Interesting. Both timely, given the recent discovery of the massive failure to disclose the asset hiding in his family trust by Carl Bates, yet also rendered less pertinent because of it - in reality a wide swathe, and…
> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them? No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard…
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies…
Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. Almost the entirety of the growth in…
The big thing I think with any book is to aim to inspire people (especially younger ones) to create for themselves, and while there's probably a way to do that with an exegesis of the existing source I don't know what…
Hey Nils, love your work - back around '90 when I joined Mark Williams I was a big Scheme fan, so your whole t3x.org site and "Scheme 9 from Empty Space" particularly puts a smile on my dial. I do think the fact that…
Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components made for a whole generation of quite…
The classic "Nautilus" manual was really interesting on two sides; one was the quality of the writing, which was all down to Fred Butzen - he just had a real knack for clarity and working with him on documenting the…
Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university - their computing department is…
Yes, prior to 4.x processes were strictly limited to 64kb code and 64kb data - essentially the equivalent to what MS-DOS programmers would call the small memory model only. There are a bunch of reasons for this, all of…
It's not based on V6, although it was basically created as a clone of it (and on the PDP-11, no less - the x86 versions of Coherent until 4.x were basically just minimal ports that kept the PDP-11's classic 16-bit…
You'd likely find the experience pretty miserable, not so much because of the C compiler - Steve did a great job with that - but actually because of the filesystem. Coherent was around for a long time, remember; it used…
Yeah, just to confirm that for v7.1, we got a full source license of it for Symantec Ghost because Microsoft had withdrawn permission for us to distribute anything at all to do with MS-DOS, and we had a lot of customers…
Not sure about the specific text the parent had in mind but "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" by Newman and Sproull (1979, but I bought it in '81 in the student edition and it influenced me a lot in my…
I love this article, and have recommended it many times in discussion with young people learning programming in other forums (although it's rare for them to come back to me to say they'd read it, so...). There are some…
Anyone from HN who wants to can drop by on the way to a more traditional tourist spot like Mangawhai or further north (although over summer I'm often away at the weekends racing stockcars). The phone number for the…
I currently live in Kaiwaka not far from Mangawhai and have since Symantec bought out Ghost in '98, as that helped me afford a first house. It's a wonderful place to live. I did a lot remotely back then and once…
> I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, and the later IDE "cable select" schemes…
Yeah, cross-subsidised products like that were an issue. But it's worth noting that part of the fine line we had to walk was that lots of the people who bought Coherent had hardware on which something like Solaris would…
> What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack Just to be clear, there's a whole heaping helping of really big work required to get there…
> The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode As the person responsible (alas), my specific recollection of this particular bug was that the root cause wasn't thermal…
Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers…
Interesting. Both timely, given the recent discovery of the massive failure to disclose the asset hiding in his family trust by Carl Bates, yet also rendered less pertinent because of it - in reality a wide swathe, and…
> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them? No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard…
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies…
Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. Almost the entirety of the growth in…
The big thing I think with any book is to aim to inspire people (especially younger ones) to create for themselves, and while there's probably a way to do that with an exegesis of the existing source I don't know what…
Hey Nils, love your work - back around '90 when I joined Mark Williams I was a big Scheme fan, so your whole t3x.org site and "Scheme 9 from Empty Space" particularly puts a smile on my dial. I do think the fact that…
Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components made for a whole generation of quite…
The classic "Nautilus" manual was really interesting on two sides; one was the quality of the writing, which was all down to Fred Butzen - he just had a real knack for clarity and working with him on documenting the…
Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university - their computing department is…
Yes, prior to 4.x processes were strictly limited to 64kb code and 64kb data - essentially the equivalent to what MS-DOS programmers would call the small memory model only. There are a bunch of reasons for this, all of…
It's not based on V6, although it was basically created as a clone of it (and on the PDP-11, no less - the x86 versions of Coherent until 4.x were basically just minimal ports that kept the PDP-11's classic 16-bit…
You'd likely find the experience pretty miserable, not so much because of the C compiler - Steve did a great job with that - but actually because of the filesystem. Coherent was around for a long time, remember; it used…
Yeah, just to confirm that for v7.1, we got a full source license of it for Symantec Ghost because Microsoft had withdrawn permission for us to distribute anything at all to do with MS-DOS, and we had a lot of customers…
Not sure about the specific text the parent had in mind but "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" by Newman and Sproull (1979, but I bought it in '81 in the student edition and it influenced me a lot in my…
I love this article, and have recommended it many times in discussion with young people learning programming in other forums (although it's rare for them to come back to me to say they'd read it, so...). There are some…
Anyone from HN who wants to can drop by on the way to a more traditional tourist spot like Mangawhai or further north (although over summer I'm often away at the weekends racing stockcars). The phone number for the…
I currently live in Kaiwaka not far from Mangawhai and have since Symantec bought out Ghost in '98, as that helped me afford a first house. It's a wonderful place to live. I did a lot remotely back then and once…
> I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, and the later IDE "cable select" schemes…
Yeah, cross-subsidised products like that were an issue. But it's worth noting that part of the fine line we had to walk was that lots of the people who bought Coherent had hardware on which something like Solaris would…
> What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack Just to be clear, there's a whole heaping helping of really big work required to get there…
> The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode As the person responsible (alas), my specific recollection of this particular bug was that the root cause wasn't thermal…
Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers…