 Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me. |
Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Could this work with a H7?
  Page 2 of 2 |
|||||
| Author | Message | ||||
RetroJoe Senior Member  Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
1. Somewhat unfair comparison - FOSS expands organically, whereas commercial software vendors pump millions into advertising, promotion, analyst relations, et al. 2. I actually am a big Microsoft fan - they have consistently delivered great value to a wide market segment. The user experience of Windows, MacOS and increasingly Linux are all roughly equivalent, so I imagine you are referring to the availability of the applications you need professionally on a given OS. But, you might be pleasantly surprised at how usable a cheap Intel box running Linux Mint, or even a $50 Raspberry Pi 4, is! 3. Android is based on the Linux kernel. While Windows still enjoys a dominant market share on the desktop, Android and iOS have roughly the same worldwide market share, at around a billion devices each. I think a watershed moment was when Microsoft ported their Office apps to both iOS and Android - that would have been inconceivable in the Steve Ballmer era, but Nadella is doing a great job leading MSFT into the modern era by embracing multiple platforms. Edited 2021-02-14 05:31 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
||||
| Tinine Guru  Joined: 30/03/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1646 |
I can only comment on my fields of expertise which are machine/factory automation and digital audio and Linux is nowhere here. NIST started off right with the EMC CNC controller, it was explained to me that the US gov were concerned about the dominance of Fanuc (Japanese). It was based on a RT version of NT but more importantly, included the Delta Tau PMAC motion controller and was supported by GM. Then someone decided to penny-pinch and so switched to Linux (now Linux CNC) and a Servotogo "motion controller". Well the Servotogo wasn't a motion controller at all, it was merely a DAC/encoder interface to the ISA bus and they tried to do all the real-time stuff in Linux. Long story short, it hasn't gone beyond job/hobby shops. All I see is Siemens+Windows, Kuka Robots+Windows, Beckhoff+Windows, on and on. Where is Linux? I never see it. Android is a different story, I use it for my HMIs and coding is a breeze.  |
||||
lew247 Guru Joined: 23/12/2015 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1676 |
Deleted Edited 2021-02-15 05:46 by lew247 |
||||
| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
@lew247, Peter responded to your specific question very early on, and I added an on-topic post about the Video Dazzler 2 project, which looks like it could meet your needs and seems like it will soon be a viable product. At that point, the conversation branched in a few directions... but I fail to understand why that is upsetting to you. This feels like one of those thorny Seinfeld social conundrums, in the "How many days are you obliged to keep a birthday card?" vein. Is it acceptable to continue a thread when it's original intent has been fulfilled? P.S. If your premise is we should not be contemplating anything outside the MaxiMite canon, then you should not be looking at add-on video boards - wouldn't a CMM2 in Mode 11 (1280 x 720) with a VGA-HDMI adapter fulfill your needs? Edited 2021-02-15 04:29 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
||||
| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Let's get the history straightened out. Christopher Strachey and David Barron developed CPL (Cambridge Programming Language)at Cambridge about 1960. Martin Richards developed BCPL (Cambridge Programming Language)at Cambridge in 1967 on the IBM 7094 under the operating system Compatible Time Sharing System or CTSS. It was a somewhat stripped down fork of CPL. BCPL is a typeless language which thinks of all variables as a word. (Martin Richards continues development of BCPL and has a variant which will run on Raspberry PI.) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed "B" at Bell Labs about 1969 as a fork of BCPL. It is a typeless language capable of recursion. Bell Labs, GE and MIT were developing "MULTICS" which became bloated. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie pulled out and developed the "UNIX" modularised operating system at Bell Labs about 1970. The first three versions were written in assembly language, versions after 1972 were written in "C". AT&T sold licenses which resulted in a proliferation of slightly different UNIX forks ... UC BCD, Microsoft XENIX, SunOS/SOLARIS, HP-UX, and IBM AIX. AT&T sold UNIX to NOVELL which sold UNIX to SCO. UNIX continued to evolve until the GNU kernal was created in the 1990s. When the Honeywell PDP-11 came along with its character data type B was forked, in 1971, to "NEW B" and, in 1972, to "C". Linus Torvalds wrote an OS kernal, reverse engineered from UNIX, which he released in 1991 under the name LINUX. It has forked into over 100 individual variants and now runs on almost every existing computer architecture. Torvalds has stated that if the GNU kernal had been stable in 1991 he would not have begun the development of LINUX. BSD UNIX then begat both the SUN OS and NextStep which begat Darwin which begat MAC-OS. Bill Strecker wrote the initial VAX/VMS in the mid 1970s with a CISC architecture. It was very stable due to a virtual memory map and priveledge modes but it is inextricably tied to single design processors. It was superseded in the 1980s by a RISC architecture and in 2000 Campaq decided to kill the entire system and all processors. Gary Kildall wrote CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors) in 1974 as a hardware specific OS designed to run on the Intel 8080 and was extremely constrained by the 8 bit architecture. He formed a company to market CP/M and initially named it Intergalactic Digital Research. The Apple II, Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080, Osborne I, BBC Micro, and Kaypro computers all used a variant of CP/M as an operating system. IBM wanted to use CP/M86 as the standard OS for their new PCs but they were unable to negotiate with Gary Kildall. Seattle Computer Works has created a variant of CP/M know as QDOS or 86DOS. Microsoft bough QDOS, renamed it to MS-DOS and leased it to IBM as PC-DOS. Initially, WINDOWS was a GUI overlay running on top of MS-DOS or PC-DOS. Eventually, the names MS-DOS and PC-DOS were deprecated and WINDOWS would run at boot time. So, today you have the choice of running WINDOWS (a derivative of CP/M), one of seemingly hundreds of distributions of LINUX, or MAC-OS (a derivative of BSD-UNIX and the GNU kernal). Here's a timeline chart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_timeline.en.svg I would tend to favor LINUX except that the proliferation of distributions is way too complex. MAC-OS will only run natively on MACs. That leaves WINDOWS as the default. Paul in NY |
||||
| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3678 |
Paul, you meant DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-11 :) I think some people think Linux is the same as a commercial product, but it isn't. The same people may (or may not?) grasp that wikipedia isn't a commercial product and how it's extended and maintained. Linux is similar. So, if Linux doesn't do a particular thing it's a bit like when no-one happens to have put something into wikipedia (or has put in only a minimal amount). Saying Linux is no good at that thing can be somewhat meaningless, especially if it's apparently a failure to grasp what Linux is and how it grows. And if Linux won't do something well, there it is (currently). It's free, as wikipedia is free, and the same person probably wouldn't criticise wikipedia if it happened not to discuss a certain subject. Personally I don't criticise wikipedia if it falls short of some commercial encyclopaedia just as I accept that Linux doesn't (currently) do everything it might. I am sure no operating system does everything well for everyone. Also, I happen to think both wikipedia and Linux are good and successful. Perfect? No. Finished? No. John Edited 2021-02-15 21:50 by JohnS |
||||
thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3865 |
@Paul_L Nice summary. Two corrections/details that you might disagree with and I'm happy to be put straight if I'm wrong: 1. 86DOS wasn't so much a CP/M variant but a CP/M workalike, and as I understand it a shoddy one, doesn't mean it's descendants didn't come to almost rule the world. 2. You're missing the VMS -> Windows NT lineage, but I guess there is a lot of Windows history missing ;-) Best wishes, Tom Edited 2021-02-15 22:04 by thwill Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
||||
| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
