I had just heard the news that Jerry had passed away.  While famous for his scifi writing, his work for the military and pushing ‘smart weapons’, getting kicked off the ARPANET for wrong think, and of course being the first person to use a word processor to write a book and get it published.

He was also known as quite the tinkerer and getting the luck of having people send him stuff to play with, and he’d write about it in his column on Byte back in the day (starting in 1984!), and you can find his full BYTE credentials here.

Although at the time I had thought of it as very chaotic, all over the place, and full of, well just simple bonehead mistakes, in retrospect Jerry’s chaos had a tremendous impact on me, and in some unconscious way I had inadvertently followed in his style through virtualization.  And I can say that although some things are pretty obvious in hind sight, when you are in the middle of it, some bad things seem like good ideas!!  Although the price for ‘bricking’ a virtual machine is a lot lower, and the ability to quickly go back and forth, and experiment more pretty much consequence free is definitely a plus!

He, along with John C Dvorak were frequent guests on TWiT, with I think his last appearance in 2015, which I have to say I had always admired their cantankerous old man style.  One that I find myself increasingly take on with age.

From Jerry’s son Alex:

I’m afraid that Jerry passed away.
We had a great time at DragonCon.
He did not suffer.

(8 Sep 2017 – 3:45pm PDT)

He was 84

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

Due to a popular demand, a previously mentioned Web Rendering Proxy has been ported to QT-Webkit, which allows it to run on Linux, BSD and other operating systems.

QT doesn’t support writing GIF images so JPEG is being used instead. You may want to adjust the option for image quality versus size.

The installation of required components is straight forward, on Ubuntu:

apt-get  install  python-qt4  libqt4-webkit

Generaly you if you can get qt-webkit2png to run, WRP will also work. Note for Windows users, you will need a X11 display server like the one that comes with Cygwin.

The script is available here.

(note this is a guest post by Tenox)

[Update: A full HTTP Proxy version has been made in this post.]

I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem – the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to microsoft.com with IE 1.5 or qnx.com with the last version of Voyager. This just doesn’t work. With rapid progression of web standards, the situation will only be getting worse in time. Something had to be done.

Quite a while ago I’ve came across Opera rendering proxy for mobile browsers. This got me thinking. If you could render a web page on a proxy server to a simplified HTML, say 3.x., this would make a lot of web browsers happy! Also, for some unrelated purposes I have been using webkit2png which allows to create a whole web page snapshot in a single png image. What if such image had an image map of clickable regions pointing to the original links?

The idea was born, but was it possible to implement and would it work? Webkit2png was quite far from having all the required functionality. Fortunately, though after some additional research I have stumbled upon picidae network. To my utter surprise they actually made all or even more functionality that I wanted in their picidae.py script. All that had to be done to adapt picidae to my purpose was to save the image as a GIF image, generate a simple HTML page with imagemap, an input box and strip all the unwanted stuff.

Webrender.py came to life. It’s a cgi-bin application that resides on a machine in the middle. It renders a gif image and spits it out to the browser together with a simple web page, containing a URL and search input boxes plus the gif and image map.

After some initial debugging and massaging out few bugs the solution worked perfectly! I could finally get the old browsers happily navigate modern websites! Check out some examples:

Yes! You can finally browse microsoft.com with IE 1.5 🙂

Or go to netscape.com in Netscape 4.x browser. This was impossible just a few hours ago!

How about some other browsers:

Enjoy!

Update: A full HTTP Proxy version has been made in this post.

(this is a guest post by Tenox)

Jason’s post on VMware reminded me of something that I wanted to post a while back. Not widely known, both VMware and Microsoft offer free and available to anyone, virtualized “hands on labs” on some or most of their products. Don’t think of them as videos or scripted presentations. They are in fact real virtual machines with real software you can play with. VMware HOLs for instance include putty.exe that allows you to SSH to the ESXi host to hack it.

If you don’t want to spend hours installing and configuring all this stuff and just want to learn the essence or gain some experience with enterprise technologies without breaking a bank I highly suggest to check them out. Also VMware labs let you preview upcoming technologies which are not yet available on the market!

VMware HOLs: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ there also is a community page.

