26 Jan
26 Jan
6:51 a.m.
Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with peripherals right? If one could devise up
emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane or otherwise tear them down to fit in
much less space, a PDP-11 could probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a
workstation, especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen
but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.
All in all, I would wager workstation has never been a well regulated term and, especially
once PCs and other micros got better, the delineation between a workstation and a consumer
PC has just gotten blurrier and blurrier. For instance, I would use the term workstation
to apply to my Raspberry Pi, someone else would probably chuckle at the thought while
sitting at their modern POWER9 system. It fits all the needs of my non-day-job computing,
so workstation enough for me.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten
<joseph(a)josephholsten.com> wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the
decline and fall of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the “it depends” edge
cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or industrial
research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a PDP-11 with a
single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it the integration of display
into the system that differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
[http://josephholsten.com](http://josephholsten.com/)
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:[+1-360-927-7234](tel:(360)%20927-7234)
6:57 a.m.
On Thu, 26 Jan 2023, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with
peripherals right? If one
could devise up emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane or
otherwise tear them down to fit in much less space, a PDP-11 could
probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a workstation,
especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen
but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.
<snip>
Isn't a Paperboy arcade cab technically a PDP-11?
-uso.
7:06 a.m.
I think what made 'workstations' different was:
1) You had your own computer, you were not just using a terminal
connected to a computer, that was time-shared with a bunch of other users
2) A very capable large bit-mapped display, hence the variation on this
term, "graphic workstation"
3) Networking to shared filesystems - in time sharing, you're all on one
computer, going to the same files on the same disk(s), in a network of
workstations, you're all going to a network with filesystems mounted on
disks on machines all over the network. Some workstations had disks and
filesystems, some did not - hence another variation, "disk-less
workstation", which booted from the network. "Servers" were big machines
with big disks, really the same kinds of machines, basically, but
configured to be effective at hosting resources and people were
discouraged from logging in and camping out on them.
That's how I remember it, the machines and capabilities were also
accompanied by the different modes of resource use that they enabled.
On 01/25/2023 05:51 PM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
Nothing says a PDP-11 has to be in a rack with
peripherals right? If
one could devise up emulated peripherals that plug into the backplane
or otherwise tear them down to fit in much less space, a PDP-11 could
probably be made to inhabit similar desk real-estate as a workstation,
especially some of the smaller LSI models. There's also the MicroVAXen
but the SUN-1 beats those to the market.
All in all, I would wager workstation has never been a well regulated
term and, especially once PCs and other micros got better, the
delineation between a workstation and a consumer PC has just gotten
blurrier and blurrier. For instance, I would use the term workstation
to apply to my Raspberry Pi, someone else would probably chuckle at
the thought while sitting at their modern POWER9 system. It fits all
the needs of my non-day-job computing, so workstation enough for me.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten
<joseph(a)josephholsten.com> wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able
the decline and fall
of the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative
about workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are
the “it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had
a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a
workstation? Is it the integration of display into the system that
differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com <http://josephholsten.com/>
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com <mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com>
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <tel:%28360%29%20927-7234>
7:15 a.m.
Luther Johnson writes:
I think what made 'workstations' different
was:
1) You had your own computer, you were not just using a terminal connected to a
computer, that was time-shared with a bunch of other users
While it wasn't UNIX but a stupidly lost market opportunity
the Tektronix 4051 was one of the first workstations.
7:25 p.m.
PERQ
There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
stuff without rewriting it all. I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
evicted.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com> wrote:
There was quite a lot of early activity of course!
Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
the "3M" workstation. One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
Pixels.
One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
from the Pittsburgh startup. There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
such as Apollo Domain.
Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
-L
On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph(a)josephholsten.com>
wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
“it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
--
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
7:58 p.m.
We had some at Georgia Tech when I was in grad school. The Accent OS for it
from CMU (I think) had a lot of ideas and techniques that showed up
later in Mach. I once referred to Mach as "Accent running on a vax".
IIRC they had portrait shaped fairly large monochrome bitmapped displays.
But I may be misremembering.
At the time I felt like anything that wasn't Unix / written in C
wasn't worth messing with.
Arnold
Marc Donner <marc.donner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
PERQ
There was some talk of making Unix run on it, but POS (PERQ-OS) was written
in Pascal and there was no reasonable way to port over all of the existing
stuff without rewriting it all. I had a PERQ in my office for a while … it
put out so much heat and noise that my officemates lobbied to have me
evicted.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:01 PM Larry Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com> wrote:
There was quite a lot of early activity of
course!
