In the late 1980s HP was building four series of computers, all based on CISC CPUs. One line was the IBM PC compatible Intel i286 based Vectra Series started 1986. All others were non-Intel systems. One of them was the HP Series 300 of Motorola 68000-based workstations, another Series 200 line of technical workstations based on a custom silicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design, the SOS based 16-bit HP 3000 classic series and finally the HP 9000 Series 500 minicomputers, based on their own (16 and 32-bit) FOCUS microprocessor. HP planned to use PA-RISC to move all of their non-PC compatible machines to a single RISC CPU family.

Precision Architecture was introduced in 1986. It had thirty-two 32-bit integer registers and sixteen 64-bit floating-point registers. The number of floating-point registers was doubled in the 1.1 version to 32 once it became apparent that 16 were inadequate and restricted performance. The architects included Allen Baum, Hans Jeans, Michael J. Mahon, Ruby Bei-Loh Lee, Russel Kao, Steve Muchnick, Terrence C. Miller and William S. Worley.

The first implementation was the TS1 a central processing unit built from discrete transistor-transistor logic (TTL) devices. Later implementations were multi-chip VLSI designs fabricated in NMOS processes (NS1 and NS2) and CMOS (CS1 and PCX). They were first used in a new series of HP 3000 machines in the late 1980s — the 930 and 950, commonly known at the time as Spectrum systems, the name given to them in the development labs. These machines ran MPE/iX. The HP 9000 machines were soon upgraded with the PA-RISC processor as well, running the HP-UX version of UNIX.

Other operating systems ported to the PA-RISC architecture include Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD and NEXTSTEP.

An interesting aspect of the PA-RISC line is that most of its generations have no Level 2 cache. Instead large Level 1 caches are used, formerly as separate chips connected by a bus, and now integrated on-chip. Only the PA-7100LC and PA-7300LC had L2 caches. Another innovation of the PA-RISC was the addition of vectorized instructions (SIMD) in the form of MAX which were first introduced on the PA-7100LC.

The ISA was extended in 1996 to 64-bits, with this revision named PA-RISC 2.0. PA-RISC 2.0 also added fused multiply-add instructions, which helps certain floating-point intensive algorithms, and the MAX-2 SIMD extension, which provides instructions for accelerating multimedia applications. The first PA-RISC 2.0 implementation was the PA-8000, which was introduced in January 1996.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article PA-RISC, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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CVS uses a client–server architecture: a server stores the current version(s) of a project and its history, and clients connect to the server in order to “check out” a complete copy of the project, work on this copy and then later “check in” their changes. Typically, the client and server connect over a LAN or over the Internet, but client and server may both run on the same machine if CVS has the task of keeping track of the version history of a project with only local developers. The server software normally runs on Unix (although at least the CVSNT server also supports various flavors of Microsoft Windows), while CVS clients may run on any major operating-system platform.

Several developers may work on the same project concurrently, each one editing files within their own “working copy” of the project, and sending (or ”checking in”) their modifications to the server. To avoid the possibility of people stepping on each others’ toes, the server will only accept changes made to the most recent version of a file. Developers are therefore expected to keep their working copy up-to-date by incorporating other people’s changes on a regular basis. This task is mostly handled automatically by the CVS client, requiring manual intervention only when an edit conflict arises between a checked-in modification and the yet-unchecked local version of a file.

If the check in operation succeeds, then the version numbers of all files involved automatically increment, and the CVS-server writes a user-supplied description line, the date and the author’s name to its log files. CVS can also run external, user-specified log processing scripts following each commit. These scripts are installed by an entry in CVS’s loginfo file, which can trigger email notification or convert the log data into a Web-based format.

Clients can also compare versions, request a complete history of changes, or check out a historical snapshot of the project as of a given date or as of a revision number.

Anonymous CVS

Many open-source projects allow “anonymous read access”, a feature pioneered by OpenBSD. This means that clients may check out and compare versions with either a blank or simple published password (e.g., “anoncvs”); only the check-in of changes requires a personal account and password in these scenarios.

Clients can also use the “update” command in order to bring their local copies up-to-date with the newest version on the server. This eliminates the need for repeated downloading of the whole project..

CVS can also maintain different “branches” of a project. For instance, a released version of the software project may form one branch, used for bug fixes, while a version under current development, with major changes and new features, can form a separate branch.

CVS uses delta compression for efficient storage of different versions of the same file. The implementation favors files with many lines (usually text files) – in extreme cases the system may store individual copies of each version rather than deltas.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Concurrent Versions System, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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After growing up in suburban Detroit, Michigan, Joy received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1979. Joy’s PhD advisor was Bob Fabry.

