From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon)
Subject: Re: DEC Ultrix freeware CD (was Re: decwindows cdrom program)
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 03:28:45 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC

In article <1992Aug26.175904.18612@decuac.dec.com> mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) writes:
>>Would some kind soul please describe this disk's contents and availability ?
>>I was unaware of it's existance, and cannot find any reference to it in the
>>latest ultrix-faq.
>
>	There is a freeware CD of compressed tar archives and some binaries
>and a bunch of other good stuff, done by one of our engineers in Europe. A
>hurculean effort that he accomplished almost single-handed (or maybe entirely
>single-handed). You might be able to get a copy by asking your local sales
>rep or sales office or ULTRIX tech support folks.
>
>	There's another project in the works called "Good Stuff" (but the
>name may change if we don't get the trademark) which will be a directly
>mount-and-runnable binary/source hierarchy for ULTRIX and eventually
>OSF1 for Alpha/MIPS. This is part of a grander scheme to provide, well,
>the good stuff off the net ( X11R5 expect gnutar-1.10 kermit-4f-095 perl
[...]

You don't know how ironic I find this -- when I interned at DEC two years ago,
this is what I was supposed to be doing, more or less.  Then we were told two
things:

a) DEC would not distribute any free software beyond what was already on the
unsupported subsets tape, and that was frozen, and had been for some time,

b) that this was a Policy, and could not be changed by one so lowly as the
sales district manager who'd hired us in the first place,

and c) well, whaddya know, they couldn't find 95 spare megs in the whole CT.
district office to cut a TK-50 from, anyway.  AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!


And so we spent a whole summer making up a Big List of "If you ever do get
your butts in gear, put X, Y, and Z on that tape", helping customers (when
the salespeople finally realized that we left them a good bit more satisfied
than the two-day-seminar "Ultrix Support Specialists" and their ilk) and
trying to explain why no, that DS5000 just wasn't very likely to beat out a
full-blown Symmetry on a TPS benchmark, and that no, we weren't particularly
interested in helping cheat at it.

Nice to see that someone, somewhere, finally managed to beat some sense into the
heads of management.
>rdist-6.0beta regexp tcsh-6.02 tex tk xv-2.21 gnudiff-1.15 kmem man mp
>mtools-2.0 rcs-5.6 Xw admin agrep bison-1.14 calc contribtools elisp
>emacs-18.58 gcc-2.2.2 gdb-4.6 ghostscript-2.4.1 ghostview-1.2 gnumake-3.62
>gnuplot-3.1 groff-1.05 jove-4.14 libg++-2.0 libtiff m3-2.07 mawk
>pbmplus sc-6.19 sps top-3.0 transfig-2.1 xdtm-2.4 xdump xfig-2.1.4
>xspread) and more, in a format where you can slap it in and run it, or
>NFS export it, or copy it piecemeal to a hard disk. We have secured
>funding, and we have a ship schedule and resources and this will happen.
>Eventually. We'll also make deltas to the kits available for FTP, or
>complete kits, for that matter.
>
>mjr.


-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon	 tls@panix.COM
  "Oh, you have wounded me!  I have very few prejudices, actually.  The
biggest problem is that I am intolerant of fools.  That is why I have
such a low tolerance level for Libertarians."  -- Jim McMaster