Posts by anthonywharris

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Seattle Computer Services and CP/M

I saw the notes about CP/M and Seattle DOS although it should be remembered that Seattle Computer Services were a CP/M-86 licensee. I worked at Digital Research in the 80s and saw the list of CP/M licensees and they appear(ed).

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

LinkSys VELOP and WIFI 6 - Yep. It doesn't work!

I have a five bedroom house much of which is open plan. I used to cover much of it (not all) with eight Google WIFI boxes. Sadly when I went to gigabit internet the coverage was ok but the WIFI speed was of course much worse than the speed coming in. Not Google's fault - that's the spec.

So, i did the research, and purchased one Linksys Velop MX5300 and two MX4200s for 'whole home mesh' with WiFi6. The units were in direct line of sight, ten feet from each other, in the same spots as the Google WIFI boxes had been. It didn't work. WIfi speed was around 60mbits. So, I added another MX4200 box - no difference. So, i added another - no difference - and another and another and another. Finally i got to 12 boxes and i was still only getting 75 to 100mbits. That was £2000+ so something else had to be done. So, i have installed CAT6 cabling on the ground and basement floors and am using the boxes as multiple WAPs. Now (surprise!) i get 400+mbits on wifi downstairs and in the basement and 300+mbits upstairs where the units are on wifi only.

So it appears that CAT6 hardwiring is still required to get any kind of performance. Either that or the Linksys VELOP system is a poor implementation.

It's 30 years ago: IBM's final battle with reality

Make sure your driver strategy is in place if you launch a new O/S

Good article Andrew. I was there in Miami when IBM launched the PS/2. They closed off the streets six blocks around the exhibition centre and as far as I remember the Beach Boys played. They should probably have saved their money. One thing you missed is that not only was OS/2 late but the driver support in the operating system was very poor. This meant that as well as blocking all the plug in cards through the new bus architecture, they also bricked all of the add on peripherals for the PS/2 that had worked with the IBM PC. Add to that the fact that the OS/2 driver team started competing with driver developers for driver business and also blocked them from developing for the architecture (until the OS/2 DDK made a brief appearance and then disappeared) and the factors that contributed to IBM's demise was complete. I recall that when the driver team saw the source code of one of our drivers some years later they threatened to sue us. That was until I pointed out that the code was based on the OS/2 DDK and they went quiet but couldn't quite believe that we had managed to obtain a copy in the few weeks that it had popped its head above the surface. Microsoft worked out early on that driver support is a key element to the success of an Operating System. Something that they seem to have lost sight of a bit with Windows Vista onwards although I suppose the switch to 64bit has made backwards compatibility more difficult. Keep the nostalgia coming Andrew, it's not like it used to be! Tony Harris