3 ms·

That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS). Is there anythin

That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS). Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

andrewstuart 6y ago
>> Is there anything more out there I can read about the history? What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2. Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking the future was OS/2. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked there. equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket information systems company in Australia and spread internationally. The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial trading software. http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron >>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS). It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of Modula2 he wrote it with. It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss inbound characters on a serial port.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Thanks for replying, and for the overview! It sounds like the early environment had that developer/engineer-driven quality to it that makes building awesome tech rewarding, and that the operations were managed by competence that was able to sustain that virtuous cycle. Both incredibly rare finds (particularly nowadays....) Wow, Googling Equinet returns 92 results (hehe probably 94 in a day or so ;) ). I thought I'd heard of them before. IRESS is very interesting, TIL about that. I get the impression Mr Cameron knew what was happening with Jecnet, knew he could replace it, knew that the result would very successfully be bought/licensed, and went to down... very nice. (Just turned up https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet-in-sight-19890908-k3kiw https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet..., possibly not directly relevant) Regarding QDOS->MS-DOS, apologies for the unclarified obscurity: QDOS, or 86-DOS, was sold for $50k to Microsoft, which turned the product into MS-DOS and made the company. The Equinet situation sounded similar to the MS-DOS/Microsoft success. (Until two paragraphs ago I thought Equinet was still a still-extant major company; I think my brain might've been conflating "Equifax" and something else ending in "-net", or maybe my brain just filed the name away a very long time ago) I do agree that not dropping characters from 16 users (plus a firehose) was pretty impressive on a... 25MHz? 33MHz? 486DX2. (Haha, how much RAM did it have...) I'm not too familiar with Modula-2 but poking around a couple of PDFs of different Modula-2 systems suggested they supported ISRs (interrupt service routines), so perhaps those were used for character buffering. (Or, likely, had to be used.) Now I'm idly curious: sure, the serial link was 9600 baud, but how fast did the feed run? 500b/s? 1KB/s? 100 lines/sec? (It would be interesting to know the average data rate of a major stock ticker in 1990!) Chances are this is a bit tricky to answer nowadays. As an aside, it would be very neat if those early pre-Win3.x versions of Equinet for Windows were to ever fall off the back of a truck. They'd probably be as unusable as CompuServe clients, but still interesting from a historical standpoint, especially if they launch at all (there are people digging Win1.x/2.x-era apps off of floppy disks (and frequenting sites like winworldpc.com and vogons.org), and while I only poke around occasionally I've never seen any discussion of anything like this, ever, and I presume there is no knowledge it existed. Hence the historical interest perspective). Quite likely it's one of those "...uhhhhhh..." sorts of things though; and maybe others have been similarly curious before me as well.

andrewstuart 6y ago

>> Is there anything more out there I can read about the history? What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2. Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking the future was OS/2. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked there. equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket information systems company in Australia and spread internationally. The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial trading software. http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron >>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS). It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of Modula2 he wrote it with. It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss inbound characters on a serial port.

exikyut 6y ago
Thanks for replying, and for the overview! It sounds like the early environment had that developer/engineer-driven quality to it that makes building awesome tech rewarding, and that the operations were managed by competence that was able to sustain that virtuous cycle. Both incredibly rare finds (particularly nowadays....) Wow, Googling Equinet returns 92 results (hehe probably 94 in a day or so ;) ). I thought I'd heard of them before. IRESS is very interesting, TIL about that. I get the impression Mr Cameron knew what was happening with Jecnet, knew he could replace it, knew that the result would very successfully be bought/licensed, and went to down... very nice. (Just turned up https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet-in-sight-19890908-k3kiw https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet..., possibly not directly relevant) Regarding QDOS->MS-DOS, apologies for the unclarified obscurity: QDOS, or 86-DOS, was sold for $50k to Microsoft, which turned the product into MS-DOS and made the company. The Equinet situation sounded similar to the MS-DOS/Microsoft success. (Until two paragraphs ago I thought Equinet was still a still-extant major company; I think my brain might've been conflating "Equifax" and something else ending in "-net", or maybe my brain just filed the name away a very long time ago) I do agree that not dropping characters from 16 users (plus a firehose) was pretty impressive on a... 25MHz? 33MHz? 486DX2. (Haha, how much RAM did it have...) I'm not too familiar with Modula-2 but poking around a couple of PDFs of different Modula-2 systems suggested they supported ISRs (interrupt service routines), so perhaps those were used for character buffering. (Or, likely, had to be used.) Now I'm idly curious: sure, the serial link was 9600 baud, but how fast did the feed run? 500b/s? 1KB/s? 100 lines/sec? (It would be interesting to know the average data rate of a major stock ticker in 1990!) Chances are this is a bit tricky to answer nowadays. As an aside, it would be very neat if those early pre-Win3.x versions of Equinet for Windows were to ever fall off the back of a truck. They'd probably be as unusable as CompuServe clients, but still interesting from a historical standpoint, especially if they launch at all (there are people digging Win1.x/2.x-era apps off of floppy disks (and frequenting sites like winworldpc.com and vogons.org), and while I only poke around occasionally I've never seen any discussion of anything like this, ever, and I presume there is no knowledge it existed. Hence the historical interest perspective). Quite likely it's one of those "...uhhhhhh..." sorts of things though; and maybe others have been similarly curious before me as well.