Affinity products for Linux

[SrPx]

-- Edited --- (by me, SrPx)

[toltec]

24 minutes ago, Echoa said:

Back in the late 80s/early 90s is when the "Mac is for designers" idea even starte

 

Actually, I remember that well in 1987 or 1988. I was working for a print shop and was sent to see a customer about a job.

 

I met my first Mac. Up to then all our artwork was done using film typesetting and pasting artwork. Litho film cameras and Drum scanners the size of a room.

 

The guy gave me a demonstration and I was impressed. Not long after Imagesetters. 

 

What a revolution I witnessed. I remember whole sections of the industry disappearing forever. In fact some people learning a trade were redundant before they finished learning.

[Bromiclime]

8 minutes ago, toltec said:

 

Actually, I remember that well in 1987 or 1988. I was working for a print shop and was sent to see a customer about a job.

 

I met my first Mac. Up to then all our artwork was done using film typesetting and pasting artwork. Litho film cameras and Drum scanners the size of a room.

 

The guy gave me a demonstration and I was impressed. Not long after Imagesetters. 

 

What a revolution I witnessed. I remember whole sections of the industry disappearing forever. In fact some people learning a trade were redundant before they finished learning.

 

sorry to go off topic

 

cant say im old enough to remember any of that myself (not the 87/88 stuff but the 89 onward was alive, but not exactly old enough im about to be 29). I have been privileged to witness the huge swing in how computers and electronics are used in many different areas and it has been interesting to say the least. Kids these days never saved things to floppy (or even know what it is) and dont remember a time without smart phones. The pace of computers and technology over the past 30yrs has been amazing, so much so my younger siblings hardly remember the likes of dial up and computers sub 1ghz. Had a teen ask me why his ethernet cable wouldnt fit, turns out it was a dialup modem he was trying to plug into lol

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Echoa said:

Unix by definition is the family of OS derivative of the original ATT Bell labs, with OSx (iOS in turn) being considered the Unix with the largest install base, you can look into it if you like or believe it's not true I don't care.

Even among those who were there from the beginning at Bell Labs do not all agree on how much 'family resemblance' there is among the various systems that are POSIX or SUS compliant.

 

BTW, not only have I 'looked into this,' I met some of those AT&T crazies (& believe me, the term fits!) back around 1983, when they were celebrating the breakup of the Bell System that allowed AT&T to commercialize Unix & caused the rift with the academic community.

 

Bottom line: don't believe everything you read on the Internet about this. All is not as it seems to be.

[SrPx]

I saw the other day a TV show where they put kids to guess how to make work one of those tape playback machines. No clue...The girl got angry as no one had told her the tape had to be inside, lol...

And that machine made my childhood(teen age, mostly) so different, as used it for loading Spectrum games, connected to a regular CRT TV (first one in B/W, lol).  Indeed the only "computer" that had seen before the Spectrum were the arcade machines in pubs. We were not even in the euro, yet. The kids now have born with technology, are being handled tablets at the age of 3 (kind of not sure personally about if this is a great thing...). Till 15 that I had no personal computers (but went to friends' houses who had, hehe. Indeed could make a sort of coded game with friends). Then came the monochrome XT computers (glorious green and purple), then the AT, I still have my old 286. Can't get ride of it somehow...That thing already allowed to create graphics pretty well (what we today could only qualify as pixel art, of course. I did not know that around 20 years later I'd be doing again that sort of art for a phone company...I dreamed about it, tho.)

 

It was my teen years...My childhood's toys were a bit less technology related :

 

Kids today don't know what they are missing.... 

[R C-R]

32 minutes ago, Echoa said:

The pace of computers and technology over the past 30yrs has been amazing, so much so my younger siblings hardly remember the likes of dial up and computers sub 1ghz. Had a teen ask me why his ethernet cable wouldnt fit, turns out it was a dialup modem he was trying to plug into lol

One version of what these days is known as a 'meme' that has been posted all over the Internet:

[SrPx]

Lol! Didn't know this one....

And even he did not show him a 5,25" ...