As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.

Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. Joy’s prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, continued the mythopoesis during an interview in PBS’s documentary Nerds 2.0.1, inflating Bill Joy’s accomplishments as having personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Bill Joy, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The initial design for what became Sun`s first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford’s Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

On February 24, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded ”Sun Microsystems”. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

Sun’s initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol ”SUNW”, for ”Sun Workstations” (later ”Sun Worldwide”). The symbol was changed in 2007 to ”JAVA”; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company’s current strategy.

Sun’s logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word ”sun”, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color changed to purple.

Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing) asked Sun’s staff from around the world to share some of their favorite anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. [http://www.thenetworkisthecomputer.com/ A Tribute to Sun Microsystems], containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun, was made available on September 2, 2009.

The “Bubble” and its aftermath

During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in that particular period increased to a level that even the company’s executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun.

Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and their assets were auctioned off, a large amount of used high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. This hurt Sun’s business as it relied a great deal on hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs,

executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In December 2001 the share price dropped to the 1998 pre-bubble level of about one hundred dollars or so and then kept going, a rapid fall even by the standards of the high-tech sector at that time. The stock dipped below 10 dollars a year later, one-tenth of its 1990 value, then quickly bounced back to 20. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company’s US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.

In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.

Many companies (like E-Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class x86-architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software. Sun responded to this in several ways, including introducing its own lines of x86-based servers to compete directly in that market, re-launching development of Solaris on the x86 platform and releasing the open-source OpenSolaris to drive interest in using Solaris, and coming out with lower cost horizontally-scaled SPARC systems.

Post-crash focus

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Sun Microsystems, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Hardware supported rings were among the most revolutionary concepts introduced by the Multics operating system, a highly secure predecessor of today’s UNIX family of operating systems. However, most general-purpose systems use only two rings, even if the hardware they run on provides more CPU modes than that. For example, Windows XP and below only uses two rings, with ring 0 corresponding to kernel mode and ring 3 to user mode.

Many modern CPU architectures (including the popular Intel x86 architecture) include some form of ring protection, although the Windows NT operating system, like Unix, does not fully exploit this feature. Its predecessor, OS/2, did to some extent, as it used three rings: ring 0 for kernel code and device drivers, ring 2 for privileged code (user programs with I/O access permissions), and ring 3 for unprivileged code (nearly all user programs).

There has been a renewed interest in this design structure, with the proliferation of the Xen VMM software, ongoing discussion on monolithic- vs. micro-kernel (particularly in Usenet newsgroups and Web forums), Microsoft’s ”Ring-1” design structure as part of their NGSCB initiative and hypervisors embedded in firmware such as Intel VT-x (formerly Vanderpool).

The original Multics system had eight rings, but many modern systems have fewer. The hardware is aware of the current ring of the executing instruction thread at all times, thanks to special machine registers. In some systems, areas of virtual memory are instead assigned ring numbers in hardware. One example is the Data General Eclipse MV/8000, in which the top three bits of the PC served as the ring register. Thus code executing with the virtual PC set to 0×7200000, for example, would automatically be in ring 7, and calling a subroutine in a different section of memory would automatically cause a ring transfer.

The hardware severely restricts the ways in which control can be passed from one ring to another, and also enforces restrictions on the types of memory access that can be performed across rings. Typically there is a special ”gate” or ”call” instruction that transfers control in a secure way towards predefined entry points in lower-level (more trusted) rings; this functions as a supervisor call in many operating systems that use the ring architecture. The hardware restrictions are designed to limit opportunities for accidental or malicious breaches of security. In addition, the most privileged ring may be given special capabilities, (such as real memory addressing that bypasses the virtual-memory hardware).

Ring protection can be combined with processor modes (master/kernel/privileged mode versus slave/user/unprivileged mode) in some systems. Operating systems running on hardware supporting both may use both forms of protection or only one.

Effective use of ring architecture requires close cooperation between hardware and the operating system. Operating systems designed to work on multiple hardware platforms may make only limited use of rings if they are not present on every supported platform. Often the security model is simplified to “kernel” and “user” even if hardware provides finer granularity through rings.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Ring (computer security), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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ProvideX is a computer language and development environment derived from Business Basic (a business oriented derivative of BASIC) in the mid-1980s.

