tux, and what system they were based on. Gentoo seemed to be the distro for those with the knowledge to compile and tweak every little aspect of their software.

Arch attracted me at times. But eventually, I always went back to Ubuntu – until I learned of Ubuntu MATE. The University had a pre-release copy of Ubuntu MATE 14.10, along with a podcast from Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress, and before I could turn around I had it on my Asus. It was simple, everything worked, and it removed the horrors of GNOME 3.

I flew happily back to New Zealand and my little country cottage.

Late in 2015, my wife became very unwell after a shopping trip. Getting in touch with some medical friends, they were concerned she’d had a heart attack. This was near the mark: she had contracted a virus which had destroyed a third of her heart muscle. It took her a few years to die, and a miserable time it was for her and for us both. After the funeral, I had rented out my house and bought a Toyota motor home, and I began traveling around the country. I ran my Asus through a solar panel hooked up to an inverter, a system which worked well and kept the beast going.

After a couple of years, I decided to have a look around Australia. My grandfather on my father's side was Australian, and had fascinated us with tales of the outback, where he worked as a drover in the 1930s and ’40s.

And so, I moved to Perth, where my brother had been living since the 1950s.

There, I discovered an amazing thing: a configurable laptop based on a Clevo motherboard – and not only that, the factory of manufacturers Metabox was just up the road in Fremantle.

Hastily, I logged on to their website, and in a state of disbelief, browsed happily for hours at all the combinations I could put together. These were all variations on a theme by Windows 7, (to misquote Paganini) and there were no listing of ACPI records or other BIOS information with which to help make a decision.

I looked at my battered old faithful; my many-times-rebuilt Asus, and decided the time had come. I started building. Maximum RAM and video RAM, latest NVIDIA card, two SSDs, their top-of-the-line WiFi and Bluetooth chip sets, sound cards, etc. Then, as my time in Perth was at an end I got it sent to New Zealand, as I was due to fly back the next day.

That was the first of four Metabox machines I have built, and is still running flawlessly using Ubuntu MATE. I gave it to a friend some years ago and he is delighted with it still.

I had decided to go to the Philippines and South east Asia to help set up clinics for distressed children, something I had already done in South America, and the NZ winter was fast approaching. Hastily I arranged with a church group in North Luzon to be met at Manila airport. I had already contacted an interpreter who was fluent in Versaya and Tagalog, and was an english teacher so we arranged to meet at Manila airport and go on from there.

Packing my trusty Metabox I flew out of Christchurch in to a brand new world.

The so called job soon showed up as a scam and after spending a week or so In Manila I suggested that rather than waste visa we have a look over some of the country. Dimp pointed out her home was on the next Island over and would make a good base to move from.

So we ended up in Cagayan de Ora – the city of the river of gold! After some months of traveling around we decided to get married and so I began the process of getting a visa for Dimp to live in NZ. This was a very difficult process, but with the help of a brilliant immigration lawyer, and many friends, we managed it and next year Dimp becomes a NZ citizen.

My next Metabox was described as a Windows 10 machine, but I knew that it would run Linux beautifully – and so it did. A few tweaks around the ACPI subsystem and it computed away merrily, with not a BSOD in sight. A friend of mine who had popped in for a visit was so impressed with it that he ordered one too, and that arrived about three months later. A quick wipe of the hard drive (thank you, Gparted!), both these machines are still running happily, with not a cloud on the horizon.

One, I gave to my stepson about three months back: a Win 10 machine, and he has taken it back with him to the Philippines, where he reports it is running fine in the tropical heat.

My new Metabox arrived about six weeks ago, and I decided – just out of curiosity – to leave Windows 11 on it. A most stupid decision, but as my wife was running Windows 11 and had already blown it up once, needing a full reset (which, to my surprise, worked), I proceeded to charge it for the recommended 24 hours, and next day, switched it on. “Hello” it said, in big white letters, and then the nonsense began… a torrent of unwanted software proceeded to fill up one of my 8TB NVMe drives, culminating after many reboots with a Chatbot, an AI “assistant”, and something called “Co-pilot”.

“No!” I cried, “not in a million years!” – and hastily plugging in my Ventoy stick, I rebooted it into Gparted, and partitioned my hard drive as ext4 for Ubuntu MATE.

So far, the beast seems most appreciative, and it hums along with just a gentle puff of warm air out of the ports. I needed to do a little tweaking, as the latest NVIDIA cards don’t seem to like Wayland as a graphics server, and the addition to GRUB of acpi=off, and another flawless computer is on the road.

Now, if only I could persuade Metabox to move to a 128-bit system, and can get delivery of that on the other side of the great divide, my future will be in computer heaven.

