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I just threw away a box of 10-year old email printouts. (Did we *have*
email 10 years ago??) In amounst the crumbling paper, I found a heavy
cardboard envolope:
AOL Version 3.0! with 99 FREE HOURS!
SAVE £££'s
SPECIAL OFFERS!
See inside for details
FREE Internet access!
100% local call access!
So easy to use, no wonder we're No.1!
IT'S HERE!
By Popular Demand:
* Your revolutionary FREE 99 hour trail!
* Easy to install, easy to use!
* Thousands of exclusive areas only on AOL!
[My typing really doesn't convey the over-the-top font sizes and insane
colour scheme. It almost looks like a 1960s detergent packet - yellow
starburst with a vivid orange border, blue and green block type, etc.]
Inside there is a CD that loudly proclaims
Discover AOL 3.0! for Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows 3.1 & Macintosh!
Complete with the little IE v2 logo.
I'm guessing this CD dated back to the time when the Internet was still
called "the Information Super-Highway". ;-)
The small print is fantastic:
Your free trail must be used within one calendar month of your initial
sign-on. Unless you cancel your account before the end of your free
trail by calling 0800 376 7444 during office hours, you will thereafter
be changed a monthly membership fee of £4.95 each month which gives you
3 hours online access each month. Additional access to AOL is charged by
the minute at only £2.35 per hour. Specific content and services on AOL
may be removed without notice or may be subject to additional
usage-related surcharges. You are responsible for the cost of your
telephone connection to AOL, and for supplemental charges for access to
AOL outside the UK. A choice of billing options is available, see online
registration for further details. To use AOL with Windows 3.1, you
require a 486 DX PC or higher, 8MB of RAM and 20 MB of HD space. To use
AOL with Windows 95 or Windows 98, you require a pentium [sic] class PC
or higher, 16MB of RAM and 60 MB of HD space. In addition a system
running AOL will require an SVGA monitor (256 colour support required),
a mouse, a 1440 kpbs [sic] modem or faster, a dual speed CD-Rom drive or
faster, and a UK copy of one of the operating systems referred to above.
To use AOL for Macintosh you require a Macintosh 68030 or higher, System
7.5.5 or later, a mouse, a 9600 kbps modem or faster, 256 colour monitor
with 640x480 resolution or better, 8MB RAM, and 15MB of free hard drive
space. Must be 18 years or over to apply. Limit of one free trail per
household. Offer only available in the UK. Local calls charged at BT
local rates. Access to and usage of AOL is subject to terms and
conditions which are available online. Please note that an AOL account
is only opened if you register online with AOL. If you have only
received the CD an account has not been opened.
IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO TRY AOL, YOU DO NOT NEED TO RETURN THE CD - YOU
WILL NOT BE CHARGED.
If you do not wish to receive information from AOL and other selected
companies on goods and services that may be of interest to you please
tick this box [ ] and return to: AOL Data Services, Redgrove House, 393
Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London SE22 8JN.
Wow. Just wow. So... let me get this straight...
- The "99 FREE HOURS" doesn't include the cost of the telephone calls.
It just means "free" as in AOL WON'T CHARGE YOU.
- The 99 hours have to be used within 1 calendar month.
- After that, you will be charged £4.95 every single month, regardless
of whether you actually use AOL at all.
- You get *three* hours of Internet access. After that you get charged
"only" £2.35 *per hour* to access the Internet.
- Access to AOL is subject to terms and conditions WHICH ARE AVAILABLE
ONLINE?!?
- A choice of billing opions is available ONLINE too...
- This thing works with Windows 3.1? o_O
- 486 DX or higher??
- OMG, back then you had to actually *specify* a PC capable of
displaying actual graphics?! :-D
- Look at that. 8 MB of RAM for an "operating system". Anybody wanna try
Vista with that? (Or XP. Or hell, even NT4?)
- Even back then, Windows 3.1 only requires 8MB RAM, but already Win95
requires *twice as much*! (And *triple* the HD space...)
- [Even back then, I already had a machine that happily displays 256
colours at resolutions more than a tad above 640x480, has a full
premptive multitasking OS with sophisticated GUI, and needs only 2MB of
RAM to do its job - HD optional.]
- I've checked thrice; it definitely says "1440 kpbs modem". (But notice
that the SECOND time it gets it right.)
- Why does a Mac require a faster modem than a PC? [Or is it just that
Apple never made slow modems?]
But The Real WTF(tm) is
- ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to present
their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Damn, I was gonna just throw this thing away - but now I'm thinking
maybe it should be in a muesium?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:55:10 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
>Damn, I was gonna just throw this thing away - but now I'm thinking
>maybe it should be in a muesium?
I regret throwing away my copy of Windows version 1 :(
--
Regards
Stephen
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> - After that, you will be charged £4.95 every single month, regardless
> of whether you actually use AOL at all.
Why is that strange? That's how modern ADSL and other similar fixed-fee
internet connections work. It doesn't matter if you download and upload at
full rate 24/7, or you don't use the connection at all, you still have to
pay the monthly fee.
(Ok, some ISPs may limit your monthly bandwidth, but others don't.)
> - This thing works with Windows 3.1? o_O
> - 486 DX or higher??
Why is that strange?
> - Even back then, Windows 3.1 only requires 8MB RAM, but already Win95
> requires *twice as much*! (And *triple* the HD space...)
Actually Windows 3.1 could run in much less, and Win95 could run with
4 MB (I have direct experience of this).
> - [Even back then, I already had a machine that happily displays 256
> colours at resolutions more than a tad above 640x480, has a full
> premptive multitasking OS with sophisticated GUI, and needs only 2MB of
> RAM to do its job - HD optional.]
Most unix machines did that in the 70's.
--
- Warp
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Stephen wrote:
> I regret throwing away my copy of Windows version 1 :(
Damn, I've never even *heard* of Windows 1! I mean, obviously there must
have been one... but I've never heard anybody speak of it... hmm. I
guess that must have been back in the days before home PCs or something.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Damn, I've never even *heard* of Windows 1! I mean, obviously there must
> have been one... but I've never heard anybody speak of it... hmm. I
> guess that must have been back in the days before home PCs or something.
From the devil's mouth itself: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
If I'm not mistaken, that ad is real.
--
- Warp
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:10:40 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>Stephen wrote:
>
>> I regret throwing away my copy of Windows version 1 :(
>
>Damn, I've never even *heard* of Windows 1! I mean, obviously there must
>have been one... but I've never heard anybody speak of it... hmm. I
>guess that must have been back in the days before home PCs or something.
I can't remember when I got it but it ran on a PC under MS DOS. IFAICR
it looked like an early version of windows explorer. It was good for
Alt + Tab-ing when my boss came in :)
--
Regards
Stephen
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>> - After that, you will be charged £4.95 every single month, regardless
>> of whether you actually use AOL at all.
>
> Why is that strange? That's how modern ADSL and other similar fixed-fee
> internet connections work. It doesn't matter if you download and upload at
> full rate 24/7, or you don't use the connection at all, you still have to
> pay the monthly fee.
>
> (Ok, some ISPs may limit your monthly bandwidth, but others don't.)
