Re: lynx-dev lynx2-7-2ms.zip update

[Michael Sokolov]

Philip Webb <address@hidden> wrote:

> but is it correct to infer that Lynx2-7-2ms runs only on BSD
> or even only on pure/strict BSD (whatever they might be)?
> are your developments of any use/interest
> to those using IRIX (me) or eg Linux [...]

I _added_ proper BSD support. I didn't and don't intend to break anything that
worked when Fote left us, if I did break something, make a bug report and I'll
fix it.

BTW, I didn't invent #ifdef __STRICT_BSD__, it already was in Lynx v2.7.2's
libwww, very likely coming all the way from CERN's original libwww. That was in
the glory days before all you microcomputer children came and spoiled our
party, when the computing technology was in the hands of real engineers, when
crybabies didn't go around playing with computers unless they could understand
engineering and hold a soldering iron in their hands. That was in the glory
days when programmers were real programmers, when they had an understanding of
what really went on inside the big noisy machine, and when they wrote code with
a clear understanding of the real cost of every instruction. I know that you
children raised on fatware and floating in your highly portable clouds will
never understand or appreciate this, but there are very good reasons why UNIX
(I mean the real UNIX as Ritchie and Thompson wrote it and as Berkeley and then
I faithfully maintained it, not the ugly "UN*X" balloon you children have
inflated) is so thin, so slim, so free of fat amenities that you children can't
live without. There are very good reasons why its authors were writing C code
while clearly seeing in their heads what machine instructions it compiles into.
Because every instruction counts. Because they understood the true cost of
every instruction. They knew *exactly* what happened inside the kernel when
they made a system call. They knew exactly what was the overhead of every
operation, and what should and should not be done in a program.

When CERN was writing the first libwww you the children of hell were already
covering the world under your dark cloud. WWW itself was your evil creation,
and Lynx, the text browser for us, the real computer users with terminals
connected with RS-232 cables that we have soldered ourselves, was our way of
counteracting it as much as we can. Then AT&T, USL, and Novell bloodsuckers
saturated the UNIX world with binary-only systems and harassed Berkeley to the
point of it having to shut down the BSD group, giving rise to Missed'em-five
and birth to the world's greatest wheel reinvention project called GNU. Thanks
to your dirty work people started forgetting what real UNIX is like, and most
people working on Lynx have probably never seen it, leading to code that built
on every UNIX clone and workalike, but not on UNIX itself.

We, the International Free Computing Task Force, are doing what we can to
remedy this. We finally got our operating system back on its feet, running on a
wider range of VAX hardware that we can support and supply our users with, and
we are doing what we can to bring back the good old UNIX applications in their
original form before they were bloated and made wholly dependent on frivolous
facilities that don't exist in the real UNIX and rightfully so.

> M$-DOS [...]

Two years ago I still had some plans for DOS. I still have them on the very
edge of my mind and at the very bottom of my to-do list, but now they are just
so far down my priority queue that I don't even want to think of them. Sorry.
But you wouldn't blame me if you knew what I have ahead of them in my priority
queue. (Sorry, can't say it here, too off-topic for this list. Some time later
there may be a URL for that in my mail signature, though.)

> M$ Windows?

If you remember anything from what I was talking about on this list two years
ago, you would know Windows must learn to live in subordination to DOS, not the
other way around.

--
Michael Sokolov                         Harhan Computer Operation Facility
Special Agent                           615 N GOOD LATIMER EXPY #4
International Free Computing Task Force DALLAS TX 75204-5852 USA
                                        Phone: +1-214-824-7693
                                        ARPA TCP/SMTP: address@hidden