John Romero sells book he used to learn Objective-C

Linguica said:

What? I posted that Don MacAskill had possession of Carmack's old NeXT machines, which is something he's publicly mentioned before. I didn't "confirm it to you" and I've never said anything about some "standard runaround" where people deny that computers were used for development.

You made that statement in direct reference to my question here (well, less of question, more of a statement):

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72504

which is directly confirming that I was wrong about other systems not still being out there in the wild.

Though you didn't make a statement about "standard runaround", rather you were noting data wiping for those machines before handover...sorry.. misread that earlier (had to go back a few days in the news to find that thread to check). My bad.

Buckshot said:

but if I were to give you a NextSTATION (or a SUN SPARC, or SGI INDY or OCTANE) to use for home, and this was still the 90's, you'd ditch it for a common PC or a MAC in a heartbeat, lol.

Don't be so certain about that -my university still had SPARC Classic workstations until 2002, and I "grew up" on them, so to speak. Sun machines were also quite different than other *NIX boxes in that they didn't have a true text mode (in fact the scrolling of their login screen was slow as molasses) -they were meant primarily for GFX/GUI use.

And yes, those x-Server based *NIX GUIs certainly did look uglier, more spartan/minimal and more confusing than a Mac or a Windows machine, but they were far from unusable. Well, from the perspective of an Electrical Engineering undergraduate, anyway.

FWIW, a 1999 Redhat Linux distro running on a 486 DX/120 didn't look much better, either ;-)

In fact, I found the SPARC Classic workstations to be quite mediocre -their response time reminded me of an underpowered mid-90s PC running Windows 95, to put it mildly. Their only positive aspect, IMO, were their RGB monitors, which were bigger and crisper than those of the average PC VGA monitor of the day (with 19" being the norm for Sun).

I'm going give SUN credit where its due... We had oodles of SPARC stations years ago in a manufacturing plant I was a sysadmin for, and those pizza boxes had the tidy-est, cleanest cabling and tuck jobs on the inside ever. They spared no expense.

SGI did as well, but SUN really stood out to me.

Heh, I hadn't really got to see inside them -until the day they decommissioned them and dumped them behind the CS department's building, monitors and all, waiting for the recycling company to pick them up. I think I snatched a few 30-pin memory modules from them.

From my day to day interaction with them, I recall their proto-optical mice which only worked on a special metallic gridded mousepad, and their buttonless floppy drives -most of which developed faults and wouldn't read/write the disks, so if someone wanted to take some data home, he had to remember which workstations had the "good" drives, log into another machine remotely, and then go shove a disk right in the face of the guy sitting there *grin* The remote ejection command also was a source of surprise/startling, as the workstation might eject somebody else's floppy in your face out of the blue

The most tech-savvy/deluxe guys used one of the two machines (in the entire department) that had a ZIP drive instead. 100 MB in one go? Luxury :-D Keep in mind, this was before 2003, so Flash drives were still at their infancy. For that matter, I think those SPARC Classic machines didn't even have USB ports. There was also only one machine in the entire department with a CD-R drive -and good luck using the archaic command-line tools with THAT.

When I was at university they had a room of SGI workstations that I used to enjoy using occasionally, just because it was funny to see other students wander in, look at the weird-looking computers with bemusement and occasionally try to use them, often giving up after a couple of minutes purely due to the unfamiliar interface.

700$ for an old book... I could buy a brand new id Anthology with all this money.

That book could be in a gaming museum since it was from Romero himself.