When I first started working with VAX C under VMS, it was a pain dealing with RMS. It had no way of handling files that were just a stream of bytes. It wanted everything to be a "record". I suppose they must have fixed that eventually.
Fortunately for me, I couldn't afford VAX C and was spared your pain. On VMS I used GCC for personal stuff and FORTRAN and DCL for the company I worked for. I cussed GCC at the time (I was used to Turbo C for the PC), but it has come a long way, and I hear that it even runs on some mult-core microcontrollers now.
I'm not sure GCC existed for the VAX when I first started using VAX C. If it did, I wasn't aware of it. I really learned C and wrote my first Lisp interpreter using DECUS C on a PDP-11 running RT11.
There's always some catch with every operating system. One such was the VMS filesystem database-like features. Encoding type and record information directly into the filesystem may have looked like a good idea at some point, but the moment your use case doesn't fit what's pre-made for you then those features are worthless and just in the way. You couldn't even FTP a binary file from VMS, it would always be padded to the nearest 512 byte. What Unix did right was to define a filesystem as having *no* record- or type information - you take care of that yourself, in your program. Infinite flexibility follows.
On the other hand, the built-in version control in the VMS filesystem wasn't in the way, and could be very useful.
Aside: Yesterday I tried joining a conference call with CISCOs Webex system. It runs in the browser using cross platform HTML/CSS and Javascript. It also requires installing plugins for FLASH, a cross-browser system, and Java the famous "write once run anywhere" language. Did it work in my Chrome or Firefox on Linux? No. Why the hell not?
See why I'm grumpy?...
Webex actually works fine for me on Linux. It's infinitely better than MS Skype when it comes to desktop sharing (b/c it looks like it's local, instead of some unreadable something). Video is better too. These things matter to me because a good part of the year I'm on the opposite part of the globe from my co-workers and customers.
But even though it works on my Linux PC, these days I mostly run the Webex Android app on a tablet instead.
About the evil of BigCorp (well..) I found this delightful article from 1984: How we trapped the dinosaurs
Quote:
".. And we discovered that the Big Boys of the computer industry were not after all engaged in a race to get the best computers to the most users at the lowest cost but were instead playing marketing muscle games to lock in the biggest proportion of users to the highest cost computers possible. It began to remind us of another big movie of 1967, The President's Analyst, in which a new superpower is discovered to be the Phone Company, with evil designs for exceeding the plots of any mere nation."
Hmm...any chance you can explain how you got webex to work on Linux?
I have Debian, Firefox, Java plugin, FLASH plugin, all working. Webex runs but not one single feature works! I don't see any helpful advice on the webex support pages for Linux.
I suspect I'm missing a bunch of libraries built for i386 on this 64 bit system.
What OS you choose is a matter of personal preference and pain tolerance and perhaps political ideology for some.
I still used Windows XP and Office 2000. Works like a champ and so do all the development tools like Quartus and Rowley Crossworks, FreePascal, Qaurtus, etc
Ohh yeah I still have a rotary phone at home.
Don't need the bleeding edge. Won't touch the latest from MS, always wait until SP2 or so.
What OS you choose is a matter of personal preference...
No, it is not.
Not many years ago if you wanted to use a computer and take part in the modern networked world at all you only had one choice, MS Windows. Your bank would not talk to you unless you used Internet Explorer, you friends and colleagues would not understand you unless you used Word and Excel etc. Interesting software like the Propeller Tool and Quartus would not run anywhere else. Many devices only worked with Windows drivers. And so on and so on.
Right there we had a monopoly. The computing infrastructure of the entire world dependant on a single supplier in a foreign country for most. No choice. Madness.
That was the point, about 1997, that I said to myself that "enough was enough". As it did many others. We no doubt suffered a lot of pain and deprivation over the years as a consequence.
Call that "political ideology" if you like. I call it a practical realization of a bad situation.
You rightly point out that today we can exercise personal preference to some extent. Apple has grown huge. Linux became a thing to the extent that things like Quartus now run on it. Software authors have realized the value of cross platform support, think Firefox, Chrome, Sublime, Atom, node.js, PropellerIDE and tons of others.
And today the OS is irrelevant for most people. Everything is web based. All they need is a browser for their Google and Facebook and github etc etc.
We are not out of the woods yet though. Increasingly the desktop is irrelevant and mobile is the thing. Not much choice there now is there.
Netscape saw this and got beaten down badly by MS. We live in much better times these days due to open efforts.
(I've expanded this comment originally written on mobile)
Javascript was showing real potential back then. I remember running and looking through cool, in the browser demos that got stalled for 5 years or so. Then things began to pick up, and today we have what the Netscape guys saw and more. A lot of people, myself included, didn't fully understand it, but we liked what we saw.
