And people think this last star wars movie was flawed!

HA!

(This is a guest blog post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

A Christmas gift for those who run Windows NT on Alpha AXP, MIPS or PowerPC. These ports of Windows are really lacking some good applications. Yes, there are utilities and games, Alpha even has Microsoft Word, Excel and Oracle DB, but apart from that there just are no serious apps available.

Calamus is a professional DTP (Desktop Publishing) software. It was actively developed and sold by a German company Invers up until 2018. If you want to play around with the latest version you can download a 30 day trial and (at the time this article was written) even purchase the Lite version for 99 Euro on calamus.net. There are versions for Windows, Mac and Atari ST.

Atari ST ?! Well yes, the original Calamus was born some 30 years ago on Atari ST:

I had pleasure of using Calamus professionally on Atari for several years in early 90s. At the time when 486 could have max 64MB RAM and 640×480 VGA, a high-end Atari TT packed 256MB Magnum card and 1280×1024 framebuffer. The memory and high resolution displays were really needed to process large images and complex page layouts.  You can read more about my Atari TT restoration efforts.

In the mid ’90s DMC decided to port Calamus to Windows NT to take advantage of emerging high end PCs and RISC platforms. An interesting fact is that the port wasn’t really a full source code rewrite, which was impossible due a large codebase size. Even that Calamus has 100% native Windows GUI and a lot of functionality has been rewritten, inside the software lives a small embedded Atari ST emulator that does on fly translation of some of the Atari/m68k ABI. You can read a bit about it here.

At the time of the port, Windows NT was still being actively developed on RISC platforms, so thankfully Calamus has been compiled on all of the available NT CPUs. Alpha version was probably the most popular choice because of performance. High end Alphas were the fastest machines capable of running Windows among all hardware. When publishing firms were thinking about upgrades they naturally looked at DEC as a first choice as regular PCs weren’t powerful enough.

I finally found a copy Calamus NT with support for all the RISC CPUs. It took me quite a lot of time and resources to track down and obtain copy of a surviving media from an owner of a publishing studio. This is how it looks when you first install it:

Interestingly there were separate builds for 386/486 and Pentium CPUs. 

If you don’t have one of these machines you can still run Windows NT MIPS on Qemu:

And finally to the goods! You can get them in my my archive. If you just want to play with small demo without installing the whole app look in the demo folder.

So this last 24 hours has been chaotic.  I’d had this word press installation for a number of years, going back to the 2 week Blogspot outage a long time ago.  But things change and I’ve found dealing with systemd and it’s bizarre need to hide and obscure things, along with it’s worthless logging a losing fight.  So over Thanksgiving I saw this “web reseller” package that has 250gb space and 1TB of network for $15 a year.  And being a reseller means I can add additional domains and whatnot for free.

As you may have seen rss was broken the menu bars stopped working and all kinds of other smaller issues.  I figured it was as good time as any to do a fresh install of word press and only copy the article, comments and user tables.

In the middle of this, the superglobalmegacorp redirection broke as it’s no longer a combined site.  And then disaster struck when I tried to move the install to PHP 7.1, getting away from 5.6 as I was constantly running out of memory.

Something happened on the hosting side and their server lost all configs for virtuallyfun.  I’d opened a ticket, and after 4 hours of nothing I moved the site back to the old machine, but I got interrupted with life and it was all messed up.  As soon as I got up, the issue has been resolved and we are back.

For me, this site feels substantiality faster than the older one.  The old server literally costs me $25 a month.  But it’s old and tired.  I have a sales call out on a new data center in Tai Po, Hong Kong so I may be moving all my USA hosting here. Which would be nice for me, at least the server will literally be down the street.

Oh well you know the internet, things move.

I’ve been debating about doing a SQL dump and purging the user table, and placing a copy of this blog on archive.org ..  I know at the same time people will load it up and place shitty ads all over it..  but at the same time I’d like to keep a better copy of my insane ramblings.  I see some people already tried, but their backup strategy is clearly automated and all they did was capture a single article.

As always, keep backups!

**added

For those with legacy systems, currently the HTTP site works.

Naturally for older systems the SSL support is still SHA-1 centered, and the entire SSL infrastructure is quickly moving to SHA-2.  Plenty of the site’s resources will be linked as https, and that’s pretty much the way it is.

I’ve tried to get some devs to write a simplified front end to the wordpress database to at least make things visible to legacy systems, but for some reason people just run away at the prospect.  Personally I’d love to have one in classical ASP so I can host it on Windows NT Server 4.0 … But I haven’t had any takers.

For my own benefit here is what I amputated to get rss working.


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Oh yes!

Quickly adding a drive into my retro-pc!

Dump the contents…

Happy Thanksgiving

Honestly it looks like most of it was long since destroyed.

As you can see, not a heck of a lot there.  I didn’t even know they were kept around, but rather I had a feeling that they were part of those big ‘wise’ investments where companies pay an insane amount of money for old tech companies, and promptly shut them down.

Compuserve is owned by AOL, who in turn along with Yahoo! was bought by Oath: a division of Verizon.  And what is interesting there?

Yep, they are indeed moving everything they have bought to OpenStack, and killing everything else that can’t easily make the jump.  From someone who works in the field I know that the people who sign checques always are more interested in new and exciting than anything old, associated with older companies, and older executives that have either moved on or out of the way creating that power vacuum that jr’s crave.  And in that bussle it’s time to kill the old.

Too bad it’s never preserved, nor do they honestly ever care about the brands they spend so much money on removing from the market to remove any chance of resurgence in competition.

Personally I’d just see it as a waste of time and effort, all this buying and shutting down. All it tells me is that Verizon knows that it fundamentally can’t create a messenger that could rival AOL instant messenger, nor could they run a communications forum longer than Compuserve so their only way to clear the space and remove any doubt is to spend billions to shut down zombie corporations who have been doing their best to destroy themselves for the past 20 years.

Look no further than AOL’s own acquisition of broadcast.com, and how within the space of 3 years AOL took it from a company to simply paying 5.7 Billion USD for a $9.95 domain name.

Big data is watching.