[TriLUG] Win4Lin

[Ric Moore via TriLUG]

On 03/11/2015 03:14 PM, Scott Chilcote wrote:
> On 03/11/2015 02:20 PM, Ric Moore wrote:
>>
>> Do you remember WABI that came with Caldera Linux?? That was SO SLICK!!
>> You launched it, fed the floppy drive with your Win3.1 disks and
>> entered your license number, and you had! real Windows running on the
>> desktop in it's own xterm, complete to having the Win Chines when it
>> loaded. That was as slick as anything,. I had it from one of the
>> Caldera devs that they actually saw a Win95 version, which somehow got
>> jerked before it was released. Mysterious!
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_%28software%29
>>
>>
>> http://web.archive.org/web/19990913191434/http://www01.heise.de/ct/english/98/10/166/
>>
>>
>>
>> I truly miss Caldera. Ric
>>
> Hi Ric,
>
> I didn't come across WABI, that was a few years before Win4Lin.  It
> looks a lot like what we were doing with Win4Lin though.  At one point I
> had a working demo of MIME type support for Windows file formats, within
> Linux.  Click on a video file type in nautilus, and it would pop up a
> Win4Lin window, which would load the video in Windows and start it
> playing.  It seems trivial, but it was new functionality for its time.
>
> The WABI page also says that DOS Merge was supported in Caldera.  A few
> years later that became the Win4Lin codebase.  Their company (TreLOS)
> was sort of smashed together with a local Linux/networking company
> called Lastfoot.com in Morrisvile to form NeTraverse.


I really liked Caldera. They made some of the "faithful" spitting mad to 
see licensed versions of software bundled with what was mostly a RedHat 
knockoff. There was a licensed version of Netscape Server that was way 
ahead of it's time. It even had a simplistic gui to admin with, while 
Apache was still something you had to use vi on while wearing a Hogwarts 
peaked hat.

Funny thing, as an attribute to Bob Young's sense of humor, there were 
two of us as regular active participating users of Caldera in West 
Virginia on the Caldera email tech support list. Bob hired us both. So, 
he cornered the West Virginia market for RPM based distro super users in 
one fell swoop. We got a laugh out of that.

I truly miss the Bob Young days at RedHat, it was a completely brave new 
world paradigm to start up as they did. I think it was 1999 when I held 
the hot-sauce eating contest at the Linux Expo. Mad Dog Hall did the 
narrative, and it was his premise that the higher your IQ was, the 
higher your tolerance was for hot sauces. I forget who won, probably Mad 
Dog. It was a great time back then!

I guess RedHat's most closely held secret can now be revealed 15 years 
later. There was ONE piece of Windows kit hidden in the locked and 
secure hardware testing lab ...the automatic CD duplicating/labeling 
machine for the boxed set production. There was no Linux equivalent back 
when. We couldn't let Stallman know I guess! :) Ric



-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
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