ProvideX is available on several operating systems (Unix/Linux/Windows/Mac OS X) and includes not only the programming language but also file system, presentation layer interface, and other components. The language is primarily designed for use in the development of business applications. There are numerous companies using the technology as the basis for their application in markets such as distribution, property management, health care, transportation, etc. While primarily used in North America, there are developers around the world which use ProvideX.

Over the years since its inception and as the computer industry has changed, ProvideX has added functionality such as a graphical interface, client-server capabilities, access to external databases, web services, and, more recently, object oriented programming capabilities. The language has generally maintained compatibility with its roots; thus applications developed in ProvideX have been able to remain current even though the world of technology has changed.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article ProvideX, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Netpbm is an open source package of graphics programs and a programming library, used mainly in the Unix world. It is a highly portable package, working under many Unix platforms, Windows, Mac OS X, VMS, Amiga OS and others and is included in all major open source Unix-like operating system distributions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Netpbm, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Apple Lisa and Macintosh (and later, the Apple IIgs)

Beginning in 1979, started by Steve Jobs and led by Jef Raskin, the Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple Computer (which included former members of the Xerox PARC group) continued to develop such ideas. The Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first commercially successful product to use a GUI. A desktop metaphor was used, in which files looked like pieces of paper; directories looked like file folders; there were a set of desk accessories like a calculator, notepad, and alarm clock that the user could place around the screen as desired; and the user could delete files and folders by dragging them to a trash can on the screen. Drop down menus were also introduced.

There is still some controversy over the amount of influence that Xerox’s PARC work, as opposed to previous academic research, had on the GUIs of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh, but it is clear that the influence was extensive, because first versions of Lisa GUIs even lacked icons. These prototype GUIs are at least mouse driven, but completely ignored the WIMP concept. Rare screenshots of first GUIs of Apple Lisa prototypes are shown [http://www.pegasus3d.com/apple_screens.html here] and [http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&topic=User%20Interface&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium here]. Note also that Apple was invited by PARC to view their research, and a number of PARC employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh GUI. However, the Apple work extended PARC’s considerably, adding manipulatable icons, a fixed drop-down menu bar and drag&drop manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example. A list of the improvements made by Apple to the PARC interface can be read [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&topic=Software%20Design&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date here] (folklore.org) It’s hard to say which particular features were originated in which project, though. Jef Raskin warns that many of the reported facts in the history of the PARC and Macintosh development are inaccurate, distorted or even fabricated, due to the lack of usage by historians of direct primary sources.

In 1986 the Apple IIgs was launched, a very advanced model of the Apple II successful series, based on 16-bit technology (in fact, virtually two machines into one). It came with a new operating system, the Apple GS/OS, which features a Finder-like GUI, very similar to that of the Macintosh series, able to deal with the advanced graphic abilities of its Video Graphics Chip (VGC).

Graphical Environment Manager (GEM)

Digital Research (DRI) created the Graphical Environment Manager as an add-on program for personal computers. GEM was developed to work with existing CP/M and MS-DOS operating systems on business computers such as IBM-compatibles. It was developed from DRI software, known as GSX, designed by a former PARC employee. The similarity to the Macintosh desktop led to a copyright lawsuit from Apple Computer, and a settlement which involved some changes to GEM. This was to be the first of a series of ‘look and feel’ lawsuits related to GUI design in the 1980s.

GEM received widespread use in the consumer market from 1985, when it was made the default user interface built in to the TOS operating system of the Atari ST line of personal computers. It was also bundled by other computer manufacturers and distributors, such as Amstrad. Later, it was distributed with the best-sold Digital Research version of DOS for IBM PC compatibles, the DR-DOS 6.0. The GEM desktop faded from the market with the withdrawal of the Atari ST line in 1992 and with the popularity of the Microsoft Windows 3.0 in the PC front by the same years.

DeskMate

Tandy’s DeskMate appeared in the early 1980s on its TRS-80 machines and was ported to its Tandy 1000 range in 1984. Like most PC GUIs of the time it depended on MS-DOS. The application was popular at the time and included a number of programs like Draw, Text and Calendar as well as attracting outside investment such as Lotus 1-2-3 for DeskMate.

Amiga Intuition and the Workbench

The Amiga computer was launched by Commodore in 1985 with a GUI called Workbench based on an internal engine which drives all the input events called Intuition, and developed almost entirely by RJ Mical. The first versions used a blue/orange/white/black default palette, which was selected for high contrast on televisions and composite monitors. Workbench presented directories as drawers to fit in with the “workbench” theme.

Intuition was the widget and graphics library that made the GUI work. It was driven by user events through the mouse, keyboard, and other input devices.

