[HN Gopher] ST-DOS
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       ST-DOS
        
       Author : snvzz
       Score  : 193 points
       Date   : 2024-03-28 04:14 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sininenankka.dy.fi)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sininenankka.dy.fi)
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | ST as in Atari?
        
         | xenophonf wrote:
         | Maybe! Could also be ST as in Sami Tikkanen, the author.
         | 
         | Edit: Ooh, looks like ST-DOS is this person's MS-DOS clone.
         | Nifty!
        
           | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
           | St.DOS (For TempleOS)
        
         | kqr wrote:
         | Confusingly, the operating system of the ST was called TOS -
         | The Operating System.
        
           | efrecon wrote:
           | or Tramiel Operating System?
        
             | bregma wrote:
             | The ST was named using Sam Tramiel's initials, so I always
             | assumed TOS was Tramiel Operating System. It's all Tramiel
             | from Commodore on down.
        
               | Findecanor wrote:
               | Officially ST stood for "SixTeen", as it was a 16-bit
               | system.
               | 
               | That was emphasised when the later 68030-based model in
               | the series was named TT ("ThirtyTwo").
        
               | richrichardsson wrote:
               | Interesting, I'd read somewhere that is was
               | "Sixteen/Thirty-two", as M68k has a 16 bit data bus but
               | is 32 bit internally.
               | 
               | TT was then Thirty-two/Thirty-two as the '030 data bus
               | was 32 bits.
               | 
               | Yours makes more sense though.
        
       | jpalomaki wrote:
       | There's also a link to an emulator, running in browser:
       | https://archive.org/details/losb425#
        
       | hnlmorg wrote:
       | The tag line in that site changes with each refresh. I had one
       | which read something like
       | 
       | > Hardware assisted multitasking was an error
       | 
       | Which made me chuckle.
        
       | danbruc wrote:
       | I recently stumbled across the MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 source code
       | [1].
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
        
       | skissane wrote:
       | Not clear at first what this is.
       | 
       | Turns out it is someone's personal clone of MS-DOS.
       | 
       | Nothing to do with Atari ST, the "ST" is the author's initials
        
         | squarefoot wrote:
         | I was confused as well. Turns out the right link is this one:
         | http://sininenankka.dy.fi/~sami/fdshell/index.php
         | 
         | Tl;Dr: "lEEt/OS is a graphical shell and partially posix-
         | compliant multitasking operating environment that runs on top
         | of a DOS kernel." [...] "lEEt/OS is slowly but surely migrating
         | from FreeDOS to ST-DOS, its own DOS kernel."
        
         | Findecanor wrote:
         | Not a far-fetched thought though. The Atari ST's "TOS" used MS-
         | DOS formatted floppies.
        
           | cmrdporcupine wrote:
           | And its "GEMDOS" was basically a fusion of MS-DOS and CP/M,
           | but on 68/k. (not surprising since it was made by Digital
           | Research).
        
         | quenix wrote:
         | > Nothing to do with Atari ST, the "ST" is the author's
         | initials
         | 
         | Or STM32, as I initially suspected.
        
       | Maakuth wrote:
       | https://github.com/Gessle/leet_os here's a github mirror of the
       | source code, if you don't feel like downloading the zip for
       | perusal.
        
       | TheDudeMan wrote:
       | Oh, DOS. Fond memories.
       | 
       | My first experience was the 3.x era. Does anyone else remember
       | DR-DOS?
        
         | shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
         | I remember my cousin ran DR-DOS 6 on their PC.
        
         | b3lvedere wrote:
         | Yes. Many years ago when i worked for a computer shop, i was
         | kinda 'forced' by the shop owner to sell it whenever a new
         | computer was sold. He bought lots of it and nobody would buy
         | it. I hated it.
         | 
         | Back in the BBS era i loved 4DOS, but looking back in hindsight
         | it was just a bunch of extra tools on top of MS-Dos.
        
           | TheDudeMan wrote:
           | I had that one, too. Good stuff. Yeah, just tools, but
           | useful.
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | I had a single game that, AFAICT, the CD-ROM version couldn't
         | run on MS-DOS the normal way because the intro it showed needed
         | more conventional memory that was possible with mscdex
         | loaded[1]. There was a workaround that consisted of running the
         | program that would resume from the latest save, then exiting to
         | the main menu. If you had a large enough hard-drive, you could
         | also run it by copying the data to your hard drive, then
         | manually pointing the game at the path (thus allowing you to
         | omit the CD-ROM driver).
         | 
         | I managed to get it to run off the CD by using the nwcdex (From
         | Novell Dos 7, after Novell purchased Digital Research), which
         | could load itself into EMS.
         | 
         | 1: This was the CD-ROM version of Master of Magic. The intro
         | needed approximately 630KB of conventional memory to run.
        
         | UncleSlacky wrote:
         | I enjoyed playing the built-in "Advanced NetWars" game:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars#Legacy
        
       | JdeBP wrote:
       | Reading the documentation, "this is a clone of MS-DOS" turns out
       | to be quite a misleading summary of what this is.
       | 
       | The documentation claims things (which I have not verified
       | personally) such as forking, signals, and pipes. Instead of a
       | SUBST command there is a MOUNT command. And there's a convoluted
       | piece of hooplah that stands in place of what MS-DOS could do
       | with the SHELL= line in CONFIG.SYS .
        
