Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

[F Murtz]

"The secret word is 'mindless'." Thank you, Groucho.

Wow - flamed by both of his personalities in the same day.
I've made it (whatever "it" is).

Blimey this subject has generated a lot of verbiage.

 

[SG1]

Blimey this subject has generated a lot of verbiage.

Yes Roddles & verbal diarrhoea go together.

 

[Jasen Betts]

Indeed. And I remember thinking when W95 came out (late!) how much
Microsoft had "borrowed" from MacOS, AmigaOS, Next and the *nix window
managers.

95 and 98 were still DOS underneath, you could close 95 and get back
to the dos prompt, with a little tweaking you could do the same in 98

 

[Jasen Betts]

No they werent. Particularly when they installed device drivers for
all the hardware and even rescanned for drives visible, and didnt
use the bios or dos functionality at all, even for the keyboard etc.

So did DOOM, that doesn't make it an operating system.

 

[Mike Pumford]

greenaum wrote

Win stopped using the bios LONG ago. Its basically just used in the boot
phase now.

Actually in modern PC's there is an increase in BIOS use. Windows and other
32bit protected mode operating systems stopped using the BIOS as the
BIOS vendors never wrote protected mode friendly code. A modern PC with
an ACPI BIOS provides a bytecode that can be executed in the OS kernel
to do chipset specific operations in an OS neutral way. ATI also do
a similar thing in their video card ROMS for certain setup operations
as well. Suspending and resuming a modern laptop is done this way as are
a lot of the motherboard device discovery/power managment.

This bytecode approach gives the OS vendor a way of controlling the processor
mode and leaves it up to the OS to make sure the bytecode interpreter
is suitable for the OS environment. These BIOSs are not without their bugs
but the situation is getting better especially since newer versions of
Windows don't tolerate bugs in these bits of code.

Makes you wish they had done it this way in the first place although I'd
imagine the performance penalty on even a 486 would be shocking.

Mike

 

[Joe Thompson]

Scott Lurndal wrote

Because few bother to cater for those of you that prefer a different OS.

You might as well whine about having to pay for heated seats when
you want to use a car in a place like Hawaii that never needs them.

But I can certainly order a car that doesn't have them, I may just have
to wait longer (it will often be cheaper as well unless the dealer
really wants the one with heated seats off the lot and is willing to eat
the cost of them to do it).

Or child restraint anchor points in your new car when
you dont have any kids and never have kids in your car.

I actually have heard several childless people complain about safety
features aimed at children driving up the cost. -- Joe

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

Sigh! Proprietary meant that the formats were not published. To
translate that sentence for you, it meant that nobody knew what the
formats were and, thus, could not write code to read those formats
unless they were ble$$ed by MS.

Even the published ones require reverse engineering to implement. Have
you looked at the scandal that is OOXML, Barb?

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

But it didn't have a mouse ball.

Are you sure?

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Rod Speed]

Jasen Betts wrote

95 and 98 were still DOS underneath,

Only for booting, not for normal ops once booted.

you could close 95 and get back to the dos prompt,
with a little tweaking you could do the same in 98

Irrelevant to what did the work once 9x was booted.

And even NT, XP etc use a relatively primitive system
for the boot phase that isnt used once they are booted.

So does *nix.

 

[Rod Speed]

Jasen Betts wrote

So did DOOM, that doesn't make it an operating system.

Yes, but the others clearly are OSs.

 

[Rod Speed]

Mike Pumford wrote

Actually in modern PC's there is an increase in BIOS use.

Not to anything like the level seen with DOS.

Windows and other 32bit protected mode operating systems stopped using
the BIOS as the BIOS vendors never wrote protected mode friendly code.

They stopped using the BIOS for a lot more reasons than that.

A modern PC with an ACPI BIOS provides a bytecode that can be executed
in the OS kernel to do chipset specific operations in an OS neutral way.

And there arent all that many chipset specific ops to do with normal ops.

ATI also do a similar thing in their video card
ROMS for certain setup operations as well.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed.

Suspending and resuming a modern laptop is done this way as
are a lot of the motherboard device discovery/power managment.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed.

