- > That’s because in some ways, the ST and Amiga were better than a PC running Windows 3.x. If you didn’t experience it, that statement sounds absurd. But if you experienced it, you totally know what I mean
Do people really find that absurd? I was a Mac user, but I've never seen anyone seriously argue a PC with Win 3.x was better than Amiga or the ST. It was ubiquitous, but it was both less pleasant to use and uglier than practically any contemporary non-x86 option. It's not like Microsoft wasn't trying, of course; Windows had to run on commodity PC hardware designed to run DOS, which meant a wide variety of potential hardware had to be supported or supportable; the Mac, the ST and the Amiga each had a single hardware vendor.
- This is great; it's really well sourced. Check out the footnotes for additional reading material.
- Does anyone know what games the Unix Z-Machine originally shipped for, if any, and for which machines? There wouldn't have been high demand in 1985 for a Unix version of Infocom games (understatement). There are mentions of the "AT&T PC" in the source, and a snippet of 68000 assembly language.
There's a Fooblitzky interpreter too, but that didn't ship for anything Unixlike.
- When the game Beyond Zork starts up, it asks the Z-Machine interpreter what platform the interpreter is running on. If it's a platform that supports graphics, the game uses a custom font to draw an on-screen map; if it's a platform that only supports text, it does not try to draw the on-screen map. If it's a VT220, it uses the VT220's built-in special characters to draw the map.
Probably nobody was buying a special VT220 edition of Beyond Zork, I think that version was used by the developers working at Infocom, who did their work on a minicomputer and terminals. I believe it was a VAX, rather than a Unix minicomputer, but it wouldn't surprise me if the Unix Z-Machine interpreter had a similar story behind it.
- Beyond Zork’s map drawing code will also produce an ASCII art variant of the map for systems that can’t easily handle the custom font, like, IIRC, the Apple II.
The Infocom dev machine was a DECSystem 20 (PDP-10 architecture) until circa 1988, when they ported tools to the 68020-based Mac II.
I expect they thought the Unix source would be a good basis for future non-Unix development; comments in the source itself allude to this possibility; I’m just wondering if it was used in any shipping product. I suspect it wasn’t.
- I actually don't think any UNIX variant ever shipped as a commerical product. My gut feeling while working on the project was that it was perhaps a reference implementation, documenting proper z-machine behavior the various assembly versions needed to match. But that's a literal guess, TBH.
The list of known system codes (used as identification for packaging and so forth) can be seen here: http://pdd.if-legends.org/infocom/fact-sheet.txt
- It was clearly a very popular machine with users; there was no real business case for producing clones, and yet there were no less than 3 companies that attempted PDP-10 clones -- one of them in the mid 1990's! -- in addition to the one-off clone at Xerox PARC. Ritche and Thompson wanted one at Bell Labs to develop early Unix (and settled for a PDP-11 instead). And DEC threw it completely away in 1983 by stopping development on the successor machines. They could have done one at least more generation, and it would have been at least a modest success and kept some of those users on board the DEC train.
- You have to wonder, what would modern CPUs look like if Thompson and Ritchie had implemented unix on a PDP-10 and that had become the 'normal' for CPUs...
- It's not a given that a "Unix" on a PDP-10 would have taken off like the PDP-11 version did. I believe the success of Unix was partially because it ran on an inexpensive and wildly popular mini.
Even as a PDP-10 fan, I have to admit that the PDP-10 was not exactly the wave of the future during the 1970s. It had a decent niche and a steadfast following, but sooner or later it would have disappeared in favor of 8-bit byte addressed computers.
- Real alternative history territory here, but one path possible path is that it still have been attractive enough to port to the VAX, and we'd have ended up in roughly same place. Lots of handwaving and assumptions, of course.
I'm not sure Unix failing to take off would have been bad. It would certainly be a different world.
- Some random thoughts. Writing a timesharing system for a computer with a 16-bit address space forced the Unix philosophy with many small single-purpose programs passing data between them. A timesharing system on a PDP-10 wouldn't have this constraint, and may well not have developed the Unix philosophy. Maybe that would have removed some of the appeal of "Unix-10".
