[HN Gopher] I work in DOS for an entire day (2014)
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I work in DOS for an entire day (2014)
Author : Tomte
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-07-05 14:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| don-code wrote:
| It's a neat idea that, thanks to the applications-not-protocols
| approach taken by many platforms today, probably isn't viable any
| longer.
|
| When the article was written, my workplace communicated over
| e-mail (IMAP-enabled), our calendars supported CalDAV, and we did
| have an instant messaging system that ran over extensions to SIP,
| which _was_ compatible with libpurple. We also all had voice
| phones on our desks for very-impromptu calls. The ironic part of
| all this: it was Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Lync. I at the
| time was using Linux with Pidgin and Evolution, there being no
| Microsoft clients for any of the stack.
|
| Nowadays, our stack is GApps with Slack, and a heathy dose of
| Zoom. To get Slack out of the way: good luck; the XMPP and IRC
| gateways were retired ages ago, and interactive API clients even
| today appear to be second-class citizens. GApps is interesting in
| that they do support standards like IMAP and CalDAV, but only if
| your organization allows for "insecure authentication" options,
| which mine does not. Otherwise, you're glued to a browser app
| that sometimes breaks in browsers that aren't Chrome. And let's
| not even start with Zoom.
|
| My point in saying this is: in 2014, this would have been seen as
| a cool project, and I'd bet some coworkers would've even
| encouraged me to try and get it working. In 2021, this is how I'd
| get fired.
| CTOSian wrote:
| well there is DesqviewX, so someone could use remote X apps , I
| am not sure if QEMM is working well with FreeDOS.
| ok123456 wrote:
| DESQview/X was X11R5 not X11R6. I'm not sure anything more
| complicated than xeyes would work.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Golang in DOS! "...and it was updated in March 2012 to include
| the Go programming language in addition to C, C++, and Fortran. "
|
| I wouldn't mind having Rust on 486 but it doesn't look like it
| will ever be possible from what I read about its architecture.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Rust can link 32-bit code that can run 16-bit segmented mode
| [0] and if you can figure out the right set of protected mode
| magick, you could almost certainly get it working in flat mode.
|
| I started working on a DOS-based project and played around with
| Rust before deciding that it was going to be tough and would
| not be as optimal as just dropping to C and using OpenWatcom
| which is pretty capable considering its age, IMO.
|
| [0] https://github.com/o8vm/rust_dos
| [deleted]
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I managed to compile for a 386 as a target for a no_std rust,
| but as far as running the compiler goes, might be SOL on that
| one.
|
| https://github.com/teknoman117/ts-3100-images/tree/master/ru...
|
| (for this SBC: https://docs.embeddedarm.com/TS-3100)
|
| My goal was to follow blog_os on this board for fun. Main
| sticky point is the 386 not having any hardware atomic
| operations (which didn't show up until 486).
|
| I recently got a current Gentoo base environment booting on a
| 133 MHz AM5x86 based industrial SBC and it takes 3 minutes to
| compile hello world in C++ (70 seconds for C) so I'm not super
| confident you'd even want to use rust compiler on a 486, even
| for "a day in a programmer's life from 30 years ago"
| experiment.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Technically, as a single-core CPU, all operations are atomic.
| /s
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I suppose I should say instructions which let you do
| critical sections without disabling preemption or
| interrupts =P
| mmastrac wrote:
| Hah yes. I got used to the CLI/STI pattern around perf-
| sensitive or concurrent code on <=386 back in the day.
|
| EDIT: though I wonder now if you could use the fact that
| flags are returned from basic memory ALU operations to
| implement some basic atomics.
| [deleted]
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"Many DOS applications that use TCP/IP use a TCP library rather
| than a system driver, and FreeDOS has two that are compatible
| with the Crynwr packet driver:
|
| _mTCP_ , still supported and accompanied by a handful of
| utilities (including an IRC client), and the venerable
|
| _Waterloo TCP (WATTCP)_ developed in the early 1990s. "
| tssva wrote:
| mTCP is small enough to be used easily on DOS systems all the
| way back to the original PC. I have several XT class systems
| which I have restored. I have a few 8-bit ISA NICs which I use
| along with the FTP server provided with mTCP to transfer files
| to them.
| ok123456 wrote:
| I would use a 90s version of Slackware over DOS. With DOS you
| have to fight with different DOS Extenders and all the pain
| associated with that.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Since DOS is a single-task system, fortunately you only have to
| fight them one at a time.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Unless you ran DESQview, of course.
| mmastrac wrote:
| You're still fighting them one at a time, just with very
| small timeslices.
| [deleted]
| theshadowknows wrote:
| So this makes me wonder what the smallest modern OS is that's
| usable for daily tasks (browsing, email, some light not taking).
| And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video
| editing, sound editing). I'd be curious to see what can be done
| on-device. I bet there's some cool stuff...time to google!
| ghaff wrote:
| Multimedia editing, especially video, is what kills you there.
| Not so much from an OS perspective. You can do a minimalist
| container Linux install but in terms of the resources you need
| on the system.
| handrous wrote:
| Any modern, major browser will bloat your install size &
| minimum system requirements (if you want to actually use the
| software you've got, that is).
