LinuxMusicians

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:56 am

Gps, don't ever mention BASIC to another programmer. That's a part of history that is too barbaric and painful to revisit. Like the holocaust.

Believe it or not, there actually was a worse computer language. It was called COBOL. It was supposed to be for ordinary businessmen to use, rather than programmers. You can probably imagine how well that worked. I forget what the letters C O B O L stood for. Something like:

Chimps, Orangutans, and Babboons Official Language

Or maybe not.

I ones wrote a program, in basic that calculated a two stroke exhaust pipe. Formulas came from a motor magazine.

I should have listened to others back then and just use a spreadsheet.

It was on an AtariST, that already had 1/4 inch floppies, a 20MB hard disk. 2MB internal ram.
But it could run Cubase, and had a midi in and midi out. (the round ones)

Yes it was painfull, and if anybody would do it, you would find out fast why line numbers are not a great solution.
For the younger people here, that Atari did not produce any sound, the sound came from midi hardware. (like a yamaha dx 7, a midi box, and or a drum computer)

Shame I cant try what you said, to see what happens if you put those lines out of order.

I also remember that painfully looking for typo' s. Just a space at the wrong place, already returned an error.
It was often faster to just retype the line, instead of searching for the actual typo......

Then the problem, were because of the line numbers, I had to add jumps, just to prevent some lines from being executed.

The one good thing about basic though, the program are in general easy to understand and read, unlike with C, were if there are no comments, you first need to figure out what is happening.

Back on topic, I need to win the lottery , and then hire some coders to figure out alsa and add comments....

Gps wrote: An AtariST, had 1/4 inch floppies, a 20MB hard disk. 2MB internal ram.

Readers, take note. That's MB for megabytes. Not gigabytes. If you have a tiny (by today's standards) 20 gigabyte hard drive, then his was 100 times smaller than yours. (The harddrive, I mean.)

And I'll bet he paid about $1000 USD for it. Which was probably around the late 1980's. And given inflation over those years, this means that he paid about 2 grand in today's money for a system that today would be worth... well nothing as a computer. It may be worth melting down if it has some gold on the motherboard.

We talking about the "Dark Ages" of computers. This is so long ago that Fred Flintstone was Gps' neighbor.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 7:46 pm

Gps wrote: An AtariST, had 1/4 inch floppies, a 20MB hard disk. 2MB internal ram.

We talking about the "Dark Ages" of computers. This is so long ago that Fred Flintstone was Gps' neighbor.

At work at an airplane factory, (Fokker) behind an IBM system (workstation) running a Cad program called CADAM. The good ? old days of main frames, and the according prices for renting those computers, from IBM.

Now guess the operating system, a small hint it was not Dos (nor Windows)
UNIX (don't know which one exactly) Probably HP UNIX

I do remember asking what the operating system was on our computers. I got laughed at at first, it was not windows, and I replied, I had already had figured out that part, but what is it ? / vs \

Almost nobody could answer my question, except for one English contractor who told me it was probably UNIX.

Who would have thought back then, that one day, I at home would again have those / to the right, in stead of the dos way. C:\

I hated Dos, it always made me talk to my computer.
-You are a bad command or filename yourself.

Already one point for Linux, which tells you, it either can't find the file, or does not recognize the command.

Yes, I have a love/hate relation with computers.

It also makes me smile my current vid card has more memory, then the entire Atari. Progress ?

That would have been AIX, IBM's version of unix, which they had purchased the rights to distribute from A.T.&T if I recall correctly. I'm writing this off the top of my head based upon computer history videos I've seen. It was Bell Labs that made unix first, right? Then they sold it to American Telephone and Telegraph who licensed it out? I know it went through a series of owners, and I do know IBM's unix was called AIX (which I think they will still sell to you).

And it was apparently this unstable history of ownership, combined with high pricing, that led Linus Torvalds to write his own quasi-compatible unix knockoff for his own PC.

By the way, the easiest (serious) computer language is REXX. IBM made it for their mainframes. It's primarily a much less cryptic batch language. Very easy BASIC-like syntax. Not full of weird non-alphabetic characters that make your code look like chinese symbols, like Perl. (Yuck.) The really easy part is that you don't have to declare your variables before you use them. Their "type" changes depending on what value you assign and what instruction you use them with. For example, the REXX SAY command is pretty much like BASIC Print. And comments are C style /* and */

Check this out:
Like BASIC, REXX is interpreted...so no compiling. Your source code is your program.

That code does look readable.

I do not know much about UNIX, so your probably right. AT&T does ring a bell.


And yes, Richard Stallman and a few friends were reverse engineering UNIX to have it run on a much cheaper computers. X86 ?
Also they did not like the the proprietary part of UNIX. Why cant I share my code and or programs?

They did not have a Kernel though, but had the other tools you need for an OS. (I am quoting Richard Stall man here, from the docu, Revolution OS)

One day they met Linus, who did have a Kernel.

And BOOM, Linux was born.

Might have to watch that docu again, I cant recall what Linus motivation was to write a Kernel.

Edit:
Found something, that looks about right. 19" monitor.
IBM RS/6000
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jerryss/3314211281

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS/6000

The plan was to enable the RS/6000 to run multiple operating systems such as Windows NT, NetWare, OS/2, Solaris, Taligent, AIX and Mac OS but in the end only IBM's Unix variant AIX was used and supported on RS/6000. Linux is widely used on CHRP based RS/6000s, but support was added after the RS/6000 name was changed to eServer pSeries in 2000.

Been thinking about this topic, and the revolution OS docu.

What made Linux take of was them having a killer ap, of which I right now cant recall the name. (server related)

Years later.
I also remember the shock going through the Linux community.

Wait What? There are people who want to game on Linux ?


I am thinking of how I am gonna explain to Valve why they need to fix ALSA.

I already saw somebody who wanted to install a DAW on the steam deck.... (he claimed he needed windows for that)

We can have hope.