211–220 of 382 posts
I was having a chat with one of the young guys in the office yesterday. He was complaining that his first PC had windows 7 and was slow, because he only had 2GB of RAM. And I was thinking: Gosh, probably he never typed "dir" or "c:" in his life... I feel sooo old :/
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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 was a pretty great OS. Used to enjoy using a Litestep shell instead of explorer. While it wasn't great for a lot of games, many did run fine. I liked it a lot better than OS/2 that I ran previously. I generally ran 2-4x the amount of RAM as most did. Still do. Pretty sure this made a lot of the difference.
I rain it until it wouln't run sensible anymore in Windoes 10. I then ditched Windows for Linux soon after - I can recommend KDE Plasma if you want to have something thats sorta configureable enough like Litestep was.
still waiting for this one
I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so peop…
That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.
What sort of tactics did you use to convince them? Maybe I can apply them to where I work too...
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…
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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
Considering he "only" joined MS in 1981 (which was found in 1975?), I'm surprised no more people between him and Bill stayed at MS.
Also shouldn't Paul Allen still count (from Wikipedia, "Allen resigned from his position on the Microsoft board of directors on November 9, 2000, but he remained as a senior strategy advisor to the company's executives.")?
Edit: wow, never knew he worked at Valve, too.
What does "DEVICE=" in config.sys actually do? As in, why is this in config.sys:
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe
c:\dos\emm386.exe
It looks like "brain damaged" was the developer's go-to insult when frustrated :D 2024-04-25 19:35 ~/sort/dl/MS-DOS % grep -nri 'brain[ -]damage' . ./v4.0/src/DOS/STRIN.ASM:70:; Brain-damaged TP ignored ^F in case his BIOS did not flush the ./v4.0/src/DOS/PATH.ASM:24:; MZ 19 Jan 1983 Brain damaged applications rely on success ./v4.0/src/DOS/FCBIO.ASM:28:; MZ 15 Dec 1983 Brain damaged programs close FCBs multiple ./v4…
Hardly surprising. If you grep the leaked NT3.5 sources for the f-word, you will find similar comments directed towards IBM.
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If not for space considerations, I would be right there with you. I still have hardware and software to get me back to NT 4.0 or Windows 95 (OSR 2, please, it wasn't tolerable before that). I haven't needed to in a while, but in a previous job, we'd run across old disks in some author's archive and I'd go home to dig around, find a 5.25" drive and rig something up, reach back in time. I could maybe do Windows for Wor…
SCSI drives almost never go bad. Compared to IDE/SATA, they were significantly better built and had lower failure rates. I still have a few 15k RPM Cheetahs that still work, last I checked :).
I appreciate the work in getting this open sourced but I find it telling that this had to be done through an outside motivator. There seems to be no internal "ticking clock" to get some of these things out in to the open. That's fine no one is owed the source code for this stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there was more interest on the side of the companies to get some of their formative history out so peop…
That's valid feedback. There is no clock, but there maybe should be. In this case, yes, Jeff and I had to PUSH. And that's a hassle. I'll ask around.