[ale] Party like it is 1995

Tue Jun 7 08:13:48 EDT 2016

>I  thought CDE was dead in 2012 it was release under GPL,

That is the beauty of Free Software....it hardly ever really dies.

Many, many, MANY years ago I used an email package called the Rand Mail Handler (MH).   It was a command line mail reader that used commands to read your email.  It worked great.

Then graphics came out and MH seemed a little hokey, and I received a lot of flack from people for using it.

Then someone wrapped a set of graphics around it (like a lot of Unix programs did back in the day), and it became "xmh".  I used that for a while.

Then people started sending attachments in email and MH (therefore xmh) did not cut it any more, but someone resurrected MH and added MIME extensions to form exmh.  That lasted me quite a while, until Motif raised its head, and poor exmh looked a little pale next to all those fancy buttons, but someone finally "Motifed" it and it became mexmh (or something like that), and I used that for years.

Each time it looked as if "mh" had been abandoned, and each time someone came back, grabbed the sources and moved it forward.

Another example of this:  The last, full implementation of the language ADA is a Free Software project (GNAT):

http://libre.adacore.com/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/

which even has Raspberry Pi support.

There is (I am told) a free version of Multics floating around:

https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/multics-history/

And last but not least, just to show that Free Software may never die, look at emacs!

So you see "The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated" - Mark Twain.

Warmest regards,

maddog

----- Original Message -----
I  thought CDE was dead in 2012 it was release under GPL, but in July
2014 they release 2.2.2 on FreeBSD. I never saw this, but there a disc
out base on Debian 6 with CDE 2.2.0 call CDEbian.

Of the X toys, my favorite was XEarth, I would run that in the
background on my desktop. Xfishtank was another. I know that back in
the early days, after I install the OS, I would make sure XV was also
install so I could have a good background.

Scary, this year marks 20 years of Linux for me. Sad part I got the
gray hair and beard to match.

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 8:33 PM, maddog at li.org <jonhall80 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Visix Galaxy
>
> I worked with Visix Looking Glass.  A nice product that used a server to paint the widgets.
>
> You wrote your program to their APIs, compiled and linked it and when you ran the program on an Apple, it looked like Apple, when you ran it on MS, it looked like a MS app, ran it on X Windows, it looked like Motif.  You could even run the server that did the rendering on a third system if you needed the extra CPU power.  The software was pretty cool, but as you said, expensive.
>
> The tattoos were a bulldog that talked about Alpha Linux.  I still have a few some place.
>
> Thanks for the write up.  It brought back lots of memories.  I am usually the guy that does that, so it was nice to be on the receiving end for once.
>
> md
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> a) for the time, it seems ¨user friendly¨
> b) you should be embarrassed. ;)
>
> I´ve spent hours looking for a similar fvwm to what I used for years in
> the mid-1990s.  fvwm-crystal is close, but the window-dressing it too
> large and my 5min attempts to figure out how to make it smaller has
> failed multiple times.
>
> The first time I met Maddog was around 1995-96. Think he was still
> working for DEC. I was quite the noob with just a few yrs of Unix
> programming experience. Think 3 guys from my team drove over to the
> building near JSC (we were developing applications for the MCCs
> world-wide) and he seemed pretty high on Linux at the time. The
> suggestion that we stop developing for Unix and just develop for Linux
> was made.  I thought he was crazy, since we doing cross-platform
> development with expensive commercial libraries to make that easier
> (Visix Galaxy).  We were required to support: Windows, MacOS, OS/2, AIX,
> HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, OSF/1 (soon to be Digital Unix), Irix, Ultrix,
> and a few others I can´t recall.
>
> MD handed us some temporary tattoos - RedHat and Alpha ... something.
> Not sure if we all went for a beer, or just my friends, my memory fades,
> but I did wake up with one of those tattoos applied. Had an Alpha on my
> desk at JSC and Ultrix on my desk back in the company facilities. OSF/1
> was the primary platform used inside the FCRs at JSC.
>
> Did a tour of the POC at Huntsville last year (Payload Operations
> Center) and asked about the computing platforms. Nobody knew what they
> were running. I´d installed my team´s software on those systems and all
> others around the world all those years ago, so I was curious. The
> controllers were working an issue that day - payload retrieval for the
> station, so they didn´t have time for questions from visitors.
>
> Anyway, while I wasn´t really ready to use Linux exclusively at the
> time, I did dual boot it at home (with OS/2) using a tiny ZIP file
> version that had X/Windows and modem support, dialed into the NASA
> network and was doing some development work when my box was hacked. Took
> the HDD into to work, handed it over to the network admin and never
> heard anything more about it. I recall the error message, ¨you don´t
> exist, go away.¨
>
> And from that point forward, I cared much more about security. Don´t
> think any of the Unix systems were hacked, but remember this was before
> NAT and our development machines were directly on the internet back
> then. It was a different time.  I was quite the noob; doubt there was
> really much hacking needed to breech my install.
>
>
> On 06/06/2016 05:52 PM, Jeff Layton wrote:
>> I hate to say it, but I actually liked CDE :)  Maybe it's because I'm old...
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>> I'm partying like it is 1995.
>>>
>>> Got me CDE on Ubuntu 15.10.
>>>
>>> I can not remember if xroach is compatible with CDE.  I know it works
>>> with MWM.  I can't see my roaches.  I move a window and I the program
>>> wakes up and does its thing.  No roaches.
>>>
>>> Xsnow is not making my desktop any colder either.
>>>
>
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-- 
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Chuck "PUP" Payne
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