DOS Nostalgia - an old timer's reflections
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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