[HN Gopher] Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
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Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
Author : kencausey
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-01-07 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| userbinator wrote:
| _The first person to make this discovery (as far as we can tell)
| was Daniel B. Sedory aka The Starman, whose illustrated PC DOS
| 1.1 boot sector page is much nicer than anything I could put
| together._
|
| I highly recommend his site too --- there's plenty of boot-sector
| analyses there, explanations of the PC boot process, and other
| low-level information presented in fast-loading, script-free ad-
| free HTML from someone whose goal isn't to make a quick $$$, but
| rather to share information freely. In other words, a great
| resource of the "document web".
|
| As for this article, it also reminds me of "junk DNA" sequences,
| which could have similar relevance to biological historians.
| iforgotmypass wrote:
| Perhaps someone could help out solve my 20 year old mystery? When
| I was a kid, I had briefly access to a computer. My memory might
| be mistaken on the details, but I just can't find on Google what
| kind of computer it was. It had 5 inch floppies, I am pretty sure
| that games on it only used four colors (cyan, magenta, white,
| black). I think it had joystick similar to Atari's. It had Bubble
| Bobble game.
|
| Edit: Photos of Commodore computers look really close to what I
| remember, but not exactly. Also, Latvia (where I live) just
| recently had regained independece from USSR and it was a time
| when the market was flooded with clones for everything. E.g.
| instead of NES kids had famiclones like Zhiliton, UFO or in my
| case, I think it was Dendy.
|
| Edit: Floppy reader was in-built, not external, as far as I
| remember.
|
| Edit: Sorry, more like 30-year mystery. Somewhere around
| beginning of 90s.
|
| Edit: I think it also had game Alley Cat.
|
| Edit: Thank you everyone for chiming in! This inspired me and
| gave extra keywords for further investigation and narrowing down
| the exact model / make. Gonna continue searching on Sunday.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html has
| "eXoDOS/eXo/eXoDOS/Bubble Bobble (1988).zip" which you could
| try with DOSBox. Other commenters mentioned that the DOS
| screenshots use the red/green/yellow CGA palette but plenty of
| CGA games switched video modes for a tiny extra bit of variety.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I just played it and it's pretty fun. If I force CGA mode,
| the Taito title screen is in white/cyan/magenta but the rest
| of the game (first two levels at least) are in
| yellow/green/red.
| rzzzt wrote:
| On that note, does anyone know whether the original IBM TTL
| monitors supported "hardware emulation" of alternative
| palettes?
|
| On a compatible Amptron(?) display we had, the brightness and
| contrast pots had an integrated switch. If you pulled on the
| brightness adjuster, it switched to a green-black monochrome
| palette, while the contrast control switched it to the red-
| green-yellow palette.
| samwillis wrote:
| Could it have been a BBC Micro?
|
| They look a little the commodore but have 8 colours from memory
| though...
|
| Right time period.
|
| Some had a built in joystick i think from memory but can't find
| any photos from a quick search.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Alley Cat also ran on the PCjr: https://oldcomputers.net/ibm-
| pcjr.html
| gtirloni wrote:
| Check here: https://computerhistory.org/
| jacquesm wrote:
| That sounds like CGA. Could have been any IBM compatible, can
| you describe the shape of the case and whether or not the
| floppy drive(s) were built in or external?
| samwillis wrote:
| I think we need a little more info, roughy date, location?
|
| Some computers were very regional.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| You could click through the different platforms bubble bobble
| was released for on mobygames to see which one looks familiar.
| The DOS version seems to have had a CGA 4-color mode but it
| wasn't cyan/magenta. Amstrad CPC looks like a candidate:
|
| https://www.mobygames.com/game/cpc/bubble-bobble/screenshots
| teddyh wrote:
| The colors sound like normal PC CGA graphics, but the joystick
| sounds like maybe a PCjr (or compatible), which, IIRC,
| sometimes came with a joystick, since the machine itself had
| built-in joystick ports. The CGA graphics could be explained by
| the games being written for PC CGA graphics, and not the
| better, but obscure, PCjr graphics.
