DOS Nostalgia - an old timer's reflections
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Yeah man. That c64 rocked! I wrote a text editor in 6502 asm (ok, ok, 6510 asm TECHNICALLY) at $C000 using up only 3K ;) Try -THAT- with c++ on XP... But I don't think kids these days have it much easier than we did. Back then, we were close to the machine. The machine grew up around us. Today, kids are so far away from the machine that they may never find it. I miss flipping the on switch and -BAM- less than a sec later you're in the basic interpretter. It whispers "Ready." to you and begs you to enter some code :) I wish my kids had a basic interpretter to do screen block graphics with via cursor movement. But you just can't do that anymore...:( No more Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Stev e;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;St eve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve; Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Stev e;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;St eve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve; Remember that? Goin to the dept store, keyin in 10 PRINT "Steve;" 20 GOTO 10 RUN and watchin it scroll on...:) My biggest beef is that computer science is de-volving from art down into a lowly science. And consequently I'm outa work! Now even a stupid (and i MEAN stupid) business major can build a db app (sorry - web app). Kinda sucks to have 12 years of Oracle and C++ experience when you need your resume to say SqlServer and C#... Ok. I'll quit it. L8r daze...:) ...Steve
Steve Hazel wrote: Kinda sucks to have 12 years of Oracle and C++ experience when you need your resume to say SqlServer and C#... Man, I hear what you're saying... of course, one of the issues that we programmers are faced with is keeping up witht the technology. I'm usually one cycle behind the current trend... especially after being one of those early Java adopters... I've not touched Java since '98. I have had some training in .NET and will probably continue to use/learn it... but I do miss those old 8bit days.... C=64. Now that I think about it I miss the old 16/32bit days of the Amiga :) Oh well. Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser When access is allowed to a member, it said to be accessible. Otherwise, it is inaccessible. - MSDN:C# Programmer's Reference
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0 byte addressing with the old 6502 - memory tricks - interrupt swapping - Dr. Dobbs magazine - the old Transactor mag - Writing games in ASM and then writing the basic loader to set it up using peek and poke . No printer drivers - you wrote your own - 64K memory segments - overlays - Yea I miss it too. NOT :) Richard In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. Orson Welles
God yes, printer drivers were the worst. Drove me batty, especially when the odd client would come along with a non-standard wide-format dot matrix. Threw out the reporting all together. Arrggh!
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaMacbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.
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How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nish, old man, one day you will look back twenty years from now and sigh wistfully about the good old days with Windows XP, .NET and having to download at sub-light speed speeds. DOS was fun, but things certainly are for the better now.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South AfricaMacbeth muttered: I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er DavidW wrote: You are totally mad. Nice.
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How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
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How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? You mean like when I click "Start", "run...", type in "cmd" and hit enter? You mean the DOS window that comes up? Nostalgic??? Heck. It's still there! Oh wait, what's that funny border, blue title, and scrollbar on the right? Oh well. Must be a new version of DOS! Nishant S wrote: When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Same bugs. Different clients. Have there been any real advances in the art of programming? A resounding NO! And don't give me any shit about OOD/OOP, C#, relational databases, web, etc. All this stuff has merely shuffled around "the problem", it hasn't done squat to solve it. Nishant S wrote: Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Run. (gee, how appropriate that old BASIC command still is). :-D Marc Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's f*cked up universe simulator.