Anyone remember the angry, fire beating Mozilla logo from that time? Some of those peeps didn't give up, despite a brutal computing environment. They did build new innovative tools and it took a lot to get them out there and in use like we see all over the place today.
Another group that helped was the Hollywood effects teams. They got sold an all windows solution. SGI ruled the roost, and a deal with MS hurt them badly. This effort was a general failure. Unix has its merits. You can google "Fahrenheit Project" to identify the root of a lot of this. At the time, I was into OpenGL for a number of reasons, the number one being it was the UNIX way, and Direct X was the Windows way. Being a UNIX fan, due to IRIX being the best computing experience I've ever had, brought a lot of skepticism.
SGI had produced Windows workstations. http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html These were awesome windows computers! If you were into graphics at this time in computing, there was the idea of shared memory and non-shared memory. In your typical PC, the bus speed was slow, and graphics subsystems were including more and more RAM to handle larger and deeper graphics functionality demands. The SGI O2 Visual Workstation was a shared memory computer. It's graphics hardware tapped the same RAM as the CPU did, and this made for some amazing things. Want to see moving video on rippling surfaces, or run a sub pixel accurate compositing application on gigabyte images? The O2 was your computer. It could do things at a few hundred mhz that even the fastest PCs at the time could not do, or if they did, didn't do well. All about big geometry and bitmaps.
Well, those windows computers were SGI IRIX style from the ground up. And that is what killed SGI. Turns out, Microsoft owns the rights to the ARC loader software in the BIOS used in IRIX machines. That same approach in PC land brought an experience to PC users they were not accustomed to. No more text mode bios screen. Turn it on, and it's a beautiful, simple, robust experience from the get go. Unlike IRIX, which could dynamically manage shared memory, NT required that one select the amount of RAM to be shared. No big deal, just get a lot of RAM and share, say 2GB of it. Full screen games, like Unreal Tournament, ran at impressive HD resolutions at picture perfect frame rates and did so with full textures and effects. Awesome. Gamers came in to buy the machines as did many graphics and production type people.
This was a great thing, and it got Windows into Hollywood, but it was lopsided. At the time Direct X was getting a lot better, Open GL suffered under Windows. Is there any wonder why? Of course not.
So, SGI decided to flesh out their computing line and compliment their super computers with Linux terminals, or workstations. You see, MIPS just wasn't keeping up with Intel. Nobody was. Eventually, it was time to move over, and those beautiful Windows stations were how SGI chose to do it. The Linux was to follow, and that ARC loader type BIOS was the key to having the whole experience well managed. Once the Linux work was complete, people would have been able to buy an O2, running IRIX, do awesome stuff and network with supercomputers, or buy a Linux machine doing the same basic things, or do Windows, if that made sense. The open choice strategy was bold and would have played out very well for SGI, who was gaining a lot of fans in the general computing space. SGI has always been well known in specialized niches, academia, government, NASA, etc...
Microsoft got pissed. Nobody got to sell an open machine and SGI became an even bigger target than it was for graphics muscle. But I digress...
The effects guys in Hollywood tried it. Gave Windows a go, and Windows versions of popular applications were made, and a lot of effort was put into making it all work. Big fail. Most of the studios found their old IRIX gear ran circles around the Windows stuff, and moved to Linux after the promise of great Visual Workstations got crushed. Each of them opened up stuff they were good at, share and share alike, and they built up teams to do effects, and we got things like WETA out of that whole process. Not a Windows machine in sight, and it all was 5+ years behind too.
Microsoft Legal demanded SGI either ditch their ARC loader, or only sell Windows. No advanced graphics for Linux. So SGI did only Windows and that whole development path ended up scuttled. We lost a lot on that, and most people don't even know what we lost.
Things would have been very different today.
Back to the shared memory for a bit... today we have much faster PC bus speeds, but we still have that bus, and graphics hardware still has massive amounts of RAM and we still have to copy and manage data streaming across that bus. There would have been a valid alternative out there, shared memory, where the CPU and GPU can work together, right on the same data, etc...
How important was this? Let's just say Win 2K running on an SGI was perfect. No window tearing, no in process screen drawing, nothing. Just rock solid, frame locked, fast GUI operations. It took us many years to get back there with Windows 7, faster PC busses and a complex compositing window manager. And Microsoft did get there, and it's window manager is really good now too. And now you know who a lot of that came from, and what happened to them.