Most systems that I have seen either charge you X per minute you're
online, X per unit of data downloaded/uploaded, or X per month. AOL are
charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
minute as well.
No number they're No.1? :-/
>> - This thing works with Windows 3.1? o_O
>> - 486 DX or higher??
>
> Why is that strange?
It isn't, rationally - it's just amusing! :-D
I wonder - at what point will obsolete computer hardware become valuable
antiques?
>> - Even back then, Windows 3.1 only requires 8MB RAM, but already Win95
>> requires *twice as much*! (And *triple* the HD space...)
>
> Actually Windows 3.1 could run in much less, and Win95 could run with
> 4 MB (I have direct experience of this).
Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just
remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
>> - [Even back then, I already had a machine that happily displays 256
>> colours at resolutions more than a tad above 640x480, has a full
>> premptive multitasking OS with sophisticated GUI, and needs only 2MB of
>> RAM to do its job - HD optional.]
>
> Most unix machines did that in the 70's.
Most Unix machines [as I understand it] cost more than my house in the
70's. ;-) Not that this really negates the point you were making...
10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes
you feel sad...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Warp wrote:
> From the devil's mouth itself: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
It... it scares me... mummy, please make the scary thing stop waving its
arms around and yelling hysterically at me. (._.)
[Jesus, and I don't even have a sound card...]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Stephen wrote:
> I can't remember when I got it but it ran on a PC under MS DOS. IFAICR
> it looked like an early version of windows explorer. It was good for
> Alt + Tab-ing when my boss came in :)
Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an
application program that runs under MS-DOS. If you write Windows, you go
back to DOS. When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs
Windows. And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement
capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in
an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the
top of MS-DOS, and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real*
OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware
abstraction, etc.
Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
looking for one that actually functioned?
Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells"
where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast
yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!
I guess a few things _have_ improved slightly...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> But The Real WTF(tm) is
> - ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
>
> As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to present
> their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O
I would venture to say that they probably didn't know if the Internet
was going to be important or not, and went with the cheapest hook-up
available. While it may seem stupid for someone in a Western business
concern not to have known, in 1998, that the Internet was definitely
going to be important, any observer of the American automobile industry
will aver that management can be guilty of graver stupidities than that.
Regards,
John
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:16:03 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>Most systems that I have seen either charge you X per minute you're
>online, X per unit of data downloaded/uploaded, or X per month. AOL are
>charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
>minute as well.
That was round about the time I joined AOL (I used AOL 3). The reason
was you could pick a payment plan that gave you free access numbers
and no download limit with dialup.
--
Regards
Stephen
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:24:03 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an
>application program that runs under MS-DOS. If you write Windows, you go
>back to DOS. When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs
>Windows. And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement
>capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in
>an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
>
You probably don't remember what it was like to run DOS in the 80's.
Batch files ruled :) At work we had a menu application that ran the
apps that were commonly used or you could go into DOS and run them
from the command line..
I had an Amstrad PC-1512 which ran under DR DOS that you could run GEM
(Graphical Environment Manager).
>IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the
>top of MS-DOS, and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real*
>OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware
>abstraction, etc.
True.
>Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
>and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
>looking for one that actually functioned?
Very true :)
--
Regards
Stephen
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> [Jesus, and I don't even have a sound card...]
Then you missed most of it.
--
- Warp
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an
> application program that runs under MS-DOS.
Don't you mean "over"? If you say "under" you are effectively saying
that the underlying system was Windows 3.11, and you ran DOS on top of
it. Clearly you meant the other way around: The underlying system was DOS,
and Windows ran on top of it.
> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.
What does that even mean?
> When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs
> Windows.
Actually, especially in the early days of Windows 3, it was quite
common for systems to boot to DOS, period. When you wanted to start
windows you wrote "win". Only few people added that "win" to the end
of their autoexec.bat. (I assume this was more common at workplaces
where Windows3 was used for everything.)
> And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement
> capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in
> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
but it's still multitasking.
> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the
> top of MS-DOS
That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
processes those two files at startup".
Some people claimed that Win9x had the exact same system as DOS+Win3
with the exception that it boots directly to Windows without ever starting
command.com. Others claimed that the process was just part of the normal
startup of Win9x, and there was no DOS involved per se. (When you chose
the "boot to DOS" option, the only difference between a normal boot is
that at some point the booting process branches to the DOS side.)
But Win9x was indeed somewhat of a hybrid at best.
> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real*
> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware
> abstraction, etc.
"Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?
As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
in Windows.
And as I said, Windows 3 already had multitasking.
> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
> looking for one that actually functioned?
Are you confusing it with trying to optimize the drivers so that most
of them would be loaded in himem?
> Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells"
> where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast
> yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!
Was that a problem with the OS or one with the hardware? Word was a
rather big program even back then.
--
- Warp
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> AOL are
> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
> minute as well.
Well, it was dialup. What do you expect?
(Heck, even *today* some people still use dialup and pay per minute.
Naturally this is becoming rarer and rarer, as with ADSL you get a
connection which is a thousand times faster at a fraction of the cost.)
> > Actually Windows 3.1 could run in much less, and Win95 could run with
> > 4 MB (I have direct experience of this).
> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just
> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
probably required more than those 4 MB.
> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes
> you feel sad...
Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P
--
- Warp
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Stephen wrote:
> You probably don't remember what it was like to run DOS in the 80's.
> Batch files ruled :)
Oh, I think I do actually... Certainly even into the 90's, even though
Windows was around, batch files still ruled. That or QBASIC.
[Where I work, we have some analytical software that was written
in-house. It's written in QBASIC. For legal reasons I am required to
keep it in working order. I AM NOT JOKING. Mercifully, since it's
QBASIC, there isn't actually a lot that can really go wrong - it's
blissfully unaware of most of its surroundings. But suffice it to say
that printing to a networked laser printer is... interesting?]
And let us not forget how much scripting I did in AmigaDOS. Unlike
MS-DOS, this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after
Unix, not to mention a small cottage industry of scriptable GUI components.
Under AmigaDOS, "more" was a GUI program! A minimal one, granted - but
that's why everybody used "PPmore". PP = PowerPacker, referring to this
program's ability to natively open PP files without having to invoke PP
to unpack them first. But everybody used it for its wildly superiod GUI...
That's one thing I liked about the Amiga. So long as your LIBS: folder
contained a copy of powerpacker.library, every program in the system
that did anything involving PP files would work fine. I gather that both
Unix and Windoze are supposed to work the same way... but you don't get
to see it in practice.
Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two
floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so that
it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files were on
the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could still find all
of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it sounds, but it worked
magnificantly.
[Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
anywhere........]
>> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
>> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
>> looking for one that actually functioned?
>
> Very true :)
Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS
powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never
tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> But The Real WTF(tm) is
>> - ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
>>
>> As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to
>> present their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O
>
> I would venture to say that they probably didn't know if the Internet
> was going to be important or not, and went with the cheapest hook-up
> available. While it may seem stupid for someone in a Western business
> concern not to have known, in 1998, that the Internet was definitely
> going to be important, any observer of the American automobile industry
> will aver that management can be guilty of graver stupidities than that.