Sensitivity and ethnic diversity means celebrating difference, not hiding from it. - Christian Graus
Every line of code is a liability - Taka Muraoka
Microsoft deliberately adds arbitrary layers of complexity to make it difficult to deliver Windows features on non-Windows platforms--Microsoft's "Halloween files" -
Yeah man. That c64 rocked! I wrote a text editor in 6502 asm (ok, ok, 6510 asm TECHNICALLY) at $C000 using up only 3K ;) Try -THAT- with c++ on XP... But I don't think kids these days have it much easier than we did. Back then, we were close to the machine. The machine grew up around us. Today, kids are so far away from the machine that they may never find it. I miss flipping the on switch and -BAM- less than a sec later you're in the basic interpretter. It whispers "Ready." to you and begs you to enter some code :) I wish my kids had a basic interpretter to do screen block graphics with via cursor movement. But you just can't do that anymore...:( No more Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Stev e;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;St eve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve; Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Stev e;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve;St eve;Steve;Steve;Steve;Steve; Remember that? Goin to the dept store, keyin in 10 PRINT "Steve;" 20 GOTO 10 RUN and watchin it scroll on...:) My biggest beef is that computer science is de-volving from art down into a lowly science. And consequently I'm outa work! Now even a stupid (and i MEAN stupid) business major can build a db app (sorry - web app). Kinda sucks to have 12 years of Oracle and C++ experience when you need your resume to say SqlServer and C#... Ok. I'll quit it. L8r daze...:) ...Steve
What, A C64. You were really way up there weren't ya? :) My family's first computer was the Vic-20. Yep Vic-20. A C64 was like "WOW". I remember the old "COMPUTE" magazines where they gave you entire programs you had to type in with a binary loader. One byte at a time. They provided checksums to guarantee that it worked, but hey, it did. Saved them off to the tape drive attached to the machine when we were finished. I guess it kinda worked. We then moved up to an IBM PC. Not that fancy IBM PC XT model. We had 5 expansion slots to their 8. 2 5.25 drives, we did have a 4 color princeton monitor though. Kinda cool. I remember hanging out at "Computerland" trying to obscond with old chips to fill out our memory board. We never did get the thing up to 640K. We maxed it at 584 or something goofy like that. Oh well. The good old days. Strange. Even today, one of my most used programs is the dos prompt. I wonder why. Death to an age gone by. :(( Nick
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How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Don't even get me started...:laugh: Those were the days, going through the machine replacing triodes every morning if the heaters weren't glowing brightly, dusting and lightly oiling the little cogs in the printers, firing up the boiler with an armload of wood to build up enough steam to run the generator... We didn't have 'C'; we had to program in 'B'. But I miss my stone axe, too.:-O It is ok for women not to like sports, so long as they nod in the right places and bring beers at the right times.
Paul Watson, on Sports - 2/10/2003 -
How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Nishant S wrote: which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram You used a 'monster' machine man! I worked on a Tandy 1000 with a whole 64K of RAM and one 5 1/2 inch floppy drive. I used Turbo Pascal 1.0 and GWBasic back then. Nishant S wrote: PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor Do you remember Copy2PC and Norton Commander? Those were hot tools too! Nishant S wrote: Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers I started working for an antivirus company in 1990 and had to code 50% assembly and 50% c. I think I knew everything there was to know about DOS internals, and I'm not kidding! To bypass stealth viruses I wrote the the disk access layer programming the HDD and FDC controllers directly. Oh man! That was fun!
There are only 10 kind of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Nishant S wrote: Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers dont forget the undocumented InDos flag u needed to open files from the tsr without screwing up the 'other' apps file handles hehehe i think i prefer p4's and 512mb ram and windows / linux / macos ... (well maybe not macos)
l a u r e n wrote: ont forget the undocumented InDos flag u needed to open files from the tsr without screwing up the 'other' apps file handles So the lady had several aces under her sleeves! This wasn't very common knowledge, except for hackers (in the good sense of the word).
There are only 10 kind of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
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l a u r e n wrote: ont forget the undocumented InDos flag u needed to open files from the tsr without screwing up the 'other' apps file handles So the lady had several aces under her sleeves! This wasn't very common knowledge, except for hackers (in the good sense of the word).
There are only 10 kind of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
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How many of you feel nostalgic when you see something that reminds you of the good old DOS days? I mean when I think of all the 16 bit asm fun we had using Masm/Tasm, the first exposure to C using Turbo-C (not ++) which we ran on an 8088 machine with 640 Kb ram and no hard disk. We used 3 5.25 inch 360 Kb floppies to run TC :-) And er also a bit of GWBASIC (and later Turbo Basic), but we used to all sorts of cool stuff with it :-) The best game we had was Digger and Prince of Persia (the first version). The monitor was a phospor green monochrome but it could get 15 shades of green and 15 blinking ones too. PCTools and Norton Disk Doctor were reverred tools. Writing a TSR using Int27h was considered the achievement target for newbie hackers. Ah, that was life. When I think of my younger days I wish I could go back to it. Now I see these little youngsters running around playing with .NET and XP and stuff!!! Nish
Author of the romantic comedy Summer Love and Some more Cricket [New Win] Review by Shog9 Click here for review[NW]
Those were they days! I started out with TC++ 2.0, then upgraded to TC++ 3.0. I never liked Borland C++ - it was just big and bloated. Turbodebugger! TASM! TLink! Borland! Times have passed :( -- Shine, enlighten me - shine Shine, awaken me - shine Shine for all your suffering - shine