|
| I recently used a very minimal install of Void on a machine
| that crushes what I had in, say, 2005, on a performance basis
| (2GB memory, dual-core Celeron clocked over 1Ghz, solid-state
| disk) and the whole system was slooooow and choppy even using
| mostly suckless software like dwm, including their Surf
| (webkit-based but otherwise as minimal as it gets) browser--if
| I opened even _one_ "web app" or more than a couple lighter
| pages at once.
|
| If you remove the requirement for a modern Web experience, we
| used to fit pretty damn good GUI operating systems on single
| live-boot floppy disks (QNX had one of these, IIRC, and it was
| great--much better UI responsiveness under load than a Linux
| desktop, kinda like BeOS but even tinier)
| genghizkhan wrote:
| If you're okay compiling your own kernel I'd wager you could
| get by on around 30 odd megabytes using the Alpine base image
| (5MB userland and the rest kernel), though it would not be
| sufficient to do any compilation on its own.
| exdsq wrote:
| How much would 'build-essentials' add to that do you reckon?
| prox wrote:
| I would go for Pi as well. The Pi3 I have can do most daily
| tasks, I assume the 4 is even better, especially for video
| editing (blender perhaps?)
| citrin_ru wrote:
| It's depend on what is considered usable for daily tasks. I
| don't think there is a modern OS as small as DOS which can run
| FireFox or Chromium, but NetBSD and OpenBSD have kernels
| smaller than FreeBSD and much smaller than Linux, but still can
| run most modern open-source software including browsers.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, I've got OpenBSD installed on my iMac G4 from ~2002.
| Runs fine, quite well in fact (and is fully up to date with
| modern security features)! Now if I were to put an SSD in
| there, it would be even better! Hmmm... weekend project added
| to the list... ;)
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Menuet32/64 is pretty small, and I think it runs a Webkit
| browser.
| papacho wrote:
| if by small you mean code size, Haiku can do all of that.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I spent a few hours playing with RISC OS on my pi 400, and it
| is a pretty complete system. The image download was less than
| 200MB.
| deckard1 wrote:
| QNX was almost this. I believe at one point you could even run
| Firefox or Chrome on it.
|
| > And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video
| editing, sound editing)
|
| Somewhat amusingly, an OS like DOS (or QNX) would probably be
| better at video/sound editing than any "modern" OS. It took a
| _long_ time for Linux to be able to do audio processing or
| other real-time low latency things. Even today you may have to
| tweak things a bit[1] depending on your use case. A video
| editor that has complete control over your machine would
| absolutely scream. A lightweight DOS with support for newer
| hardware (USB, PCIe, etc.) with a thin Vulkan /OpenGL and
| networking stack would probably be ideal for these types of
| apps.
|
| [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio
| VLM wrote:
| A chromebook.
|
| People don't do "on device" anymore outside of unusual
| situations.
| pavlov wrote:
| Mac OS 9 is probably the weirdest evolution of 1980s single-
| task computing into something you could still use as a daily
| driver.
|
| It was kept alive by two entirely disparate user groups: the
| iMac crowd who only used a browser (or the AOL client), and
| professional designer users who spent the entire day in Avid
| (or Pro Tools or After Effects or QuarkXPress or Photoshop).
| mattl wrote:
| You'd be surprised how much you can get done with Mac OS 9
| with Classzilla.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Yes, but Mac OS 9 (and any MultiFinder version of the classic
| Mac OS) at least presented the _illusion_ of multitasking.
| And it did multitask, as long as the apps cooperated and
| handed off to each other, and an extension didn 't go bang or
| smash into another one, and ...
|
| But, jokes aside, I still got a lot of work done in Mac OS 9
| back in the day, so it wasn't nearly that dire even if it was
| best not to peek under the hood.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It would be fun to dust off Turbo Pascal for a small utility.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I started working on a (not-yet-released) scripting language
| that can target DOS. Not public yet and needs more work to
| clean it up, but it can successfully build an EXE or COM that
| lets you easily target DOS to do something.
|
| https://github.com/mmastrac/kalos
|
| I have some other code that I haven't added to this project
| that allows you to do things like write text to the screen,
| etc.
| flatiron wrote:
| Fire it up in dosbox!
| herodoturtle wrote:
| This brings back memories of me, a naive and curious 11-year old
| keyboard adventurer, ignorantly running DriveSpace, in the
| pursuit of more space.
|
| Months later I discovered the file I'd accidentally created,
| which when deleted, gave me my hard drive space back.
|
| Since then I've been hooked on computer programming.
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| taftster wrote:
| Holy spam, batman.
| zh3 wrote:
| Depends what sort of work you're doing, but it's really not that
| hard and personally I find it great for focus (maybe it's like
| old school writers banging out a novel on a Remington). I've got
| at least half a dozen 386's and 486's that run DOS (diskless) to
| this day and the lovely thing is the lack of distraction.
| kencausey wrote:
| This could use a (2014). While this is a very recent re-post it
| clearly states that it is a re-post from 2014.
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(page generated 2021-07-06 23:02 UTC)