[Bromiclime]

32 minutes ago, R C-R said:

One version of what these days is known as a 'meme' that has been posted all over the Internet:

 

i used 5.25" floppys in my class in grade school with an apple II to play games, then at home 3.5in floppys for saving pictures and music, used zip drives later on because they had "SO MUCH STORAGE" before fairly quickly moving to CDs/DVDs

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Echoa said:

i used 5.25" floppys in my class in grade school with an apple II to play games, then at home 3.5in floppys for saving pictures and music, used zip drives later on because they had "SO MUCH STORAGE" before fairly quickly moving to CDs/DVDs

I still have a functioning (!!) USB Zip drive & about a dozen 100 MB zip disks. I bought it for my sister to use with her circa 2000 'old world' CRT iMac so I could send her files via 'sneaker-net.' At the time, I was using one of the SCSI Zip drives with my Macs, along with an early 90mm magneto-optical drive that took 230 MB disks. That MO drive cost $1000 & the cartridges were around $30 each!

[v_kyr]

Normal for those who growed up in that earlier times. - On the NeXT computers we had first those 3½-inch drives for "extra-high density" ("ED") 2880 KB floppies, the disks were bloody expensive those days. Thus people often manipulated common 720 KB double-sided double-density MFM disks by burning an extra ED index hole into those, in order to reformat those with higher capacity (though cheap media here had data losts and wasn't able to give you the ED capacity).

Can't remember on how many ED floppies the OS was distributed, but it might have been some six to eight or so. Those who had a Cube with an MO drive of course used that instead, though that one was slow in read/write compared with nowadays solutions.

Later they introduced CDs and the OS was then distributed on CDs, so you had to have the external CD-ROM drive.

[R C-R]

Did the NeXT computers require a SCSI interface for connections to MO, CD, & similar 'high capacity' external drives like pre-USB Macs did? If they were anything like those Macs, just configuring a SCSI daisy chain that worked reliably with several devices was a challenge that younger folk should be thankful they never had to deal with. Because I had several devices that used different connectors, I had to contend with a variety of 25 & 50 pin cables, adaptors, & terminators; make sure there were no conflicts with device numbers; & do all the other stuff old timers probably remember all too well to keep the chain working & happy.

[v_kyr]

The NeXTcube had enough internal space for connecting SCSI devices and the NeXT MO drives (Sony manufactured here, as the CD-ROM and ED floppy drive too) inside. The Cube had a case slot and opening for those and thus these were primary an accessory for the Cube. Though the NeXT computers also had an external SCSI-II connector ( a MicroD 50-pin connector with thumbclips, also known as Mini 50 or Micro DB50) for daisy chain connection of SCSI-devices here. - When placed in an fitting external SCSI-enclosure such drives like MOs, HDDs etc. were also usable on a NeXTstation (pizza box) which of course had much less internal free space here. - Generally the mass storage devices for NeXTcomputers had to be SCSI-devices.

Another tricky made and first very hard to get as replacement and expensive part was the NeXTstation switching power supply, which was just slightly longer but thinner as a common packet of cigarettes. That one was too originally made by Sony for NeXT. - The NeXTlaser printer was a special one from Canon (as far as I recall) made for NeXT, which had it's own special connector, here the NeXTcomputer itself did the postscript rendering due to it's outstanding Display Postscript capabilities, so the laserprinter itself didn't had any clues about postscript and was much NeXTcomputer dependent (not usable otherwhere) for printing.

[toltec]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

 just configuring a SCSI daisy chain that worked reliably with several devices was a challenge that younger folk should be thankful they never had to deal with. Because I had several devices that used different connectors, I had to contend with a variety of 25 & 50 pin cables, adaptors, & terminators; make sure there were no conflicts with device numbers; & do all the other stuff old timers probably remember all too well to keep the chain working & happy.

 

Oh gawd, I remember it like it was yesterday. 

 

Thanks for bringing that up and making me feel old 

 

The word Syquest still makes me shiver.

[SrPx]

-- Edited --- (by me, SrPx)

[SrPx]

Serif should be worried... it seems it has attracted a bunch of old timers with its Affinity, lol...

