On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:40:49 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

>
> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't
> so busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off
> bigger salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.
>

Who gives a flying fuck about 50-year-old computing. That shit
is long dead and buried so why the need to resurrect the stench?

The future, and present, is GNU/Linux/FOSS/FreeBSD.

Keep your comments progressive and keep your nostalgia up
your fucking ass where it belongs.

--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:35:52 +0100, Chris Elvidge wrote:

>
> Perhaps it could be rewritten in Rust, as an alternative to a new Linux
> kernel written in Rust as opposed to writing bits of the current kernel
> in Rust.
>

Why Rust?

Rust is just another fucking crutch for all the fucking retards who
could not master computer science sufficiently to master C.

C is the ultimate and only programming language.

But the problem is that C requires a sophistication and maturity
that 99% of "programmers" do not possess.

All those who advocate Rust only attest to their retarded and
hopeless programming "expertise."

--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.

Lester Thorpe wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:35:52 +0100, Chris Elvidge wrote:
>
>> Perhaps it could be rewritten in Rust, as an alternative to a new Linux
>> kernel written in Rust as opposed to writing bits of the current kernel
>> in Rust.
>
> Why Rust?
>
> Rust is just another fucking crutch for all the fucking retards who
> could not master computer science sufficiently to master C.
>
> C is the ultimate and only programming language.
>
> But the problem is that C requires a sophistication and maturity
> that 99% of "programmers" do not possess.
>
> All those who advocate Rust only attest to their retarded and
> hopeless programming "expertise."

I'm of the theory that all programmers should know how to create resources and
dispose of them the instant they are not needed.

- Via auto scope
- Via constructors and destructors
- Via malloc() and rigorous calls of free()
- Fsck garbage collection (for the most part)

--
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic, and
utterly humourless rictus. It was the sort of grin that is normally
accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps
out of the teeth.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Lure of the Wyrm"

On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>
> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM? 8)
>
> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>

GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
been as easy, to do it earlier.

The 8088 was 1979.
The 68000 was 1979.

The 68000 apparently had the address lines to operate 16MB of memory.
But at the time, our 68000 design had 128KB on it. The thing was,
DRAM was its own worst enemy at the time, a super-crude technology,
intended to make engineers jump from a second floor window. It's a good
thing we only had 128KB, at the time. The DRAM chips could only withstand
-0.5V of undershoot. Once a genius in the DRAM industry, figured out a way
to allow the undershoot to be -2.0V, that is when DRAM began to be more practical.
Our system was a "cost be damned" prototype, so I feel we would have had
more memory, if who ever designed it, had wanted to add more. (The machine was
a freaking disaster, and FCC part 15, it would have blown the front end off
the test instruments - I took a machine home, and it wiped out all television
reception. We had a lot to learn back then, about emissions.)

https://wiki.console5.com/tw/images/thumb/1/1c/MC68000-MC68010-MC68HC000-64-DIL-Pinout.png/270px-MC68000-MC68010-MC68HC000-64-DIL-Pinout.png?20110817192929

By 1987 or 1991, I expect there was enough memory, for a person
to have aspirations. I don't think you could easily rush Linux
out the door earlier. Maybe you could have done your first version
on a mainframe. They had core memory.

Paul

On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>
>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM? 8)
>>
>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>
>
> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>
> The 8088 was 1979.
> The 68000 was 1979.

The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the 8088
was the 68008.

....

--
Cheers, Carlos.

In comp.os.linux.misc The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> People don't want to pay for operating systems any more. The *only*
> place Microsoft hangs on is the desktop, and desktop sales are now more
> or less commercial. Not many average dudes buy a desktop when they can
> have a fondleslab or a big fuck off 'rob me' mobile phone...
>
> Only hardcore gamers
>
> Nothing of any real significance has come out of Microsoft for ages.
>
> It is really a cash cow now. It will dwindle and get sold off. Gates has
> his billions.

Any major future dwindling of M$ won't be due to Windows losing
dominance, since it's already down to just 12.8% of their revenue
in 2022:
https://businessquant.com/microsoft-revenue-by-product

Money-wise they're mainly a "cloud" company now, selling services
that may often run on Linux. In fact they're making contributions
to Linux kernel development now, so it really is a brave new world:

Microsoft Engineer Sends Rust Linux Kernel Patches For In-Place
Module Initialization
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Rust-In-Place-Module-Init

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On Thu, 19 Sep 2024 18:23:36 -0600, clinker wrote:

> OS2 had a good run for example. It is still alive and well in some
> proprietary industrial equipment because it is impervious to hacks as no
> one remembers it.