|
| But... 20 years? That's like, 2002. PCs were abundant then, and
| CGA graphics were already ancient, and use of joysticks in
| games were already relatively uncommon; mouse & keyboards were
| the norm.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Is PC DOS the predecessor to MS-DOS, made strictly for IBM? How
| many versions were there and when did Microsoft change it?
| thanatos519 wrote:
| It was IBM's OEM version of MS-DOS, more or less.
|
| Random Google result:
| https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/my-dos-versi...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes. PC DOS 7.1 was the last version, i.e. it continued
| development in parallel with MS-DOS. The whole history can be
| found here [1]. All versions including their amazing (they're
| really good) manuals are available on WinWorld [2].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS
|
| 2. https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-dos/1x
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There's a version table on Wikipedia, probably.
|
| The history of DOS is actually really complicated, arguably
| even moreso than UNIX, so apologies for the mess I'm about to
| throw upon you. Because, before we can even talk about DOS, we
| need to talk about two other technologies IBM wanted in their
| new PC: CP/M and BASIC. CP/M was the closest thing to a
| standard disk operating system in the microcomputer world, and
| BASIC was the JavaScript of the 1980s. IBM absolutely needed
| both if they wanted to sell computers.
|
| Microsoft was involved with the IBM PC because IBM needed a
| BASIC interpreter. The OS would have come from Digital
| Research. But, there was a problem: IBM wanted to use Intel's
| 8088 chip. CP/M only worked on the incompatible[0], older 8080,
| and CP/M-86 had been delayed for so long that a company called
| Seattle Computer Products (SCP[1]) started writing their own
| 8086 DOS instead. They called it the Quick and Dirty Operating
| System (QDOS). Bill Gates got wind of IBM's OS problems, bought
| SCP and QDOS, and sold it to IBM so the PC could ship on time
| with an OS: "The IBM Personal Computer DOS", or "PC-DOS".
|
| So, to answer your first question strictly; PC-DOS was not made
| for IBM. It was made for SCP's own S-100 machines first.
| However, in a sense, it _was_ made for IBM, in that Microsoft
| made plenty of customizations for them and it contains drivers
| specific to IBM machines. Bill Gates stipulated that they 'd
| retain ownership of the OS; but the intended licensing model
| was for other PC vendors to buy the source code and customize
| it to their own, incompatible architectures. This was the
| licensing model CP/M used[2]; such a machine would be DOS-
| compatible but not run any IBM software.
|
| Later on, of course, Compaq was able to legally reimplement the
| IBM BIOS, creating an "IBM-compatible" machine; and then
| everyone else in the industry figured out how to do the same
| and drastically undercut IBM. So MS-DOS was eventually turned
| from an OEM licensable into a consumer software product that
| would work on a "standard PC". Digital Research also got into
| the consumer OS market with DR-DOS, which Microsoft
| contemplated killing through underhanded tactics[3] but was
| able to outcompete by better OEM relationships. There's also
| legally distinct reimplementations of MS-DOS _itself_ , such as
| DIP-DOS, X-DOS, and later FreeDOS.
|
| [0] Blame Federico Faggin jumping ship and taking the patents
| with him. Or the Intel manager who demanded he show up to work
| on time.
|
| [1] Not a front for the SCP Foundation. Or, at least that's
| what THEY want you to know!
|
| [2] This licensing model also persisted into early Windows;
| there are special OEM versions of Windows 1.0 that run on
| Zenith Data Systems machines. It's also the reason why OS/2 1.x
| comes in "IBM" and "Microsoft" flavors. Microsoft OS/2 was more
| of a devkit for OEMs who were expected to customize OS/2 in the
| same way that they were supposed to customize DOS. But it also
| shipped with technologies that IBM OS/2 didn't have, like LADDR
| - pluggable disk I/O drivers that would later be reworked into
| Windows 95.
|
| I should also note that the "DOS-compatible" business model
| looks a lot like Android fragmentation if you squint at it a
| little. Remember how I said this was more complicated than
| UNIX?
