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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#341

Post by Sakos »

ssdspoimdsjvv wrote: post #198
saagarjha wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No upside for the company? Do you not see all the people who are delighted to be able to browse the code?

No commercial upside for sure. Just some extra reputation points among a very niche group and maybe some happy employees.

The historical value is invaluable for our species, especially in the far future. There is a moral imperative for this kind of thing to be made available for posterity that, in my opinion, completely overshadows any commercial, copyright or political correctness concerns.

Frankly, there should be regulations guaranteeing source code release after a few decades, and that all code, including third party code, is released from copyright protection. In return, companies should be granted legal protection from any potential legal consequences. It was over 30 years ago. The idea that somebody should be able to sue Microsoft for copying code or a third party can sue them for releasing it or that they should in any way be punished for unsavory language used THIRTY years ago is clearly utter insanity.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#342

Post by snickerer »

schandur wrote: post #327
andsoitis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Kids with a hacker mentality (let's face it, even in the 80s those of us who hacked around with DOS etc. were the teeny tiny minority) have more options than ever before, including but not limited to FreeDOS, Linux, or a bunch of others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-sour…

You said the magic keyword: "curiosity", when it comes to computers and tech at least. Something that I find severely lacking among - for lack of a better term - Gen Z.

The youth of today simply don't have it in them! Unlike us back then, they're just not as cool, not as strong, not as smart...

This complaint is as old as mankind and has always been wrong. It seems to be a feature of human thinking that we glorify the memory of our own youth.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#343

Post by blkhawk »

cout wrote: post #250
blkhawk wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

windowblinds is a window decoration customizer - LiteStep does nothing of the sort :) LiteStep completely replaces explorer.exe as the shell host and you can then customize what functions you want to have in your UI. The windows themself would stay looking the same.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#344

Post by lproven »

garaetjjte wrote: post #294
lproven wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, still files called `.DOC` but with a different internal format.

There have been at least 3 successive MS Word file formats:

Word for DOS, WinWord 1/2/6/95: old .DOC format

(I think this also applies to Classic MacOS Word 1-5.)

Word 97, 2000, XP, 2003: new .DOC format

(Classic MacOS Word 98, X and 2001 were based on a port of the Windows codebase. Mac OS X Word 2004 and later are OS X-only, but are still based on the Windows codebase and use the same file formats.)

Word 2007-365: new Zipped XML format, .DOCX

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#345

Post by cmer »

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 liked changing the copyright company name to my own name. Made me feel like such a boss.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#346

Post by hnlmorg »

m4rtink wrote: post #336
tambourine_man wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The old 8bit micros from the c64 era had plenty of documentation. Those computers even shipped the schematics of their hardware, let alone a manual for BASIC.

I literally learned to program by reading those manuals

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#347

Post by orthoxerox »

schandur wrote: post #327
andsoitis wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Kids with a hacker mentality (let's face it, even in the 80s those of us who hacked around with DOS etc. were the teeny tiny minority) have more options than ever before, including but not limited to FreeDOS, Linux, or a bunch of others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-sour…

You said the magic keyword: "curiosity", when it comes to computers and tech at least. Something that I find severely lacking among - for lack of a better term - Gen Z.

It's the difference between hackers and users. You probably don't rebuild your car's transmission and don't build your own long-distance radio, but there are people that do it for fun. However, there was a time when both drivers and operators consisted mainly of people that hacked on cars and radios. Some of the hackers were involuntary hackers and gladly became users when cars became appliances.

The same applies to PCs. Gen X and older Millennials had to become hackers just to get the sound working in their newest game, so if you saw a guy on IRC you knew he was a fellow hacker. Now everyone is online, including people who would simply not use a PC back in the 80's or 90's. They can afford to treat their personal computing devices the way I treat my personal commuting device: fuel goes into this hole, I need to consult the manual to open the boot to top up window washing fluid, the rest I happily delegate to a professional. But the hackers are still there: grease monkeys, DXers, hackers proper.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#348

Post by stikit »

sponaugle wrote: post #276
at_a_remove wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed - Space is a key for being able to collect and restore this kind of stuff. I have most of my working machine lined up along a wall in one of my garage/lab areas ( https://youtu.be/XHvdqB6LSg0 ). My wife has pretty much no idea what those computers are for, and my daughter just wants to play Oregon Trail on them. They are fun to collect and restore. It is also helpful to be good at replacing capacitors. ;). Tho…

Amazing collection. Thanks for posting! Could you share a bit of your process for finding and restoring? The work involved must have been extensive.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#350

Post by GnarfGnarf »

andsoitis wrote: post #258
grishka wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS is notorious for this. By default, it would only run binaries signed with an Apple-issued certificate. You can bypass this multiple different ways, of course, but that requires knowing that it can be bypassed in the first place. Then there are mobile OSes where you don't get to see the binaries at all. Yes you can repack an apk but again, that's a more involved process requiring specific tools and knowledge (an…

> MacOS is notorious for this. By default, it would only run binaries signed with an Apple-issued certificate. You can bypass this multiple different ways, of course, but that requires knowing that it can be bypassed in the first place. What do you mean? When I compile something with a myriad of different language stacks or compiler toolchains, I'm not aware of an Apple-issued certificate ever being involved and thos…

It won’t run on another user’s computer unless it’s been Notarized.
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