[rescue] Re: Tags and previous owners

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Stephen Dowdy wrote:

> A Lot of CAE shops use(d) Sun/Solbourne stuff.  I believe the original
> Commodore Amiga was designed on a Sun 3/60.

Really?  I woulda thought that it would have been designed on paper, based
on the age of it and that it was done by a bunch lowly hackers rather than
proper engines (see how much more effective lowly hackers can be
sometimes?).  Could be wrong though.

Speaking of designing hardware, there is something I've been wondering
about for some time.  Is there a way, for fairly low money, to design
boards on a computer, then do something like print them out for component
soldering?  Maybe print them on something like a T-Shirt transfer (IE, the
printing on special paper transfers to the board).  I supposed that
getting a laser cutter and sprayable silver could do, albeit rather
wasteful of silver.  What about retrofitting a plotter with a silver pen?
I think I've seen those around.
 
> It's a testament to Solbourne's systems and OS/MP that it took nearly 5
> years from Solbourne's Chapter 11 for places like Compaq and Apple to
> clear them out for good.

Lots of companies Chapter 11.  It is a reason to be concerned, but it
doesn't mean that anything bad will happen, at least not immediately.  For
instance, more than one company (my employer included) has Chapter 11ed as
a preventative measure against potentially ruining lawsuits.  Just
yesterday, I saw a notice that UGS filed for Chapter 11 out of fear of
asbestoes lawsuits going badly.
 
> While it may seem bad for a computer manufacturer to use a competitor's
> system for its design team, it's far worse when you see a
> word-processing/dtp layout program User Manual written in a competitor's
> product! (i'd heard rumors of things like the MS Word manual being written
> in FrameMaker in the early days)

Well, having tried to maintain a nearly 500 page document in Word, I
wouldn't blame anyone, Microsoft included, for not wanting to use Word for
long documents.  Besides, Framemaker was made for doing things like
manuals, and most word processors aren't. 


--
Joshua Boyd