This bytecode approach gives the OS vendor a way of controlling the
processor mode and leaves it up to the OS to make sure the bytecode
interpreter is suitable for the OS environment. These BIOSs are not
without their bugs but the situation is getting better especially since
newer versions of Windows don't tolerate bugs in these bits of code.

Makes you wish they had done it this way in the first place although
I'd imagine the performance penalty on even a 486 would be shocking.

And thats why it wasnt done that way.

 

[Jim Brown]

jmfbahciv wrote

Jim Brown wrote

Sigh!

Heavy breathing aint gunna save your bacon.

Proprietary meant that the formats were not published.

Duh. NTFS support etc is perfectly possible anyway.

To translate that sentence for you, it meant that nobody knew what the formats were

How odd that plenty managed to work them out anyway. It aint rocket science, stupid.

and, thus, could not write code to read those formats unless they were ble$$ed by MS.

How odd that so many did anyway.

Try again.

 

[Jim Brown]

Joe Thompson wrote

But I can certainly order a car that doesn't have them,

You can order anything you like, and some manufacturers refuse to
supply the car without that and certainly dont give you a price reduction.

I may just have to wait longer

It wont ever happen with some manufacturers.

(it will often be cheaper as well unless the dealer
really wants the one with heated seats off the lot
and is willing to eat the cost of them to do it).

And thats just as true of a laptop that comes with Win.

I actually have heard several childless people complain
about safety features aimed at children driving up the cost.

Corse some fools whine like that. But you cant order the car without that, you
get to like that or lump it, just like you do with laptops that come with Win.

And you can certainly get a chinese laptop that doesnt pay MS a cent for anything anyway.

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

There have been ages since I couldn't read a document. It still
happens all the time that it formats strangely. But that happens
on other MS installations as well; where the setup for the
details is different from what the original author intended.

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011b.html#4 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in Londn

regarding Melinda's pages with some mainframe historic documents moving
.... there was some comment that princeton was removing her pages because
of possible hate crimes issues ... over her comments about MVS.
http://web.me.com/melinda.varian/

she had a multi-file postscript version that was many tens of megabytes
(with lots of pictures) that I converted to PDF (4mbytes) and did an
awz/kindle conversion. frequently kindle conversion becomes smaller file
.... but with all the images, the kindle version is twice as large
(9mbytes, as pdf).

other of the PDF files with figures that are line-drawings using
characters didn't convert nearly as well (and converted to smaller
files) for kindle ... with the characters in the drawings being
"flowed".

 

[Rod Speed]

Scott Lurndal wrote

Actually, probably even more so.

Wrong with normal ops like reads and writes to the drives etc.

Sometime you should try to broaden your horizens and spend some time looking into SMM.

No need, I know what its about.

The SMM handler which is part of the BIOS executes _very_ frequently
(and invisibly) while Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, et. al. are executing,
particularly when the power saving features of the system are in use.

And most operating system interactions with the hardware platform
are handled by the ACPI bytecode as others have noted.

Pity the drive ops aint. Video in spades. Comms in spades. Etc etc etc.

 

[SG1]

Are you sure?

Yes the cooks are female mice.

 

[SG1]

How odd that plenty managed to work them out anyway. It aint rocket
science, stupid.

I remember the "Works" and "Orifice" incompatability. Strange both were M$.

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

jmfbahciv wrote


Heavy breathing aint gunna save your bacon.


Duh. NTFS support etc is perfectly possible anyway.


How odd that plenty managed to work them out anyway. It aint rocket science, stupid.


How odd that so many did anyway.

Try again.

How much odder that even Microsoft software fails to correctly interpret
Word documents across versions.

 

[Patrick Scheible]

How much odder that even Microsoft software fails to correctly interpret
Word documents across versions.

That's not odd at all. That's how Microsoft forces people to upgrade
and breaks open source compatibility. Being able to get away with
that kind of stunt is one way you can know they have a monopoly.

-- Patrick

 

[Joe Thompson]

I remember the "Works" and "Orifice" incompatability. Strange both
were M$.

I think Works originally wasn't. -- Joe