Technologists Notes

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

Working with the JAWS machine brought me back to thinking about NEXTSTEP 486 being developed on that machine. I only know part of the story first hand. Andy Groves and Steve Jobs were friends. Between the two of them, it was decided that NeXT should create a 486 version of NEXTSTEP and that JAWS would be the best development platform. If I recall correctly, it was late December 1991 that Steve, Avie Tevanian and a few other NeXT folks came to Michael’s conference room and told Michael, Glenn Henry, probably Dennis Jolly, some other Dell folks and me about their plans. Glenn and I went to hear Steve announce NEXTSTEP 486 and demo on JAWS at NeXTWorld in January 1992. Dennis was the primary sales VP providing impetus for joint Dell/NeXT efforts — Dennis and I would routinely go to the (in)famous NeXT headquarters in Redwood City to discuss our joint plans. (more…)

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

The JAWS machine will always have special sentimental value to me because of the Andy Grove experiences, the Steve Jobs experiences, demoing JAWS on Computer Chronicles, etc. My instance of that machine has also been of practical value for my testimony at a hearing in a patent matter, and in preparing Windows 3.11 machines for other patent matters. (more…)

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

[update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking using emulated VGA and NIC.”]

Dell SVR4 User Guide

Dell UNIX originally ran on hardware from almost 30 years ago, with almost all peripherals dependent on the (now long defunct) ISA bus. Though such hardware is still available on eBay, from recyclers and others, the door is closing on sustaining Dell UNIX on bare metal. Thanks to Antoni Sawicki’s Qemu/Bochs & Virtual Box efforts, perpetuating Dell Unix on virtual machines is much more practical. However, SLIP will never cut it for network access when even 10BaseT seems painfully slow. For several years I’ve been intending to try to get an Ethernet driver for a card supported by Virtual Box emulation, probably an AMD Am79c970. (more…)

A long time ago (early 1992?) in some forgotten place (San Mateo?) someone who used to look like me…

(I probably have on VHS somewhere, but found this at https://archive.org/details/intel486)

Thinking the i486 could do everything may have been a bit short sighted?

(more…)

[Update 12/7/2022: “Warren Toomey receives the 2022 USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award for founding and maintaining tuhs.org, The Unix Heritage Society, which for three decades has provided a forum for discussion of the history of Unix and a repository that collects, preserves and makes available to the public documents, bibliographies, source code, web links, and personal recollections pertinent to the evolution of this most influential of operating systems.”]