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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#331

Post by miki123211 »

WalterBright wrote: post #300
Stratoscope wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like to play with language. English has a million words in it. Why not use it? And why stop there, I insert words from other languages, play with the spelling, use bad puns, allusions to movie dialog, whatever crosses my mind. 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…

If you're writing for the pleasure of writing, that's fine. I think such an approach is great for fiction books and poetry in particular.

If you're writing in a professional context, expect your words to be read by non-native English speakers or just people that are extremely tired and want to get their work done quickly.

I think using uncommon and domain-specific words is fine when nothing else is precise enough, but there's no reason to say "touch base" when "get in contact" works.

People should also be aware of cultural context, if you're being overly sensitive and using flowery corpo-speak, people from other cultures may miss your point entirely. A sentence like "John is doing great work, but I can see some areas for future improvement" reads very differently depending on the culture. "John isn't up to standards and needs to improve if he wants to stay with the company" is much clearer. "John fucking sucks and needs to do better" is overdoing it and using the excuse of being direct to be a jerk.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#332

Post by fuzztester »

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 editing command.com too, with debug.exe, to change some of the standard messages, or even command names, as you did.

Another cool DOS thing was that you could type Alt+255 (last 8-bit character code) as part of a filename. That appeared like a space character, so made it effectively "hidden" to those who did not know about the trick, because they could not type its name to list or edit it.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#335

Post by snvzz »

davidgnz wrote: post #316
snvzz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an actual open source version, which was retracted[0]. Fortunately for the commons, what's done is done. 0. https://archiveos.org/drdos/

Thats the DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project. Its a set of patches for the Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 kernel. The license file inside the original Caldera OpenDOS 7.01 source archive says: "Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source or binary form free of charge if (a) you are a student, faculty member or staff member of an educational institution (K-12, junior college, college or library), a…

I heard there was some resolution re: copyright mess in the last few years, but I currently cannot find anything about it.

To the point I might have dreamed it. Odd.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#336

Post by m4rtink »

tambourine_man wrote: post #318
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…

Many replies here argue that there are plenty of choices today for the hacker-inclined, many more than 40 years ago, which is true, of course. But I think what your post implies is that regular computers back then invited you to hack them. It might have awoken a curiosity that could have otherwise remained latent in many of us. A anecdote from the other side of the fence: Apple used to ship an app called ResEdit whos…

I think ots rose tinted glasses to a degree and survivorship bias - the learning curve was very steep, documentation lacking or absent + no one to ask for help. I was glad I could run some games on my C64 and never really got farther with it due to these limitations.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#337

Post by Narishma »

cesarb wrote: post #283
lproven wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My brain is rusty It is. Because: > but I feel like MSDOS 5.11 was where things finally just worked There was no MS-DOS 5.11. It went 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22. IBM had a few extra versions as the divorce was occurring at the time.

> There was no MS-DOS 5.11. There was Windows 3.11 which ran on top of MS-DOS 5.0, the two numbers probably got mixed in their memory.

There was also an MS-DOS 2.11.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#338

Post by anthk »

tracker1 wrote: post #106
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #5

Interesting MS-DOS history to be uncovered with the source code of MS-DOS 4. I wonder if we will see MS-DOS 5 or 6 soon? FreeDOS, an open source DOS clone, has been around for a while: https://freedos.org/ https://github.com/FDOS

I'd like to see NTVDM open sourced... It's been leaked and there are unofficial builds to get support into 64-bit Windows through the emulation code. Could be a huge boost for general support. Not sure how much work it would take for Linux or even just wine. But might displace DOSbox.

Get ReactOS' NTVDM. Mount the ISO, find the bigges CAB file on it (easy), extract it, and then use that DLL dropped into any DOS game folder.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#339

Post by PodgieTar »

fuzztester wrote: post #332
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 editing command.com too, with debug.exe, to change some of the standard messages, or even command names, as you did. Another cool DOS thing was that you could type Alt+255 (last 8-bit character code) as part of a filename. That appeared like a space character, so made it effectively "hidden" to those who did not know about the trick, because they could not type its name to list or edit it.

I used to do this on Windows XP to make my desktop look cleaner, all the files were ALT+255 repeated N times, or, more accurately, repeated a random number of times.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#340

Post by rep_lodsb »

captaincrunch wrote: post #271

The input handling for file names is shit -- the GETWORD and MUSTGETWORD routines, doesn't check if the file name (or) extension exceeds the length (8 characters for the filename and 3 for the extension). GETWORD: CALL GETLET JBE NONAM ;Exit if termination character DEC SI MUSTGETWORD: CALL GETLET JBE FILLNAM JCXZ MUSTGETWORD DEC CX CMP AL,"*" ;Check for ambiguous file specifier JNZ NOSTAR MOV AL,"?" REP STOSB NOSTAR…

If it's longer than 8.3, the name is shortened, or runs into the extension field. It's a design decision, not a bug:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071217-00/?p=24...

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