Essentially all of computer science academia was aware of the Xerox Alto,
although it wasn't a commercial product and wasn't Unix.
Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
the "3M" workstation. One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
Pixels.
One of the early commercial attempts was the Three Rivers PERC (or PERQ?)
from the Pittsburgh startup. There were Unix adjacent systems as well,
such as Apollo Domain.
Of course then Sun got started, and MIPS, and the IBM RT and VaxStations
so by the mid '80s it was quite crowded.
There is a whole other arc about the graphics workstations, with SGI,
Ardent, Stellar, Stardent, and so on.
Also, before graphics became affordable, there were various clustered
character generator based systems like Convergent Technologies.
-L
On Jan 25, 2023, at 7:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph(a)josephholsten.com>
wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of
the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
“it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
--
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
31 Jan
31 Jan
8:03 a.m.
On 1/25/23 17:01, Larry Stewart wrote:
Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began
talking up the idea
of the "3M" workstation. One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One
Million Pixels.
The way I heard it, a workstation needed to have Menus, a Mouse, and a 1
MIPS processor. It also had a megabyte of RAM, at least a megabit LAN, a
megapixel of display, and cost about a megapenny.
Thanks,
/Mary Ann Horton/ (she/her/ma'am)
maryannhorton.com <https://maryannhorton.com>
"This is a great book" - Monica Helms
"Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel
Available on Amazon and bn.com!
<https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Lighting-Transgender-Equality-Corporate-ebook/dp/B0B8F2BR9B>
11:43 p.m.
I was a grad student at CMU at the time. Raj Reddy told me back then that
it was 1 MIPS, 1 million pixels, 1 megabyte of RAM.
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 21:04 Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
On 1/25/23 17:01, Larry Stewart wrote:
Jim Morris left PARC and went off to CMU and began talking up the idea of
the "3M" workstation. One MIPs, One Megabyte of RAM, and One Million
Pixels.
The way I heard it, a workstation needed to have Menus, a Mouse, and a 1
MIPS processor. It also had a megabyte of RAM, at least a megabit LAN, a
megapixel of display, and cost about a megapenny.
Thanks,
*Mary Ann Horton* (she/her/ma'am)
maryannhorton.com
"This is a great book" - Monica Helms
"Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel
Available on Amazon and bn.com!
<https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Lighting-Transgender-Equality-Corporate-ebook/dp/B0B8F2BR9B>
26 Jan
26 Jan
7:12 a.m.
I believe the term "workstation" came from the integrated interactive
engineering design terminals/systems. Can't remember details, but
companies like ComputerVision had had them before UNIX and 68000 were a
thing,
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 7:31 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph(a)josephholsten.com>
wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the
decline and fall of
the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
“it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
7:47 a.m.
On Jan 25, 2023, at 4:31 PM, Joseph Holsten <joseph(a)josephholsten.com> wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the decline and fall of the UNIX
workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about workstations prior to the
Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the “it depends” edge
cases?
Nope, Apollo and the Three Rivers PERQ both predate Sun. And while one can certainly
question PERQ's commercial success I don't think one can question
Apollo's—they were done in by HP's purchase, not by market forces.
Apollo Aegis wasn't actually UNIX, but was very UNIX-like since it was designed by
people who had worked at Prime on PrimOS and on MULTICS before that. And later releases
provided more specifically UNIX-style environments for users as an alternative to Aegis.
The Three Rivers PERQ had several different environments available, including multiple
UNIX implementations.
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations
within academic or industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
They mostly looked like the Xerox Alto, once it made waves in the research community.
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an
installation had a PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is
it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use in their
work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at home tonight how
"A History of Personal Workstations" defines it. Note that I wouldn't
necessarily require a workstation to be primarily used by a single user; lots of 1970s CAD
systems supported multiple user workstations on a single computer.
-- Chris
1:20 p.m.
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net>
wrote:
WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System. I had never heard of it before. The
first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.
* What do I
really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single
terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
1:33 p.m.
On Thu, 26 Jan 2023, John Cowan wrote:
WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical
workstation; it came
out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System. I had never heard of it
before. The first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably
the IBM 1620 (aka the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try")
from
1959.
Mmm... Would a GT-40 connected to a PDP-11/40 count as a workstation? I
started using that around 1975 (along with serial terminals, of course),
in my first job at Uni of NSW (after graduating from there).
-- Dave
11:58 p.m.