What perplexes me more is that a few months later, they hired a company
to design and host a website for us - and we continued using AOL home
Internet access for FIVE YEARS. Hmm... So important enough to spent £900
on the design and hosting of a dedicated website, but not important
enough to go with a real ISP?
Suddenly I'm understanding the vast profusion of dialup modems I threw
away last week!
Of course, after that an "ISP" opened for business on the same business
park as the guys I work for, and we went with them.
They were never terrifically reliable. I'd quite often have to walk
across the lawn and knock on their door to ask why something or other
wasn't working. (Typically we had no Internet access at all - which,
back in those days, just meant we couldn't send or receive email.)
One day, I went over to ask why our connection was down, and discovered...
...that the entire building was empty. And by "empty", I mean there were
no desks, no chairs, no filling cabinets, no plants, just a deserted
building. (!!!) When I eventually obtained the keys to the building from
site management, I discovered that some potential new tennants had been
taking a look round and had unplugged the network hub that powers our
building.
[The visitors understandably didn't realise that the equipment in this
deserted building *does*, in fact, still need to be running. Hell, why
would you think that though? You get a call from a business park
inviting you to have a look round a vacant building, and find that some
other company's critical infrastructure is run from that building... GO
FIGURE!]
About a month *after* this, we got a letter from the ISP telling us that
they don't do ISP work now; they just do consultancy. Gee, thank you SO
MUCH for telling us!
When I had a look at their infrastructure [which, obviously, I'd never
been allowed near before], I discovered that the wireless transmitter in
our building connects to a similar one in their building. But whereas
ours is mounted on the wall, theirs was inside a Tupperware box that
someone had crudely gouged some holes into using a pair of scissors to
allow the wires through.
(ARE YOU READING THIS?? We paid several thousand pounds per year for
THIS level of professionalism!)
The box was sitting in the loft space, and the power and network cables
trail out under a moved ceiling tile. The power cord was at this point
holding an extension cord off the ground. The network cable vanished
into a tangle of Cat5 around two 3com 48-port switches, went through a
Sonicwall firewall, and then vanished into an underground fiber optic
link to the switch room in the main park reception area.
When you get to the main switch room, you discover something a bit more
professional-looking. And it turns out our "ISP" was actually just
leasing an Internet pipe from a company called Network-I. So we became a
direct customer of Network-I, to keep our existing system working.
(It appears they're still going: http://www.network-i.net/ )
Anyway, I don't know what Network-I actually "do". Certainly they seemed
to be far more professional than the clowns who had just deserted us.
But they were giving us 0.5 Mbit/sec of bandwidth for quite a steep
price. When we asked for more, they wanted to charge us £6,000 to lay a
brand new fiber link.
BT told us they could install a new link for nothing, and it would be
direct to our building (rather than going through the switch room and
then through our old ISP's deserted building). They told us the link
could be active in 21 days [which seemed a little surprising considering
it involves digging up roads].
We signed up. Nothing happened for a while. You see, "BT" is not
*actually* BT any more. The people we spoke to were "BT local business"
- which is actually "Crystal Communications", a nobody company that won
the right to put "BT" on their vans. They operate on behalf of BT, but
they're a seperate, unrelated company. In particular, they have nothing
to do with the actual service. They're just salesmen.
After many days of frantic calling, I eventually managed to get hold of
the *real* people - the ones who actually know about laying cables and
assigning IP addresses and so forth. Actual network engineers. Things
went much better after that...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> Well, I can say with authority that Windows 3.11 was simply an
>> application program that runs under MS-DOS.
>
> Don't you mean "over"?
Well, I suppose you could rephase it that way. Either way, Windows 3.11
was no "operating system". It was an MS-DOS application program.
>> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.
>
> What does that even mean?
I meant to write "quit Windows".
>> When you start the PC, it boots DOS first, and then runs
>> Windows.
>
> Actually, especially in the early days of Windows 3, it was quite
> common for systems to boot to DOS, period. When you wanted to start
> windows you wrote "win". Only few people added that "win" to the end
> of their autoexec.bat. (I assume this was more common at workplaces
> where Windows3 was used for everything.)
Yeah, that's true enough - especially since after you change some
settings, you can never quite be sure if MS-DOS let alone Windows will
still work. Plus you need to see all those error messages scroll past as
you boot the machine, so you if everything went OK - and if not, which
parts failed.
[I recall it used to be a Big Deal whether "extended memory" got enabled
or not. I knew a guy who even had a whole book devoted to "taking your
PC beyong 640KB". I don't know what the difference between "conventional
memory" and "extended memory" is or was, but this "problem" seems to
have entirely gone away now...]
>> And Windows 3.11 was litle more than a GUI with window movement
>> capabilities and icon management. [Why would you want several windows in
>> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
>
> But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
> but it's still multitasking.
AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of
them can actually "do" anything at a time, but you can have several
applications "started". (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program
that prints out numbers, and then switching to another window and seeing
the first program stop printing until you switch back.)
>> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the
>> top of MS-DOS
>
> That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
> run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
> whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
> processes those two files at startup".
Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely
switch between the two...
>> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real*
>> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware
>> abstraction, etc.
>
> "Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
> alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?
...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at
all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The
answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to
reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".
> As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
> the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
> already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
> Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
> in Windows.
Does Win9x run in protected mode? [This isn't rhetorical - I can't
actually remember.]
Certainly WinNT introduced security. Win9x can be made to show a login
prompt, but you can just cancel it if you don't feel like logging in.
You then have unlimited access to every file on the local machine.
>> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
>> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
>> looking for one that actually functioned?
>
> Are you confusing it with trying to optimize the drivers so that most
> of them would be loaded in himem?
IIRC, even something as trivial as getting a CD-ROM drive to work
[assuming you were rich enough to afford one] used to be quite
challengine. I can remember stumbling across cyclic load-dependency
chains before now.
>> Somewhere on the Internet, there's an MP3 of "Microsoft Jinglebells"
>> where a guy laments that "I've sat here installing Word since breakfast
>> yesterday". Certainly it used to really *be* like that!
>
> Was that a problem with the OS or one with the hardware? Word was a
> rather big program even back then.
I have little personal experience, but I recall that back in the old
days, getting PC software to work tended to be *very* difficult. (Most
especially games, but any large application such as Word tended to be
tricky to set up.)
Maybe it was because the hardware wasn't up to much. Maybe it was
because MS-DOS is so primitive. I'm not really sure...
Certainly on the Amiga scene, "installing" a program usually meant
putting the floppy into the drive and clicking an icon. A tiny few
programs required you to actually copy a font file to your system disk
or something, and usually had extensive and meticulous instructions
explaining exactly how to do this, in language even a 5 year old could
follow. Either that or the application got ignored in favour of
better-documented alternative apps...
[It was only very late into the party that Amiga programs started to
have "installers", and these were usually just DOS scripts that perform
some minimal checks before copying a few files. Uninstallers appeared
even later. Generally this kind of thing just wasn't necessary, because
installation was so simple...]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> AOL are
>> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
>> minute as well.