         | skissane wrote:
         | > Reading the documentation, "this is a clone of MS-DOS" turns
         | out to be quite a misleading summary of what this is.
         | 
         | Not a "clone" in the sense of 100% compatible... but a "clone"
         | in the sense of borrowing a significant degree of ideas and
         | APIs/syntax from it, yet also deviating at various points
         | (whether for good reasons or for idiosyncratic ones)
         | 
         | It is a clone more in the sense that the Japanese mainframe
         | operating systems Fujitsu MSP and Hitachi VOS3 are/were clones
         | of IBM MVS: they started out as a direct copy of MVS-due to IBM
         | having released earlier versions into the public domain, and
         | Fujitsu/Hitachi illegally stealing the IP of later ones-but
         | over time diverged in incompatible directions
        
           | smoppi wrote:
           | ST-DOS is a DOS implementation, but it is not meant to be a
           | clone of MS-DOS. It is mostly syscall-compatible with MS-DOS,
           | but the driver API and many other things are completely
           | different. After all the definition of DOS is just "disk
           | operating system".
           | 
           | All real mode programs that are compiled with Watcom C/C++
           | should work. The most recent versions of Watcom's protected
           | mode runtime don't currently work, because they use some
           | undocumented MS-DOS syscalls that are not implemented in ST-
           | DOS. I intend to create a compatibility TSR that will solve
           | most issues with those MS-DOS programs.
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | Context: http://sininenankka.dy.fi/~sami/fdshell/philosophy.php
        
       | vanderZwan wrote:
       | I don't know what it is about Finnish culture that results in
       | such a significant number of permacomputing hackers1 that go to
       | great lengths to preserve old-hardware, but I am grateful for it.
       | 
       | 1 When I say significant I mean "at least two, but one of them is
       | viznut"2. That is significant, right?
       | 
       | 2 http://viznut.fi/en/
        
       | marttt wrote:
       | This sure is a Very Finnish Project. (Definition: a completely
       | random Finn, always carrying a barely noticeable smirk, is taking
       | an utterly improbable or completely unnecessary project and
       | finishing it to absolute, ridiculous perfection. Warmest
       | greetings to all Finns from the other side of the Gulf! I love
       | you guys forever.)
       | 
       | Also, there was more discussion on ST-DOS (involving the author)
       | on the Dos Ain't Dead forum: http://www.bttr-
       | software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20883
        
         | exikyut wrote:
         | Finnishing it*
         | 
         | FTFY
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | If only this power could be harnessed. But I think by
         | definition, it can't. :-)
        
           | wenc wrote:
           | Sisu?
        
           | rauli_ wrote:
           | Like Linux or MySQL?
        
             | omoikane wrote:
             | The first thought that came to my mind were actually the
             | Future Crew, and one of their members were also named Sami
             | (but seems unrelated to this author).
        
       | souvlakee wrote:
       | How do people create a 90s old-school dial-up design in 2024? Is
       | there a special framework for it?
        
         | scrumper wrote:
         | Haha really? Can't tell if joking. Something else we used to do
         | in the '90s was View Source.
        
         | Sharlin wrote:
         | All the HTML that worked back then still works, so I'm not sure
         | what you're asking? Table layouting works just as it used to.
         | HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype works. `<body text=""
         | bgcolor="">` works. And so on. You just write HTML. By hand. As
         | disturbing as it may sound in 2024.
         | 
         | This specimen is particularly pure, not having any sort of a
         | stylesheet (after all, we had CSS 2.0 already in 1998), the
         | only <link> tag pointing to the RSS feed (which we _didn't_
         | have until 1999)!
        
       | mtmk wrote:
       | Nothing like the good old days of CRT monitors, buzzing floppy
       | drives, loud hard disks, and the good ol' DOS prompt C:>.
        
       | marttt wrote:
       | Question: considering that the Mpxplay music player [1] supports
       | native audio playback via Intel HDA on DOS (confirmed with
       | FreeDOS), should it also work out of the box on ST-DOS?
       | 
       | 1: https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/
        
       | fsiefken wrote:
       | Can it run Windows 3.11 and if so would there be a multitasking,
       | lfn, speed or memory advantage in doing so compared to dr-dos,
       | ms-dos or freedos?
        
       | WalterBright wrote:
       | What's interesting is when I think about MS-DOS these days, I
       | think I could make a functional duplicate in short order. But
       | nobody did it at the time.
       | 
       | (How I'd do it is write all the semantic code in D, such as the
       | code for EDLIN, and debug it all. Then hand-translate it into
       | asm.)
       | 
       | P.S. One of the smartest things Gates/Allen did to write their
       | original BASIC was to write an 8080 emulator on a PDP-10(?). This
       | enabled much, much faster development than trying to hand-
       | assemble code and toggle it in.
        
         | ab5tract wrote:
         | Were there not many MS-DOS clones at the time?
        
           | WalterBright wrote:
           | There was DR-DOS, but it came years later. I don't recall any
           | others.
        
       | jlundberg wrote:
       | This is really cool and inspiring. Looking forward to trying it
       | on the 8086:es my kids have.
       | 
       | Slightly related noteworthy project: http://svardos.org/
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-28 23:01 UTC)