Due to a mistake made by the Commodore sales department, the first floppies of AmigaOS which were released with Amiga1000 named the whole OS “Workbench”. Since then, users and CBM itself referred to “Workbench” as the nickname for the whole AmigaOS (including Amiga DOS, Extras, etc.). This common consent ended with release of version 2.0 of AmigaOS, which re-introduced proper names to the installation floppies of AmigaDOS, Workbench, Extras, etc.).

Early versions of AmigaOS did treat the Workbench as just another window on top of a blank screen, but this is due to the ability of AmigaOS to have invisible screens with a chromakey or a genlock – one of the most advanced features of Amiga platform – even without losing the visibility of Workbench itself. In later AmigaOS versions Workbench could be set as a borderless desktop.

Amiga users were able to boot their computer into a command line interface (aka. CLI/shell). This was a keyboard-based environment without the Workbench GUI. Later they could invoke it with the CLI/SHELL command LoadWB which performs the task to load Workbench GUI.

One major difference between other OS’s of the time and for some time after was the Amiga’s fully Multi-Tasking Operating System, a powerful built in Animation system using a hardware blitter and copper and 4 channels of 26k 8 bit sampled sound. This made the Amiga the first Multi Media computer years before other OS’s.

Like most GUIs of the day Amiga’s Intuition followed Xerox, and sometimes Apple’s lead, but a CLI was included which dramatically extended the functionality of the platform, but Cli/Shell of Amiga is not just a simple text based interface like in MS-DOS but it is another graphic process driven by Intuition engine and with same gadgets included in Amiga graphics.library and serving the GUI process and CLI/Shell interface integrates itself with the Workbench, sharing the same privileges with the GUI.

The Amiga Workbech still evolved over the 1990s, far beyond the official withdrawn from Commodore in 1994. See the next section.

MS-DOS file managers and utility suites

Because most of the very early IBM PC and compatibles lack any common true graphical capability (they only shared the 80-column basic text mode compatible with the original MDA display adapter), a series of file managers arose, including Microsoft’s DOS Shell, which features typical GUI elements as menus, push buttons, lists with scrollbars and mouse pointer. The name Text user interface was later invented to name this kind of interface. Many MS-DOS text mode applications, like the default text editor for MS-DOS 5.0 (and related tools, like QBasic), also shared the same philosophy. The IBM DOS Shell included with IBM DOS 5.0 (circa 1992) supported both text display modes and actual graphics display modes, making it both a TUI and a GUI, depending on the chosen mode.

Advanced file managers for MS-DOS were able to redefine character shapes with EGA and better display adapters, giving some basic low resolution icons and graphical interface elements, including an arrow (instead of a coloured cell block) for the mouse pointer. When the display adapter lacks the ability to change the character’s shapes, they default to the CP437 character set found in the adapter’s ROM. Some popular utility suites for MS-DOS, as Norton Utilities (pictured) and PC Tools used these techniques as well.

DESQview was a text mode multitasking program introduced in July 1985. Running on top of MS-DOS, it allowed users to run multiple DOS programs concurrently in windows. It was the first program to bring multitasking and windowing capabilities to a DOS environment in which existing DOS programs could be used. DESQview was not a true GUI but offered certain components of one, such as resizable, overlapping windows and mouse pointing.

Applications under MS-DOS with proprietary true GUIs

To take the maximum advantage possible in lack of a true common GUI under MS-DOS, the most of the graphical applications which worked with EGA, VGA and better graphic cards had proprietary built-in GUIs, before the MS-Windows age. One of the best known was Deluxe Paint, a popular painting software with a typical WIMP interface.

The original Adobe Acrobat Reader executable file for MS-DOS was able to run on both the standard Windows 3.x GUI and the standard DOS command prompt. When it was launched from the command prompt, it provides its own true GUI (on VGA), which provides the full of its functionality to read PDF files.

Microsoft Windows (16-bit versions)

Windows 1.0 was a GUI for the MS-DOS operating system that had been the OS of choice for IBM PC and compatible computers since 1981. Windows 2.0 followed, but it wasn’t until the 1990 launch of Windows 3.0, based on Common User Access that its popularity truly exploded. The GUI has seen minor redesigns since, mainly the networking enabled Windows 3.11 and its Win32s 32-bit patch. The 16-bit line of MS Windows were discontinued with the introduction of Windows 95 and Windows NT 32-bit based architecture in the 1990s. See the next section.

