- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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Ah, the Quick and Dirty Operating System… we meet again.
How much you wanna bet that a select few turbo-nerds are racing to debug it or something.
i remember writing .bat files and pretending they were really fancy update scripts when i was like ten they did nothing but it was still fun :)
Please use punctuation.
punctuation is a scam created by the shadow government
yeah punctuations is silly who cares
Typicalcommingfromashillforbigwhitespace!
It isn’t. There’s a reason for it.
I still use bat h files and the system scheduler to automate a shocking amount of my job.
Like half of my job is writing .bat files to automate stuff locally and not tell my boss that all I do anymore is double click the right things in the right order…
You can put in a timeout command at the end, and then call the next .bat file.
For example “TIMEOUT /T 60” waits for 60 seconds before resuming, or you can override it by pressing any key.
So if you know how long the wait time between scripts is, just write a master.bat and call them in order, with adequate waiting time in between.
Okay so the dumb part is a lot of this is me abstracting away our complex build system. I’ve basically bubble-gummed a dedicated build system in top of it for only the tasks I do. At a certain point if I start adding configurations or timing I might as well just wrap it in gradle or something. But the system that I’m calling is already their attempt at simplifying another build system that’s underneath it that was written by the old guard using arcane sorcery. The whole thing is a mess
Or just use the
@CALLcommand to call them in order without having to guesstimate how long they run.This guy is a master bat-er
I had a job like that and powershell was a godsend. I let it slip when I accidentally set the multiplier for the delay randomiser too low and it did a months work in a morning. I ended up writing a guide for the others there when I left but sadly everyone but me had computers that supported newer versions of Windows where the scripts ended up broken. They asked me to come back and update it the Monday after I left. I asked if they would pay me to do it. They said no. Then I said no.
This is part of why I still have manual kickoffs for mine. Never need to worry about work getting done while I’m away or getting done suspiciously fast. Also they should have paid you lol, the dingdongs. Would cost a lot more just in work lost having someone else spend time deciphering and fixing it. They could always get someone else up to speed with the system after it is fixed by you so there’s little or no down time
Next step, bind them to unused keys on your keyboard and press them in the right order
I suggest Autohotkey ;)
op’s job is now turning on the computer and setting off ahk.
Just set up a drinking bird to set off AHK.
op’s job is now overseeing a drinking bird
Wow a promotion; fancy!
i propose to create a menu in which you can define what batchfiles to run in what order. its been a while since i worked with batch files, but if memory serves right, that should be doable, no?
Do you ever list your job title as Batman?
only if they keep the it room as dark as possible and whenever someone walks in for help they jump up onto the desk with a flashlight and yell "I’M BATMAN’ while wearing a cape and underpants.
Tra-la-la!
50% hero. 100% cotton.
No, because the IRS wants to tax Batman
They were important to boot games that needed most of your limited memory.
640k should be enough for anybody
tell that my mouse driver, the soundblaster driver and the cdrom driver fighting over every single byte of that precious ram 😩
Bill Gates denied saying this, by the way.
Or to play the demo made by the warez group that cracked it before launching the game.
I guess we now have a timeframe in which to expect the release of Windows.
30+ years after death. Better than 70+ years of copyright 🤷
Is this useful for hobbyists besides poking around and seeking the design philosophy at work back then?
Like would there be any advantage or reason to implement this in a home project? For example maybe that it’s lightweight and has some rare compatibility or anything like that?
I think its interesting from a historical perspective.
I imagine people will examine the code, find easter eggs, bugs, unknown features, amusing comments etc.
I look forward to seeing what is found.
Looking forward to the “when I wrote this code, only god and I knew how it works. Now only god knows” comments.
There are a lot of decades old embedded systems out there. Every so often you hear about a big company still relying on floppy disks and other old tech, including major railways and airplane companies. Having the source code will help with debugging better than having to disassemble or other reverse engineering.
Would this have Bill’s code in it ? Or was he off the shop floor by then ??
Did Gates write any code? Wasn’t he the marketing guy?
You’re thinking of Shit Jobs, the FruitCo charlatan. Gates’ pancake sort algorithm held the speed record for 30 years.
His last product was the OS for the Tandy model 100 in 1983.
I’d be surprised if Windows 11 didn’t still have bill’s code in it
I’d be surprised if Bill had written anything substantial in decades tbh.
Both of these comments are probably true.
Windows is just shit piled on top of shit and sold as something new. It’s so bloated so they can maintain backwards compatibility. So original code is definitely in Windows 11.
Ever hear of Windows NT? Legacy DOS code was relegated to userspace long ago. And NT was designed by Dave Cutler, the guy who designed VMS and RSX-11. Most certainly not “shit piled on top of shit.” Unix could have learned a thing or two from Dave but by then it was too late; the plane had very much taken off.
So not 3? Why not, because it was the most successful or something? 🤷Plus I never even heard of 4 before. I’m going to have to look that up.Bah, I was thinking of windows. I need to get some sleep.
As far as Windows goes, 95 was actually version 4.00.950 for the first version.
98 was 4.1, 2000 was 5.0, XP 5.1, Vista 6.0, 7 was 6.1, 8 was 6.2, 8.1 = 6.3
Then they jumped to 10 in both the name and internal version.
Windows 11 is still 10.0.x though.
Woah MIT license. That’s a lot more permissive than I expected.
Look at them, embracing open source like this, how wonderful.
I’m sure the only reason why they waited this long is that they needed to make sure it’s old enough that the companies they stole code from can’t sue.
Can’t wait for the OSS community to fork it and build some cool shit on top of this /s
Well, this should be incredibly useful for Dosbox and improving playability of retro games, right?
Perhaps, if there are some very specific compatibility issues that haven’t been solved yet.
That said, MS-DOS 4 isn’t even the most recent version, the last one was 6.22 to my knowledge, and IIRC a lot of games tended to require at least version 5 or 6.
And look at all of they ways they are extending the open source community via github and copilot!
They sure are extinguishing any posible fear I may have about the absolutely destroying anything beautiful.
Did they use source control of any kind back then?
Soke vrsions of DOS used a VCS named Source Library Manager, SLM, aka Slime. Later, it became Microsoft Delta, and eventually SourceSafe, then they switched to SourceDepot, which was a flavor of Perforce.
Where is the ctrl+alt+del function defined? I just want to see what made that sequence work. I’d also be interested in where ctrl+break is defined.
Ctrl+alt+delete was a separate interrupt line direct from the keyboard. That is, when you pressed the three keys, the interrupt signal was asserted, causing the CPU to jump to the interrupt service routine, which should be in the source code package.
is it in the source code, or is it just passed right to BIOS?
It was originally a BIOS interrupt, but eventually got captured by the OS. Here’s Dave Bradley talking about inventing it https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_lg7w8gAXQ
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/DOS/CTRLC.ASM
; The user has returned to us.
So ominous.
; Well... time to abort the user.
GoodbyeToo late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS already exists
ReactOS is a Windows clone though, not an MS-DOS one…
And it’s cloning NT
That is different source code, doing way more.
how is reactos these days? is it a drop-in replacement for windblows yet?
not quite. it works for some things, but still a lot to go!
still can’t run on bare metal unless you have very specific hardware
Wake me up when they open source Windows 10/11.
I think nobody wants that. I can think of a better way to fuck up your hardware and it pulls nails too.
Microsoft…you keep it. We good.
Let’s wait until 2050s.
That’s too optimistic, haha!
Should have just before the heat death of the universe (if we are lucky)
when rust
