This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (42 messages)
You got me curious about the Colorado. Turns out that OS/2 does *not* support tape drives but will run them off standard IDE or SCSI drive controllers as if they are floppy devices. BackMaster seems to be the most favored tape backup currently although there are some complaints about speed.…
>>No tape backup for OS/2…… BackMaster is available commercially from MSR Development; it supports both FAT and HPFS file systems, is compatible with Stacker, etc. Costs around $70. GTAK SCSI Tape Backup is shareware and is also supposed to be fairly capable. Seems like there are a few others as…
The news wasn't *THAT* bad, speaking in relative terms, of course. The year-end number had been announced previously and the 1st quarter number was half the loss of the prior year's first quarter. So, as Chico Marx said, "Who you gonna believe: me or your own eyes?" 🙂
Kodak knows film is slowly dying and that they have to get into digital imaging in a bigger way than Photo CD. They want to protect their stake in industrial, scientific, and medical imaging. They also have a super fast 4 meg video ram chip that lurks in their R&D…
I always kinda hoped Kodak would take an interest in C=.
One of the companies I work for has a Commodore filing cabinet with a "Made in Canada" legend. They don't know how old it is, but their president won't let them throw away anything, including ideas. 🙂
I guess there's blame enough to spread around. 🙂 If Ali's so knowledgable about finance, how come C= so often blames losses on currency fluctuation. Hasn't he heard of hedging? I know it's easy to criticize. It's amazing the company stays in business at all.
>>What was wrong with the Tramiels? Nepotism? You could probably add peculation, misrepresentation, component substitution without compensation, stock manipulation, and a variety of other interesting practices without risk of libel. Of course, a coating of success can cover up lots of surface flaws. 🙂
Can a foreign corporation be indicted? I'm not a lawyer – so I won't speculate; but certainly foreign assets in this country can be seized. My recollection is that there was an earlier suit – about six years ago. The plaintiffs were a couple of institutional holders who accused C=…
#120100-
#Shareholders update
Message #120157
For what it's worth, I recently received compensation from Commodore under the stockholder class action suit filed about 18 months ago. The amount of compensation was *MUCH* more than I had expected. Isn't this the second time in recent years that Commodore has had to pay off the stockholders for…
I meant hardware cache ram, not the diskcache. Wasn't Amouse optimized for an MS-DOS serial i/o emulation? OS/2 uses a totally different serial port driver (and let us be thankful for THAT).
Steven, with OS/2, cache ram numbers are also important. A 256K cache board seems *lots* faster than a 64K cache, all other things being equal. I use a 486/33 with 8MB and have no speed problems except when entering and exiting the Windows environment, which generates lots of reading and…
I used Frame on a Sun UNIX net. We used it to run a "publish- on-demand" tech manual library. The engineers would manage AUTOCAD drawings; the inventory people would manage parts lists, the systems people would write assembly plans; and the integration people would write the master style layouts. All…
I will refrain from making cynical comments on the action in C='s stock and offer you the "dead cat" theory. That is, dropped from high enough, even a dead cat will bounce. 🙂
Steve, I don't think that sales number represents real buying. More likely it is short sellers closing out their positions. A couple of investor advisories recommended shorting C= when it was 5 and change in June.
Salmon-ware? Where's my royalty?
Gracia, I have the first release of ProCalc and, as I recall, I liked it, with a few exceptions. As I recall the rnd() function actually truncates and the cell linking feature is broken. There were a couple other minor problems. Using a DeskJet 500 I got good results with…
I'm not sure I can help you. Barnes, which now has a hyphenated name because of a merger, is a good teaching hospital in St. Louis and I know they have teleradiology, which means digital images. One suggestion, avoid lawyers and doctors; try to talk to the physicists or the…
Are you near a teaching hospital? One with a radiology residency program? If so, you could probably talk the nuc. med. techs into scanning the film for you if you offer them a copy. The DuPont F-Series scanners (which handle up to 14×17 film) give you a good 256 gray…
I second Bob's OS/2 suggestion. I get to like it more with each use. I know the Beta disk includes developer's tools, but i don' tthink there's a complete compiler. The general release of 2.1 is supposed to include one. If not, the Walnut Creek CDROM includes GNU C and…
I have the Walnut Creek OS/2 CDROM. It's a combination of freeware, IBM software and tech notes, and shareware. I don't think the $24 cost is excessive for assembling 190 MB of software, mastering, and distributing. If their Amiga disk is as good as the OS/2 disk, it's worth twice…
The fastest XWin I've ever seen was Dale Luck's A500 running X Client off a Sun3. Yes, it was mono, but it was FAST!
