knuckleheadsmif

6 ms·

31.
by knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
My memory was that it was released and then two weeks cancelled when HP decided to close down Palm and sell off WebOS. I worked for a short time (6 months) working on the tablet setup experience. And yes, then they were being dumped at fire
32.
by knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
Missed in the history in the article is that John Warnock and Chuck Geschke planned to build a computer/printer turnkey publishing system when they left Xerox. PS was just a piece of it. It was after a Steve Jobs meeting that changed t
33.
by knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
I’m one of the few people who has written a lot of Interpress (for the Xerox Star) and was responsible for making it work on a number of Xerox printers all implementing a different subsets mostly because it was evolving protocol which diffe
34.
by knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
I was part of Unicode effort it’s inception at Xerox and then Apple. It has drifted so far from the initial core principles (that happened a very long time ago) that I find Unicode as a whole a technical embarrassment. Seeing yet another du
35.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
It is common in some contexts. Unicode also has within it formatting rules for a lot of this stuff although not the kind of rules you’ll find in a manual of style or a typesetting rule book. Japanese can flow top to bottom and right to left
36.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Yep. I worked on Oakmead (for Xerox) and would walk to Fry’s and CL often at lunchtime.
37.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Yes it was, before they, NeXT, moved to Redwood City.
38.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
You are correct. They were there for years. It was not a huge superstore then. While it was. It was very close to the corner you listed but it was actually on Oakmead itself.
39.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
The main reason for OpenFirmware being added (was not in the 6100, 7100, or 8100 PPCs)was because Apple was supporting the Mac Clone business back then. I was at Apple back then, on the project this post is about, and remember being in Open
40.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
The project was cancelled around the time this article was published (maybe a month or 2 later.)
41.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Internally we used IBM’s RS6000 compiler. Novell contracted with Cygnus for a GNU based compiler for their NLM developers that was being developed concurrently with our development. That compiler was for all the PIN based architectures (PA-
42.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Here is an article: https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd19950304.h...
43.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
C code (complied, maybe?, with a C++ compiler for things like variable scoping. I forget.) NetWare’s code almost assuredly was pure C as some of the processors it supported may not have had C++ compilers then? Compilation was done on an IBM
44.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
It looked just like Netware except setup was actually more simple as it auto detected stuff on the network simplifying the process. At the time it was being developed for MIPS, PPC, SPARC, and PA-RISC (I’m thinking there was a fifth platfor
45.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
I sent you an email. Yes it was PIN.
46.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
This is a great and accurate historical history of the Network Server and its software. I worked at Apple, in the same building with the Apple’s Shiner team and AIX teams, and had a Network Server in my office because I was on the team at A
47.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
This brings back memories for me. I’m retired now but I helped develop and implemented many of the algorithms for multilingual text and Unicode back in the 80s first at Xerox and later at Apple. What this article misses is a lot of the comp
48.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
I was one aisle over on the editor team. Your memory matches mine about how the BWS came about. It was about opening the system up to allow apps to easily be added unlike the original “trait”-based system that was closed by design. Traits w
49.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
They gave up on the 88000 the same time Apple did (yes it was considered at Apple too) and is directly related the IBM/Apple PPC partnership and Apple’s insistence that Motorola being a second source for the PPC. It was really Motorola
50.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
What most everyone here missed, just like Steve Jobs when he say Smalltalk, was the entire network of computers that were released with the Star System they sold a separate network print server, file server, mail server… the were all separa
51.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
I looked more closely at the email and realized I know most of the folks who sent those messages.
52.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
For a good primer on how/why the user interface was the way it was you can read this Byte article. These images are from the one of the early Star releases. https://www.tech-insider.org/star/research/acrobat&#
53.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Interesting question but I suspect desktop wallpaper is fairly old (70’s) from some Alto environment.
54.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
The tools is not what you think it is. IP here stood for InterPress. It’s capturing an image from the desktop as an Interpress file, the predecessor (again) to PostScript with the same imaging model as PostScript. It’s what Dorris used to p
55.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Here is one interesting manual for Viewpoint (which I called Basic Work Station in other posts) that was the rewritten version of Star that it was open to others writing apps. It’s a good document with examples or the Mesa APIs for usage.
56.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
That’s Dorris Wells’s desktop! She was a graphic designer for Star. She did many of the icons.
57.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
And the Lilith computer was an Alto clone. I’m not sure why Worth spent so much time basically redoing what was done in almost an identical way.
58.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Open sourcing would also require open sourcing all the development tools. Also open sourcing the original code while interesting to look at would be impossible to extend (not impossible but very hard). It would make the most sense to open s
59.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Mesa was really a great language that was really only missing first class support for Object rather than the way it was takes on which made star a closed system. It had to do with the ‘trait’ system and the static analysis that had to be do
60.
by knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
Xerox also owned the GEM is with had a Mac like windows system. They eventually had a PC add on board to the 6085 (the 8010 hardware successor) that could show a PC within a Star window. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/

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