Many things

[Tony Duell]

> 
> 
> "Randy McLaughlin" <randy at s100-manuals.com> wrote:
> 
> > [...] PostScript is useless in this
> > case since the documents are stored as graphical images and cannot be used
> > on the classic computers.
> 
> What????
> 
> What makes you think that "classic computers" are character based?
> I don't want to start a "my machine supported graphics earlier than
> yours", but as a datapoint, I used a PERQ for my undergrad project in
> the early 80s. Since this was running Unix V7 (or smth close), I am

The PERQ 1 came out in 1979 IIRC....

THe Unix was almost certainly PNX (always pronounced 'Peenix', for 
obvious reasons if you've ever used it :-)) It's the least useful PERQ OS 
for me, because it doesn't really support user-written microcode (what's 
the point of a PERQ if you don't modify the microcode).

> sure you can get a postscript viewer running on it (or a tiff viewer
> for that matter), while you'd have no chance in hell of getting

Maybe. You've got a maximum of 2M bytes of physical memory (and the video 
memory is taken from that). OK, there is the PERQ 2T4 with 4M bytes, but 
(a) AFAIK only 2 of those have survived (I would love to be proved wrong 
on that) and (b) PNX was never ported to that machine. I've never come 
across a PNX version that supported any form of virtual memory either. I 
suspect getting a postscript viewer onto that would be 'interesting'

> Acrobat Reader for it.

Agreed!

> 
> Which gives me a nice excuse to repeat my favorite line: I use open
> source software not because it is free, but because I get to keep the
> code (so I do not depend on the code author to port the software to
> newer/different/stranger platforms).

Yes. For me, having the source code is more important than it being free 
(I don't use free software that comes as binaries-only, i do have the 
source listing for the (IBM copyrighted) BIOS ROM in this PC).

-tony