On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2000 at 06:30:22AM -0200, Marc Esipovich wrote:
>
> > > > Im still wainting to hear anything about the indigo i hear alot of talk
> > > > about the indigo2 but nothing about the original blue boxes
> > >
> > > The problem is that the origin docs are gone by now and SGI can't
> > > just go and ship the IRIX source to hackers ...
> >
> > Wow, what do you mean gone by now? are you saying there's no chance in
> > hell to obtain the documentation? it can't be gone.
>
> Remember that SGI is a company that designs a large fraction of a system.
> So the designers of some piece of hardware and it's direct users, the
> kernel programmers have close to each other. For a lot of chips
> documentation never is written or at least never the same way so it would
> be the case for chips that would be marketed as such. It's obvious that
> this isn't good at all for Free Software where the access to high
> quality documentation is crucial.
>
> So now imagine what has happened to all the knowledge about a machine
> during the decade after it was developed? The product's development
> finishes, it get's marketed, the OS for gets some final bugfixes and
> even later it gets phased out. Silence. Meanwhile the brains behind
> the machine leave the company, tapes and paper go to some dark room
> where nobody still remembers them and the machine gets forgotten.
>
> Slow death of a computer ...
Unrelated, but similar: I'd like to port Linux/m68k to the Tektronix XP21
X-terminal I have. It has a 68030, TMS34020 and NE2000 Ethernet, but where do
you find docs? Tektronix has sold their X-terminal division to NCD.
If a machine is older than the web, AltaVista won't help you neither.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP} -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
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