Media explodes!

[GGJaguar]

Ah, the joy sitting in the department Chair's office using an 8088 PC with dual floppy drives to write my Masters thesis with the buzzing of a dot matrix printer filling the air.

 

[walrus]

The good old days!

walrus

 

[Opsimath]

What was the storage capacity of those floppies? Anyone remember? Something quite laughable by today's standards!

I remember having to come up with 8-character file names which would have to contain enough information to differentiate one document from another. It could be a challenge sometime. At least dividing them onto different floppies helped, but then the floppies were always having to be switched out.

 

[GGJaguar]

What was the storage capacity of those floppies? Anyone remember? Something quite laughable by today's standards!

I think it was 720K for the 5 1/2 inch floppy and 1.44MB for the 3.5 inch disk.

 

[DThomasC]

I remember the 3.5" floppies were 1.4MB, but I couldn't remember what the bigger, floppier ones held so I had to look it up. By the end of the 5 1/4 inch floppies, IBM had a version that held 1.2MB, but GGJ is right that most were 720KB. Having my memory jogged, I now remember that before the 720K were 360K double sided and 180K single sided. My first PC had a single sided drive in it, but I could use both sides of a 360K floppy by removing it and inserting it upside down.

Computer geek fun fact: Unix was created before MS-DOS and still lives a healthy life in the forms of Linux (android phones and many other embedded systems) and... wait for it.... Mac OS-X!!

 

[GAD]

You can have spaces between commands and arguments.
FORMAT is a command
C: is an argument

Technically C:\RUN LTG.EXE would work with run as a command.

 

[GAD]

I remember the 3.5" floppies were 1.4MB, but I couldn't remember what the bigger, floppier ones held so I had to look it up. By the end of the 5 1/4 inch floppies, IBM had a version that held 1.2MB, but GGJ is right that most were 720KB. Having my memory jogged, I now remember that before the 720K were 360K double sided and 180K single sided. My first PC had a single sided drive in it, but I could use both sides of a 360K floppy by removing it and inserting it upside down.

Computer geek fun fact: Unix was created before MS-DOS and still lives a healthy life in the forms of Linux (android phones and many other embedded systems) and... wait for it.... Mac OS-X!!

OSX is Free-BSD based, but your point well stands. Unix is *everywhere* including under LTG.

 

[DThomasC]

Sorry if I lent the impression that OSX is based on Linux. I meant that both Linux and OSX are based on Unix, which is actually older than MS-DOS.

 

[fronobulax]

In the spirit of those who have nothing better to do than argue iPhone vs. Android and Vi vs, emacs, UNIX is a trademark and only systems that adhere to the Single UNIX Specification can be called UNIX. Similiar systems, such as Linux, are UNIX-like. Than said, popular usage assumes all UNIX-like system can be called Linux. Popular usage rarely distinguishes between Unix and Linux unless a purchase order is involved. This is the process by which trademarks, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Photoshop become generic terms.

 

[GAD]

In the spirit of those who have nothing better to do than argue iPhone vs. Android and Vi vs, emacs, UNIX is a trademark and only systems that adhere to the Single UNIX Specification can be called UNIX. Similiar systems, such as Linux, are UNIX-like. Than said, popular usage assumes all UNIX-like system can be called Linux. Popular usage rarely distinguishes between Unix and Linux unless a purchase order is involved. This is the process by which trademarks, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Photoshop become generic terms.

Try calling Mac OSX "Linux" in front of a room full of developers, linux geeks, and the like. Ask me how I know.

Linux is any system that uses the Linux kernel, which was written by Linus Torvold. Free-BSD is simply not Linux. Free-BSD is closer to Solaris than it is to Linux.

Still, you are absolutely right about them all coming from UNIX.

 

[DThomasC]

Thank you for the chart. It's enlightening. Probably about a quarter of the history that I carry around in my head was completely made up by me, but the belief that I've been carrying for literally decades is that both Linux and BSD were blatant attempts to create an operating system that was functionally the same as Unix, but without the licensing that went along with Unix. So, no they're not Unix, they're Unix-like, but they are undeniably based on Unix.

As for vi vs. emacs, I never developed a fondness for either. (I spell both without any capital letters because the Unix commands to launch them are all lower case.)

 

[GAD]

Thank you for the chart. It's enlightening. Probably about a quarter of the history that I carry around in my head was completely made up by me, but the belief that I've been carrying for literally decades is that both Linux and BSD were blatant attempts to create an operating system that was functionally the same as Unix, but without the licensing that went along with Unix. So, no they're not Unix, they're Unix-like, but they are undeniably based on Unix.

As for vi vs. emacs, I never developed a fondness for either. (I spell both without any capital letters because the Unix commands to launch them are all lower case.)

If you're not using vi, you're doing it wrong.

As a consultant I love vi because it's always installed. I do all my coding in vi and have developed entire websites using it. When you know it, it's crazy fast, but the learning curve is substantial.

 

[GAD]

Also, if you think the UNIX family tree is a lot to take in, check out the Linux distribution timeline!: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg (It's huge)

And then there's RedHat: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/RedHatFamilyTree1210.svg

 

[DThomasC]

In the spirit of those who have nothing better to do than argue iPhone vs. Android and Vi vs, emacs, UNIX is a trademark and only systems that adhere to the Single UNIX Specification can be called UNIX. Similiar systems, such as Linux, are UNIX-like. Than said, popular usage assumes all UNIX-like system can be called Linux. Popular usage rarely distinguishes between Unix and Linux unless a purchase order is involved. This is the process by which trademarks, such as Xerox, Kleenex and Photoshop become generic terms.

Concerning the bolded part about any Unix-like system being called Linux, GAD already stated that Linux is anything running the Linux kernel, and I just want to emphasize that there's an honest to gosh Linux kernel in so many things we use today. Android is probably the most common in terms of shear numbers, but before Android most other cell phones ran some version of Linux. The head unit in your car almost certainly runs Linux. When I had Dish TV I took apart the box and found that it was running Linux. Almost every web server in the world runs Linux today. Smart TV's all run Linux. Chromebooks all run Linux. They're crap in my opinion, but they're very popular in K-12 education. The adorable little Raspberry Pi runs Linux, though I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with them. I'm sure there are many more that I can't think of off the top of my head, and next year ten more household devices will be running a Linux kernel that aren't already.

Linus Torvalds must be very proud of himself.

 

[GAD]

Ask me about my Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster!

 

[DThomasC]

Cool. I can't see much point in using a cluster of them for distributed storage, so you must be doing distributed computing. Does Hadoop make use of the built in graphics processor?

 

[fronobulax]

Given GAD's networking background his Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster may have no other purpose than to show that if he can build one he understands the tech and so his clients have warmer, fuzzier feelings about the job he is about to do for them.

It may also be just that making distributed systems work is pretty fun stuff.

 

[GAD]

Given GAD's networking background his Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster may have no other purpose than to show that if he can build one he understands the tech and so his clients have warmer, fuzzier feelings about the job he is about to do for them.

It may also be just that making distributed systems work is pretty fun stuff.

Nailed it.

 

[gjmalcyon]

Given GAD's networking background his Raspberry Pi Hadoop cluster may have no other purpose than to show that if he can build one he understands the tech and so his clients have warmer, fuzzier feelings about the job he is about to do for them.

It may also be just that making distributed systems work is pretty fun stuff.

I think it is to run GAD World Headquarters:

 

[DThomasC]

I'm going to guess that the huge majority of Raspberry Pi projects are completed just for fun and have no real practical purpose.

Having said that, one of the companies that I consult for builds a medical device that has a Raspberry Pi inside.