Free Woodworking Report Available

[Dave Hinz]

Ehh...pays well, y'know?

Good point. There are still ATMs running OS/2 out there.

Dave Hinz

[Swingman]

Actually, I had a valid, and authorized, senior moment when I was trying to remember the terminology for the real impetus, IMO, in the advent of the personal computer a la "cheaper hardware": "non-proprietary" hardware. Something Apple has certainly never been guilty of, and certainly not IBM in the 360 series, which was not "personal computing" by any yardstick.

But, I may well have wrongly assumed that the discussion was about the PC and its hardware/software/OS.

[Pat Barber]

Ummmm... Unix is "standard" ????

I been in this computer crapolla for quite a few years myself and which of the just over 200 variants of Unix is the "standard version" ????

and while I'm at it.... just when did a collection of utility programs called Windows get to be a OS ???

Mike Marlow wrote:

[Dave Hinz]

Sure.

They all are. A _good_ Unix sysadmin can speak to any of them with a minimum of retraining between. And nearly all of the current flavors of unix can be used to build the same tools from the same sourcecode.

When it went from being the shell to being the kernel, which would be when they went from the win95/98/98SE/ME world to the WinNT/win2K/winXP/win2003 world, I think.

[Pat Barber]

See my comments about W/XXXX from an earlier statement.

Let's see:

The largest number of midrange computers in the world are running OS/400, which will also run Unix,AIX,Linux and Windows as "guests" all at the same time.

AIX(another Unix) is installed in about a billion systems strung all over the world.(even the famous Flea-Bay)

MVS is running most/all of the major mainframes in the world. That little OS has been around since 1970's and only god knows what the current version is...

I don't recall any of the "other" folks like RCA,Data General,Honeywell Bull,Digital,GE,etc are still around.....(I left out many dead companies)

Besides, this is NOT a computer forum and we need to move right along to somthing wood related ????

Dave H> Right, there are mainframe computers these days as well, but...can you

[Morris Dovey]

I'd be willing to go with any/all for which I can write, compile, link, and run programs in C89 (with POSIX.1 extensions), though a C99 [ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E)] compiler would be nice...

Now be fair -- *nix isn't very far from being a collection of utilities itself (although there's worlds of difference in quality.)

[Pat Barber]

[Dave Hinz]

Thought they were running Solaris? Were a few years ago, at least for the application servers. Rack after rack after rack of V880s...

How many of these are _current_ major players, though? Lots of Linux at GE, at least in Med Systems (sorry, "GE Healthcare" now).

I've got a computer built into a cherry cabinet. Beautiful, but ancient. I should do something about that.

[Dave Hinz]

D|I|G|I|T|A|L monitor built in the 1990s, which I probably won't be able to replace in kind.

[Swingman]

How about starting in 1988 with David Cutler and his team's first iteration of Windows NT, and for real, circa 1993, with the release of NT 3.1 to the public?

[Dave Hinz]

Yes, that's what I thought as well. When DOS became an app that runs in Windows, rather than Windows being an app that ran in DOS.

I am truly abashed at the depth of my knowledge of Microsoft's history. And to think I used to be an proponent (well, in the early 80's, but still...)

[Duane Bozarth]

Dave Hinz wrote: ...

The embedded market in terms of numbers of cpu's is far larger than the desktop market (as you may well know). Last numbers I recall from Embedded Systems Programming survey of embedded developers something under 10% were using either of those as an OS for their or their employers' product(s).

Large number of user interfaces are going that way though simply as course of least resistance...

[Duane Bozarth]

...

Of course...only brought into the discussion to balance off that there is another whole world out there besides the PC...

[Charles Krug]

Different market entirely.

Embedded systems range from 4-bit microcontrollers, FPGAs to MIPS and PowerPCs . . not so much Intel chips 'cuz the power consumption is HUGE.

TI used to sell their compilers to run under UNIX, but they made a huge move to CodeComposer Studio, which is really only happy under Windows.

VxWorks sells their development tools to run on most everything for the low low price of around $50k/seat. But if you need vxWorks, you REALLY need vxWorks.

Interesting side note: A big "microcontroller" is the Zilog Z-80 and its descendents. They sell around 200Million of them a year for a buck or so apiece. I learned to program on the Z-80-based TRS-80 Model 3 that had a WHOPPING 48k of RAM.

[Dave Hinz]

That's probably going to change; Wind River just went Linux.

Yup. No longer makes sense to custom-anything when there's an easy solution on the shelf.

[MSCHAEF.COM]

They're both cell phone application delivery platforms.

I think the line is blurring, particularly since consoles are moving towards more networking and computers have such a history for gaming.

-Mike

[Dave Hinz]

So, more embedded than "sitting at a computer" kind of thing.

OK. But, still, I don't think a game console fits many peoples' definition of "current major computing platform".

[MSCHAEF.COM]

In article , Charles Krug wrote: ...

I've done embedded development for devices used in process control. These have to be powered by extremely low-power intrinsicly safe bus connections. That means power consumption in the tens of milliwats. The chip used was an Intel 80188EB.

-Mike

[MSCHAEF.COM]

...

Microsoft. I said as much in another post.

That said, they didn't have anything to do with the price or availabiliy of the hardware. I also doubt that the marginal difference between Integer BASIC and Applesoft was what made or broke the Apple ][.

Going back, Microsoft was founded in reaction to the avaibility of cheap hardware (in the form of the Altair 8800).

-Mike

[Dave Hinz]

Yeah, I saw that after I read this. Not sure of posting order, not that it matters.

I used to have an Altair 680, but a... let's say person I know... left it IN A LEAKY GARAGE and it got wrecked. Ask me how I feel about that. No really, go ahead.