|
| [3] The idea was to have Windows 2 or 3 throw fake, non-fatal
| error messages at the user if it was running on DR-DOS.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I love this. This is what makes the internet the beautiful,
| amazing place that it is - anyone can publish and you get these
| highly specialized, well-written, informative articles on
| esoteric topics.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Especially stuff you might have come across 40 years ago and
| it's been sitting at the back of your brain ever since.
|
| I recently closed a 20-something year mystery to do with a
| weird TV advert from the UK in the late 90s. I could never
| figure out why a certain poster for a musician was on the wall
| in a room. Fast forward to 2021 and I managed to hunt down the
| writer of the advert who had some background info, and then put
| me in touch with the director and we figured it out and had a
| laugh about it. And I contacted the musician who was very happy
| to also have the mystery closed. It's nice to check off a
| 20-year-old item on your TO DO list.
| jnsie wrote:
| That sounds really interesting. Any chance you could share
| more details?
| thom wrote:
| Very much seconded!
| creeble wrote:
| 3rded!
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| This is exactly why I miss IMDB's "I need to know" board. You
| could post a partially correct memory snippet from decades
| ago and someone would chime in with the answer. I had
| memories of movies I'd watched on TV as a young child. I had
| no name or context, but simply little moments stuck in my
| brain, and someone was able to resolve those to a title.
|
| The closing of the IMDB message boards was a terrible loss
| IMO. You could visit an obscure actors message board, and you
| might run into someone who knew them. You could discuss a
| movie's intricacies with someone, and share theories, etc, on
| the specific board for that movie. It was a goldmine for
| movie fans, and I still miss it.
| jorvi wrote:
| I wish there was something like that for books.
|
| I remember reading a book in my youth about a kid that
| lived in a shielded city with an AI controlling it with the
| assignment to keep everyone 'happy' (= docile). He/she
| breaks protocol and gets ejected through a trash chute.
| Meets an old man. Crossed a wasteland and finds old ruins,
| learns something and then blows up the shielding of the
| city to make it free again.
|
| In the Dutch translation either the old man or the main
| character was called 'gull' or 'sea gull'. I've posted on a
| few subreddits and forums with people pretty much ignoring,
| and I have scoured Google without much results neither.
| quercusa wrote:
| Try
| https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-
| ident... - they solve this kind of thing all the time.
| abbeyj wrote:
| Maybe
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Fall_of_Night
| or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars ?
| Also sounds similar to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run but doesn't
| quite match.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've had the same with some music and even from pretty
| vague descriptions about tempo and content some people were
| able to find a couple of pieces that I thought I'd never
| hear again.
| abbeyj wrote:
| You might want to try
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| There's a really good NPR podcast about this very kind of
| thing, where there's a guy who's been hunting down a
| particular "musical tone" for more than a decade, and it
| talks both about how hard it is to be the kind of person that
| _needs_ those answers, the process of arriving at an answer
| (including many, many false starts and red herrings), and the
| satisfaction that comes from figuring it out.
|
| I don't want to spoil it, but the tremendous tragedy/irony is
| that a certain class of people within the IT industry could
| have answered the guy's question (or at least put him
| definitively on the right track) after hearing it just one
| time, which I think is actually a really important lesson to
| fully internalize: whatever thing that's been
| haunting/daunting you, if you get lucky enough to just
| mention it in front of that one right person you'll be
| immediately closer to an answer than if you spent literally
| ten years chasing it without their insight.
|
| I'm not a huge podcast (or any audio/visual media) advocate,
| but this one is worth listening to if you're stuck in the car
| or something:
|
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/516/stuck-in-the-
| middle/act...
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| If you like that one, you may enjoy this one too (which has
| much more of a mystery to it imho)
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| I was listening to that episode while riding a bus and I
| was almost screaming internally the whole time. I knew
| exactly what that song was and by whom, and had a dusty
| old low quality mp3 still on some harddrive at home,
| possibly acquired through less than legal means at least
| some 15 years ago.
| [deleted]
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