On 1/25/2023 11:20 PM, John Cowan wrote:
WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical
workstation; it came
out in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System.
It also ran standard RT-11. UC Santa Barbara had a room full of them
that I used to (badly) teach PDP-11 assembler in the early 1980s.
Each student had their own 8" floppy disk which held the OS and
enough utilities to edit and debug programs.
Jon
27 Jan
27 Jan
12:04 a.m.
John Cowan writes:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson
<cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net>
wrote:
WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System. I had never heard of it before. The
first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.
I think that WP is not correct here, the Tektronix 4051 beat it to market
by a year.
* What do
I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single
terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
3:29 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
I love how I can fire off a query and get so much info. But I wonder: does TUHS have any
way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible documents? What would be
preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with “articles”?
I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to mailing list
messages and other resources.
But also, I’m lazy and I am not committing to editing a journal.
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, at 10:04, Jon Steinhart wrote:
John Cowan writes:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 8:47 PM Chris Hanson
<cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net>
wrote:
WP says the Terak 8510/a was the first graphical workstation; it came out
in 1976-77 and ran the UCSD p-System. I had never heard of it before. The
first *personal* workstation (non-graphical) was probably the IBM 1620 (aka
the CADET system, "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try") from 1959.
I think that WP is not correct here, the Tektronix 4051 beat it to market
by a year. * What do
I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single
terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I think "a graphical system intended to be used by a professional to use
in their work" is a good starting point for a definition. I should check at
home tonight how "A History of Personal Workstations" defines it.
3:38 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
Joseph Holsten writes:
I love how I can fire off a query and get so much
info. But I wonder: does
TUHS have any way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible
documents? What would be preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with
“articles”?
I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to
mailing list messages and other resources. But also, I’m lazy and I am
not committing to editing a journal.
Seems like you already know the answer and just don't like it.
The only way to get coheret articles is to write the. Wikis
suck for this sort of thing.
An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing would be to create
a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.
Jon
4:41 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, at 13:38, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Joseph Holsten writes:
Ah, I meant to ask: is there an existing wiki or repository? Or am I starting one?
And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for articles these days? A
decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc
to translate. I’ll need to knock my rust off.
I love how I can fire off a query and get so much
info. But I wonder: does
TUHS have any way of consolidating these threads into easily digestible
documents? What would be preferred, a wiki? or a source control repo with
“articles”?
I’m mostly wanting summarize this kind of thread and include links to
mailing list messages and other resources. But also, I’m lazy and I am
not committing to editing a journal.
Seems like you already know the answer and just don't like it.
The only way to get coheret articles is to write the. Wikis
suck for this sort of thing.
An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing would be to create
a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.
6:34 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
Ah, I meant to ask: is there an existing wiki or
repository? Or am I starting one?
https://wiki.tuhs.org/
I've discussed writing a few articles with Warren and it sounds like he's all
for more folks producing content. Ultimately it's Warren's call on that one,
but I'm very interested in starting to produce some content.
An appropriate way for us to do this sort of thing
would be to create
a repository where we can contribute to documents written in troff.
I've considered this exact thing save not for this project, but just as a way to
approach collaborative writing. I wouldn't have the attention span to admin such a
repository, but would more than happily contribute to one, I love exposition and free
access to knowledge.
- Matt G.
6:36 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
Hi Joseph,
At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred
macro set for
articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
knock my rust off.
There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
Regards,
Branden
6:53 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki transpiler would be:
1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.
We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people that they think
might get lost in project noise. There's times I'd love to have some way to
*roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts from MediaWiki are uuuuugly.
Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki
format pretty quickly.
Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a master as diverse
edits in different places wouldn't track with one another. In this case, the *roff
sources would probably make a better master for diff reasons.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Joseph,
At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred
macro set for
articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
knock my rust off.
There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
Regards,
Branden 
7:28 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
fwiw, Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) claims to be able to translate between MediaWiki and
both man and ms roff macros.
d
On 27 Jan 2023, at 11:54, segaloco via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki transpiler would be:
1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.
We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people that they think
might get lost in project noise. There's times I'd love to have some way to
*roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts from MediaWiki are uuuuugly.
Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki
format pretty quickly.
Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a master as
diverse edits in different places wouldn't track with one another. In this case, the
*roff sources would probably make a better master for diff reasons.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Joseph,
> At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
>> And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
>> articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
>> in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
>> knock my rust off.