>
> Well, it was dialup. What do you expect?
Even back then, may ISPs offered per-minute charges OR flat-rate
charges. AOL are charging you both ways at the same time.
> (Heck, even *today* some people still use dialup and pay per minute.
> Naturally this is becoming rarer and rarer, as with ADSL you get a
> connection which is a thousand times faster at a fraction of the cost.)
A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec
broadband. ;-)
But up to a hundred times faster? Sure.
>> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just
>> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
>
> Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
> probably required more than those 4 MB.
Well, I guess if you want to cache page layout, and you have a page
that's moderately large, even on plain text you could eat hundreds of KB
quite fast. You wouldn't have to sprinkle many image files in to exceed
4 MB - even if we assume the software is actually efficient.
>> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes
>> you feel sad...
>
> Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
> with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P
Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging. [The
largest file I've ever downloaded was 4GB, and that took 3 days. I think
it was Star Wreck - damn amusing, BTW!]
But yes, not so long ago, writing a program that "achieves realtime MP3
decoding" was seen as a major achievement, and *encoding* could take
days. I was shocked to discover the other day that my copy of WinAmp is
using about 0.25% CPU to decode a Vorbis file in realtime. [Recall that
Vorbis is more CPU-intensive than MP3.]
I find it staggering how my Amiga took over 2 *hours* to render
SKYVASE.POV (uh, why?), yet PCs toay can do it in mere seconds. At a
much higher resolution. With AA.
And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain
applications to start up. WTF?
[Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given
that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that
one go.]
PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a
handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no
reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why
is it so slow?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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This must actually be Windows 2. I see overlapping windows at :18 which
weren't implimented in Windows 1.
--
H²
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"Halbert" <hal### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
news:4849370e$1@news.povray.org...
> This must actually be Windows 2. I see overlapping windows at :18 which
> weren't implimented in Windows 1.
>
> --
> H²
>
? I stand corrected by myself. It did have overlapping windows after all.
--
H²
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, I suppose you could rephase it that way. Either way, Windows 3.11
> was no "operating system". It was an MS-DOS application program.
Being launched by another system doesn't make an OS less of an OS.
(If that was the case then Windows XP, Linux nor basically anything
is an OS because they all are launched by the BIOS.)
Not that Windows 3 was a true OS by any serious definition of the meaning.
> >> If you write Windows, you go back to DOS.
> >
> > What does that even mean?
> I meant to write "quit Windows".
It still isn't any sign of Windows not being an OS. (And again, I'm not
saying it was. I'm just saying that the argument is flawed.)
> [I recall it used to be a Big Deal whether "extended memory" got enabled
> or not. I knew a guy who even had a whole book devoted to "taking your
> PC beyong 640KB". I don't know what the difference between "conventional
> memory" and "extended memory" is or was, but this "problem" seems to
> have entirely gone away now...]
We are talking about 16-bit vs 32-bit Intel systems here. The 16-bit
Intel processors couldn't handle over 1MB of memory. (Well, the 286 had
some paging support built into it, but I don't know if any computer ever
used it.)
Even today 32-bit Intel processors support running in 16-bit mode, with
all the same limitations. Back in the days of the 386 and 484 this
presented a problem: The processor would have supported a 32-bit mode,
but all the existing OSes and programs were 16-bit. How to get access to
the extra memory you could install in a 386, beyond that 1MB?
The solution was ugly, awkward and in the past now, as all modern OSes
support fully 32-bit mode (and the best ones even 64-bit mode).
> > But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
> > but it's still multitasking.
> AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of
> them can actually "do" anything at a time
How exactly is that different from a regular pre-emptive multitaskin OS
running in a single processor?
The difference between cooperative and pre-emptive multitasking is not
whether two programs can physically "do" anything "at the same time"
(because they can't; it's a physical impossibility imposed by having
one single CPU).
The difference is that in cooperative multitasking programs have to
play nice and give CPU to others (through the OS), while in pre-emptive
multitasking the OS forces task switches (with the aid of the CPU).
The end result is basically the same (assuming all the programs "play nice"
in the cooperative system).
It was perfectly possible to run several programs at the same time in
Windows 3 and have them run simultaneously. Even the Windows version of
POV-Ray was originally made for Windows 3, and it didn't lock the computer
during renders.
>, but you can have several
> applications "started". (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program
> that prints out numbers, and then switching to another window and seeing
> the first program stop printing until you switch back.)
Windows 3 didn't multitask DOS windows. That's not really relevant.
> >> IIRC, Win95 and Win98 (and WinME?) are slightly thicker layers over the
> >> top of MS-DOS
> >
> > That's debatable. While the boot process of Win95 and Win98 do indeed
> > run config.sys and autoexec.bat, as DOS did, it's a matter of definition
> > whether this is "booting to DOS" or simply "the booting process of Win9x
> > processes those two files at startup".
> Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely
> switch between the two...
Well, my PC has Linux and Windows XP, and I can freely switch between
the two. That doesn't mean one is running on top of the other.
> >> and it was WinNT that finally replaced DOS with a *real*
> >> OS with actual *features* such as security, multitasking, hardware
> >> abstraction, etc.
> >
> > "Replaced DOS" in which context? WinNT was a completely separate
> > alternative, not an "upgrade". Why are you even comparing it to DOS?
> ...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at
> all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The
> answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to
> reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".
I'm not really getting your point. If I installed linux on a PC
I wouldn't have had any "exit to DOS" button either. So what?
> > As for hardware abstraction, what was the basic difference between
> > the hardware management in NT and the one in Win98? Remember that Win98
> > already had DirectX (if I'm not mistaken even DirectX 9.0c will work on
> > Win98). You can't get much more abstract than that with respect to hardware
> > in Windows.
> Does Win9x run in protected mode? [This isn't rhetorical - I can't
> actually remember.]
Yes. (Sure, it didn't use all the "protection" offered by the CPU as
efficiently as it could.)
> Certainly WinNT introduced security. Win9x can be made to show a login
> prompt, but you can just cancel it if you don't feel like logging in.
> You then have unlimited access to every file on the local machine.
Win9x was never even designed to be a multiuser OS. It's not all that
strange, really.
> Certainly on the Amiga scene, "installing" a program usually meant
> putting the floppy into the drive and clicking an icon. A tiny few
> programs required you to actually copy a font file to your system disk
> or something, and usually had extensive and meticulous instructions
> explaining exactly how to do this, in language even a 5 year old could
> follow. Either that or the application got ignored in favour of
> better-documented alternative apps...
Since you so much fancy that, I find it really strange that you are
so prejudiced against the Apple Macintosh. It's exactly like that, but
on steroids.
You constantly complain about current Windows/Linux systems for their
complexity and write utopistic memories about your beloved AmigaOS, but
when someone mentions the modern equivalent of the Amiga/AmigaOS, namely
the Apple Macintosh, you immediately start complaining about those exact
same things which were so great in the Amiga. (Closed hardware, OS tied
to hardware, niche market, whatnot. Just change "Mac" with "Amiga" and
the complaints are still exactly as "valid".)