These moves impacted me. At the time, I was doing CAD and 3D modeling and effects. I-deas, Alias, MAYA, etc... and doing that stuff on IRIX was awesome. MIPS failed, so the move to Intel was a godsend, and the whole idea of Linux taking those roles on a commercial level, not just the open source efforts we did get, would have made a big impact.
Apple stepped in though! Their move to Intel along with OSX, which is about as SGI like in terms of well managed, high quality, beautiful computing as you can get, became the serious Unix workstation of choice for many, and Linux sort of lost on the Desktop for lack of serious, focused efforts to go there. For those who cared, it ended up being Apple, and OpenGL, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who thought they could kill SGI and gut OpenGL while promoting Direct X... Bastards!
So.. the effects people adopted Linux, opened various tools, and Titanic was done, followed by awesome work by the likes of WETA studios, who did Lord of the Rings. Many production, graphics, content create, etc... types of people, along with academics, scientists, research, all went Apple, and used Linux on the back end due to SGI adding it's NUMA multi-processing moxy to Linux, not Windows, which doomed Windows to the desktop, where it remains today. It's not a serious option for supercomputing. Linux is, as IRIX was.
You can thank the chief scientist at SGI for that one. Once SGI adopted Linux and Itanium, it was game on for them in the HPC space, which saved the company from the brutal gutting it got at the hands of Microsoft, among others...
So the take away here is this:
It is not so important that any one person adopt the tools, but it is very important that they can, if they want or need to. The Mozilla guys were able to carry on and bring us the awesome browser experience they envisioned 10 years ahead of everyone else and while Microsoft was still figuring out what the Internet was and releasing turds like Front Page...
The effects guys make us awesome movies and startups of all kinds can tap open computing to change the world and they don't have to ask permission.
Android? That's an obvious one.
You probably run more open code today than you realize, and it's kept your costs down and your choices up.
That keeps everyone honest and it limits exploitation and abuse from larger players.
So run what you want. It's no big deal. But also remember we need enough to be open to matter, or it won't matter and your computing tech life can and will suffer as it has before.
Try typing "about:mozilla" into your Firefox browser and see this:
"The twins of Mammon quarrelled. Their warring plunged the world into a new darkness, and the beast abhorred the darkness. So it began to move swiftly, and grew more powerful, and went forth and multiplied. And the beasts brought fire and light to the darkness.
Those peeps were competing and winning big. Abuse of closed computing almost ended all that. Those of us who saw it all happening identified with that angry dino. Google for the happy one just prior to this one, if you want.
And also just realize some of us need to feel strongly and run open code, or there won't be any.
So all this Mozilla stuff is saying computers are not evil and OSes are not evil, it is the Browser that is potentially evil due to the way it creeps into our computers and dominates our lives.
So where does this fit in to the OP's request for advice on a new computer? All the OSes will load Mozilla or Firefox, won't they?
And yes, I do understand the rampant brutality of the proprietary software developers against each other and against their beloved customer bases. So I finally decided I didn't not want to be 'road kill on the Internet super-highway' and went over to open-source.
And also just realize some of us need to feel strongly and run open code, or there won't be any. -- the wisdom of Potatohead
"Godzilla loves me this I know, for the Mothra tells me so..." -- the Phoney Art League
Well, getting a new computer is a pretty great time to think about computing. Again, run what you want. No worries. It's all pretty good, well maybe not ChromeOS... and it's about having fun, getting stuff done, making the money, etc...
I think it's good to have the dialog on this stuff. It's good, in the sense of understanding how people get to where they are at and what that means for everyone.
I also think people should not feel worry or shame over any of it either. Truth is, we've got a lot of great choices. Make 'em and game on, right? Right. For me, it's often interesting to understand how others see it all and to learn what they value.
Comments
On the other hand, the built-in version control in the VMS filesystem wasn't in the way, and could be very useful.
But even though it works on my Linux PC, these days I mostly run the Webex Android app on a tablet instead.
About the evil of BigCorp (well..) I found this delightful article from 1984:
How we trapped the dinosaurs
Quote:
I have Debian, Firefox, Java plugin, FLASH plugin, all working. Webex runs but not one single feature works! I don't see any helpful advice on the webex support pages for Linux.
I suspect I'm missing a bunch of libraries built for i386 on this 64 bit system.
I still used Windows XP and Office 2000. Works like a champ and so do all the development tools like Quartus and Rowley Crossworks, FreePascal, Qaurtus, etc
Ohh yeah I still have a rotary phone at home.
Don't need the bleeding edge. Won't touch the latest from MS, always wait until SP2 or so.
I have not seen a phone attached to the wall since ten years ago and a rotary dial phone since ten years before that!