It wasn’t impervious to hacks. I remember reading the original programming
manual, and noticing about four different ways to crash or hang the
system.

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:41:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> DOS is still used in a lot of industrial kit ...

You mean the obsolete, unsupported, proprietary MS-DOS or DR-DOS, or the
Open Source, still being developed, FreeDOS?

> There is evidence that Linux itself is getting bloated, and in need of
> the same 'back to basics' approach that Linus dud 30 years ago.

It’s just as modular as it always was. You can even build it for certain
architectures that completely lack memory protection.

> Linux is like C. It has its issues, but everyone understands them
> everyone can program in it and it works well enough. And it doesn't need
> licenses to be paid to use it.
>
> And sometimes its easier to fix bugs in it than to rewrite it in Rust
> etc.

You do know that the Linux kernel is accepting Rust code now, don’t you?

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:40:49 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't so
> busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off bigger
> salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.

The Amiga made a giant leap in hardware capability, then stood still as
competitors surpassed it. For example, the Apple Mac was able to improve
its hardware with minimal breakage in app compatibility, because of its
good software abstractions. Whereas Amiga apps had to work directly with
the hardware, so that hardware could not be improved without breaking
those apps.

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:34:06 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> The original Unix ran on less that 128K RAM

Remember, other OSes were more efficient than that, because they were
mostly written in assembly language. Unix, being written in C, was larger
and slower.

On Thu, 19 Sep 2024 18:23:36 -0600, clinker <azigni@yahoo.com> wrote in
<eg3HO.8194$MxR.395@fx47.iad>:

> Not to derail this thread, which is a good one, but it is possible an
> operating system will be developed that threaten both Linux and Windows
> existence as it is known today.
>
> OS2 had a good run for example. It is still alive and well in some
> proprietary industrial equipment because it is impervious to hacks as no
> one remembers it.

Is it 64-bit yet?

--
-v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
OS: Linux 6.11.0 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
"Confucius say: Man who run behind truck get exhausted."

On Fri, 9/20/2024 5:19 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>>
>>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM?   8)
>>>
>>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>>
>>
>> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
>> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
>> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>>
>> The 8088 was 1979.
>> The 68000 was 1979.
>
> The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the 8088 was the 68008.

At the time, people knew better than to buy the 8088 or the 68008.

But good things come from following the theme. In this article,
is a description of Torvalds early equipment. And partially
why he was inclined to work on Linux. It was the poor quality
of the stuff that was coming on the machines he was buying :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL # A thing that used the 68008

"Linux

Linus Torvalds has attributed his eventually developing the Linux kernel,
likewise having pre-emptive multitasking, in part to having owned a Sinclair QL
in the 1980s.

Because of the lack of support, particularly in his native Finland, Torvalds
became used to writing his own software rather than relying on programs written
by others.[28] In part, his frustration with Minix, on the Sinclair,[29] led,
years later, to his purchase of a more standard IBM PC compatible on which he
would develop Linux.

In 'Just for Fun', Torvalds wrote, "Back in 1987, one of the selling points of
the QL was that it looked cool", because it was "entirely matte black, with a
black keyboard" and was "fairly angular". He also wrote he bought a floppy controller
so he could stop using microdrives, but the floppy controller driver was bad,
so he wrote his own. Bugs in the operating system, or discrepancies with the
documentation, that made his software not work properly, got him interested in
operating systems.

"Like any good computer purist raised on a 68008 chip," Torvalds "despised PCs",
but decided in autumn 1990 to purchase a 386 custom-made IBM PC compatible,
which he did in January 1991.
"

I think you can see there, how that over-developed the muscles in his middle finger.

Paul

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 08:33:00 -0700, Bobbie Sellers wrote:

> Linux is good but still Thunderbird cannot do the
> tricks that Yet Another Mailer did nor the Usenet access programs.

Luckily, those are not the only programs available on Linux systems for
that sort of purpose.