Oh, if you’re wondering what happened to the Asus? It is still on the kitchen table in our house in the Philippines, in pieces, where I have no doubt it is waiting for another rebuild! Maybe my Stepson Bimbo will do it and give it to his niece. Old computers never die they just get recycled

— Chris Thomas

In Requiem

03/05/1942 — 02/10/2024

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The second and final part of Chris' personal history with Linux

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:33:37 GMT

This is the second, and I very much fear the last, part of my friend Chris "da Kiwi" Thomas' recollections about PCs, Linux, and more. I shared the first part a few days ago.

Having found that I could not purchase a suitable machine for my needs, I discovered the Asus ROG Windows 7 model, in about 2004. It was able to have a RAM upgrade, which I duly carried out, with 2 × 8GB SO-DIMMs, plus 4GB of SDDR2 video RAM, and 2×500GB WD 7200RPM hard drives. This was beginning to look more like a computer. Over the time I used it, I was able to replace the spinning-rust drives with 500GB Samsung SSDs, and as larger sticks of RAM became available, increased that to the limit as well. I ran that machine, which was Tux-compatible [“Tux” being Chris’s nickname for Linux. – Ed.], throwing away the BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death – that is, Microsoft Windows. – Ed.] and putting one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu with GNOME on it. It was computing heaven: everything just worked, and I dragged that poor beast around the world with me.

While in San Diego, I attended Scripps and lectured on cot death for three months as a guest. Scripps at the time was involved with IBM in developing a line-of-sight optical network, which worked brilliantly on campus. It was confined to a couple of experimental computer labs, but you had to keep your fingers off the mouse or keyboard, or your machine would overload with web pages if browsing. I believe it never made it into the world of computers for ordinary users, as the machines of the day could not keep up.

Thank you, Ian and Debra Murdoch, who developed the Debian version of Tux – on which Ubuntu was based.

I dragged that poor Asus around the Americas, both North and South, refurbishing it as I went. I found Fry's, the major technology shop in San Diego, where I could purchase portable hard drives and so on at a fraction of the cost of elsewhere in the world.

I flew happily back to New Zealand and my little country cottage.

Late in 2015, my wife became very unwell after a shopping trip. Getting in touch with some medical friends, they were concerned she’d had a heart attack. This was near the mark: she had contracted a virus which had destroyed a third of her heart muscle. It took her a few years to die, and a miserable time it was for her and for us both. After the funeral, I had rented out my house and bought a Toyota motorhome, and I began traveling around the country. I ran my Asus through a solar panel hooked up to an inverter, a system which worked well and kept the beast going.

And so, I moved to Perth, where my brother had been living since the 1950s.

There, I discovered an amazing thing: a configurable laptop based on a Clevo motherboard – and not only that, their factory was just up the road in Fremantle.

Hastily, I logged on to their website, and in a state of disbelief, browsed happily for hours at all the combinations I could put together. These were all variations on a theme by Windows 7, and there were no listing of ACPI records or other BIOS information.

I looked at my battered old faithful, my many-times-rebuilt Asus, and decided the time had come. I started building. Maximum RAM and video RAM, latest nVidia card, two SSDs, their top-of-the-line WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets, sound cards, etc. Then, I got it sent to New Zealand, as I was due back the next day.

That was the first of four Metabox machines I have built, and is still running flawlessly using Ubuntu MATE.

My next Metabox was described as a Windows 10 machine, but I knew that it would run Tux beautifully – and so it did. A few tweaks around the ACPI subsystem and it computed away merrily, with not a BSOD in sight. A friend of mine who had popped in for a visit was so impressed with it that he ordered one too, and that arrived about three months later. A quick wipe of the hard drive (thank you, Gparted!), both these machines are still running happily, with not a cloud on the horizon.

One, I gave to my stepson about three months back, and he has taken it back with him to the Philippines, where he reports it is running fine in the tropical heat.

“No!” I cried, “not in a million years!” – and hastily plugging in my Ventoy stick, I rebooted it into Gparted, and partitioned my hard drive for Ubuntu MATE.

So far, the beast seems most appreciative, and it hums along with just a gentle puff of warm air out of the ports. I needed to do a little tweaking, as the latest nVidia cards don’t seem to like Wayland as a graphics server, and the addition to GRUB of acpi=off, and another flawless computer is on the road.

Now, if only I could persuade Metabox to move to a 128-bit system, and can get delivery of that on the other side of the great divide, my future will be in computer heaven.

Oh, if you’re wondering what happened to the Asus? It is still on the kitchen table in our house in the Philippines, in pieces, where I have no doubt it is waiting for another rebuild!

Chris Thomas

In Requiem

03/05/1942 — 02/10/2024

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