[ale] Party like it is 1995

[maddog@li.org]

>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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