The main window of a given application can occupy the full screen in ”maximized” status. The users must then to switch between maximized applications using the Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut; no alternative with the mouse except for de-maximize. When none of the running application windows is maximized, switching can be done by clicking on a partially visible window, as is the common way in other GUIs.

In 1988, Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement of the LISA and Apple Macintosh GUI. The court case lasted 4 years before almost all of Apple’s claims were denied on a contractual technicality. Subsequent appeals by Apple were also denied. Microsoft and Apple apparently entered a final, private settlement of the matter in 1997.

GEOS

GEOS was launched in 1986. Originally written for the 8-bit home computer Commodore 64 and shortly after, the Apple II series it was later ported to IBM PC systems. It came with several application programs like a calendar and word processor, and a cut-down version served as the basis for America Online’s DOS client. Compared to the competing Windows 3.0 GUI it could run reasonably well on simpler hardware. But it was targeted at 8-bit machines and the 16-bit computer age was dawning.

The X Window System

The standard windowing system in the Unix world is the X Window System (commonly X11 or X), first released in the mid-1980s. The W Window System (1983) was the precursor to X; X was developed at MIT as Project Athena. Its original purpose was to allow users of the newly emerging graphic terminals to access remote graphics workstations without regard to the workstation’s operating system or the hardware. Due largely to the availability of the source code used to write X, it has become the standard layer for management of graphical and input/output devices and for the building of both local and remote graphical interfaces on virtually all Unix, Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, with the notable exception of Mac OS X.

X allows a graphical terminal user to make use of remote resources on the network as if they were all located locally to the user by running a single module of software called the X server. The software running on the remote machine is called the client application. X’s network transparency protocols allow the display and input portions of any application to be separated from the remainder of the application and ‘served up’ to any of a large number of remote users. X is available today as free software.

NeWS

The PostScript-based NeWS (Network extensible Window System) was developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid 1980′s. For several years SunOS included a window system combining NeWS and the X Window System. Although NeWS was considered technically elegant by some commentators, Sun eventually dropped the product. Unlike X, NeWS was always proprietary software.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article History of the graphical user interface, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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* Amiga 2065 the first Ethernet controller for Amiga computer family. Uses the Zorro-II bus interface and equipped with the NMOS Am7990 chip.

* MicroVAX Q-Bus Ethernet controllers (like the DELQA).

* DECstation 2100/3100 MIPS architecture motherboard Ethernet.

* DEC 3000 AXP 64-bit Alpha AXP architecture motherboard.

* Sun Microsystems Sun Hydra 3/80, SPARCstation 1, SPARCstation 2, and SPARCstation IPX computer motherboard.

* Various x86-Personal computer ISA network interface cards (some called NE1500 and NE2100 ). Under Unix operating systems like FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Linux the device driver is usually called le(4).

* QEMU emulating Sun-4 architecture (sun4m) virtual network interface.

* GXemul with le(4) emulating ARM, MIPS, M88K, PowerPC, and SuperH CPU. One example architecture is DECstation 5000 (3max).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article AMD Lance Am7990, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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A key part of Xinet history has been the company’s expertise in Unix operating systems. AT&T first distributed their Unix source-code to university researchers at Carnegie Melon and U.C. Berkeley. U.C. Berkeley researchers popularized their own version of Unix, which became known as “Berkeley Unix.” In 1979, when AT&T announced its intention to commercialize Unix, it prompted the researchers at U.C. Berkeley to form a cooperative set called MT Xinu which set out to package Berkeley Unix as a commercial operating system and to handle support for it among its users. In 1983, MT Xinu was among the first companies to release a commercial version of Unix called BSD Unix 4.2.

Throughout 1987–1989, MT Xinu released the first Unix-to-Mac connectivity software and the first AppleTalk print spoolers (K-spool). Xinet AppleTalk server file-sharing products, K-AShare, and K-FS joined K-Spool in 1990. Over time, MT Xinu had become more and more of a consulting company, since all the hardware vendors had begun to produce and promote their own versions of Unix. Xinet first emerged as the division of MT Xinu, which was responsible for developing and supporting a server for Unix that would connect with Mac clients. In 1989, some of MT Xinu’s employees, including current Xinet CEO, Scott Seebass, decided to form a separate company.

Incorporated in 1991, Xinet retained all of MT Xinu’s key software engineers as well as all the source-code rights to continue making the “K-products.” Xinet determined that its expertise in Unix/Mac connectivity would make a big difference in improving prepress performance, so in 1995, Xinet released FullPress, the foundation for WebNative Suite.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Xinet, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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