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“For these machines (Cray-1 or X-MP) you couldn’t really go into a store and buy an application, like you do for a PC these days. Now, you just ‘install’ W
by Nanzikambe 13y ago
“For these machines (Cray-1 or X-MP) you couldn’t really go into a store
and buy an application, like you do for a PC these days. Now, you just
‘install’ Word and it runs. For these machines, everything came in
source-code format and you needed to compile it before you could run
it. You use the … compiler to turn it into machine code the machine
could understand,” Tantos said. “That was the main way you interacted with
these machines. Without the compiler, you can’t feed it that.”
And at last, we have located Gentoo's antecedent!
- mschaef 13y agoIBM mainframes were the same way... installing the OS required a compile process. If you're interested in experiencing the joy of setting up OS/360 first hand, it's more possible than you might think. Here are instructions for building OS/360 on the Hercules emulator: http://www.conmicro.com/hercos360/ http://www.conmicro.com/hercos360/ None of the steps in the process is all that involved, but some of the mechanics are very different. 60's vintage OS/360 on an IBM mainframe is very unlike the Unix model that most people are used to these days.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoGentoo's antecedent was freebsd ports. Hence the name portage.
- Nanzikambe 13y agoIndeed. I'm a Gentoo user and contributor since late 2002 :) I suspect I should've surrounded my post in <JOKE> </JOKE> tags, I wasn't actually suggesting one is anyway descendant from the other. It is fascinating to see how far back the methodology goes though, I wasn't aware of this.