“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
Part of why video conferencing got sidetracked in the 1990s were the wasted, ultimately counter-productive, efforts associated with ITU-T Recommendation T.120, “Data protocols for multimedia conferencing”, an ambitious family of specifications, once seemingly essential to the industry, and now disdained.
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at https://technologists.com/DellUnix2.2.1/
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.”
update March 2012: Antoni Sawicki has Dell SVR4 running
under Qemu/Bochs, and subsequently reports that he has
Dell Unix “working correctly” under VirtualBox. CHS]
“Dell UNIX? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
A couple of weeks ago I had my new XO with me for breakfast at a nearby bakery café. Other patrons were drawn to seeing an XO for the first time, including a Linux person from Dell. I mentioned Dell UNIX and we talked a little about the people who had worked on Dell UNIX. He expressed surprise that mention of Dell UNIX evokes the above quote so often and pointed out that Emacs source still has #ifdef for Dell UNIX.
Quick Googling doesn’t reveal useful history of Dell UNIX, so here’s my version, a summary of the three major development releases.
For the longest time, I’ve avoided learning about Flash. When Flash was becoming popular for animations on web sites, it was mis-used and usually annoying. And all of the Flash-based ads are usually still annoying.
Some release of Red Hat Linux (4.1?) included RealEncoder and RealServer. Those were the basis for my first production use of RealVideo. Subsequently, after the Real/Red Hat bundling arrangement was discontinued, I bought a RealServer G2 license and used the Linux version (6.0.3.303) for my own purposes and for Comp Carnage.