One of my favourite tricks back in the early 90s when I was a trainee was to annoy and confuse the folks in the next room to us, by making them think they were hearing things. They had an old dot matrix printer in their room which was accessible via the network from our room. There is a little nugget of info that is common knowledge to geeks but less so to humans, that the ASCII character code 7 is 'System bell', ie it tells the computer or printer to beep. I wrote a little program that featured random delays before sending character code 7 to their printer, so throughout the day the printer would randomly issue a beep. It was timed such that people would hear it but not be able to pin down the source very quickly, and the random delay meant that it was unlikely that anyone would be waiting for it so as to pin down its source. For weeks the lads and lasses from that room would tell us programmers about the weird random beep they kept hearing, and we would deny all knowledge. That's not quite true (its half true ). Unix is still out there and going strong. Some large corporations use it. Sun Microsystems have it as their preferred operating system. Linux is a Unix work-alike, but is not actually Unix, although the two are largely (but not totally) compatible with each other. Unix tends to have different flavours depending on the hardware it is meant for, whereas Linux is meant to be far more generic, with different flavour for different roles but less specific about hardware. For example HP and Sun both have their own specific Unix flavours.
Thanks, Clueless. I was only considering the PC applications. Sun Microsystems are certainly big players in the commercial field, a fairly close friend is reasonably high up in their UK operation and often goes to USA to head office. Ubuntu is the OS which I favour and is backed by the Ubuntu Foundation, which was set-up by Mark Shuttleworth with a capital of 10,000,000$, in order that it should always be free of charge and free to adapt.
Hi, Kathy No I haven't come across that one. I started on a mainframe at BT, then went on to a Sinclair QL and Amiga's, both based on Unix with their own variations. Jan Jones wrote the "Super Basic" language which did away with the "Go sub" and "Go to", by defining "Procedures" and calling them from memory. Tony Tebby wrote the pointer system for the QL (to use a mouse). Tony also wrote the operating system (he now lives in France).
I've not came across that one neither. I had little practical involvement with Unix systems to be honest. Most of what what I know of it comes from my time at university, and the fact that the Amiga and the Mac both used a cut down and tailored derivative of Unix as their OS. It is worth noting, when younger folks speak of MS Windows being the bees knees, that Unix was well established as a multi-user multi-tasking operating system decades before MS came along, and Xerox established the first graphical user interface for an operating system. Sun came up with the windowing design that we now take for granted, MS couldn't even think of an original name, Sun OS used 'X Windows', which is now the established core of Linux's user interfaces. The Amiga was graphical and multitasking back in 1985, while Microsoft were still stuck with their text based, single user single threaded operating system which could only address 64 kilobytes of memory at any one time. Microsoft didn't get a proper multitasking operating system until Windows 95 (its predecessor, 3.11, could give the illusion of multitaking by running several apps at once, but only the app in the active window would actually run, the rest would suspend). With the advent of 64bit versions of Windows, MS made a big song and dance about the new memory address range going beyond the 4GB limit and being able to manipulate 64 binary digit integers for improved speed. Unix had both of those abilities while I was still a wee nipper. If the people behind Unix and Linux had the marketing skills that MS have, poor old MS would be nothing but a small one man band software agency
Periwinkle, Cobol and Pascal are good examples of languages that would motivate someone to be anything other than a programmer I remember in my early days doing just enough Cobol to pass my various training courses, and once they were out of the way, I haven't so much as looked at a single line of Cobol or Pascal ever since. It's interesting you mention GIS. My first proper job in computing involved lots of GIS work. We used a product called Tactician, which in its day was probably one of the most powerful and flexible GIS mapping tools. I worked in a small firm that provided IT and marketing support for other companies. They would send us their customer databases etc and then we'd do all sorts to them, removing duplicates, marking customers as active, lapsed, gone away etc, fixing addresses etc, then we'd put them all on a thematic map showing which areas were most valuable to the client, where they might want to put a new shop, where they are wasting their marketing money etc. We regularly did drive-time analyses too, finding which customers were within a given drive time radius of their shops etc, so that they could focus a campaign on those specific customers, or in one case where the client wanted to close some shops and open others, we highlighted where they had two shops within the same same drive time radius as some customers while other customers had to drive much further etc. The Amiga used something based on X-Windows which I believe was created by Sun Microsystems. Linux was text based, like early Unix, but in recent years has also gone down the X-Windows route. That's all nerdy detail though, because the actual appearance is just as everyone is used to with Windows, although there are many different derivatives, for Linux the two most common being Gnome and KDE, both similar in appearance to Windows, as they would be as MS nicked the idea from Unix'es X-Windows system.
An interesting thing with the Amiga's was that they had three processors, which allowed you to start a disk formatting (main processor), start an involved calculation (maths processor) and then go on to graphics work while the other two were still working. As I remember it the processor's had girls names.
Only the 4000 had a maths coprocessor by default, although you can add one to all the Amigas. In all of them though, there was a graphics coprocessor, and a sound coprocessor, and a very limited DMA which took care of much of the disk and port handling work. I can't remember the names of all the chips, but I remember one was called Gary. And why not? In most computing circles chips have long, tedious numbers. Gary wasn't the main CPU, but if it was, Gary would be a better name that M68EC000.