Not many years ago if you wanted to use a computer and take part in the modern networked world at all you only had one choice, MS Windows. Your bank would not talk to you unless you used Internet Explorer, you friends and colleagues would not understand you unless you used Word and Excel etc. Interesting software like the Propeller Tool and Quartus would not run anywhere else. Many devices only worked with Windows drivers. And so on and so on.
Right there we had a monopoly. The computing infrastructure of the entire world dependant on a single supplier in a foreign country for most. No choice. Madness.
That was the point, about 1997, that I said to myself that "enough was enough". As it did many others. We no doubt suffered a lot of pain and deprivation over the years as a consequence.
Call that "political ideology" if you like. I call it a practical realization of a bad situation.
You rightly point out that today we can exercise personal preference to some extent. Apple has grown huge. Linux became a thing to the extent that things like Quartus now run on it. Software authors have realized the value of cross platform support, think Firefox, Chrome, Sublime, Atom, node.js, PropellerIDE and tons of others.
And today the OS is irrelevant for most people. Everything is web based. All they need is a browser for their Google and Facebook and github etc etc.
We are not out of the woods yet though. Increasingly the desktop is irrelevant and mobile is the thing. Not much choice there now is there.
(I've expanded this comment originally written on mobile)
Javascript was showing real potential back then. I remember running and looking through cool, in the browser demos that got stalled for 5 years or so. Then things began to pick up, and today we have what the Netscape guys saw and more. A lot of people, myself included, didn't fully understand it, but we liked what we saw.
Anyone remember the angry, fire beating Mozilla logo from that time? Some of those peeps didn't give up, despite a brutal computing environment. They did build new innovative tools and it took a lot to get them out there and in use like we see all over the place today.
Another group that helped was the Hollywood effects teams. They got sold an all windows solution. SGI ruled the roost, and a deal with MS hurt them badly. This effort was a general failure. Unix has its merits. You can google "Fahrenheit Project" to identify the root of a lot of this. At the time, I was into OpenGL for a number of reasons, the number one being it was the UNIX way, and Direct X was the Windows way. Being a UNIX fan, due to IRIX being the best computing experience I've ever had, brought a lot of skepticism.
SGI had produced Windows workstations. http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html These were awesome windows computers! If you were into graphics at this time in computing, there was the idea of shared memory and non-shared memory. In your typical PC, the bus speed was slow, and graphics subsystems were including more and more RAM to handle larger and deeper graphics functionality demands. The SGI O2 Visual Workstation was a shared memory computer. It's graphics hardware tapped the same RAM as the CPU did, and this made for some amazing things. Want to see moving video on rippling surfaces, or run a sub pixel accurate compositing application on gigabyte images? The O2 was your computer. It could do things at a few hundred mhz that even the fastest PCs at the time could not do, or if they did, didn't do well. All about big geometry and bitmaps.
Well, those windows computers were SGI IRIX style from the ground up. And that is what killed SGI. Turns out, Microsoft owns the rights to the ARC loader software in the BIOS used in IRIX machines. That same approach in PC land brought an experience to PC users they were not accustomed to. No more text mode bios screen. Turn it on, and it's a beautiful, simple, robust experience from the get go. Unlike IRIX, which could dynamically manage shared memory, NT required that one select the amount of RAM to be shared. No big deal, just get a lot of RAM and share, say 2GB of it. Full screen games, like Unreal Tournament, ran at impressive HD resolutions at picture perfect frame rates and did so with full textures and effects. Awesome. Gamers came in to buy the machines as did many graphics and production type people.
This was a great thing, and it got Windows into Hollywood, but it was lopsided. At the time Direct X was getting a lot better, Open GL suffered under Windows. Is there any wonder why? Of course not.
So, SGI decided to flesh out their computing line and compliment their super computers with Linux terminals, or workstations. You see, MIPS just wasn't keeping up with Intel. Nobody was. Eventually, it was time to move over, and those beautiful Windows stations were how SGI chose to do it. The Linux was to follow, and that ARC loader type BIOS was the key to having the whole experience well managed. Once the Linux work was complete, people would have been able to buy an O2, running IRIX, do awesome stuff and network with supercomputers, or buy a Linux machine doing the same basic things, or do Windows, if that made sense. The open choice strategy was bold and would have played out very well for SGI, who was gaining a lot of fans in the general computing space. SGI has always been well known in specialized niches, academia, government, NASA, etc...
Microsoft got pissed. Nobody got to sell an open machine and SGI became an even bigger target than it was for graphics muscle. But I digress...