On 9/20/24 11:40, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-09-20, chrisv <chrisv@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> clinker wrote:
>>>
>>>> OS2 had a good run for example. It is still alive and well in some
>>>> proprietary industrial equipment because it is impervious to hacks as no
>>>> one remembers it.
>>
>> We also had Amigas and Atari ST's, before it become impractical to
>> compete with the Wintel juggernaut on the desktop.
>>
>> If Micro$oft could push all of those (at least somewhat) established
>> platforms out of the market, what chance does a newcomer have?
>
> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't
> so busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off
> bigger salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.

Very, very true. The owner of the massive debt demanded
thet the company be liquidated so he could recover as much as
possbile from cut rate sales of the silliest models..

bliss
--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com

On 9/20/24 12:11, Lester Thorpe wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:40:49 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>>
>> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't
>> so busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off
>> bigger salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.
>>
>
> Who gives a flying fuck about 50-year-old computing. That shit
> is long dead and buried so why the need to resurrect the stench?
>
> The future, and present, is GNU/Linux/FOSS/FreeBSD.
>
> Keep your comments progressive and keep your nostalgia up
> your fucking ass where it belongs.
>
>

We oldsters are entitled to use Usenet as we please
and if you are so young try out Redox. CBM failed only
30 years ago, when I was in my youthful 50s. Aminet is
still up and serving the latest version of AmigaOS on expensive
machines.

bliss

--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com

On 9/20/24 17:00, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:40:49 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't so
>> busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off bigger
>> salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.
>
> The Amiga made a giant leap in hardware capability, then stood still as
> competitors surpassed it. For example, the Apple Mac was able to improve
> its hardware with minimal breakage in app compatibility, because of its
> good software abstractions. Whereas Amiga apps had to work directly with
> the hardware, so that hardware could not be improved without breaking
> those apps.

Good applications on the Amiga did not run directly on the
hardware. The AmigaOS ran on the hardware and lots of gamers and
demo-coders would exploit the hardware ignoring the OS. The OS had
everything
but memory management.

bliss

--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com

On 20/09/2024 22:19, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>>
>>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM?   8)
>>>
>>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>>
>>
>> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
>> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
>> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>>
>> The 8088 was 1979.
>> The 68000 was 1979.
>
> The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the 8088
> was the 68008.
>
> ...
>
FSVO 'equivalent' :-)

--
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Jonathan Swift.

On 21/09/2024 02:08, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
> On 9/20/24 11:40, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2024-09-20, chrisv <chrisv@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> clinker wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> OS2 had a good run for example. It is still alive and well in some
>>>>> proprietary industrial equipment because it is impervious to hacks
>>>>> as no
>>>>> one remembers it.
>>>
>>> We also had Amigas and Atari ST's, before it become impractical to
>>> compete with the Wintel juggernaut on the desktop.
>>>
>>> If Micro$oft could push all of those (at least somewhat) established
>>> platforms out of the market, what chance does a newcomer have?
>>
>> The Amiga would have fared much better if Commodore's board wasn't
>> so busy running the company into the ground while siphoning off
>> bigger salaries than IBM's bigwigs were getting.
>
>     Very, very true. The owner of the massive debt demanded
> thet the company be liquidated so he could recover as much as
> possbile from cut rate sales of the silliest models..
>
The owner of the debt was probably perfectly entitled to do just that.

Money doesnt come without strings

>     bliss

--
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of
conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which
they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by
thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

― Leo Tolstoy

On Sat, 21 Sep 2024 09:17:22 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

>
> Ah, Just another troll
>

Ah, just another self-proclaimed, stuck-up moderator.

--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.

On 21 Sep 2024 08:49:41 GMT, Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:

> Le 20-09-2024, Lester Thorpe <lt@gnu.rocks> a écrit :
>>
>> Who gives a flying fuck about 50-year-old computing.
>
>
> Every tool you promote is an old tool, every tool you despise is a
> modern tool. Whatever your choices, the terminal, the editor, the GUI
> (you say you don't use GUI but you are stuck in the old fvwm by the
> way).
>

Software does not "age" like biological organisms or material corrosion.

Software "ages" via a lack of development and nearly all the tools
I utilize are still being actively maintained.

