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Let's bring back those DOS 4.0 period sayings. Does this mean if you happen to be talking to BillG you could talk about brain damaged programs and he'd nod appreciatively?
Oh, you mean like it's some period saying? I'm using it normally. But then again, it's not like I'm keeping my finger on the pulse of the current trends... See also http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/brain-damaged.html
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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.
Tangent, but Windows NT had a POSIX subsystem for a while.
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DOS 5.0 was peak perfection. 6.22 or whatever was just stupid double stack and other worthless garbage.
> stupid double stack DoubleSpace/DriveSpace? Mostly, you are absolutely right, yes. MS-DOS 5.0 was the peak, and then it started to acquire bloat as MS bundled stuff to compete with DR-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 7. But the thing is that by modern standards, the bloat is tiny. :-) I gave MS Office 97 a bad review at the time because it was several times bigger than Office 95, had virtually no new functionality, but introduced…
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> stupid double stack DoubleSpace/DriveSpace? Mostly, you are absolutely right, yes. MS-DOS 5.0 was the peak, and then it started to acquire bloat as MS bundled stuff to compete with DR-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 7. But the thing is that by modern standards, the bloat is tiny. :-) I gave MS Office 97 a bad review at the time because it was several times bigger than Office 95, had virtually no new functionality, but introduced…
What format was used by Word 95? RTF?
The latter one is more capable and compatible with modern things. Open Word and see how it calls DOC "Word 97-2004"
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…
My favorite Hex Editor hack was when I cracked a Windows software simply by changing the instruction "Equal to" to "Not Equal to" where it matches for Software Key with user entered key.
and noops.
we were reverse engineers, make no mistake
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…
> MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989 That's genuinely something today I appreciate but when putting the 10th floppy in to update windows3.x. relative these days! > it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer Can't agree more. trying to get my cousins and nephews interested is in their term "Not important"
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…
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…
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> It's just that there are more descriptive and neutral terms available to us, so why not use them? Because it's boring.
Walter, you and I have known each other for a long time. Not in person; we've never met. But through our interactions here on HN. I have a lot of respect for you and for everything you have accomplished. So I have to ask you directly: Is being "boring" or not the way we should decide how to express ourselves? Regarding a "quick test" vs. a "sanity test". Instead of judging this on what is "boring", why can't we make…
I hope the readers/listeners would find it fun, too.
If they mine what I write for an insult, that's on them. I'm not interested in people looking for an insult, or people who get offended on behalf of others. I don't enjoy being around people where I have to walk on eggshells.
For example, I'm bald. I'm not a person experiencing hair loss. I'm bald. I've got a chrome dome. I have to wear a hat when I drive in order to not blind oncoming drivers with the glare from it.
Is changing the words going to change anything? Nope. I'm still just as bald, no matter what words are used.
I think it was Paul Graham that recently tweeted that people should not use the word "delve" into rather than "dig" into, because the former is pretentious and the latter is simpler. I'm a delver, spelunker, archaeologist, excavator, explorer, etc. Take that, Paul!