91–100 of 218 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unless they used punch cards For MS-DOS?
Not likely. Punch cards disappeared around the end of 1976.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/the-oldest-known-ver...
I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
Yes, but that assembly was not DOS, and it wasn’t easy.
Microsoft purchased the DOS code, they didn’t write it. Of course, they did develop and modify DOS. But that was a clever (and lucky) business deal, not a technological accomplishment.
The real beginning of Microsoft was earlier, with Allen, Gates and Davidoff writing the Altair BASIC interpreter. That was a serious achievement.
They had never seen the computer they were writing that assembly code for. They did not even own any computers. It took them 8 weeks on a university computer they were not supposed to be using for that
“Altair agreed to meet them to possibly buy a BASIC interpreter… Gates and Allen had neither a BASIC interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. Allen adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10.
The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory, leaving plenty of room for the interpreted program. In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read, and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque to meet with Altair…
While on final approach into the Albuquerque airport, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootloader to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed. Only when they loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system's memory size did Gates and Allen know that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unless they used punch cards For MS-DOS?
Not likely. Punch cards disappeared around the end of 1976.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not likely. Punch cards disappeared around the end of 1976.
We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.
But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.
From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
Replace Assembly with TypeScript/Rust/Go/whatever and as long as the idea is good and useful, same thing applies today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replace Assembly with TypeScript/Rust/Go/whatever and as long as the idea is good and useful, same thing applies today.
Except the competition was essentially non existent and no one would copy your product with llm in a day
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replace Assembly with TypeScript/Rust/Go/whatever and as long as the idea is good and useful, same thing applies today.
Except the competition was essentially non existent and no one would copy your product with llm in a day
I wonder how long it'll be before they release the source for the earliest Windows versions. The fact that they still have the source for this very old DOS at least gives hope that they also do for old Windows.
The day they would make Windows 2000 codebase open source (or source available) would be the day I could die happy (although I'd probably be long dead anyways by the time there's a glimmerof chance of it happening). What a beautiful, smooth-running operating system it was.
I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a couple of years to repair it, no luck. It wasn't just about the files on the HD, it was easy enough to transplant the drive and read/write anything, it was that I really liked the way I had the environment configured. Sure, it was all kind of moot, but it became a kind of personal windmill to resurrect this old thing. In the end, I booted an XP CD in it, and selected 'upgrade', and voila, it was Duncan Idaho, back from the dead.
Anyway.. loved win2k, but not a fan of the hive.