Second, the VAX grew from the PDP-11 as a 32-bit addressing extension. So porting from the PDP-11 to the VAX is rather natural and easy. In contrast, the PDP-10 is rather different from both the PDP-11 and VAX. Programs written in assembly language will not port over. If Bell labs would have developed a C language for the PDP-10, I wager it would have looked different and not have become popular in an 8-bit byte world.
- Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some ways the architecture argument doesn’t really hold up. I think it’s more what machine were they could access.
https://linfo.org/pdp-7.html#:~:text=The%20PDP-7%20was%20a%2....
- Yes, this is the thing -- it's clear that Ken Thompson valued simplicity, one reason being that he and a couple of other people could maintain the entire thing without a large support organization. Whether that would have survived the PDP-10, I'm not sure. But I suspect it would have have been recognizably Unix.
- PDP-7 Unix is even more cramped with a 12-bit address space per process.
- Is this the parallel universe where Mac won and Windows faded into obscurity. Amiga took over gaming and PlayStation and XBox never happened ? .
Also. Steve Jobs lives…..
- Foonly and Systems Concepts seemed to have a decent business, although their customer base was largely restricted to one each: Tymshare and Compuserve, respectively.
The PARC clones were two-off.
- > The Righteous 3D had mechanical relays that clicked audibly when you were using it
Interesting! I assume these had something to do with bridging to the 2D graphics card? I found other references on the web to the relays clicking, but not an explanation of what the relays are doing, or how often you'd actually hear them in practice.
- Author's website is here
- This was the Mac's answer to Doom back in the day. Huge during Mac LAN parties of the era.
- Seems like practically everybody who had a microcomputer with a disk drive in the early 80's had a version of this and a version of Zork I.
- Some good commentary here on the Apple II's BASIC graphics primitives https://github.com/fadden/fdraw/blob/master/docs/manual.md
quote below from the Lines section ---
The Applesoft routine isn't quite the same as the standard Bresenham algorithm, because it doesn't move diagonally. Consider a line from (0,0) to (50,10) -- gently sloping down and to the right. The standard algorithm would plot exactly 51 pixels, one in each horizontal position. The "pen" always moves one pixel right, but sometimes also moves down.
In Applesoft, the "pen" can move either right or down, but can't do both at once. This results in lines that feel thin when near horizontal or vertical, but become thicker as they approach 45 degrees. This reduces performance, because Applesoft draws twice as many pixels for a diagonal line as the basic algorithm. It can also be visually jarring when animated, because lines get very thick when near diagonal.
- This is a fascinating document. This was like a year after Windows 3.1 started eating the PC world, and a year before NeXT threw in the towel on hardware entirely, and approx. three years before the Internet became mainstream.
John Perry Barlow is the interviewer, very tech savvy, and he seems to have been convinced NeXT had finally figured it all out and was going to make it big in the business world. Didn't really see Windows coming, I guess, or didn't understand that high-end PC hardware would rapidly become cheap enough to make NeXT's hardware irrelevant in that space.
- Unfortunately, it was economies of scale. By 1992, NEXT was only shipping 750 units a month. PCs were shipping about 3 million units a month. Even if NEXT was 100 or 1000 times it would still be small potatoes in the face of the PC market
- Make no mistake I would have loved mass market NExT. Multitasking. Vast memory. Graphics performance only dreamed of in the pc world. Once they started shipping with a HD instead of the optical 20mb cartridge disk jt had everything one would want in a power machine.
Sigh.
- The optical disk was such a terrible choice. As an option? Sure. As the primary disk for a system reliant — like nothing that came before it — on fast swapping to virtual memory for interactive perf? Yikes.
(Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)
- More
i could have spreadsheet, database, agenda and word processor open and swapping between docs instantly while my win3.x desktop lurched and trashed disk with just 1-2 windows open. also win3.x at the best of times was pretty crashy. a few reboots a day was quite common.
plus memory. some programs wanted expanded, some wanted extended so you ended up with multiple boot configurations, some for games, some for windows, some for dos apps.
In fact, Psion did release a SIBO "emulator"* for DOS which seems to be basically a PC port. It's intended for developers, and hews to replicating the mobile devices rather than taking advantage of the PC hardware, but you can imagine polishing it a step further.
* https://home.hccnet.nl/joop.nijenhuis/psion/emul_0e.htm