No subject

NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and SunOS.  There are others too (spring, 
openstep?).

The PROM is written in forth and is extensible.  It is tightly coupled 
to the hardware, but not to the OS.  FWIW, sun got a forth firmware 
spec into the standard PCI spec.

The Sun netra servers also have a mode where you can toggle the power 
switch remotely builtin to the prom and accessible from a standard 
serial terminal.  It's cheaper then remote power switches if you have 
racks.

...

>  The reason I don't like Compaq is that their tools all assume you will be
>running MS-Windows.  It is not a coincidence that their remote management
>tools -- which work very well -- also work mainly with MS-Windows.

It would be interesting if someone had linux versions of these tools.  
I know some of it is SNMP based.

>  My point, and how it relates to Linux, is thus: The reason the PC wins
>where nominally "better" proprietary systems have lost is that the PC is not
>under anyone's control.  

And they're cheaper.  If no one controls it, everyone can cut corners.

> If the PC were more like proprietary systems,
>chances are, we would not be having this conversation at all, because Linus
>would never have been able to hack together his own Unix kernel on a cheap
>386.

I don't know about that.  After all, lots of people bought big 
expensive computers, threw away vendor support, and installed an 
unsupported OS instead of the proprietary one.  I'm talking about Unix 
on DEC PDP-11s and VAXen of course.

Are there any other examples of this from before the PC era?  Before 
linux, freebsd, netbsd, openbsd, BeOS, and OS/2?


>  Be careful what you wish for.  You may get it.  :-)

Very true

>-- 
>Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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-- 
-------
Tom Buskey