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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#181

Post by eru »

stepupmakeup wrote: post #178
pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

>Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. do you mean non-system ones?

Some OSs want their binaries to be signed and probably have checksums etc. It would be hard to keep those valid when mucking around with a hex editor.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#183

Post by stubborngoat »

aquir wrote: post #176
ssklash wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super cool to see MZ initials, which are for Mark Zbikowski. They are still to this day at the beginning of every Windows executable/PE file.

What? Is this what MZ means? Fascinating!

"He was the designer of the MS-DOS executable file format, and the headers of that file format start with his initials: the ASCII characters 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A)" Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#184

Post by josefx »

pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

> Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor.

Luckily that isn't universally true. I had to do a decent amount of binary modifications on Linux to deal with bugs and glibc compatibility issues.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#185

Post by Zardoz84 »

chx wrote: post #22
GalaxyNova wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of XP components are still in use in modern windows, whereas DOS was completely replaced around the time Windows XP came around.

Around the time Windows 2000 came around. Up to Windows 3.11 it was a GUI on top of DOS. Windows 95, 98, Me used DOS to boot and it was still possible to stop the booting process at a DOS prompt (although in Me this was no longer official). Finally Windows 2000 had nothing to do with it as it is NT based.

Windows 9x and ME, yet used bits Iog DOS beyond bootstrapping. They were using config.sys to load drivers

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#186

Post by smokel »

pavlov wrote: post #175

When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC. I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since…

I remember trying to rename LILO (from "Loading Linux" fame) to PIPO [1] by simply editing the bytes with a hex editor.

Turned out that didn't work, because there was an additional sanity check that halted the boot process if the "LI" bytes were corrupted.

Of course I put through and was a happy user of PIPO for some years, until Grub came along.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipo_de_Clown

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#187

Post by pjmlp »

grishka wrote: post #125
lchengify wrote: post #12

So if MS-DOS 4 was released in 1986, and it is now 2024, that's a 37 year gap between release and open source. That means Windows XP should be open sourced by ... 2038. Not as far away as it seems. I'll add it to my calendar.

I doubt Microsoft would ever open-source any NT Windows versions because the current ones are based on the same code, just with added touchscreen nonsense, adware, and overt contempt for the user. We may see Windows 9x open-sourced. But then again, it's a stretch because Win32 API is still in wide use today. Releasing the sources for 32-bit Windows versions even this old may have an adverse effect on Microsoft's mark…

> I doubt Microsoft would ever open-source any NT Windows versions because the current ones are based on the same code, just with added touchscreen nonsense, adware, and overt contempt for the user.

Initiatives like MinWin and OneCore, secure kernel, device guard,... caused lots of rewrites and moving code around.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#189

Post by ZiiS »

autoexec wrote: post #149
stevetron wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the year 2000, I was studying computer science at a university. Most of their PC's ran on Windows 3.1. I was using it at home. But one day, Microsoft sent me an offer: I could purchase the student release of Windows 2000 workstation for a mere $25.00. I went for it, and found it better than the Windows NT nap-sayers at school said. I don't know why I was contacted. Probbably because of other Microsoft programs…

Windows 2000 Pro was what I used at home for a long time and it was great. NT 3 and 4 were absolutely terrible which might explain your NT naysayers at school. I never once had to reapply a service pack in Win2k

Still remember the first time I touched Windows NT 4. Half an hour into work experience: Opened up a printer dialogue set a setting that hard crashed the PC; then slowly every other PC in the building as soon as they tried to print (i.e. just as they had _finished_ whatever they were working on; but often just before they _saved_ it).

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#190

Post by justinclift »

Stratoscope wrote: post #101
steelbrain wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I missed the bus on this one. What's wrong with "sanity check"?

As someone who recently asked our QA team to change the name of one of our test suites from "sanity test" to "quick test", maybe I can provide some perspective. Many software developers like me have faced challenges to our mental health. Indeed, there has been a time or two when I questioned my own sanity. And perhaps the sanity of some of my colleagues! It's not so much that there is something inherently wrong with…

> Many software developers like me have faced challenges to our mental health.

It's a stressful industry at times, probably almost everyone has had crap times at one point or another. And then there's Covid, which affected everyone.

Doesn't mean every mention of the word "sanity" needs to be expunged from our language though. :( :( :(

That way lies er... madness. (!) ;)

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