> There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
> authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
> manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
> gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
> Regards,
> Branden
7:35 a.m.
New subject: Collecting notes for future “historians” was: Earliest UNIX Workstations?
I've moved to markdown or asciidoc for things like this. So many things can
import them and they are easier to write than roff or TeX.
Warner
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:29 PM David Arnold <davida(a)pobox.com> wrote:
fwiw, Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) claims to be able to
translate between
MediaWiki and both man and ms roff macros.
d
On 27 Jan 2023, at 11:54, segaloco via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
You just got my head all abuzz on whether a *roff<->MediaWiki
transpiler
would be: 1. Possible and 2. Beneficial.
We use a MediaWiki at work for aggregating random tidbits from people
that they
think might get lost in project noise. There's times I'd love to
have some way to *roff-ize the materials for white papers, the printouts
from MediaWiki are uuuuugly. Benefits on the flip-side would be rapidly
getting all sorts of documentation into Wiki format pretty quickly.
Of course, for an actual documentation project, there would need to be a
master as
diverse edits in different places wouldn't track with one
another. In this case, the *roff sources would probably make a better
master for diff reasons.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
> On Thursday, January 26th, 2023 at 4:36 PM, G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Joseph,
> At 2023-01-26T14:41:50-0800, Joseph Holsten wrote:
>> And if I’m writing in troff, is there a preferred macro set for
>> articles these days? A decade ago I wrote manuals in mdoc but papers
>> in LaTeX; these days I just lean on pandoc to translate. I’ll need to
>> knock my rust off.
> There's always ms. It's pretty easy to acquire, and will produce
> authentic looking traditional Unix papers with little effort. Here's a
> manual that Larry Kollar and I wrote, in source and PDF forms. It's
> gotten positive feedback from the groff mailing list.
> Regards,
> Branden
26 Jan
26 Jan
3:52 p.m.
On 2023-01-25 19:31, Joseph Holsten wrote:
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an
installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is
it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I remember people calling something a workstation,
if it has the four "M"
at least 1 MByte memory
at least 1 megapixel display
at least 1 mbit/s network
can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?)
3:58 p.m.
at least 1 million words of marketing?
-rob
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 8:54 PM emanuel stiebler <emu(a)e-bbes.com> wrote:
On 2023-01-25 19:31, Joseph Holsten wrote:
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If
an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is
it the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
I remember people calling something a workstation,
if it has the four "M"
at least 1 MByte memory
at least 1 megapixel display
at least 1 mbit/s network
can't remember the fourth(was there a fourth?)
9:14 p.m.
Check out: Magnolia - The Tektronix Unix Personal Computer September 1980
<https://streaklinks.com/BXrcuEsysvYb2V7QEQCkESzw/https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Fbitsavers_tektronixmliaplan_4739361>
This redates - Sun or Apollo, but not the Perq - a.k.a. the 'Pascalto'
Magonila was done in Tek Labs and it eventually birthed Tek
Workstation Division which was a complete failure, although did Tek
eventually commercialized the Magnolia as the Tek 4404 -- a Smalltalk
system (which you can so a web search). One of the Busines Schools (HBS I
think) wrote a study about it called 'Why Skunks Don't Work."
ᐧ
On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 7:32 PM Joseph Holsten <joseph(a)josephholsten.com>
wrote:
It seems like there are bountiful articles able the
decline and fall of
the UNIX workstation, but I’ve had a hard time finding narrative about
workstations prior to the Stanford SUN workstation.
* was the SUN-1 the first commercially successful product? What are the
“it depends” edge cases?
* were there common recipes for proto-workstations within academic or
industrial research? What did those look like, who was involved?
* What do I really mean by workstation? Ex.gr. If an installation had a
PDP-11 with a single terminal and operator, is it not a workstation? Is it
the integration of display into the system that differentiates?
--
Joseph Holsten
http://josephholsten.com
mailto:joseph@josephholsten.com
tel:+1-360-927-7234 <(360)%20927-7234>
690
days inactive
695
days old
27 comments
21 participants
participants (21)
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arnold＠skeeve.com -
Chris Hanson -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
David Arnold -
emanuel stiebler -
G. Branden Robinson -
Jaap Akkerhuis -
John Cowan -
Jon Forrest -
Jon Steinhart -
Joseph Holsten -
Larry Stewart -
Luther Johnson -
Marc Donner -
Mary Ann Horton -
Rob Pike -
segaloco -
Steve Nickolas -
Tom Lyon -
Warner Losh