>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them.
Columbia University during the 1990s was a SunOS/Solaris shop (and, before then, VAX <https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/>). My first year, AcIS (Academic Information Systems, IT for faculty/students) set up a single computer lab in the engineering building <https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...> with HP workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.
The boxes used the same Kerberos authentication as the Sun systems, so I presume I must have been using context-dependent filesystems for binaries when logging into the systems locally, or when I chose to remote log into one specifically from elsewhere (just for novelty's sake; I preferred the Sun cluster, or the Sun box dedicated to staff use).
MAE—the raison d'etre for the HP boxes—was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced HP, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.
If this is true, it will be a significant change in strategy. The company has always played upmarket. Average iPhone prices have risen since the first iPhone 18 years ago, as opposed to falling. Around that time, I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
But Apple had already released a $799 laptop - the eMate 300 in 1997.
Ahead of its time - ARM processor, 28-hour battery life, flash storage, wireless modem card. Its curved, translucent case design (with a handle!) was echoed in the iMac (1998) and iBook (1999).
It also appears to have come with a decent keyboard.
I have strong nostalgia for the eMate. Yes, it had a nice keyboard (at least comparable with the era); smaller pitch than standard keyboards. And, of course, resitive pen-based touch screen.
It _was_ a PDA with a keyboard though. It had a good office suite, a web browser, printer drivers, and a vibrant developer community. But you probably still expected to dock it with Newton Connection Utilities on a computer to add software and get data off it.
When I started at Goldman Sachs, I was told early on of an "Israeli discount" and "Canadian discount"; that is, investors were more skeptical of companies based in those countries.
I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if the VSE contributed to this?
>Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.
I was told right after the bombing, by someone with a large engineering firm (Schlumberger or Bechtel), that the bombers could have brought the building down had they done it right.
>but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody
I am happy to report that I was doing the same thing in 1986 with GEOS on Commodore 64! And again in 1990 with PC/GEOS on Tandy 1000!
(Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
I have pleasant memories of using SpeedScript on my C64 to write several papers in high school. What an amazing piece of software: a word processor in 5 KB.
I used Applixware on Linux during college. Here's what I wrote to someone else at the time:
----
I've been using Applixware 4.2 then 4.3 to write papers and such for a year and a half. Bear in mind that I've only used the Words module, not anything else.
In many ways Applixware is a superb program. Great interface, great looks, multiple-language support, including dictionaries and thesauruses (important for a Spanish major like me). The only major deficiencies are 1) inadequate filters support (Word 6/7 import and export is pretty buggy; I hear 4.4.1 will do a much better job, and handle Word97 too) and 2) missing some basic features like a simple way to do single/double spacing (you have to type in the measurements yourself).
----
Another notable omission is word count; I used a macro as substitute.
Despite the flaws (4.4.1 did not fix the inability to do simple line spacing, and I was told by the company that there were no plans to change this), Applixware was good enough. I produced .rtf files that I printed via Word on campus laser printers, and .pdf files for job applications during senior year.
I think Applixware was the corporate standard office software at Sun Micro in the late 90’s. This was during the Sun-on-Sun initiative that “banned Windows” and had all employees running Solaris on Sparcstations. There was grumbling. Sales, admin staff, basically anyone not technical, well let’s say they were not pleased.
Sun switched the standard to StarOffice around ~2000 iirc, it was a nice improvement but still not great for folks who only knew MS Office.
>It was as formative of a moment as my 2nd Grade teacher showing us a really complex looking (at the time) rainbow flower in LOGO (she had one of few color Mac classic), and showing us it was simply the work of drawing the path of one petal, then repeating same “work” after changing two values (starting angle and color).
I also well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
>This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old threads.
The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped bundling usenet service in the 2000's.
There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at least a third of the remaining active lost access when the Google spam service stopped.
One of the projects on my agenda is a classifier that detects those people on social media by detecting "signs of hostility." This was hung up for a while because I thought the process of making a training set would kill me [1] (not seeing these people was a major motivation for the project) but now I'm more optimistic. I still gotta make a generic ModernBERT + LSTM + calibration classifier though.
