Gregory's ServerThe installer partitions and formats the disk, asks whether you want full setup (all fonts) or minimal setup (less fonts), copies the files, and invites you to remove the floppy from the drive 0 and reboot.
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48 comments
 @mmu_man This system often gives me BeOS vibes, but from what I can tell from old photos, this UI probably was in TRON since late 80s. So, who copied whom? :) First launch. The system is booting, and it is quite fast. Before we can begin, we should answer a few simple questions. Do we want BTRON style settings or Windows style settings? I am curious how things are in BTRON, but not enough to set it to non-Windows and get lost/confused.  @nina_kali_nina if there are different fonts installed, would be nice to see what sort of variation in Kanji style is available. Or maybe it's just more sizes of (unscaled) bitmap fonts. @drj here are more or less all the fonts available in the text editor. Some of the font options looked just like other options, but used Chinese versions of kanji instead of Japanese ones. @nina_kali_nina aha, nice to see. Line 2 is "that crappy Roman Latin font that seems to be ubiquitous among Japanese phototypesetters" spaced badly/full-kanji-width. @nina_kali_nina tbh, i don't know. i don't do Kanji font recognition; was going off the Latin part. But just on the basis of its ubiquity, Mincho would be a good guess. @nina_kali_nina oh it uses maru instead of checkmark for confirmation. makes sense  @nina_kali_nina hmm if this system is so ubiquitous, we need to ask the important question: does TRON fight for the Users? @nina_kali_nina Thank you so much for this great overview! @nina_kali_nina have you tried pasting the selected drawing into the text editor? there's some pretty strange embedding things on the system! @fkinoshita I haven't, but I imagine it will work similarly to OLE in Windows 3.1, where an app will be embedded inside of an app! @nina_kali_nina Yes, you can even embedded the webpages and it preserves all links inside it! @nina_kali_nina @fkinoshita It's kind of similar, but unlike OLE, every file is also a directory and actually contains all the documents linked into it more or less. It's similar to how hard links work on Unix, although the name is associated with the inode equivalent (the real object), not the directory entry equivalent (virtual object a.k.a. link record) @nina_kali_nina unixemu is a system program (basically a kernel module), not a user program. It only implements Unix API compatibility, and not a shell environment. A Unix shell environment with development tools can be found at http://www.chokanji.com/developer/download.html (specifically selfenv.bin). Once you've installed it, you can run /SYS/ucli from the console to get a Unix shell, although it's a bit limited @andreww thank you for the explanation! This is what I expected. Kind of sad they didn't put it on the CD, there was still plenty space left. Also, curiously, the 4.5 release looks just like 1.1 release https://www.os-museum.com/brightv/brightv.htm p.s. Thank you for your OS archival and museum efforts :) @nina_kali_nina B-right/V's appearance barely changed across versions, with probably the biggest change being the wallpaper. Even the last version of its 16-bit predecessor, 1B/V3, looks pretty similar (although 1B/V1 and 1B/V2 were much flatter). AFAIK there were some major changes between B-right/V versions that weren't immediately obvious (for instance, B-right/V R2 a.k.a. Chokanji 1 added support for all codepoints of the TRON character set and Chokanji 4 added shared libraries) @nina_kali_nina Here's Chokanji 4, which is very similar to Chokanji V (AFAIK the biggest changes in V are the VMware guest enhancements and a different beginner's guide) @nina_kali_nina And here's 1B/V3. Despite looking similar, 1B and B-right/V are actually distinct OSes, although AFAIK at least some code was carried over from 1B to B-right (mostly in the GUI and applications). Despite being released in 1996, 1B/V3 is still a 16-bit 286 protected mode OS (the first versions came out in the late 80s). The demo version fits on 2 floppies but still has quite a bit of functionality @andreww oh, do you have the demo somewhere? I would love to try it out on my 286! @nina_kali_nina Yes, I've uploaded both the 1B/V3 demo and Chokanji 4 to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/1bv3_demo Both of these include both installer and pre-installed images (PCem for 1B and QEMU for Chokanji) @nina_kali_nina BTW I'm still working on getting my entire OS museum VM ready to upload. It's taken a bit longer than I thought. I may have gotten a bit too carried away with installing OSes from my backlog. I've been collecting emulated OSes for 20 years, but there were several years where I was downloading stuff but not installing anything. @nina_kali_nina At least now I've only got a few things I want to install, and then I just have to write a simple GUI launcher, clean up some of the metadata/scripts, and actually package it as an image. The initial release will have over 1600 images representing over 600 distinct OSes for over 250 platforms (of course, both of these BTRON OSes are going to be included) @andreww awesome!!! Great job! Can't wait to see what OSes I will discover there, and what OSes I know about that you don't have in there yet :) @nina_kali_nina I've still got a pretty significant backlog of install images as well, although I'm going to save most of that for later release. Pretty much anything I consider to be of particular historical significance will be in the initial version though. Much of my remaining backlog is hobby OSes, some of the more obscure 8-bit OSes, and other versions of some of the systems I already have installed. @nina_kali_nina That's only counting OSes that already run in emulation though. I've also go a bunch that currently don't run in emulation but I plan to fix the appropriate emulators to get them working. The first of those is Atari Unix System V (which starts to boot in Hatari but crashes). I'll definitely be documenting this and all my future emulator development projects on my YouTube channel and blog  @nina_kali_nina @eichin @nina_kali_nina   @nina_kali_nina I was confused by the third screenshot looking like it contradicted what you said later about cats not intruding on those windows, then I realised that they both had particles after them and were actually part of the text and I like that  @nina_kali_nina this and the way window management is done via right click gives me very plan9 vibes i wonder if someone at bell labs used a system like this. @lily I think both are based on Xerox PARC concepts. The author of the OS mentions that he saw Alto and was majorly inspired, but couldn't work on related concepts at first due to politics |
@nina_kali_nina oh a hand-mouse-cursor… not unlike BeOS. Cute wait cursor though 🙂