--
- Warp
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec
> broadband. ;-)
It was a figure of speech. And it wasn't all that far-fetched either.
Some people *do* have even faster connections than that, and at a rational
price. A friend of mine could download over 10 MB/s (mega*bytes*, not bits).
Ok, maybe not with ADSL. OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
(for example I could upgrade to that right now if I wanted to).
> >> 10 years ago, so much was possible with so little hardware. Kinda makes
> >> you feel sad...
> >
> > Except that you couldn't download and watch 8GB of anime encoded
> > with H.264 (or even divx, for that matter). :P
> Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging.
Not really, if you have a fast connection and good seeders.
> But yes, not so long ago, writing a program that "achieves realtime MP3
> decoding" was seen as a major achievement, and *encoding* could take
> days. I was shocked to discover the other day that my copy of WinAmp is
> using about 0.25% CPU to decode a Vorbis file in realtime. [Recall that
> Vorbis is more CPU-intensive than MP3.]
More shocking to me is that even many-years-old computers can *encode*
MPEG-4 *in real-time*, especially knowing a bit about what that requires.
> I find it staggering how my Amiga took over 2 *hours* to render
> SKYVASE.POV (uh, why?), yet PCs toay can do it in mere seconds. At a
> much higher resolution. With AA.
There's an example scene which comes with POV-Ray which is even more
telling: scenes/advanced/piece3/piece3.pov. It says:
// Due to the large number of objects, you will probably have to
// have a lot of memory to render this scene.
// Rendering time using a 25Mhz 386 w/Cyrix fpu is approximately 60 hours.
With a top-of-the-line modern PC you can render that exact scene in
almost real-time (using the rt-rendering feature of pov3.7).
> And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain
> applications to start up. WTF?
Back then programs allocated and initialized something like 200 kB of
memory and had to read about that much data from files. Nowadays it's
the same, but changing the kB to MB.
> [Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given
> that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that
> one go.]
It's not only loading (and probably decompressing) the textures and
models, it's probably transferring them to your graphics card. This is
not one of the fastest possible operations even today (although faster
than reading from disk).
> PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a
> handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no
> reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why
> is it so slow?
Because calculating intersections with hundreds of thousands of rays
is cpu-intensive?
--
- Warp
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>> A thousand times faster? I have yet to see anybody with 56 Mbit/sec
>> broadband. ;-)
>
> It was a figure of speech. And it wasn't all that far-fetched either.
> Some people *do* have even faster connections than that, and at a rational
> price. A friend of mine could download over 10 MB/s (mega*bytes*, not bits).
Well hell, when I was at Uni 10 years ago [OMG, I'M OLD!!] we had a 100
Mbit/sec connection to the Internet. Back in the days of 12 kbps modems.
Do you know what "envy" looks like? Cos I did! ;-)
> Ok, maybe not with ADSL. OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
> (for example I could upgrade to that right now if I wanted to).
I thought the maximum speed possible with ADSLv1 is only 8 Mbit/sec? [No
idea what it is for ADSLv2 - nobody offers that in the UK yet.]
Anyway, you're talking to somebody who's employer pays £12,000/year for
a mere 5 Mbit/sec. [Mind you, that is *both ways*. And if it breaks,
somebody is on 24-hour callout. And you get a dedicated IP address. And
so forth...]
>> Er... well even today, downloading *8GB* is rather challenging.
>
> Not really, if you have a fast connection and good seeders.
As this discussion we've having neatly illustrates, "fast" is a relative
term. ;-)
> There's an example scene which comes with POV-Ray which is even more
> telling: scenes/advanced/piece3/piece3.pov. It says:
>
> // Due to the large number of objects, you will probably have to
> // have a lot of memory to render this scene.
> // Rendering time using a 25Mhz 386 w/Cyrix fpu is approximately 60 hours.
>
> With a top-of-the-line modern PC you can render that exact scene in
> almost real-time (using the rt-rendering feature of pov3.7).
Weeeeee... And "they" said that real-time ray tracing would never
happen! Obviously it's just a matter of computer power. ;-)
[Hmm, "Cyrix"? Whatever happened to them anyway?]
>> And yet, at the same time, it *still* takes forever for certain
>> applications to start up. WTF?
>
> Back then programs allocated and initialized something like 200 kB of
> memory and had to read about that much data from files. Nowadays it's
> the same, but changing the kB to MB.
I'd ask why this is the case - but I imagine we won't come to any useful
answer...
>> [Most exasperating is the length of time TF2 takes to start. But given
>> that it's loading several GB of texture data from disk, I'll let that
>> one go.]
>
> It's not only loading (and probably decompressing) the textures and
> models, it's probably transferring them to your graphics card. This is
> not one of the fastest possible operations even today (although faster
> than reading from disk).
Possibly. I don't know - my graphics card only has, what, 512 MB of RAM?
[Off the top of my head. I might be wrong on that.] How much data can
you possibly stuff into it? ;-)
I suppose it could quite possibly be generating MIP-maps at the same
time. And checking the game files for corruption/hacking. (VALVe's
anti-cheat system and all that...)
>> PS. Seriously. Why the hell is SKYVASE.POV so slow? It contains, like, a
>> handful of quadratic primitives and a simple texture. There's no
>> reflection or refraction, IIRC there's only 1 point-light source... why
>> is it so slow?
>
> Because calculating intersections with hundreds of thousands of rays
> is cpu-intensive?
Yes, but why is SKYVASE.POV in particular so much slower than other
scenes of apparently similar complexity?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> Well, I suppose you could rephase it that way. Either way, Windows 3.11
>> was no "operating system". It was an MS-DOS application program.
>
> Being launched by another system doesn't make an OS less of an OS.
> (If that was the case then Windows XP, Linux nor basically anything
> is an OS because they all are launched by the BIOS.)
>
> Not that Windows 3 was a true OS by any serious definition of the meaning.
The point is that Windows 3.11 was really just a *program* that reads
mouse input and makes a graphical display. It basically does almost
nothing else. I could, hypothetically, sit down and throw something
together in TurboPascal that does the same thing.
>> [I recall it used to be a Big Deal whether "extended memory" got enabled
>> or not. I knew a guy who even had a whole book devoted to "taking your
>> PC beyong 640KB". I don't know what the difference between "conventional
>> memory" and "extended memory" is or was, but this "problem" seems to
>> have entirely gone away now...]
>
> We are talking about 16-bit vs 32-bit Intel systems here. The 16-bit
> Intel processors couldn't handle over 1MB of memory. (Well, the 286 had
> some paging support built into it, but I don't know if any computer ever
> used it.)
>
> Even today 32-bit Intel processors support running in 16-bit mode, with
> all the same limitations. Back in the days of the 386 and 484 this
> presented a problem: The processor would have supported a 32-bit mode,
> but all the existing OSes and programs were 16-bit. How to get access to
> the extra memory you could install in a 386, beyond that 1MB?
>
> The solution was ugly, awkward and in the past now, as all modern OSes
> support fully 32-bit mode (and the best ones even 64-bit mode).
I see... So all that HIMEM.SYS crap was just a hack to convince outdated
software to use new hardware capabilities? No wonder it never worked well...