I also do not use "fvwm." I use "fvwm3" which is the latest incarnation
of probably the best window manager available:

https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3

A GUI is useful so far as it provides an easement and anything beyond
easement is pure useless dazzle, and it is mainly dazzlement to which
most "modern" GUIs strive.

The point and purpose of computing is to produce information and the
CLI is just as effective if not more so.

You are advised to keep your meaningless piffle to yourself.

>
> Because rust is
> far from an easy language to master.
>

Ha, ha, ha!

Try using C for threading and cache optimization. YOU would quickly
fall apart and run to Rust or some other crutch.

>
> So you prove your real argument against rust is because it's a new
> language. And you prove, at the same time that your real argument
> against python is because it's newer than C, too.
>

More piffle.

C, being just shorthand for assembly, is the ultimate language.
There is no need for anything else.

In the true arena of computing, which is science and engineering,
C is lord and master.

For scripting, however, and other trivial stuff, anything can suffice:
bash, perl, tcl, python, etc.

Yes, python is a mere SCRIPTING language that has been inflated to
enormous proportions to satiate all the programming ignoramuses
that have flocked around it.

So, again, learn to keep your piffle to yourself.

--
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.

On 2024-09-21 04:30, Paul wrote:
> On Fri, 9/20/2024 5:19 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
>>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>>>
>>>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM?   8)
>>>>
>>>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>>>
>>>
>>> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
>>> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
>>> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>>>
>>> The 8088 was 1979.
>>> The 68000 was 1979.
>>
>> The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the 8088 was the 68008.
>
> At the time, people knew better than to buy the 8088 or the 68008.

Millions of people bought the 8088: the original IBM PC and its clones
used it. Interestingly, the Amstrad PC used the 8086. And Olivetti, but
dunno if all models.

....

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On Sat, 9/21/2024 4:19 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 20/09/2024 22:19, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
>>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>>>
>>>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM?   8)
>>>>
>>>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>>>
>>>
>>> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
>>> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
>>> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>>>
>>> The 8088 was 1979.
>>> The 68000 was 1979.
>>
>> The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the 8088 was the 68008.
>>
>> ...
>>
> FSVO 'equivalent' :-)

You pick processor families, by their decorator colours.

Once I saw this, I just had to have one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS9900#/media/File:KL_TI_TMS9900_Black_Background.jpg

The colour really does make a difference. The white one is obviously better...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#/media/File:XC68000.agr.jpg

The TMS9900 only drew 1 watt, so you didn't need a cooler, and
got to enjoy the shiny white finish.

Paul

In comp.os.linux.misc Lester Thorpe <lt@gnu.rocks> wrote:
>
> Ah, just another self-proclaimed, stuck-up moderator.

This is Usenet, and unmoderated groups, there are no moderators here.

On 21/09/2024 16:32, Rich wrote:
> In comp.os.linux.misc Lester Thorpe <lt@gnu.rocks> wrote:
>>
>> Ah, just another self-proclaimed, stuck-up moderator.
>
> This is Usenet, and unmoderated groups, there are no moderators here.
>

That's why the use of the word "self-proclaimed".

On 21/09/2024 12:33, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2024-09-21 04:30, Paul wrote:
>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 5:19 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>> On 2024-09-20 22:59, Paul wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 9/20/2024 7:59 AM, chrisv wrote:
>>>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> If Linux had existed we would never have had DOS
>>>>>
>>>>> Linux on an 8088 and 64k of RAM?   8)
>>>>>
>>>>> I guess the 68000 was also an option...
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> GCC came out in 1987. Linux in 1991. There may be
>>>> something to the timing there. Maybe it wouldn't have
>>>> been as easy, to do it earlier.
>>>>
>>>> The 8088 was 1979.
>>>> The 68000 was 1979.
>>>
>>> The equivalent to the 68000 was the 8086. Or, the equivalent to the
>>> 8088 was the 68008.
>>
>> At the time, people knew better than to buy the 8088 or the 68008.
>
> Millions of people bought the 8088: the original IBM PC and its clones
> used it. Interestingly, the Amstrad PC used the 8086. And Olivetti, but
> dunno if all models.
>

My PC clone had an NEC V20 and a hard drive of a monumental 20MB IIRC.
It was all I could afford

--
Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper
name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating
or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its
logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of
the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead. They must
face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

Ayn Rand.