nick of time

[Paul Edwards]

So Google Groups is showing this message now:

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And I had already made an effort to move
to my own newsreader as you have seen from
my most recent posts. So I was half-safe.
The half is because it is very laborious
to read messages with my primitive software.

However, today an unrelated change happened.

A day or two ago I got PDPCLIB producing
OS/2 1.x NE executables, with a view to
switching PDOS/86 to NE - as MSDOS 4.0
(European, multitasking) had support for
(although I've never used it so I don't
know the details).

And then I managed to get PDOS-generic to
work for 16-bit NE.

And then I realized I could use the OS
gender-bender facility proven with UEFI
doing Win64 with a little bit of "glue",
by getting OS/2 2.0 programs to run
under Win32.

Then I realized what I really wanted to do
was get Win32 programs running under OS/2 2.0+
(as competition for Microsoft - and I know
that Odin32 exists, but it appears to be both
unsupported and broken for my purposes).

And that nominally required ArcaOS. Which I
had already purchased back in July.

And when I went to install ArcaOS I noticed that
it mentioned Thunderbird newsgroups. I hadn't
heard of (or at least - remembered) Thunderbird,
but I knew what newsgroups were.

So I took a look and after some hassle (I needed
to click authenticate and then shut down and then
refresh the newsgroup list - not the "new groups"),
I managed to get into this group.

However I still had a problem - I clicked on reply
to the previous message I posted, and was wondering
why it wasn't being sent. I haven't configured email
because I'm not trying to send email from here at
this stage.

After trying to find a way to force the message to
be sent I realized that it was sending an email,
not a newsgroup message. So I went back and tried
follow-up this time.

I always copy and paste stuff I type before hitting
send etc, so it was still in the clipboard.

So I did a followup this time, and then a paste, and
the message looked fine.

However, I failed to notice that previously I had
pasted just the new text (which I had written yesterday
to James but hadn't organized to send).

So I ended up having two copies of the replied-to text
which I only noticed when it arrived ("immediately")
on Google Groups.

So now I've bought time.

My plan is to have the newsgroups feed into Fidonet
technology. But that requires more development. Also
I want it to work on the mainframe too, and currently
I don't even have rudimentary capability because both
mvssupa.asm (PDPCLIB) and z/PDOS and Hercules/380 all
require more work to make it happen.

So sorry about the extra quoted material, and I should
be fine now.

So it looks like I am transitioning from Windows 2000
to ArcaOS now. I run both under Virtualbox under Kylin
Linux on a Zhaoxin processor.

BFN. Paul.