 

Quote

Thanks for bringing that up and making me feel old 

 

I don't feel old, I feel experienced... ! C'mon it has its advantages, too !   

Plus, I look much younger than I am in the mirror...   (surely is just the way I look at it...!  )

 

[toltec]

1 hour ago, SrPx said:

Plus, I look much younger than I am in the mirror...   (surely is just the way I look at it...!  )

 

 

I have noticed these days that mirrors are pretty awful. They just don;t make them like they used to. Something to do with China I'm told.

I know that in China, mirrors don't work very well. They always cut the top of my head off 

 

Or maybe that's a a sign of getting old ? 

[SrPx]

First: China is improving in all of its products... just look how the Cintiq alternatives are starting to be real threats for the brand ...Second (and mostly) : It's the point of view.   

[Wikinger]

Les Chinois sont capables à la fois de bien et de mal.

Ils savent s'adapter au marché.

En fabriquant des produits qui répondent aux exigences des clients, ils peuvent fabriquer à des prix très bas sur demande.

Mais c'est inévitablement au mépris de la qualité.

Si le client exige un produit de qualité, il en est parfaitement capable. 

[SrPx]

11 minutes ago, Wikinger said:

Les Chinois sont capables à la fois de bien et de mal.

Ils savent s'adapter au marché.

En fabriquant des produits qui répondent aux exigences des clients, ils peuvent fabriquer à des prix très bas sur demande.

Mais c'est inévitablement au mépris de la qualité.

Si le client exige un produit de qualité, il en est parfaitement capable. 

 

Indeed, I've been told that in their internal market they have brands of very premium quality. They typically export tho lower cost products/brands. Surely this way is a good business compensating the large costs of shipping, which tend to be huge. I have VERY positive experiences in 3D printing small plastic figures for games. Better said, models which I made very recently, sent as 3D prints (in a kind of plastic) to serve as a sort of visual guide, and with that and my 3D files they generated very top quality mold injection produced miniatures. Even more, it was a first for me to create a basic set of assembling parts to be 3D printed, and this Chinese company made it with such accuracy that all copies later on did assemble perfectly. Given the material tolerances in plastics, and how can vary stuff from one copy to another, this is quite hard to get, and they got it perfect. Have some other less optimal experiences with color accuracy in cardboard/paper color printed illustrations, but this happened with a number of POD printers all around the world, too. (now I have my club of favorites, hehe) . Not gonna say names, I don't want to favor anyone, neither damage others. But their (the Chinese companies I've interacted with) capability of reach everywhere, ability to produce large volumes, etc, make them a formidable actor in production. (my 2c)

 

 

[dougdi]

You whippersnappers! I built my first computer at 9 years old, in 1964, from plastic!

 

Digicomp 1

[Fleegle]

So, what was the topic of this thread about again...?

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Fleegle said:

So, what was the topic of this thread about again...?

Futility?

[walts.photo]

Great thread!     

 

A single killer app could get a lot of people to use linux.       

 

Like  Apache for servers.

 

Or like the visicalc spreadsheet when PCs first came out. 

 

[Patrick Connor]

1 minute ago, walts.photo said:

Great thread!     

 

A single killer app could get a lot of people to use linux.       

 

Like  Apache for servers.

 

Or like the visicalc spreadsheet when PCs first came out. 

 

Well perhaps... if the Affinity range was not already on Windows and Mac, but surely less so if is cross platform and linux.

 

The main argument is that people who have linux now want this app, but much less so that people will move to linux because of this app. There are those here who are keen to stop using Windows or Mac which they only use for a few apps like Affinity, but they already have linux. So given our starting point of support for Mac OS & Windows & iPad I'm less convinced "a single killer app (Affinity) could get a lot of people to use Linux" if we supported it too. It's much more reasonable to believe the other reasoned arguments that Affinity would be a success on Linux with those people already using that OS.

[Mithferion]

Some news:

Quote

 

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 3.0 is now available.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes. The main highlights are:

• Direct3D 10 and 11 support.

 

 

For anyone who wants to give it a try.

Best regards.