SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System • Hacker News Board

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#61

Post by frou_dh » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #53

ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

MenuetOS also suffers this problem. The 64 bit version is closed-source/non-Free, but available free of charge. Great way to limit wider interest in the project, and they're not even making bank. They get to spite the people who'd want to fork the project, I guess. The D programming language also had this problem for a long time (closed-source/non-Free compiler backend), but thankfully no longer.

Just because outsiders consider something a "problem" does not make it so. I find it odd to talk about someone else's baby like that.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#62

Post by tluyben2 » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

I have asked many times for the source from author, Podatron, but he doesn't seem to like the idea. I use Symbos on the MSX-2 and with a disassembler under an emulator you get quite far without the sourecode, especially if you start by studying the source code to the apps on the system. Luckily the system is very small (as is the memory on these machines), so with a few weekends of tinkering you can find your way around in it.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#63

Post by emily-c » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #26

Why does every OS screenshot (not from a big company) always have to have a few pictures of women in it? It's ridiculously unprofessional in my book.

In this particular case it feels like a throwback to 80s-style tech marketing. I think the low resolution bitmap images look cool and associate beauty with the OS in a way. I understand your point but I say keep them!

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#64

Post by bluejekyll » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #44

bluejekyll wrote: post #13

The Z80 will always have a place in my heart. Mostly because we used it in college to build a computer from scratch on a wire board. That was an awesome project, and one of the classes that I remember fondly from nearly 18 years ago.

What year was that?

I think it was my last semester of college, so it would have been the first half of 2000.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#65

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

Oh wow, I'm getting Amstrad craving all over again.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#66

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand

Don't be so patronizing. Of course they understand it, but what they want is something different from what you want: status in the demo scene. If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers.

It's not like open-sourcing it is going to enrich them in some more concrete fashion than social currency; in fact, authors of very popular open-source projects regularly find themselves in the humiliating position of having to beg for money.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#67

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #26

Why does every OS screenshot (not from a big company) always have to have a few pictures of women in it? It's ridiculously unprofessional in my book.

In this case it's arguably tied to 80s home computer nostalgia, but that itself rests on a bedrock of 'computers are boys' toys' sexism that gave us booth babes and all sorts of other nonsense. Magazines of the period had small ads for 'graphics collections' (soft porn) you could order on disk and of course much BBS culture was a way of accessing porn for boys either too young or too shy to buy it in magazine form.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#68

Post by pvg » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #51

lallysingh wrote: post #26

Why does every OS screenshot (not from a big company) always have to have a few pictures of women in it? It's ridiculously unprofessional in my book.

Uh, it has (at least, by conventional stereotypes; I don't know the actual gender identity of the individuals involved, at least some of whom are fictional) women’s headshots, a man (though this might not be apparent in the actual image without being familiar with the source image), a male demonic figure, and a reptilian beast that doesn't particularly have strong gender indications. So, is your complaint that it I c…

The screen cap is dominated by three glamour shots of women. It's not like it just happens to contain a woman getting on a train or ordering a coffee, among other images.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#69

Post by Someone » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #20

The specs on this are kind of weird. Z80, 1MB memory, 2TB HDD. Is this some kind of super Z80 clocked at 50+Mhz? I tend to think of Z80 systems as having 32-128kB of memory and 400k floppies for storage.

2TB disk? If you use a real Z80, you can probably run that in append-only mode for the rest of your life. Writing full time at 100kB/s would produce about 9GB/day, filling up that disk in about 6 years. Producing and writing 100kB/s isn’t realistic for a Z80 at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/4744/how-...)

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#70

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #66

ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand Don't be so patronizing. Of course they understand it, but what they want is something different from what you want: status in the demo scene. If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers. It's not like open-sourcing it is going to enrich them in some more conc…

>If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers.

What? This doesn't happen.