Hello Maurice!

14 Oct 14 18:51, you wrote to me:

 MK> Hey Kees!

 KvE>> All the above was implemented on very expensive mainframe and
 KvE>> minicomputers.

 MK> Back in the late 1980's VMS was most often the going thing on mainframes
 MK> whereas so-called minicomputers often ran minix or BSD, usually BSD given
 MK> it's earlier history.

 Where I worked we had quite some kit from HP as long as they called their
 systems desktop-calculator. This enabled us to bypass the IT department.
 But we were later absorbed anyway.

 MK> Seems to me that minix dominated the 16-bit
 MK> architectures way back then and dumb terminals wired into a VMS driven
 MK> mainframe was all the rage.

 We were only a few miles away fron Andy Tannenbaum, but the minix had no
 backup from a corporate entity, so it did not enter into our world very much.

 MK>   However I suppose this all depends on what
 MK> one was exposed to at that time and your posted history is likely
 MK> correct
 MK> for early Fidonet development.  My first exposure to Unix was Sun's
 MK> SparcStation running Solaris in the early 1990's.

 I still have a M20, but compared to current day Intel and AMD, it is slow.
 I will probably scrap it one ofe these days, the screen takes far to much
 space and requires extra support of the table ;)

 After the OS aged, I installed Linux, Sparc is no longer supported by Debian.

 MK> Given the above, from my perspective back then, DOS never stood a
 MK> chance.
 MK> I never bothered with PC's until the first 32-bit processors started
 MK> rolling out and even then made it a point to replace the crippled 16-bit
 MK> software they usually came bundled with (5.25" bootable floppies at the
 MK> start).

 Well we are still confronted with it's offspring ;(
 My last Fidonet activities on MS were with W95 for a node an XP for a point
system.

 KvE>> No, it is still there and is not maintained.

 MK> Business as usual.  Good to see some things never change.  ;-)

 Well if you see what some people still proudly use, Russian Roulette seem
 safer.

 KvE>> If you force the conservative people out of Fidonet, the net will
 KvE>> lose it's current already weak momentum and die.

 MK> Those people don't exist and what you see are actually cyber ghosts.
 MK> Having said that, the conversion routine I use for local display of
 MK> messages relies on the builtin obsolescence you appear to be referring to
 MK> in the above quote.

 Well some of these ghosts can be quite verbal at times, but now I understand
 why they regurgitate the same subjects every so many years.

 As for the builtin obsolesence, I know your hobby-horse. That part may be
 an inconvenience, to me it is not the most worrying.

 My worries are more in the field of OS/2 Warp x.xxx,  WFW  and fossil based
 telnet shims in a world that is slowly moving to IPv6.

 Your answer will probably be: We are all to old to be present when that
 really becomes a problem.

Kees

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