Softa/ForGen archeology

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:50:39AM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
>> Does Softa/FourGen code generally depend on compiled binary
>> programs, in particular x286 code?  If not, we will probably put
>> this on CentOS 5 Linux box, otherwise I would probably want to go
>> with OSR 5.0.6a under VMware.
>
>The problem with Fourgen code is that it largely depends on
>MenuMaster/Maestro/Ease, which is Xenix/SV, and therefore requires
>IBCS/ABI to run.
>
>That, in turn requires a 2.4 kernel -- I gather *some* versions of ABI
>will run on *some* 2.6 kernels, but there's a *lot* less activity on
>the project than you might expect.

I have several sites running SCO COFF binaries on SuSE 9.0 Pro systems, but
have never been able to get them running on anything later than that.

The last new OSR 5 system we installed replaced an OpenDesktop 2.0 system
because their Filepro application had been developed with an 80286 Xenix
binary wrapper program.  What made life really interesting was that it was
written specifically for the Radio Shack DT-100 terminals, reprogramming
function keys on the fly into multi-key sequences to make the user's life
easier.

I ended up writing a C program that, like many communications programs,
forked itself to sit between the Xenix application and the terminal
catching the function key programming commands, and translating the
keyboard input from non DT-100 terminal emulations.

I have recently been getting up to speed with the free VMware server, and
have a fresh OSR 5.0.6a system and two CentOS 5.1 i386 systems running on a
fairly low-end CentOS 5.1 x86_64 box with 2GB RAM and a commodity 500GB
SATA drive.

The OSR 5.0.6a VM instance is significantly faster than our in-house OSR5
box.  This isn't surprising considering that the native OSR5 box is running
a 300MhZ Pentium with 284MB RAm while the VMware host is an Intel(R)
Core(TM)2 CPU 4400 @ 2.00GHz.

>Attempts have been made to shake the code out of whomever owns it, but
>a) the last successful track-down I'm aware of is at least 3 years old
>and maybe more, and b) whomever it was who had it wanted $10K for it.

I suspect that somebody could effectively reverse engineer MenuMaster in
python or similar scripting language in a week or so of serious effort.

>It comes up here every 6 months or so; I could dig the relevent
>messages out of my archive, but so can you.  :-)

No thanks.

Bill
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