"QDOS" purportedly stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System" - from humble beginnings, etc. Apparently, Bill Gates had an implicit agreement with Gary Kildall to not develop operating systems - Microsoft was supposed to focus on languages and development tools, and leave the OS market to Kildall's Digital Research. If there was such a collusion, it went out the window when IBM came shopping for a PC DOS. Still, the blame lies with Kildall for initially snubbing IBM. He's one of the more tragic figures in computing history - he died at the age of 52, cause of death undetermined. Paul L, thanks again for another great history lesson! One small correction: the Apple II ran its own proprietary DOS, developed by a small outfit contracted by Steve Jobs (Shepardson Systems), written in about a month for $13K dollars! CP/M originally only ran on 8080/Z-80 machines, but was available on the (6502-based) Apple II if you plugged in a Microsoft Z-80 "Softcard". I believe the Z-80 coprocessor was MS's first foray into the hardware market. Apparently, Paul Allen convinced Gates there was a great opportunity to leverage the Apple II install base for people who needed to run CP/M business applications (WordStar, dBase, et al). Allen was right - for about a year, pre-MSDOS, the Softcard was Microsoft's largest revenue generator. Edited 2021-02-16 00:29 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
||||
| Friet Newbie  Joined: 16/12/2020 Location: BelgiumPosts: 13 |
Paul_L said : "Bill Strecker wrote the initial VAX/VMS in the mid 1970s with a CISC architecture. It was very stable due to a virtual memory map and priveledge modes but it is inextricably tied to single design processors. It was superseded in the 1980s by a RISC architecture and in 2000 Campaq decided to kill the entire system and all processors" Indeed, Compaq did end the Alpha CPU's (sold to Intel) and switched to Itanium right before the merge with HP. However, VMS was not killed. It was ported to Itanium and till today still runs on the HPE Integrity servers. Target is to support OpenVMS on Superdome later this year. (up to 32-socket x86-64 boxes). In 2014 HP spun off the OpenVMS division, and a new company was formed to further develop/support OpenVMS. That company is vmssoftware and currently they are in the process of porting OpenVMS to the x86-64 architecture. They are still tightly linked to HPE, but once the port to x86-64 is 100% complete, i wouldn't be surprised they will start supporting other vendors x86-64 servers as well. You would be surprised how many companies are still running OpenVMS for mission critical applications today. (disclaimer : i work for HPE - please don't shoot me now :-)) |
||||
| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
@Friet ---> You're way too young to be talking to me. I don't know anything about anything that happened after 1990.  It's no surprise that OpenVMS support is continuing. Things that work get supported for decades after newer gadgets came along. CICS on top of COBOL is still being used as a primary repository by most money center banks. Newer gadgets were supposed to have destroyed it about 1963. I just can't understand why Computer Associates killed Clipper and then Microsoft killed FoxProWin. They worked .... very well indeed. Paul in NY |
||||
| Friet Newbie Joined: 16/12/2020 Location: BelgiumPosts: 13 |
@Paul_L  .. I started in IT in 82 (yes, i'm young going on 60 this year). Started as operator on a Formation F4000 minicomputer posing as an IBM370/4341..later systems programmer using Cobol/Assembler on that same system.MVS-CICS as TP Monitor-JCL for batch processing, VSAM for indexed file handling. VM/CMS ; XEDIT for the developers (a precursor to todays virtual machines ..in 82!) and all that stuff from the good old days. Weird thing is : i got my IT degree, continued to work in IT, but never again in a programmers role. Or even remotely involved. I did dabble (as a form of hobby) in clipper summer '97, wrote a few programs for friends, nothing fancy. I have the same feeling about the fact those were killed of. Even till today i don't see any programming environment (business related) that allows you to produce working applications so fast. |
||||
| RetroJoe Senior Member Joined: 06/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 290 |
Microsoft has managed to destroy just about 100% of their acquisitions - I attribute it to the strong NIH ("Not Invented Here") component of their corporate culture, albeit that appears to be changing quite a bit under Nadella, as compared to this guy Where did all the departmental RDBMS's go? To the Cloud, of course I am in no way affiliated with this offering, but use it regularly and endorse it without reservation. The "freemium" version is very generous and can satisfy many data management tasks for $0. @Geoff, if you haven't found a permanent replacement for your MMBasic bug tracking repository yet, you could have an app runnng on AirTable in a jiff, and use it to post a bug submission template on your website. It could, of course, go "off the air" like your old one, but IMO the risk of that is practically zero. Edited 2021-02-19 04:39 by RetroJoe Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P. |
||||
| Page 2 of 2 |
|||||
 Print this page |
