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Open Sourcing DOS 4

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Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#361

Post by cdchn »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #216
stubborngoat wrote: post #183

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…

I think a lot of people left Microsoft to start/join Valve, foremost of which Gabe Newell himself.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#362

Post by cdchn »

sebtron wrote: post #237
conkeisterdoor wrote: post #72

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 :)

TP was apparently someones name before they force-pushed to change it too.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#363

Post by cdchn »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #129
moody__ wrote: post #73

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…

For some insight, look how people are combing for curse words/ devs making jokes about people being brain damaged etc. There is no upside for the company, and all that has to happen is some unsavory politically incorrect joke to get missed from sanitization and the are on the cancelled chopping block.

Part of me thinks that its not cancellation but more not wanting to personally insult people, by name, in a medium that you never thought anybody but a handful of people might see (and certainly never expected to be published verbatim for the entire world to see) from 35 years ago (maybe people who wrote those comments were a bit less mature)

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#364

Post by cdchn »

HeckFeck wrote: post #221
NewsaHackO wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some insight, look how people are combing for curse words/ devs making jokes about people being brain damaged etc. There is no upside for the company, and all that has to happen is some unsavory politically incorrect joke to get missed from sanitization and the are on the cancelled chopping block.

I think I lost it when they suggested we stop using the term 'sanity check' or 'sane defaults' because they might offend, well, brain damaged people. I am close to writing a browser extension that does a find and replace to reverse change these imposed, humourless, coddled changes.

How dare people attempt to be more empathetic towards others.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#365

Post by cdchn »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #113
Stratoscope wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Or sometimes people voluntarily make these changes not because someone has a problem, but because they're considerate of other people.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#366

Post by cdchn »

at_a_remove wrote: post #168
eesmith wrote: post #165

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…

>Recommending just "test" is ... well, double-plus ungood, in the sense that we now have no idea of the qualities of this test and how it could be distinguished from some other test. Hard pass.

Describe the difference between a test and a "sanity test?"

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#367

Post by cdchn »

eesmith wrote: post #243
at_a_remove wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I think this even is contradictory for what a lot of people think a "sanity test" means. A "test" may check that something is correct, where a sanity test would be a lower fidelity test that simply checks that something is not obviously wrong.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#368

Post by cdchn »

justinclift wrote: post #190
Stratoscope wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Many software developers like me have faced challenges to our mental health. It's a stressful industry at times, probably almost everyone has had crap times at one point or another. And then there's Covid, which affected everyone. Doesn't mean every mention of the word "sanity" needs to be expunged from our language though. :( :( :( That way lies er... madness. (!) ;)

Or maybe you, having faced those challenges, next time your fingers hover over the keys to type "sanity" simply pick another, perhaps more descriptive word.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#369

Post by lproven »

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 indeed a Windows 3.11 and the much more common Windows for Workgroups 3.11 which was a profoundly different product (32-bit disk subsystem & 32-bit networking subsystem -- the first time these pillars of Win9x went out into the world.)

But neither of them ran on any particular version of DOS. They ran on PC DOS, MS-DOS and DR-DOS -- although Microsoft tried very hard to block the latter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

They ran on DOS 3.3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

There's nothing at all that links them especially to MS-DOS 5.

Re: Open Sourcing DOS 4

#370

Post by HeckFeck »

cdchn wrote: post #364
HeckFeck wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I lost it when they suggested we stop using the term 'sanity check' or 'sane defaults' because they might offend, well, brain damaged people. I am close to writing a browser extension that does a find and replace to reverse change these imposed, humourless, coddled changes.

How dare people attempt to be more empathetic towards others.

It's certainly about a feeling, and I think superiority has more to do with it than 'empathy'. This much is clear with the aggression, bullying and moral grandstanding that's usually behind the language police.

I empathise with myself first, and will use what ever word feels right in the situation. I'd rather speak my mind than please everyone. That's sanity for me and for many others.

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