>>> But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
>>> but it's still multitasking.
>
>> AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of
>> them can actually "do" anything at a time
>
> How exactly is that different from a regular pre-emptive multitaskin OS
> running in a single processor?
In a real multitasking OS, several programs can "do stuff" at once.
[Obviously the hardware is being time-sliced, but that's not visible to
the end user.]
> It was perfectly possible to run several programs at the same time in
> Windows 3 and have them run simultaneously. Even the Windows version of
> POV-Ray was originally made for Windows 3, and it didn't lock the computer
> during renders.
Really? That's news to me. I was told that only the program that owns
the active window can actually use the CPU.
[Clearly the "experts" I paid a lot of money to be taught by got their
facts wrong - I must admit I haven't personally verified this
scientifically. When a teacher tells you something works a certain way,
you usually believe them.]
>> Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely
>> switch between the two...
>
> Well, my PC has Linux and Windows XP, and I can freely switch between
> the two. That doesn't mean one is running on top of the other.
1. You have to reboot the machine to do that.
2. It is possible to use XP without Linux. It is possible to use Linux
without XP. It is not possible to use Windows 3.11 without MS-DOS.
>> ...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at
>> all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The
>> answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to
>> reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".
>
> I'm not really getting your point. If I installed linux on a PC
> I wouldn't have had any "exit to DOS" button either. So what?
Windows 3.11 *requires* MS-DOS in order to function. Windows NT does
not. (And obviously neither does Linux.)
>> Does Win9x run in protected mode? [This isn't rhetorical - I can't
>> actually remember.]
>
> Yes. (Sure, it didn't use all the "protection" offered by the CPU as
> efficiently as it could.)
I wasn't sure whether it was still real-mode or not. Certainly the NT
kernel seems a lot more stable. ;-)
>> Certainly WinNT introduced security. Win9x can be made to show a login
>> prompt, but you can just cancel it if you don't feel like logging in.
>> You then have unlimited access to every file on the local machine.
>
> Win9x was never even designed to be a multiuser OS. It's not all that
> strange, really.
Well quite.
Back when Win9x first appeared, "networks" were still these new-fangled
things that not many people had. So why would you bother putting
security into a system that you need physical access to anyway? [The
Amiga also lacks any semblence of security - for the same reason.]
>> Certainly on the Amiga scene, "installing" a program usually meant
>> putting the floppy into the drive and clicking an icon.
>
> Since you so much fancy that, I find it really strange that you are
> so prejudiced against the Apple Macintosh. It's exactly like that, but
> on steroids.
>
> You constantly complain about current Windows/Linux systems for their
> complexity and write utopistic memories about your beloved AmigaOS, but
> when someone mentions the modern equivalent of the Amiga/AmigaOS, namely
> the Apple Macintosh, you immediately start complaining about those exact
> same things which were so great in the Amiga. (Closed hardware, OS tied
> to hardware, niche market, whatnot. Just change "Mac" with "Amiga" and
> the complaints are still exactly as "valid".)
I don't recall ever complaining about the hardware being closed, or the
OS being tied to it. [Though obviously it *is* a bit of a pitty that
Macs come in a fixed set of configurations and cannot be changed.]
Certainly a Mac is something I'd like to try one day. However, there are
problems. The most obvious ones:
1. A Mac is a very expensive piece of hardware [assuming you can find
somebody who sells them].
2. I would have to throw away all my existing software.
3. I would have to buy replacements for all [or at least some] of the
stuff I just threw away.
4. Some software can only be found on Windoze.
Apple are quick to claim that it's "easy" to get a Mac to talk to other
Windows PCs. But given that I have two Windows PCs and they don't want
to talk to each other, what are the chances of them talking to a
complete alien? ;-)
If I was going to go down this road, I'd need to know for sure that I'd
actually be able to do something *useful* with a Mac. I played this game
with Linux; I had both Windoze and Linux installed, but since 98% of the
software I want to use is on Windoze, I just never actually rebooted to
get to Linux. Eventually I got tired of Linux being catestrophically
broken every time any item of hardware changed, so I just removed it
completely.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> The point is that Windows 3.11 was really just a *program* that reads
> mouse input and makes a graphical display.
Well, all operating systems are just programs that read mouse input
and whatever. Are you trying to say that an OS is *not* a program?-)
> It basically does almost nothing else.
It does a lot more else. It had a rather extensive graphical API, for one.
> I could, hypothetically, sit down and throw something
> together in TurboPascal that does the same thing.
You mean that TurboPascal cannot be used to write an OS?
> I see... So all that HIMEM.SYS crap was just a hack to convince outdated
> software to use new hardware capabilities? No wonder it never worked well...
Nope. It was a way for newly-written 16-bit software to use more than
1MB of memory.
> >>> But Windows 3 does support multitasking. Granted, it's not pre-emptive,
> >>> but it's still multitasking.
> >
> >> AFAIK, it supports running several applications at once. Only one of
> >> them can actually "do" anything at a time
> >
> > How exactly is that different from a regular pre-emptive multitaskin OS
> > running in a single processor?
> In a real multitasking OS, several programs can "do stuff" at once.
And so they can in a cooperative multitasking OS. I don't really see
the difference.
> [Obviously the hardware is being time-sliced, but that's not visible to
> the end user.]
Nor it is in a cooperative multitasking OS either (as long as programs
behave properly).
> > It was perfectly possible to run several programs at the same time in
> > Windows 3 and have them run simultaneously. Even the Windows version of
> > POV-Ray was originally made for Windows 3, and it didn't lock the computer
> > during renders.
> Really? That's news to me. I was told that only the program that owns
> the active window can actually use the CPU.
You were told wrong.
> >> Well, a PC that has Windows 95 also has MS-DOS, and you can freely
> >> switch between the two...
> >
> > Well, my PC has Linux and Windows XP, and I can freely switch between
> > the two. That doesn't mean one is running on top of the other.
> 1. You have to reboot the machine to do that.
And the difference with Win9x/DOS is...?
> 2. It is possible to use XP without Linux. It is possible to use Linux
> without XP. It is not possible to use Windows 3.11 without MS-DOS.
We were talking about Windows 95 in this context, not Windows 3.
> >> ...whereas a PC running Windows NT4 does not, usually, have MS-DOS at
> >> all. Many people asked "where's the 'exit to DOS' button gone?" The
> >> answer being "MS-DOS is a completely several OS and you would have to
> >> reboot to exit WinNT to get to it".
> >
> > I'm not really getting your point. If I installed linux on a PC
> > I wouldn't have had any "exit to DOS" button either. So what?
> Windows 3.11 *requires* MS-DOS in order to function. Windows NT does
> not. (And obviously neither does Linux.)
So? As I said, it was a completely separate alternative. I still don't
see how it "replaced" anything.
> I wasn't sure whether it was still real-mode or not. Certainly the NT
> kernel seems a lot more stable. ;-)
Was the *kernel* of Win95 notoriously unstable? (Of course that comes
down to the definition of "kernel".)
