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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

> In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company, the third employee to reach this milestone, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He retired the same year from Microsoft 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 Micr…

Early Microsoft seemed to be a pretty hardcore environment. I guess many employees came and got burned out in a few years.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#242

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…

Looks as if someone did an s/retarded/brain damaged/g before making the code public :)

That was my first thought, but that wouldn’t explain the hyphenated versions in there.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have literally no idea what the 'sanity test' involved actually did, and the common use in computing has little connection to any such use in psychology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanity_check informs me: "A sanity check or sanity test is a basic test to quickly evaluate whether a claim or the result of a calculation can possibly be true." ... "In computer science, a sanity test is a very brief run-through of…

I cannot cop to "smoke test" being interchangeable with "sanity test," in any way. Smoke tests are obvious crashes, often before any real input. I had a friend on the build team of Windows NT 5.0 (until it was called Windows 2000) and their version of smoke test was "can it boot up to the login screen," and that's similar to working in electronics, where powering up your machine or circuit is all you do and you hope…

We do not know if what was described as a "sanity test" actually meets your definition of a sanity test, or was used for some other purpose like a smoke test.

A quick look using Google Scholar finds people using "sanity test" for smoke testing, like

"Typical behavior is to allocate any special resource requirements it needs, map the device into virtual address space, initialize the device and perform a brief “sanity test” to ensure that the device appears to be working correctly" at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...

or

"The minimum essential test cases that need to be executed to evaluate the essential functionality are known as Sanity Test Cases" https://uksim.info/icaiet2014/CD/data/7910a048.pdf

or

"Sanity test is a brief run-through of the functionality of the software system to assure that the system works as expected." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6006830

But it's also used for full testing, including human intervention, like

"There will always be a role for manual testing. For one, it is the only real way to sanity-test your automation itself." - https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

and

"Sanity test cases which checks basic functionality and are run for pre-system acceptance and when product goes thru major change. These test cases deliver a very high project value to both engineering dept and to customers." https://ijaer.com/admin/upload/06%20Apr_2012_Sheo%20Kumar.pd...

as well this example which distinguishes between shallow-and-wide smoke tests with deep-and-narrow sanity tests.

"a smoke test generally consists of a collection of tests that can be applied to a newly created or repaired computer program. This is a “shallow and wide” approach to the application." while "Sanity testing will be performed whenever cursory testing is sufficient to prove that the system is functioning according to specifications. A sanity test is a narrow regression test that focuses on one or a few areas of functionality. Sanity testing is usually narrow and deep. It will normally include a set of core tests of basic GUI functionality to demonstrate connectivity to the database, application servers, printers, etc." - http://archives.christuniversity.in/disk0/00/00/48/68/01/the...

Going with PC Replacement question, since we don't know the actual goal of what was called "sanity test", we can't ourselves come up with a better name.

Which is why we should go with the OP's assessment that "quick" is an appropriate term for what they are doing. Since you don't know what that is, it doesn't matter if you buy a new term or not.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#245
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 wouldn't cry too long for the curious children of today. There are more frontiers and available resources for kids today than we ever had tinkering with an isolated TI-99/4A or VIC-20. We could share a cassette with a friend and if we were super lucky there was a local user group that met in a church basement right after the AA meeting.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#246

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…

[deleted]

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#247

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…

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.

Looks like this is him?

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/commit/2d04cacc5322951f1... https://github.com/mzbik

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#248

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…

Words have multiple meanings. In that context, “sanity” means something like “reasonable and rational behavior” (look it up in a dictionary!). It’s counterproductive to forbid the use of words just because someone is somehow unable to differentiate between the multiple meanings words have. That would be insane — as in “highly unreasonable”, obviously.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#249
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Other terms are neither more descriptive nor more neutral. 2. If someone has a problem with the term "sanity check", they are overly sensitive and they need to adjust to the realities of life. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to coddle them.

Can we please change PHP's die() function to unalive()?

How about depart().

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, Listestep what a blast from the past :) 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.

I remember running both litestep and windowblinds. I can't remember which one I liked better.
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