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From: asg@pyuxf.UUCP (alan geller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: A Nutty Idea
Message-ID: <299@pyuxf.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 18:34:49 GMT
References: <231@unsvax.UUCP> <6276@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Organization: Bell Communications Research
Lines: 56
Keywords: volunteer GNU-like PD freeware
Summary: I'm game

In article <6276@watdragon.waterloo.edu>, rmpinchback@dahlia.UUCP writes:
> In article <231@unsvax.UUCP> tlhingan@unsvax.uucp (Eugene Tramaglino) writes:
> >If everyone on the net with the appropriate skills volunteered 5 (five)
> >hours per week of their time, we could write our own OS, editor, utils, 
> >etc, and leave IBM, Apple, HP, and everyone else in the dust.  Okay, 
> ... stuff
> >I said it was Nutty.
> 
>    Not such a nutty idea... It might be hard to coordinate, but if we could
> split the project into small pieces, like one whole, complete program being
> done by each person (for small utilities), or one major module per person
> (for large packages, languages, OS), then it just might be possible.  Providing,
> that is, that we could agree on WHAT was to be done, HOW it was to be done,
> and HOW to maintain the resultant code.
> 
>    Comments, anybody?
> 
> 
>           Reid M. Pinchback
>           -----------------


Actually, it strikes me as a rather good idea.  Certainly,
there are already top-quality shareware/PD products already
available for MS-DOS;  all we'd need to do is make sure that
a new OS/compiler/etc. would be backwards-compatible.

The two main problems are the difficulty of coordinating
a large group of volunteers, and the difficulty involved
in doing PD hardware.  Hardware is important because every
two PCs out there have some sort of difference in their
configuration, and you either have to write to the lowest
common denominator (bleagh!), or have a million routines
built in to support every possible options (MS Windows), or
somehow force everyone to have (more or less) equivalent
hardware systems (Macintosh, although the II is already
giving Apple problems here).

At a more limited level, I would love to see more PD language
systems, such as XLISP and Little SmallTalk.  I would happily
participate in a project that aimed at producing a production-
quality C++ compiler, or regular C, or Modula-2, or even something
completely new; I would also like to help take systems like XLISP
and tune and extend them so that they could be used as serious
production systems on a PC or Mac.

If anyone is really interested in doing something along these
lines, my particular interest is in compilers (parsing a specialty,
not so strong on optimization), databases, and operating systems
(have I got a scheduler for you ... :-), but I'm willing to work
on pretty much anything.

...!{rutgers, princeton}!bellcore!pyuxf!asg

Alan Geller
Bellcore {who knoweth not, and careth less, from the above}