> I don't recall ever complaining about the hardware being closed, or the
> OS being tied to it. [Though obviously it *is* a bit of a pitty that
> Macs come in a fixed set of configurations and cannot be changed.]
How many times have you changed the configuration of a PC (other than
eg. adding an additional hard drive or RAM, both of which you can
perfectly well do to a Mac)?
> 1. A Mac is a very expensive piece of hardware [assuming you can find
> somebody who sells them].
You still have this misconception and you just don't want to let go
of it.
Sure, Apple doesn't offer almost anything in the below-crappy and
laughably cheap range, but their prices seem very competitive to me
when compared to PCs with *equivalent* specs. Whenever you see a
suspiciously cheap PC which seems to have high specs, there's always
something which brings the price down and cripples the system in one
way or another. Apple seldom does that.
> 2. I would have to throw away all my existing software.
That doesn't make even the least bit of sense. Are you saying that if
you buy a second computer, you have to throw away the first one? Why?
How does that make any sense?
Besides, you can install Windows XP (and AFAIK even Vista) in current
Macs. It's not a problem.
> 3. I would have to buy replacements for all [or at least some] of the
> stuff I just threw away.
Or you could just use your old computer when you need it. Why would
you throw it away? I don't get it.
> 4. Some software can only be found on Windoze.
And you can use it in your old computer. (Or, if you really want, you
can run it in your Mac too.) So what?
> Apple are quick to claim that it's "easy" to get a Mac to talk to other
> Windows PCs. But given that I have two Windows PCs and they don't want
> to talk to each other, what are the chances of them talking to a
> complete alien? ;-)
The chances are pretty good when you install the software which Apple
gives you.
> If I was going to go down this road, I'd need to know for sure that I'd
> actually be able to do something *useful* with a Mac.
Like what?
> I played this game
> with Linux; I had both Windoze and Linux installed, but since 98% of the
> software I want to use is on Windoze
Exactly what software is that?
Personally, the *only* software I need which is only available for
Windows is computer games. I boot to Windows only to play (and I do
that relatively rarely).
> Eventually I got tired of Linux being catestrophically
> broken every time any item of hardware changed, so I just removed it
> completely.
Right, no other linux user ever changes their hardware and thus
avoids all problems, which is why linux is never fixed. You are the
only person in the world to do that.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
>>> Actually Windows 3.1 could run in much less, and Win95 could run with
>>> 4 MB (I have direct experience of this).
>
>> Right. So it's the AOL client that's requiring all this then? [I just
>> remembered: IT'S AOL!!] Nothing new there then! ;-)
>
> Well, just launching IE and surfing the internet (even back then)
> probably required more than those 4 MB.
Don't know if you were joking, but Win '95 + IE worked fine on 4MB RAM.
--
"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
anl
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:04:15 -0400, Warp wrote:
> When you wanted to start
> windows you wrote "win".
Except for one person I know who renamed it to "lose.com". You can guess
his opinion.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:27:05 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> (Demonstrated by, e.g., writing a short program that prints out numbers,
> and then switching to another window and seeing the first program stop
> printing until you switch back.)
This was not the behaviour in Win3x. Win3x used nonpreemptive
multitasking, but it still was more than task switching (which is what
you describe).
Desqview also provided multitasking capabilities on top of DOS.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:16:03 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Most systems that I have seen either charge you X per minute you're
> online, X per unit of data downloaded/uploaded, or X per month. AOL are
> charging you X per month + Y per minute + BT are charging you Z per
> minute as well.
>
> No number they're No.1? :-/
I use Earthlink here in the US. They're arguably one of the largest ISPs
here. Flat rate ($50/month), no bandwidth caps, always-on connection.
Flat rate is more common here in the US, though Comcast has been toying
with tiered access based on bandwidth utilization and throttling (that's
been in El Reg a few times over the last several months).
There's a reason I don't use Comcast.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:36:35 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Even back then, may ISPs offered per-minute charges OR flat-rate
> charges. AOL are charging you both ways at the same time.
CompuServe also charged a flat rate ($19.95/month IIRC) plus a surcharge
for per-minute access to some services. Then there were add-on services
that you could purchase as well.
It was almost as convoluted as picking a cell phone plan these days.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:14:28 -0400, Warp wrote:
> OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free) to
3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as "broadband"
here in the US.
Jim
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Invisible wrote:
> [Why would you want several windows in
> an OS that doesn't support multitasking?]
Win3.1 would run several programs at once. Just not preemptively. But
unless something went wrong, you didn't really notice it.
Note that at the same time, the Mac could have several windows open, but
only one program at a time, so all the windows had to come from the same
program. What??
I went and bought an Amiga, myself. ;-)
> Ooo, ooo, remember TSRs? Remember spending hours editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
> and C:\CONFIG.SYS to try all permutations of driver loading order
> looking for one that actually functioned?
Yeah. It was sooo nice when you actually got printer drivers with the
OS, instead of six floppies of printer drivers coming with each
application.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Invisible wrote:
> this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after Unix
AmigaOS was farther from being UNIX-like than DOS 2.0 was. The two had
absolutely nothing in common.
Let me rephrase: What did you think was common about the two of those?
About the only thing I can think of is they both had pre-emptive
interrupts.
> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
> anywhere........]
I saw a distro that used symlinks to completely "fix" the legacy layout
of files. So their Linux had a /Programs and a /Library and a /Users and
so on, not unlike OSX apparently has.
> Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS
> powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never
> tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.
I didn't have any trouble with that, except for the amount of RAM it
took. Left little for the actual applications.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Warp wrote:
> Don't you mean "over"? If you say "under" you are effectively saying
I think he mean "under" in the sense of "Firefox runs under both windows
and Linux."
> (Well, the 286 had
> some paging support built into it, but I don't know if any computer ever
> used it.)
I think it had virtual memory but not dynamic paging. (To have dynamic
paging, you have to be able to restart an instruction that accesses
invalid memory, so you can restart it after you page the data into RAM
from disk.) Some applications used it, tho - photoshop did, I think.
> when someone mentions the modern equivalent of the
> Amiga/AmigaOS, namely the Apple Macintosh,
Isn't OSX based on POSIX at least? The stuff *I* liked about the Amiga
is all missing from POSIX, as far as I can see. :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Warp wrote:
> Most unix machines did that in the 70's.
Most unix machines didn't have any sort of graphics at all in the '70s,
technically. I never saw a unix machine that didn't need hardware paging
support for VM. I think the old PDPs didn't, but they were, when you got
right down to it, really almost single-user machines - every time you
ran a compute quantum, it had to be swapped in.
Certainly a sparcstation with 4MB of RAM was unusable for X11.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free) to
> 3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as "broadband"
> here in the US.
I think "broadband" is a marketing term which means "anything faster
than ISDN".
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
>
> I think "broadband" is a marketing term which means "anything faster
> than ISDN".
>
When wires are disconnected and the user heads for mobile environment,
"broadband" means pretty far "anything that connects"...
--
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
http://www.zbxt.net
aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid
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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> When wires are disconnected and the user heads for mobile environment,
> "broadband" means pretty far "anything that connects"...
