[rescue] Speaking of Solaris GUI options...

Fri Feb 7 21:11:44 CST 2003

On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 05:01:31PM -0800, Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:
> 
> Definitely.  I love my Color Turbo, and my ND Cubes. :-)

Ack!  You have both of those?  I had a Turbo Color with the 21"
Hitachi and sold it for either $2k or $1200, can't remember, back in
1995 I think .

> Oh!  And I have actually rescued my first (and only) x86 machine:  a Canon
> object.station 41!  Sadly, it's the beige version, not the black; no

Those rock, they have the Wingine stuff right?  A sort-of local bus
that NS took advantage of.

> matching keyboard, mouse or monitor, just the base unit.  But still, I
> swore I'd only own one of two x86 machines, specifically because they were
> built for NeXTstep:  the Canon pizza box, and the Intel GX Pro, another
> pizza box design built to run NSFIP.

I have never even heard of the GX Pro.

> In fact, once I get off my overworked/exhausted/lazy/procrastinating butt,
> I'll be able to build QUAD-FAT apps:  Black hardware, HP725, SS4 and now
> the object.station all running NS3.3!  Woo!  Even if it's just "Hello,

Does NS3.3 HPPA support the 735 with the 99Mhz proc?  I have one of
those with about 144MB RAM.

> <rant> Taking three years to rewrite it all in C++ was one obvious reason
> why it died the painful, stupid death it deserved... Remember Taligent?  

But remember, C++ is over 10% faster vs. Obj-C .  Calling a virtual
method vs. dispatch as handled by ObjC.  This is an actual reason that
people used to use to bludgeon the ObjC-ers.

> Swing/AWT/alphabet soup we're buried in today.  Sun's investment in NeXT
> was the best $10M they ever spent - next to acquiring the Cray CS6400 from
> SGI :-) - and they pissed it away.  Stupid, stupid, stupid. </rant>

Sun did get access to some bright guys though because they had cred in
the NS community...

They bought out Lighthouse Design, which made Concurrence and some
other useful apps for NS.  Jonathan Swartz (or Schwartz) used to be
president of Lighthouse Design.  They also got Bud Tribble of NeXT, at
least for a few years; and Patrick Naughton, who (apparently) helped
kick off Java with a strongly worded email that made the rounds of
Sun.

(And Keith Ohlfs, who designed all of NeXT's interface, ended up doing
the WebTV interface; which made the WebTV guys money; I don't know
where he was between NS and WebTV though.  I got to talk to him once,
and I think I embarassed him by thanking him profusely for the NS
interface, which I used full time for 8 months a long time ago.)

> But because of my early exposure to the Perq, I've always been on the
> losing side of every major flame war over the last 20 years:  m68k over
> x86, BSD/Mach over SysV, ObjC over C++... I'll abstain on VMS vs. Unix and
> emacs vs. vi. :-)

Just remember that the explorers and the pioneers are the one with
all the arrows in their backs :-)

> > (Someday perhaps Jobs will allow the internal-to-Apple x86 build of
> > OSX to be shipped.)
> 
> I wouldn't hold my breath.  Think about it:  Right out of the gate, MacOSX
> could have been running on NuBus-based m68k and early PowerMacs, HP-PA,
> SPARC, *and* x86 machines, and *possibly* even the Alpha (DEC sort of
> flirted with OpenStep with PDO)... Jobs clearly chose to stay focused and
> maximize resources on making the Apple PPC hardware the premier platform,

I dunno.  I think the problem is that Jobs was trying to keep the
prices high, not understanding or caring about how by commoditizing
some of this stuff he could make more money.  PDO used to be $495 per
copy, alone.

> mostly so that Apple could remain viable.  In hindsight, it's
> understandable that they simply could not overextend and had to stay with
> their installed base.

Jobs went to Apple after all this, but my timeline could be shaky.  I
don't remember.

At the time, I was working for one of the few NS resellers, OpenSource
(they used to own the opensource.com domain).

> But it still grates on me that all the work of porting to all those
> different platforms was just tossed out the window... and if you don't
> like the Mach kernel, hell, OpenStep atop Solaris, NT, and even
> (eventually) HP-UX or Tru64 or Linux... talk about the pieces all being in
> place for "world domination";  one development environment based on a

I think Jobs felt it would be too much of a reach, or maybe he just
ticked off everyone else he dealt with.

Ummm, this is too long as it is.  Good night.

--Patrick