[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:


What happened to Masscomp?
One of the Drexel, Burham, Lambert - leveraged buy-outs of the late 1980 of Milken et al.
The guppy swallowed a whale.    DBL organized a leveraged buy-out of Perkin-Elmer's computer division to create Concurrent Computer Corp (ticker: CCUR).    Masscomp was actually the surviving legal entity, and actually the surviving technology, but the PE guys were clueless and they were the surviving management team.   Funny part is CCUR still exists.

The Masscomp alumni list actually has been been active lately thanks to a post a few months back by Jack Burness (author of the original Lunar Lander for the GT that was discussed on this list a few months back).    Jack, and others from those days are immortal it seems.

We were all scattering, but the engineering team in particular tends to talk keep in touch.   I still keep up with "Fossil" - aka Roger Gourd.    Culter's old boss during the writing of what would become VMS.    He claims his beard turned grey after DC and he went bald as my boss.

The original convention wouldn't work too well on case-insentive filesystems like HFS+ in a default OS X install. ;)

First thing I do to a Mac is turn on case-senstivity so scripts (much less the rom's in my finger's) don't break.    I did have to turn off recently to install Adobe Acrobat Pro for some silly reason, but its back on and Adobe seems to work.    Lord know whys those turkeys do not do it correctly.

The only reason DEC folded case in the old days is because they used RAD50 to store file names in very small directories and ASR33 did not have lower case.    A bug became a feature.      There is no reason for a system designed using full 8-bit ASCII in the directory and designed for a "glass tty" to not keep files case sensitive.    But then again we still have the "QWERTY" keyboard because of a workaround for a mechanical bug of years gone by.  

Clem