[rescue] iAPX-432, was Re: sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Chris Hanson]

On Dec 19, 2016, at 1:53 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
>
>  (Nobody seems to know this, but AS/400s are actually phenomenally
> well-designed, well-architected, and generally fantastic machines.)

I always thought it was quite well-known, just that the general use of AS/400
hasnbt been to run interesting software like Smalltalk. I think I remember
that IBM VisualAge Smalltalk could target AS/400.

And speaking of VisualAge Smalltalk, I hope someone preserved the various
older versions of it, not just for Windows but for AIX and OS/2 as well, just
as I hope someone preserved the betas and 1.0 of the Taligent Application
Environment and Taligent Development Environment for AIX.

There was an enormous amount of interesting experimentation from the early
1980s until the mid-late 1990s, say 1981-1998, which I think of as the golden
age of workstations.

  -- Chris
  -- who likes to point out that NeXT definitively won the Object Wars by
occupying the enemy capital
  -- (Apple teams with lots of NeXT heritage moved back into the old Taligent
buildings a few years back)
  -- our coffee bar at one point even still had the little pixelated Taligent
bfoodb icon above it in teal
  -- and our doorframes even still had Taligent property sticker barcodes on
them