C='s UNIX too slow? You know, *Sun's* XWindow isn't all that fast either. The window setup time and refreshes were almost painful on a SPARC 1+ or ELC. Going from the Sunview GUI to XWindow was hard to call an advance.
>> Matt has stopped working on it (BSD4.4). Sorry to hear it. I was hoping to run some of that nifty Berkeley freeware, especially Michael Stonebreaker's database.
Speaking of UNIX, do you (or anybody) know what happened to Matt Dillon's promised port of BSD4.4? I think it was mentioned a year or so ago as "coming soon."
I wonder how many XT and AT class machines are still running. A couple of my customers have ROOMS full of 286's piled up. They aren't good enough to use and they're too good to throw away – supposedly… Even the local high school won't accept 286 donations any more.
In addition to your other comments about OS2 REXX, you can add that it isn't nearly as powerful as AREXX. File and string handling in particular are very limited in OS2 REXX.
Windows NT on an Amiga? Ah-ha….the DEC agreement starts to make sense. Sounds like the next Amiga maybe will have a DEC Alpha for a CPU, huh? C= keeps the factories humming, cranking out DEC terminals cheaper than DEC ever could and the "Amiga" is a DEC that also runs…
For what it's worth, two newsletters, Value Line and Zweig, recently recommended *shorting* Commodore at $5. Shorting a $5 stock is betting things are going to get much worse. C='s pretty good at pulling financial rabbits out of hats, but this might not be the time to buy their stock.…
I have a 2065 board I no longer use. Let me know if you want it. It was connected to a Sun net and driven only on work days by a little old sailor.
I left the USN in August after spending 2 plus years on Alameda – really got to like the place. It has to have the last remaining Packard dealer in America. I'm a civilian now, living in a burb of Wash DC in a house I couldn't sell. What a…
As a matter of fact, tactical nuclear weapons have been removed from Navy ships. There are, however, a few reactors still afloat. Fewer as times passed and budgets decline. When I left Alameda last summer, none of it glowed in the dark. Except maybe the oven at A-town Pizza on…
Have you tried OS/2 2.0? The number of handles is selectable.
>> So often companies… It's myself and two other guys, although we have a significant backer. 🙂 Nobody's quitting any day jobs yet. Rob.
Thanks for the suggestions. As maybe you can guess, we will optimize it for the Intel/MS world and if it runs easily anywhere else, that's all the better. We are trying not to close the door to other systems by accident early in the development process.
Thanks, but our images are 2D, and development will be on another machine.
Common graphic/anim
Message #23770
>>Will all the computers have similar aspect ratios? We are chewing on that issue now. The raw data will be 1:1 from the sources. The choice seems to be to keep that ratio and adjust as necessary or to convert it to 4:3, which seems to be a very common…
Thanks, great idea.
Thanks, we're willing to use different anim engines which are platform specific if only we can share the underlying graphic stills. If we can't get a common data set, we probably can't port to various machines. In this app, 95% of the effort and development cost is the data; the…
Thanks, Betty. What we're trying to do (share objects among platforms) will probably be trivial in a few years. It sure isn't easy now, though.
#Common graphic/anim
Message #23735
Guess I asked a question in the wrong place. I'll try again here. The goal is to produce an application for multiple OS's and platforms which includes animation of images 128*128 pixels in 64 gray shades. We are trying to use a common CDROM for the "data disk" and put…
Graphics commonality
Message #30340
Hello again; June seems a LONG time ago. Graphics help please? Assume a program is being written to do some animation work in an MSDOS (but probably not WINDOWS) environment. The plan is to distribute all the graphics on CDROM and put the application's operating code on a floppy. It…