about tunes, merlin, and all that...

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2 wrote:

> Speaking of Cat's Cradle, is anyone here familiar with the concept of a
> 'karass'?

No, but looking it up on the internet it seems to be some kind of mystical
relationship between a group of people who are otherwise unconnected?

> I was just casually wondering if our projects, though
> separate in some respects, are intended to do something meaningful in
> the grand scheme of things.

I have seen you mention your project in the last email or two, but it
hasn't been too clear for me when your were talking about it or about
Tunes.

> It's just a little cosmic reflection that
> occurred to me.  I simply hope that the purpose is what we hope for.
> Let's allow these several paths to diverge if they must, but still keep
> the conversation alive, for the sake of the karass.

I have looked at many dozens of OS project on the net in the last few
years. Many are done by clueless people trying to reinvent OS-9. Others,
much more reasonable like the LispOS, didn't go very far. I think that
Tunes has already done more good with these discussions and the survey
pages than all these other OS projects combined.

My impression is that Tunes and Merlin complement each other nicely. When
I became serious about computers in the early 80s, I thought that Unix
would dominate in the following years and then be followed by GUI machines
like the Xerox Alto running Smalltalk (the PC hadn't been introduced yet,
so I didn't take it into account). While I am typeing this on two Unix
machines (a Sparc/Solaris and a PC/Linux) I think it is very sad that we
are at this stage in 1998! Even if Unix now has windows ;-) . One possible
future is that Merlin will come out and have its day in the sun and later
Tunes will be ready and carve out its niche.

-- Jecel