What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2068
 |
i had the unfortunate delusion of attempting something similar in the mid-80s; it was becoming more & more...
That was the f***ing problem!!!! Sorry. In addition, another problem was those that were caused by the decision of which grandfather sources one used. I am not kidding when...
Andrew Swallow
VAXes were used to control all kinds of stuff, and they certainly did talk to different makes of printer.
were plenty of 3rd party QBus and UNIBUS boards about.
even DEC's drives like the RM03. You even got the ROM listings thrown in with those.
Ergo, by your definition, VAXes were open systems.
In this day and age I can be prosecuted for simply dumping the contents of a PC BIOS to a printer... God forbid if I actually started taking the lids off the chips inside my PC and reverse engineering the silicon (yes, people really do that). That would amount to Jail Time in the US... That doesn't sound like a very "Open System" to me.
Does your PC vendor offer the complete schematics, ROM listings and timing digrams for every component in your PC ? I can answer that for you : No, they don't, and they can't even if they wanted to because they would be revealing proprietry information.
OK, so you don't really *need* the schematics to program that lump of hardware you call a PC, right ? How about getting the programming information for it ? Hmm, let's see, an NForce4 chipset - can I get the programming info for that ? No. Oh, how about the Wireless network card ? No. Hmm, OK, so perhaps I can get some info about the graphics card ? No. OK, the sound system is pretty standard, can I get info about that ? No. Right. Give up on that, perhaps I could get the programming info for the Network interfaces on the motherboard ? Well, blow me. No.
The last VAX I used had *all* that information available to me, the end-user. That is what I call an "Open System".
Oh, and just in case you think "OK, I'll reverse engineer the drivers and libraries they give me for the hardware" - guess what ? It is illegal to do so.
That is the reason *why* a frightening number of Linux systems are running binary only drivers... The whole NDIS driver stuff for FreeBSD and Linux... Jesus H Closed System.
Cheers, Rupert