Anything an order of magnitude faster than the previous generation of
technology is "broadband"? :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:10:37 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two
> floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so that
> it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files were on
> the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could still find all
> of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it sounds, but it worked
> magnificantly.
>
> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
> anywhere........]
man ln
Thing is, there's no need in Linux to boot off multiple diskettes for
Linux - you can do a bootable CD that has everything you need *if* it
doesn't fit on a floppy. But there are distributions (Damn Small Linux
for one, Puppy Linux for another IIRC) that are entirely contained on a
single diskette.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:56:01 -0400, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free)
>> to 3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as
>> "broadband" here in the US.
>
> I think "broadband" is a marketing term which means "anything faster
> than ISDN".
Quite possibly. But here in the US, compared to the rest of the "first
world", broadband speeds are quite slow, generally speaking.
I live in a major metropolitan area and my DSL speed won't go above 3
Mbps because of "technical limitations" (distance from the telco CO).
And it's only been in the last year that I got 3 Mbps, it used to be 1.5.
I *could* pay for Comcast cable and get - I think it is - a whopping 6-8
Mbps, but then I'd be subject to their bandwidth caps and throttling = I
pay for 6-8, but I can't *use* it if I so desire. Their TOS (when I
selected my current provider) didn't allow for hosting services, either,
and I need remote access into my network. If you wanted that (at that
time, no idea if it's changed now), you had to pay something like $250 a
month for a *business* connection.
There's no way my employer would reimburse for that. They'd sooner have
me drive 45 miles to sit in an office rather than work from home.
Jim
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:16:06 -0500, Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg>
wrote:
>--
>"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.
LOL
--
Regards
Stephen
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>> [Jesus, and I don't even have a sound card...]
>
> Then you missed most of it.
A feel glad about this! o_O
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two
>> floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so that
>> it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files were on
>> the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could still find all
>> of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it sounds, but it worked
>> magnificantly.
>>
>> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
>> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
>> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
>> anywhere........]
>
> man ln
I'm sure if you knew enough about Linux, you could do this kind of thing
pretty easily. I don't have the knowledge required.
> Thing is, there's no need in Linux to boot off multiple diskettes for
> Linux - you can do a bootable CD that has everything you need *if* it
> doesn't fit on a floppy. But there are distributions (Damn Small Linux
> for one, Puppy Linux for another IIRC) that are entirely contained on a
> single diskette.
I *have* such a thing. It's a little Linux boot disk that allows you to
access an NTFS partition and rewrite the SAM DB. [The thing that stores
the local administrator password.] Very damn useful too! ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:40:39 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two
>>> floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so
>>> that it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files
>>> were on the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could
>>> still find all of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it
>>> sounds, but it worked magnificantly.
>>>
>>> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
>>> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
>>> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
>>> anywhere........]
>>
>> man ln
>
> I'm sure if you knew enough about Linux, you could do this kind of thing
> pretty easily. I don't have the knowledge required.
That's a far cry from "doesn't appear to be documented".
>> Thing is, there's no need in Linux to boot off multiple diskettes for
>> Linux - you can do a bootable CD that has everything you need *if* it
>> doesn't fit on a floppy. But there are distributions (Damn Small Linux
>> for one, Puppy Linux for another IIRC) that are entirely contained on a
>> single diskette.
>
> I *have* such a thing. It's a little Linux boot disk that allows you to
> access an NTFS partition and rewrite the SAM DB. [The thing that stores
> the local administrator password.] Very damn useful too! ;-)
Yep. I've got a copy of that one around here somewhere as well from my
days working on Win2K Server. Pity it didn't work on the domain
controller I was having problems with, though - W2Ks had a problem where
if the administrator password got corrupted (that's the best guess
Microsoft had about the issue), you couldn't even boot into safe mode.
The utility disk at the time didn't understand AD DCs (indeed, since it
was a DC, it wasn't the SAM but the AD database that needed to be
accessed, and it wasn't designed for that).
Jim
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>> this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after Unix
>
> AmigaOS was farther from being UNIX-like than DOS 2.0 was. The two had
> absolutely nothing in common.
>
> Let me rephrase: What did you think was common about the two of those?
> About the only thing I can think of is they both had pre-emptive
> interrupts.
I always wondered why the hell AmigaDOS provided this lame little "more"
command. Or why it had "type". I was even more perplexed by "ed" - a
program that lets you edit a text file one line at a time by typing in
utterly cryptic instructions. And I often wondered why the "dir" command
has a "SHOW=" option.
...and then I read about Unix for the first time, and I realised that
that's where all this stuff comes from. That "ed" thing is for scripted
editing of text files. The "SHOW=" option allows you to write
scripts-that-write-scripts. "type" is basically the Unix "cat" program.
And "more" is there because it's there in Unix.
[On top of that AmigaDOS allows scripts to have multiple parameters
(with default values), local environment variables, uses variable
expansion, and generally does a number of things similar to what various
Unix shells give you. It also has pipes, launching background processes,
etc.]
Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from
Unix. [There are no device files, pathnames have a syntax more like
MS-DOS, configuration is always stored in binary files not text files...]
>> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
>> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
>> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
>> anywhere........]
>
> I saw a distro that used symlinks to completely "fix" the legacy layout
> of files. So their Linux had a /Programs and a /Library and a /Users and
> so on, not unlike OSX apparently has.
Now I would suspect that would tend to break horribly as soon as some
new application is added that expects everything to be in the normal
locations...
[Basically I have absolutely no clue how the traditional Unix file
layout is supposed to work. I don't know why, for example, we have /bin,
/root/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/bin...]
>> Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS
>> powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never
>> tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.
>
> I didn't have any trouble with that, except for the amount of RAM it
> took. Left little for the actual applications.
They had trouble. Somebody walked past and the T-adaptor on their PC
fell apart, breaking the ring. That and the constant AUTOEXEC.BAT
editing required to set up new programs or devices on PCs...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> When you wanted to start
>> windows you wrote "win".
>
> Except for one person I know who renamed it to "lose.com". You can guess
> his opinion.
OMG, lose.com is so full of win!
[Did you see what I did there?]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> OTOH, 24 Mbit/s ADSL is completely normal
>
> In Europe, yes. In the US, no. I got an upgrade recently (for free) to
> 3 Mbps from 1.5. It's amazing that that still qualifies as "broadband"
> here in the US.
Really? I'd heard it was the other way round...
My company grudingly signed a 3-year lease with BT for our Internet. My
boss really wants to shop around for better deals.
(Er, HELLO? Are you not getting this? BT OWN ALL THE WIRES IN THE
GROUND. THERE ARE NO OTHER TELECOMS PROVIDERS IN THE UK [except in
London]. No matter who you pay the bills to, the wires under the ground
are still being provided by the same people... WTF?)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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> CompuServe also charged a flat rate ($19.95/month IIRC) plus a surcharge
> for per-minute access to some services. Then there were add-on services
> that you could purchase as well.
>
> It was almost as convoluted as picking a cell phone plan these days.
Yeah - make it complex so the user can't tell how badly they're being
screwed! ;-)
BTW... apparently some cell phones these days can actually access the
Internet. (So I'm told anyway.)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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