Basically the title
You should go read Microsoft’s attempt at excluding Linux/Unix from running on x86 using ACPI!
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202174648/http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf
Btw, in the end, they did this with their office format.
Browser too, and the whole activeX, and DirectX api system to practically force windows only development.
Yeah, same with gaming until Proton came along
for the millionth time they get to stand on the shoulders on all the wine development that came before it. and now we have to reckon with the bullshit of proton patches that never go upstream to make wine better for all
for the millionth time
Why are you mad at me? Have I ever even interacted with you before?
Calm down.
nah nah nah addressing the room is all
Coincidently one of the things they list (named pipes) as an improvement is something I’ve had a nuisance with for years. there’s multiple things that I would love wine to have that it does not but proton does
Tbf if wine were released under regular GNU instead of LGPL, Valve wouldn’t have been able to make Proton proprietary, and so their contributions would also be open source. It is unfortunate that this is the situation, but by using the LGPL license WINE basically permitted this, no?
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Okay my bad, I think I just misunderstand BSD-3 and read somewhere that Proton is Valve’s proprietary software. In terms of open source software, the only licenses I’m really familiar with are GNU, Apache, and MIT. So I read one thing online saying Proton was proprietary and assumed BSD-3 was a proprietary license without looking into it further.
Criticism may be justified, but without Proton, how far would wine have come? Without Steamdeck + proton, gaming would still be a no-go for linux and absolutely not worth mentioning. So fewer users would have switched to linux.
OK let go back and bring wine forward … Maybe it will be something in 10-20 years ( well for released titles and not future Titels.)
all I’m saying is, it sucks that this shit isn’t upstream
:O The Archive! It’s back online!! WOOOOO
Unix also including mac and bsds?
BSDs mostly, Mac wasn’t a Unix based system at the time. It also didn’t run on x86.
Ohh
The 90’s? Locked bootloaders would’ve meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.
See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it’s essentially the same thing. IBM didn’t want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.
its good to remember computers were used mostly by the computer people back then.
now with layman using theses devices en masse, things are a bit different. they dont need the nerds ro have a successful product anymore.
This! Manufacturers were trying to lock people into their systems, just by different means. Reverse engineering a piece of low-level software (BIOS) so that you could run high-level software written for that machine architecture on different hardware was the main battle of the day.
Made me think of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.
Liked the first season but worry the second is crap so haven’t watched it.
I really enjoyed all 4 seasons.
It’s very character driven, which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I enjoyed seeing characters grow and change through the seasons and loved the way the show moved through different eras of technology.
The ’90s*
IBM built the original PC from off the shelf components and for some reason negotiated a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS with Microsoft. The only thing in the PC they held a copyright on was the BIOS ROM. A few companies tried making clones, IIRC Eagle Computer just brazenly dumped the IBM BIOS and used that and got sued out of existence. I believe it was Compaq that developed their own MS-DOS compatible BIOS from scratch that did not infringe so IBM had no case to sue. IBM got a competitor they didn’t want, and the PC became a 40 year platform.
Thanks, it’s been a while.
Valid question. You can ask this about many things:
Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?
Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?
Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.
Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?
What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works
We’ll know the answer in just a few more years here. Whole generation growing up that way currently.
On the “web without Linux”, I imagine it probably would have been scattered across a few proprietary Nixes until FreeBSD emerged from the AT&T lawsuit, upon which FreeBSD would have become the dominant web server.
I think you’re forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).
So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don’t have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it’s hard to tell. Linux’s main audience would not have cared I think.
Early Android (circa 2009) didn’t have locked bootloaders.
Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel’s today are unlocked when purchased from Google.
Even my earliest Verizon phones weren’t bootloader locked - they didn’t start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn’t bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.
Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them.
locked bootloaders are still a thing mostly on the US.
over here having them locked is the exception, not the norm.
What? At least two years ago, all had locked bootloaders and half of the vendors wouldn’t let you unlock it. “Here” being central europe.
here in south america they don’t seem to be locking most of them.
granted, not all phones have an active developer porting an os to it.
Mean, so it’s a regional thing. But why do they lock in US and Europe?
i know us carriers dont like bootloader unlocking. not sure about europe.
Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.
Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.
Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the “PC compatible” industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.
Seconding that’s a not-how-things-were.
The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.
There wasn’t anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it’d handle it from there.
Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from ‘off’ to ‘running code’ was literally just an EPROM burner away.
It’s a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
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competition in the x86 OS space back then
Oh yeah: there were a stuuuupid amount of OSes.
On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.
You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.
There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.
It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.
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…I still have some OS/2 (or, rather, ArcaOS) systems running here.
Mostly for a very limited subset of things that never really migrated across to “modern” windows - I have a BBS running on there because 16 bit DOS apps on OS/2 was pretty much the best way to run them when it was 1994, and in 2024 it’s still the best way to deal with them.
but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
what makes you think that?
The same reason people who drive 20 miles a day have worries about range on an EV that’ll do 300, or why people espouse the freedom of Android but then use the default Google apps.
People like the option of choice, even if they’re not necessarily ever going to engage in making a different one.
If there are two options for a computer, one is “will run everything” and the other is “will only run Windows” a good portion of people are still going to pick the first, even though very few of them will ever do anything else, simply because people really really like having the option of choice.
I don’t think they even know that there’s a possible choice. Common people don’t understand computers, not at this level.
Cars is a good example for another reason. Do we have new cars without a built-in internet connection and continuous user (and environment) tracking, and questionable remote control functions? Afaik we don’t.
I wonder what the newest PC motherboard with the BIOS ROM in a socketed DIP chip is.
At least a decade old, if not more than.
If you wanted to swap your vendor EFI image to something else, at this point it’s all going to be via a SPI programmer, and if you own one of the two boards that it supports, coreboot/openboot.
But, essentially, you can’t swap because there’s very little supported hardware, and thus are stuck with your vendor proprietary EFI.
What’s hilarious, I guess? is that the EFI setup is more or less it’s own OS that can then chainboot an OS which is how the mid90s workstations (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) worked.