The effects guys in Hollywood tried it. Gave Windows a go, and Windows versions of popular applications were made, and a lot of effort was put into making it all work. Big fail. Most of the studios found their old IRIX gear ran circles around the Windows stuff, and moved to Linux after the promise of great Visual Workstations got crushed. Each of them opened up stuff they were good at, share and share alike, and they built up teams to do effects, and we got things like WETA out of that whole process. Not a Windows machine in sight, and it all was 5+ years behind too.
Microsoft Legal demanded SGI either ditch their ARC loader, or only sell Windows. No advanced graphics for Linux. So SGI did only Windows and that whole development path ended up scuttled. We lost a lot on that, and most people don't even know what we lost.
Things would have been very different today.
Back to the shared memory for a bit... today we have much faster PC bus speeds, but we still have that bus, and graphics hardware still has massive amounts of RAM and we still have to copy and manage data streaming across that bus. There would have been a valid alternative out there, shared memory, where the CPU and GPU can work together, right on the same data, etc...
How important was this? Let's just say Win 2K running on an SGI was perfect. No window tearing, no in process screen drawing, nothing. Just rock solid, frame locked, fast GUI operations. It took us many years to get back there with Windows 7, faster PC busses and a complex compositing window manager. And Microsoft did get there, and it's window manager is really good now too. And now you know who a lot of that came from, and what happened to them.
These moves impacted me. At the time, I was doing CAD and 3D modeling and effects. I-deas, Alias, MAYA, etc... and doing that stuff on IRIX was awesome. MIPS failed, so the move to Intel was a godsend, and the whole idea of Linux taking those roles on a commercial level, not just the open source efforts we did get, would have made a big impact.
Apple stepped in though! Their move to Intel along with OSX, which is about as SGI like in terms of well managed, high quality, beautiful computing as you can get, became the serious Unix workstation of choice for many, and Linux sort of lost on the Desktop for lack of serious, focused efforts to go there. For those who cared, it ended up being Apple, and OpenGL, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who thought they could kill SGI and gut OpenGL while promoting Direct X... Bastards!
So.. the effects people adopted Linux, opened various tools, and Titanic was done, followed by awesome work by the likes of WETA studios, who did Lord of the Rings. Many production, graphics, content create, etc... types of people, along with academics, scientists, research, all went Apple, and used Linux on the back end due to SGI adding it's NUMA multi-processing moxy to Linux, not Windows, which doomed Windows to the desktop, where it remains today. It's not a serious option for supercomputing. Linux is, as IRIX was.
You can thank the chief scientist at SGI for that one. Once SGI adopted Linux and Itanium, it was game on for them in the HPC space, which saved the company from the brutal gutting it got at the hands of Microsoft, among others...
So the take away here is this:
It is not so important that any one person adopt the tools, but it is very important that they can, if they want or need to. The Mozilla guys were able to carry on and bring us the awesome browser experience they envisioned 10 years ahead of everyone else and while Microsoft was still figuring out what the Internet was and releasing turds like Front Page...
The effects guys make us awesome movies and startups of all kinds can tap open computing to change the world and they don't have to ask permission.
Android? That's an obvious one.
You probably run more open code today than you realize, and it's kept your costs down and your choices up.
That keeps everyone honest and it limits exploitation and abuse from larger players.
So run what you want. It's no big deal. But also remember we need enough to be open to matter, or it won't matter and your computing tech life can and will suffer as it has before.
Try typing "about:mozilla" into your Firefox browser and see this:
"The twins of Mammon quarrelled. Their warring plunged the world into a new darkness, and the beast abhorred the darkness. So it began to move swiftly, and grew more powerful, and went forth and multiplied. And the beasts brought fire and light to the darkness.
from The Book of Mozilla, 15:1 "
Which about sums up the situation.
http://blog.gerv.net/2005/01/some_clarificat_1/
Mammon is just a personification of greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon
Where is this all leading .....?
And also just realize some of us need to feel strongly and run open code, or there won't be any.
So where does this fit in to the OP's request for advice on a new computer? All the OSes will load Mozilla or Firefox, won't they?
And yes, I do understand the rampant brutality of the proprietary software developers against each other and against their beloved customer bases. So I finally decided I didn't not want to be 'road kill on the Internet super-highway' and went over to open-source.
And also just realize some of us need to feel strongly and run open code, or there won't be any. -- the wisdom of Potatohead
"Godzilla loves me this I know, for the Mothra tells me so..." -- the Phoney Art League
I think it's good to have the dialog on this stuff. It's good, in the sense of understanding how people get to where they are at and what that means for everyone.
I also think people should not feel worry or shame over any of it either. Truth is, we've got a lot of great choices. Make 'em and game on, right? Right. For me, it's often interesting to understand how others see it all and to learn what they value.