2003.05.29--The question remains, for the moment, the same, though the answer is starting to come into focus.
Q. When will Helix 6.0 be released?
A: We don't know yet. But we're starting to get a better idea.
Near the end of work on Helix 5.1, we announced that once 5.1 was done, we'd begin work on Helix 6, which would run in OS X, and would be followed by Helix 7, which would run on Linux and Windows in addition to Macintosh.
At the time, we pointed out--to anyone who cared to read it--that while we had accomplished a great deal in bringing Helix to 5.1, getting to Helix 6 was going to be a monumental undertaking by comparison, vastly more difficult than anything we had attempted to that point. And we thought we'd made it abundantly clear that Helix 5.1 was still an OS 9.x product.
One of the things that makes the job of keeping you informed so difficult is that not everyone actually reads what we write here. Almost weekly, we receive either a call or an email requesting an upgrade to "the latest version of Helix." These messages often include the phrase, "That's the OS X version, right?"
The Space Race
One of our operating tenets is to look for the opportunity inside every problem we encounter. As we move further along the trail to Helix 6, a very important item on Helix wish list has seen its status bumped up from "problem" to "opportunity."
The problem is that Helix has a 2 gigabyte file size limit. This limit used to be referred to as "theoretical" because when it was originally imposed, there was no device capable of storing something that big. The 20 MByte hard drive had yet to be invented. While only a relative handful of Helix users have Collections of this size, those who have flirted with this border of the known Helix universe have found it to be harsh and unyielding.
One Helix user came to us and offered to underwrite the cost of this project. To help that customer get a clearer picture of what was involved, we set aside what we were doing briefly to examine this problem in more detail. As we studied it, we became convinced that while it only affects a few users now, it will definitely become a more serious problem in the future.
Once we get TCP/IP to work the way we want, and Helix gets all the way to Linux and Windows, our potential market will be huge and this problem will be magnified, clearly hurting our prospects for success.
Solutions to problems like these are almost never easy, and, as it turns out, like so many problems we've encountered in modernizing the Helix code base, there are at least two ways to fix it.
One alternative is raising that ceiling from 2 GB to 64 GB. It's a big job, but one that can be done in two to three months. 64 GB makes for a very roomy database. A tempting prospect. But in a day and age where you can buy drives with two and three times that amount of space, 64 GB is still quite limited, hardly what one would refer to as "scalable." Plus, the resulting code would still be in Pascal and would not address the issue of carbonization.
The preferred alternative is to completely rewrite the file system. Assuming we want to make the file size of Helix theoretically unlimited--which we do--the job is clearly a much bigger one than simply enhancing the old code. For far too long, the easy alternative has been the one taken, resulting in a Helix that is far behind its market in several key respects. The opportunity this alternative presents is to avoid that path, take a little more time and do it right, so Helix will have a future free of these concerns and more easily extendable to Linux and Windows. This is the way we want to go.
So we've made a decision--the right decision--taken the information, packaged it up and set it on the shelf next to all of the other tasks that await financing. We've even got someone ready to work on it, and, as noted above, one of the users out on this frontier is even willing to help underwrite the cost of this work. But the amount they can contribute falls short of what is needed. So if you're concerned about this problem, as they are, and feel you can help, contact us and we'll find a way to reward you for your contribution.
TCP/IP work underway
In our last Helix 6 update, we talked about work that was planned for Helix's implementation of TCP/IP. We are happy to report that that work has begun. Depending upon our level of funding as the project moves along, hope to see that part of the Helix 6 puzzle finished by fall, well ahead of the rest of the carbonization effort.
The people who are doing that work have agreed to help at a much lower rate than they usually get because they share with us a belief in the Helix paradigm and our enthusiasm to see it get to OS X and beyond. Your hopes and thanks should be with these guys as they work to put this TCP/IP stuff right once and for all.
Thus, work proceeds towards Helix 6. Our next update might be delayed a bit since we will be concentrating most of our efforts over the next several weeks on finishing beta testing and releasing Helix 5.2. As this update is posted, we are mid-stride across one of the major hurdles we are facing in this code base modernization effort. Hopefully, by the time we update this page again, we will have landed securely on the other side of this particular jump and can give you a much clearer picture of how the race is going.