Microsoft, TechEd 2013 HOLs:  http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013?y=Hands-on+Lab&t=available-online (I think you need Internet Explorer to launch them)

Enjoy!

Well I had no idea that the Tim Carleton Darrick Deel collaboration of Opus number 1 was so popular!  I had blogged about it a while ago when I was looking for the infamous hold music.

I got one quick heads up that the stereo version of the popular ‘hold’ track would be uploaded, but once it was I got 5 notifications!  One from a Darrick!  It sure sounds nicer than the mono version, but when you are on a phone what do you expect?

Apparently NPR will only host the mp3 for the weekend, so of course I’ll keep a mirror.

For anyone unfamiliar with the song, here is a little bit of history from here:

This was not a proprietary mix made by Cisco. It was licensed to Cisco for non-exclusive use in their CallManager product. Tim composed this song and is who performed it for this recording. I helped him record it one day in his garage. This recording is actually from the late Eighties.

I had the opportunity to submit the song to the guy compiling the music on hold CD and he included it in our upcoming product. The Synths used to record the song had very favorable acoustic qualities when transmitted over VoIP with a G.711 encoding. As a result Tim’s Opus No. 1 became the default hold music on Cisco’s product.

The original version has a nice stereo effect on the clapping and a real breathiness and richness in the Synths. There have been a number of people over the years that have tracked me down due to this music. It is always exciting for us to find more people that like the music enough to track it down after an encounter with it while on Hold. Tim and I will discuss the options for making this available and post back here.

Check it out, pretty amazing!

A IBM PC emulator in under 4kb!

http://ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html

(this is a guest post from Tenox)

#197 – Aclock ARM Windows RT by Peter Godwin

#198 – Alock M68K LynxOS by Plamen Mihaylov

#199 – Aclock PDP11 DEMOS by Dima Naumov

And long long long awaited…

#200 – Aclock PowerPC WindowsNT HAL Driver by myself

No cheating with numbers! Compiled and ran today on my ThinkPad 860. Just realized it’s #200. I think celebration with BSOD is in order! The screenshot was made using IP KVM. I will make an actual photo of the laptop screen another day.

Again thanks for everyone for contributions!

Last but not least there is a screenshot of previously cross compiled Aclock PowerPC OS/2 running on ThinkPad 850. Both the port and picture are courtesy of Michal Necasek of OS/2 Museum. Hope he won’t kill me for leaking the photo:

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

Not long ago I have managed to purchase a working ThinkPad 850. This was no small achievement because in last 15 years I only scored 2 dead ones, for parts. As luck strikes twice, merely a week after 850 I’ve acquired the ultra uber and ultimate laptop of all – RS/6000 Notebook 860. Err what?

Technically 860 is a ThinkPad. However it was marketed for the business / RISC users, as a laptopized  RS/6000 to run AIX, instead of oddball an ThinkPad with weirdo CPU that couldn’t even run Microsoft Office which was 850. In fact both the sales manual and product brochure do not even mention Windows NT or OS/2 at all. Smart move, but too little too late.

What are the differences? Most importantly compared to it’s younger brothers the laptop has a whooping 12″ display and massive resolution of 1024×768. This is actually not bad even in today’s standards, compared to my MacBook Air 11″. Having 860 and 850 aside the difference is massive.

Secondly the CPU is much faster running at 166 MHz vs 100 MHz for TP850. While 66 MHz in today’s standards is nothing, the actual difference is more than 50%.

That’s the good side. But there is the bad and ugly.

The laptop arrived with a rather nasty looking memory error:

I’ve tracked down the error in a support document, it translates to “Memory Error. Run memory tests”. So I did and memory passed just fine. What is going on?

So I’ve decided to ignore and try to install an OS. So happen I did have a handy Windows NT 4.0 CD and ARC floppy disk. I’ve went and installed ARC, but Windows NT wouldn’t boot and it was freezing during driver load. Nothing would help.

I have spent days trying to fix the problem. Tried replacing memory cards, running diagnostics, everything else. Because lower 32MB RAM is soldered on the motherboard I was just about to order a replacement one.