We had a very naive version of this at a company I worked for about 25 years ago. It was called “asshole detective”. We captured about 200 user comments and dredged through them by hand and scored particular words and phrases. Then we summed up the scores of each post in a thread. If a user was more than a couple of standard deviations outside the mean it’d flag them as an asshole. After reviewing this over a few weeks we found it was surprisingly good at singling out persistent assholes. It did however never action anything - that was up to a moderator to do.
I imagine it’d be good at getting rid of a lot of modern plagues on social media as they seem to have a small, predictable and shitty vocabulary.
There's a lot of people that are condescending to others, but they wouldn't see themselves as being an asshole. I see this often in Ham Radio and Electronics.
Their responses are curt, sure, but to them they are not outside the norm of the field.
(1) Never underestimate how strong feelings can have about how a repeater gets used, and (2) those feelings are stronger the less a repeater gets used.
I don't know if the worst example is the folks who got mad because I used to use my HT via the repeater to contact people in Canada 250+ miles away when tropospheric ducts were open
or the guy from the weather service who was mad that nobody on our daily net had information about a localized storm that really scared him because he saw what could have been a tornado on his NEXRAD. I told him, "look, none of us live in that spot and the only way you're going to get more information is if more people think ham radio is a welcoming hobby"
At least that’s interesting. There was an argument on our local net about growing strawberries. A new local ham chipped in and was told to fuck off and mind his own business. This resulted in what I assume was the new guy transmitting duck quacking noises on the same frequency as the net for about two weeks.
HF also requires a harder test, which is basically gatekeeping, I suppose. And a lot of people stick to FT8/FT4 because they can typically make more QSOs then with phone.
You can be an asshole on FT8, but it's harder to do.
That's roughly what I'm planning. There are certain keywords and other signs (last time I looked 40,000 Bluesky users reposted and pinned a certain 'skeet') that I would say are "hostile" and with those I can seed a list of candidates of hostile/non-hostile people and then use active learning methods to expand and clean up the list.
... what I really need is a something that detects 'text in images', i mean, I don't mind if you took a photo of a sign in the real world but posting screenshots is a bad smell, only a tiny fraction are wholesome like this:
I wish you the best of luck, but these days the main problems you're going to be facing are political, not technical. What makes people start to display "signs of hostility" these days is almost always tribal politics, and when you ban that, you are (at least from their POV), engaging in politically-motivated censorship. If it gets any kind of traction or visibility, your tool will be pinpointed as a weapon of The Enemy for suppressing truth and entrenching the powers that be, and you'll start getting threats to match.
Not to say you shouldn't do it, but you should be aware of what you're signing up for.
Indeed. I found it strange that the paper (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/acbwg_v1 ) doesn't even mention the experiences from other social media and discussion fora, nor alternative tactics such as blocking users. The experiment was conducted until March 2024 so it's already outdated; nowadays, even if you unfollow Elon Musk's preferred accounts, you will be exposed to them anyway.
> Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
Indeed.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
100% agree on the unreliability of older Mac OS. In the late 90s my university computer room offered a mix of Mac and Windows machines, and I only ever took a Mac if that was all that was free, because there was a good chance it would at some point show you a sad Mac face alongside a cutesy and uninformative crash message, while losing the essay you’d half-written (or, hopefully, only the unsaved changes).
Columbia University during the 1990s was a SunOS/Solaris shop (and, before then, VAX <https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/>). My first year, AcIS (Academic Information Systems, IT for faculty/students) set up a single computer lab in the engineering building <https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...> with HP workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.
The boxes used the same Kerberos authentication as the Sun systems, so I presume I must have been using context-dependent filesystems for binaries when logging into the systems locally, or when I chose to remote log into one specifically from elsewhere (just for novelty's sake; I preferred the Sun cluster, or the Sun box dedicated to staff use).
MAE—the raison d'etre for the HP boxes—was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced HP, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.