Harvey, (01)
It was good to see you again at the Computer History Museum's 30th
anniversary commemoration of the Internet. (02)
As I mentioned, a group of us in the CHM Software Preservation group,
including Jonathan Cheyer and I, are creating an NLS release that
includes the NLS system itself, together with supporting software,
documents, and multimedia that will help historians understand the
construction and use of Doug Engelbart's NLS. We are now recruiting
an advisory group of people who are familiar with various aspects of
NLS to help us shape what goes into this release. Thanks for your
willingness to advise us with this as we move forward. As someone who
was at the 1968 "Mother of All Demos" and worked closely with Doug,
your help will benefit us greatly. (03)
As you know, NLS ran on a PDP 20 under TOPS-20. Recently, Doug has
been running it using a PDP-20 emulator that runs under Solaris and
Linux. As part of the NLS release, we would like to provide a running
version of NLS so users can explore the system and experience what
it's like to use it. We would like to enable as many people as
possible to run the software, with as little installation as
possible. Two issues get in the way of this goal. First, installing
and configuring the emulation environment and NLS is not straight
forward, and would be beyond what most users could do. Second, many
users run Windows or Mac OS X rather than Linux or Solaris. (04)
Jonathan recently had the brilliant insight that we could solve both
problems by creating a NLS Server VMWare Virtual Appliance with a
cut-down version of Linux, the PDP 20 emulator, TOPS-20, and NLS
pre-configured and ready to run. A VMWare Virtual Appliance would
also allow Windows and Mac OS X users to run NLS. We would
appreciate the opportunity talk with the right people at VMWare, to
discuss several ideas about how VMWare might support us in our
effort. Of particular interest to us is the idea of distributing the
VMWare Player or Server with the NLS release to simplify installation
for users. We would also appreciate it if VMWare could provide
technical advice as needed to create and distribute a NLS Virtual Appliance. (05)
This would be a great opportunity for VMWare to support the Computer
History Museum and its efforts to preserve and make historically
important software systems available to the community. Thanks for
offering to help us start the discussion with VMWare. (06)
Best regards, (07)
At 09:59 PM 11/7/2007, you wrote:
>Phil-- Send me mail to the address above. I will contact my friend
>at VMware to get a referral to an appropriate engineering resource there.
>
>Harvey
>--
>
>Harvey G. Lehtman Phone: 650.941.4329
>317 Ramon Drive
>Los Altos, CA 94024 (08)
Philip Gust
Nouveau Systems, Inc. (09)
phone: +1 650 961-7992
fax: +1 520 843-7217 (010)
mailto: gust@NouveauSystems.com (011)
Nouveau Systems products seamlessly integrate collaboration,
information management, processes automation, and capture of
mission-critical knowledge. To learn how Nouveau Systems products
can help your organization drive innovation, visit:
http://www.NouveauSystems.com (012)
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