Then by a coincidence I’ve found this FAQ question … “ThinkPad 860 prompts for HAL diskette”, wait what? The answer has it – “860 support was planned for NT 4.0 PowerPC edition which never shipped. There is an unsupported HAL disk image here…”

Once HAL disk was loaded to Windows installer the system booted correctly. Note that the HAL disk also contains a video driver for the GT20 graphics card which is S3 M65 (86CM65):

It also turns out that once the hard disk was formatted and Windows NT was installed the memory error went away! Completely. I haven’t seen it since. I’m thinking it wasn’t a memory error but rather corrupted boot record or partition table.

Anyway here it is Windows NT 4.0 PowerPC:

I’m not going to go through Windows setup or ARC screens as they are covered elsewhere.

So the next step was to get the beast on to the net. Not an easy task to find a suitable NIC nowadays! Fortunately Windows NT CD has a HCL.HLP – Hardware Compatibility List. Browsing the help file I was able to filter out a handful of PCMCIA network cards with PowerPC support:

• 3Com 3C589 Etherlink III PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter
• 3Com 3C589C Etherlink III PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter
• IBM PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter II
• National Semiconductor InfoMover NE4100 PCMCIA Ethernet Adapter
• NoteWorthy Ethernet PCMCIA Adapter II
• Socket Communications Socket EA PCMCIA

The last two are actually NE2000 compatible and use a common NE2K driver. Remembering some issues with the card I decided to go for a 3C859C from ebay instead. Later on I’ve found that the only supported PCMCIA LAN cards under AIX 4.1 are, surprise – IBM PCMCIA Ethernet Adapters. So I’ve got one of them on ebay as well.

The 3Com card worked flawlessly out of the box. Showed up in the PCMCIA control panel, driver installed automatically and I’ve got in on DHCP.

From there it was rather easy. First thing one needs is latest service pack and hotfixes. Unzip and wsftp32 also come handy. And then there is the text editor!

Finding a working web browser was a challenge again. The default IE1 wouldn’t even support HTTP/1.1. Mosaic is not much better. Fortunately Internet Explorer 3.01 saved the day!

Apart from that there is almost zero software available for download for Windows NT PowerPC. The only larger utility collection is Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit which surprisingly has full support for PPC. There are also Dependency Walker, Psychedelic Screensaver, Winimage, PkZip, etc. If you have more software please send! I’m also porting some more.

On the hardware side interestingly Cygnus Supply has a very large stock of replacement parts for these laptops. If you have a broken one you can try your luck there. You could probably assemble a full laptop from the parts. Don’t be put of by “request a quote”. I used them many times before and they usually come up with reasonable prices for the parts. Make sure to have an exact IBM P/N. Also you can buy a “brand new” replacement battery. For failing hard drives a 2.5″ SCSI disk may be a problem. You can by a CF card adapter here.

Last but not least I’ve collected some links to sites with TP 8×0 stuff:

• MCbx – ThinkPad 850
• Technopolis – AIXTP
• home1.gte.net : Windows NT PowerPC Edition
• www.mindspring.com : Windows NT PowerPC Edition (almost same as above)
• NT on RS/600
• Linux on TP860 notes
• rjhawkin – random stuff

In the next part I will cover MSVC, SDK, DDK and some porting efforts I’ve been doing…

Updates:

• Ronald Gaudet sent me some useful software like Putty, Vim, Emacs!
• Working to compile some more like Lynx, VNC, maybe even early Mozilla
• The hard disk started giving up. I have ordered CF Powermonster II 2.5″ SCSI to CF converter!
• Few high res screenshots made with IP KVM:

Splash screen…

Easy Setup…

Secret Firmware Prompt…

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

OMG this is how the heaven looks like:

Source: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/CampusTours/Microsoft-Campus-Tours-Microsoft-Archives

(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

So that QNX 2.21 from the previously established purchase fund has arrived today. As an added bonus, I expected 4 x 5.25″ disks, but the media turned to be a single 3.5″ floppy disk. So it’s better suitable for more modern 286 machines and emulators.

I have imaged the floppy to a raw disk dump and booted in VMware Workstation for verification.

The floppy disk image was sent to those who contributed in the previous post.
Manuals are always available here.

Update: the floppy disk image is here…