Re: Apple PowerMac G5
On Sat, 5 Jul 2003, [iso-8859-1] Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra wrote:
> Em Sat, 05 Jul 2003 18:36:51 +0800, debia escreveu:
>
> > The S/360 was open enough that others could clone it, and they did.
>
> Wrong. There was no commitment by IBM on documenting or preserving
> interfaces, so clone-makers and plugin compatible module vendors were left
> to reverse-engineering every new change -- and IBM was known for changing
> interfaces just to lock out third-party stuff.
>
>
> > Mostly, though, you still got to run IBM operating systems on them.
>
> Which were only available because the US government forced IBM to sell
> it.
Sell it? IBM gave it away. That's why I can get MVS, MVT, MFT right now.
VS1 I think can be had, if not it's because it's been mislaid over
time. SVS I don't know about.
>
>
> > The S/370 was open enough that others could clone it, and they
> > did. In some cases, vendors (such as Fujitsu and Hitachi) provided
> > their own operating systems. However, they were derived illegally
> > from IBM's OS/VS family - there were court cases and settlements to
> > prove it. They _could_ have written their own operating systems, and
> > may have done so for the Japanese market.
>
> So how open that makes it? Not at all, in my book. EBCDIC, changing
> undocumented interfaces... that's not my definition of openness.
The problem was they stole proprietary software. The hardware platform
was open enough to allow them to write their own.
>
>
> > The PC familiy was open enough that others could clone it, and they did.
>
> This is a totally different story from the S/360 architecture. Because
> (1) the IBM PC was low priority and (2) IBM was a later entrant at a
> market then already perceived as saturated by Apple, TRS-80, Sinclair and
> others, IBM was willing to simply assemble a system based on available
> components, contrary to their first entry on the microcomputer market,
> which was a totally closed system no one paid attention. So this wasn't
> open by design, but by accident.
>
>
> > The impendiment to writing your own OS for the S/360 was not the
> > available information - back then the OS was free, and I think came
> > with source.
>
> Bundled, not free. The source was available but controlled.
I had access to the ASP source, and I wasn't controlled.
>
>
> > The impendiment to writing your own OS for the PC was not the
> > available information, but rather the availability of tools and the
> > number of people using the PC. As those problems were resolved,
> > people wrote the tools and OS operating systems, mostly in the Unix
> > mould, have proliferated.
>
> I am not talking simply writing OSs here, but writing open OSs
> on an open platform. The PC platform allowed proprietarisation by MS
Whether the OS is open is the author's choice. It has nothing to do with
the openness of the hardware specs.
> because IBM tried to make it even closer with IBM OS/2 and PS/2, thus
OS/2 was a joint venture between IBM and MS from the beginning, and both
sold it.
It's true the PS/2 (and MCA) platform was screwed down as hard as IBM
could do it, protected by patents and licence agreements - you could get
a licence to manufacture PS/2-compatible gear, and someone (Ferranti I
think) did.
> allowing MS and the clone-makers to be seen as relatively open, with
> EISA, MS-DOS, MS OS/2 and later MS Windows. Later there was the ACE
MS always had the right to sell DOS to anyone it wanted.
EISA was an attempt to combat MCA, headed by Compaq, NEC and others.
Some sided with both camps.
> consortium, which tried to create an open platform but was stabbed on
> the back by MS and Intel when they saw they could get away with it,
> because (1) their products had became good enough to prevent wholesale
> migration to open systems and (2) the open systems camp was seen to be
> in disarray because of the desktop wars (OpenLook vs CDE, X vs NeWS,
> everyone vs NeXTStep), the Unix wars (System V vs BSD, X/Open vs POSIX
> vs Sun) so on.
I was always far removed from those: the systems were too expensive for
me, too small for my employers.
>
>
> > As for Compaq killing Alpha and PA-RISC, that was driven by its
> > perception of how best to make a dollar. NT 4 was available for
> > IA32, Alpha, PPC and HP-RISC.
>
> There was never MS WNT for the PA-RISC. There was for SPARC,
> but never saw the light of the day. Likewise Solaris for the PowerPC
> was dead at arrival.
I read those names out of my "Start Here" for "Microsoft Windows NT
Workstation" document.
It's true my CD only has binaries for some of those platforms:
oot@bobtail:~# ls /mnt/cdrom/* -d1
/mnt/cdrom/alpha
/mnt/cdrom/autorun.inf
/mnt/cdrom/cdrom_w.40
/mnt/cdrom/drvlib
/mnt/cdrom/i386
/mnt/cdrom/langpack
/mnt/cdrom/mips
/mnt/cdrom/ppc
/mnt/cdrom/support
root@bobtail:~#
>
>
> > When MS withdrew support for Alpha, that pretty much killed the
> > Alpha as far as I can see.
>
> Yes, but why is that? Because NT was optimised only for the
> IA32, where it inherited MS-DOS and OS/2 assembly, time-proven code,
> agains all-new C-only RISC code in the other platforms. Not to
> mention ridiculous availability of workstation and other applications
> on RISC.
I would have thought that, from Microsoft's viewpoint, the dollars
weren't there.
For similar reasons, IBM has dropped AIX from some hardware platforms,
and has been talking for some time about dropping it altogether.
I don't think you can drum up any conspiracy theory there.
--
Cheers
John Summerfield
Please, no off-list mail at all at all. This address accepts mail only
from Debian addresses.
Reply to: