I think their cash registers ran SCO Xenix. I ran the free version on my desktop at work for a few months in the late 90s (I think that I still have the installation media).
They had the same virtual console behavior as we see in Linux.
I had a friend who worked in one of the stores, and I scared the daylights out of him by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F4 on his cash register to get a login. After switching back to F1, he learned the scary trick himself. I have no idea why all of the gettys were enabled in /etc/inittab.
Edit: I had no idea about Pier 1 (rest in peace), the 1959 proxy battle for the family takeover, Tandy's sale of Pier 1 in 1966, Tandy's purchase of a controlling interest in the failing Radio Shack for $300k, Tandy's abrasive management style, or his early demise at 60 from a heart attack.
Peir 1 folded just as we entered the COVID pandemic.
Tandy had a Xenix license from Microsoft and shipped a version on their TRS-80 Model 16 and Tandy 6000 machines (both of which were Motorola 68000-based). It would be interesting to know how much of their own stuff they used internally. I have a recollection of a (potentially apocryphal) story the TRS-80 Model 1 had a "fallback" use as an in-store management computer if they failed to sell.
Free OpenServer appeared in 1996. The cash registers were running on the x86 platform, for sure (68000 was a dead architecture for general purpose computing by then - Apple had been on POWER for several years).
I'm talking more like the late 80s when I was giving my address info to clerks at Rat Shack who were typing it into some kind of green-screen app on what, if memory serves, kinda looked like a Wyse terminal.
Agreed, that would make the conversation quite lively.
Unfortunately, anyone who managed or worked on a curses app that relayed store sales data to a corporate database would need an exceptional memory in their retirement.
I understand that trucking the natural gas into the generation plant is one workaround.
"For this whole layered scheme [of Project Jupiter] to work, the campus needs as much power as a major city — think Los Angeles. Hooking into the existing grid turned out to be a problem. The workaround: generate power on site with fuel cells running on natural gas.
”The gas is supposed to come through a new pipeline spur that still has to be built. Most of the route crosses federal land, but about half a mile runs across state land. And that’s exactly where everything got stuck: on March 31, 2026, the New Mexico State Land Office denied the right-of-way, and on July 16 it rejected the second application. The pipeline, originally due to go online in August 2026, has been pushed back to February 2027.
”On top of that, the air permit for the entire power system still hasn’t been issued: the state Environment Department’s decision isn’t expected before November 23.
”Meanwhile, local opposition keeps gaining ground — as does the nationwide movement against hyperscale data centers."
It's really telling how they just assumed all the permits would be approved, putting in no effort to ensure that would actually be the case. Because until now they've always been rubber-stamped on anything they do.
I have the two small books of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on a shelf in my living room.
The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:
"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."
Looking it up...
"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."
I've been reading an oral history of Soviet Afghanistan-veterans and unexpectedly one of them brought up this scene, talking about being a kid in school and being asked to name the most heroic literary figure he could think of. He names Huck Finn, because he knowingly accepted hell for himself in order to right an injustice and help Jim be free.
I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.
What most people do not know is that Smalltalk was originally a childrens' teaching language, a peer of Logo, which (I have learned in previous comments) preceded it.
"Smalltalk is a purely object-oriented programming language that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business."
Alan Kay, one of the lead developers of Smalltalk, said it was also valued for being good for bootstrapping ideas for building
systems. He went into that topic starting at 58:50 in this talk:
“To me the most distressing thing that happened to Smalltalk when it came out of Xerox PARC was for many respects and purposes it quit changing. Now I can tell you at Xerox PARC there were four major versions, completely different versions, of the language over about a ten year period. And many dozens and dozens of significant releases within those different versions. And I think one of the things we liked most about Smalltalk was not what it could do but the fact that it was such a good vehicle for bootstrapping the next set of ideas we had about how to do systems building. And that for all intents and purposes when Smalltalk went commercial ceased. Even though there was a book, the famous blue book, that Adele and Dave wrote that had the actual code in it for making Smalltalk interpreters and starting this process oneself, almost nobody took advantage of this. Almost no university took advantage of it, almost no commercial institution took advantage of it. And what they missed was, to me, the deepest thing I would like to communicate to you today, and that is we don’t know how to design systems yet. So let’s not make what we don’t know into a religion for God’s sake. What we need to do is to constantly think and think and think about what’s important. And we have to have our systems let us get to the next levels of abstraction as we come to them. And the thing that I’m most proud of about Smalltalk, pretty much the only thing from my standpoint that I’m proud of, is that it has been so good at getting rid of previous versions of itself until it came out into this world. Now one of the reasons we got involved in doing Smalltalk talk again, for me it was after 16 years of not working on programming languages, a couple of years ago we started this project we called Squeak, which is simply, not an attempt to give the world a free Smalltalk, but an attempt to give the world a bootstrapping mechanism for something much better than Smalltalk. And when you fool around with Squeak please please think of it from that stand...think of how you can obsolete the damn thing by using its own mechanisms for getting the next version of itself.”
The original Smalltalk-72 focused on teaching children, but for Smalltalk-76 Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls wanted different things. Alan wanted to continue the kid focus while Dan argued that a language focused on advanced programmers could be used to implement a children's language on top of it. He was proven right decades later when EToys and then Scratch were implemented on top of Squeak Smalltalk, which closely followed Smalltalk-76.
This confusion frustrated me when I first read about Smalltalk in the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine. I couldn't figure it out and at that point I had learned several programming languages and none of them took me more than two hours to become reasonably fluent in. So I was having problems with a language that kids were using?!? Later on I found out about the differences between Smalltalk-72 and -80 and that the Byte articles explained things that made sense if you already knew them but didn't help you learn in the first place. All variations of Smalltalk have become my favorite way to program ever since.
It isn't, the haters are the ones that don't get that there are many OOP flavours, mostly they only learnt one way and naturally everything is like that.
The original VB and Self are two other well known examples where there is no inheritance support.
Also most Lisp systems inspired in The Art of Metaobject Protocol tend to focus on multi-methods, instead of inheritance, to change current behaviours attached to structs.
Some prototype based languages use delegation instead of inheritance, so people assume that is the case for Self as well. The difference is subtle. But as you pointed out and Mario Wolczko said: "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so". There were also languages with neither inheritance nor delegation but that still included some scheme for sharing.
I sometimes "hate", exactly because of people having learned one flavour of OOP, usually the Java flavor of "everthing must be a class" and trying to shoehorn everything into that style of programming, insisting that inheritance must be had, even though many people have already learned the lesson of composition over inheritance, and even though one of the most popular newer languages, Rust, doesn't even have inheritance or classes. Also the "mutate everything from everywhere, as long as I have a setter"-style.
That dogmatic Java-flavor-OOP and their ideas of translating design patterns 1-to-1 to other languages like Python, disregarding the language specifics and language design choices ... ugh, such a PITA.
That's where my guards are going up, and I start observing very closely, what that person's understanding of OOP is, and whether they merely throw out buzzwords, or actually know something about what they are talking about.
When using so called OOP languages I specifically avoid inheritance, and in fact I think it's the worst aspect of it. In any case, I tend not to include inheritance into the definition of object orientation.
Going back much further in history, the involvement of the Gungans to help break the siege of Naboo mirrors the Yemeni Houthis joining the Iranians to resist the US blockade.
As I understand it, the U.S. President engaged in an agreement with the Houthis for mutual non-agression, explaining our refusal to assist the House of Saud and greater Arabia.
As I understand it, their mitochondrial DNA does not survive, so they were always the fathers of any hybrids that contributed to the modern human genome.
" recent Science study found evidence that couplings followed a distinct pattern: Neanderthal males with modern human females."
I will get back into a non-U.S. total market index fund (VXUS or equivalent) after the dust settles with Iran.
I will wait on buying the S&P, and perhaps QQQM, until after the Anthropic IPO at the very least.
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