np NP, Friday September 30, 2016

[Vorlonagent 442]

28 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

For some reason this gave me a nightmare vision of a phone or tablet running DOS. I am very glad that MS-DOS has been consigned to the technical nightmares of the dwindling past and that it is not likely to ever trouble my sight again.

There are DOS emulators...

Primarily for games.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

12 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

There are DOS emulators...

Primarily for games.

On phones and tablets?

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Not on phones. I mean, there is phone version of Win8 which is compatible with desktop Win8 metro but is not possible to convert it to operate like Win7.

I*I wouldn't think you'd want to run a Win7-like interface on a phone, maybe--maybe on a tablet...

True, tablet would be better example in this case. Or one of those devices which can work as tablet or netbook depending on how you bend it.

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Only to use Google Play. There is nothing similar you would like to use for Java.

I am referring to Android the OS not android apps.  Android the OS is, IIRC, open-source though I don't know the details.  And yeah IIRC, you need to to pay money to get google to approve your custom version of Android.

CyanogenMod got Google CTS Certification. Advantage listed: Oppo N1 can freely run Google applications and also gain full access to the Play Store. There is no cost to obtain Android compatibility for a device. The Compatibility Test Suite is open source and available to anyone for device testing. Of course, the license to actually get Google Play is certainly paid, but possibly if the license is paid by manufacturer for his version of android and you then replace it with CyanogenMod you can use Google Play without you or CyanogenMod paying anything.

 

[Vorlonagent 442]

18 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

On phones and tablets?

Yes.

[Vorlonagent 442]

2 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

True, tablet would be better example in this case. Or one of those devices which can work as tablet or netbook depending on how you bend it.

Years ago, I saw 10" tablets for sale running intel hardware and Win7.  I would cringe to think of Win 7 on even an 8" tablet screen, let alone a phone.

4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

CyanogenMod got Google CTS Certification. Advantage listed: Oppo N1 can freely run Google applications and also gain full access to the Play Store. There is no cost to obtain Android compatibility for a device. The Compatibility Test Suite is open source and available to anyone for device testing. Of course, the license to actually get Google Play is certainly paid, but possibly if the license is paid by manufacturer for his version of android and you then replace it with CyanogenMod you can use Google Play without you or CyanogenMod paying anything.

OK, you got me on that one.  I guess I need to stick to comics history. 

But I know I won't.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

47 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Yes.

...I feel quite ill.

[Vorlonagent 442]

Just now, The Old Hack said:

...I feel quite ill.

then you probably should search app stores for something called DosBox. 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

9 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

then you probably should search app stores for something called DosBox. 

Sorry. Bad old memories from struggling to get enough of those DAMNED SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY KILOBYTES THAT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE clear of TSR bullcrap so I could actually make my programs run.

[hkmaly 490]

19 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

29 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

then you probably should search app stores for something called DosBox. 

Sorry. Bad old memories from struggling to get enough of those DAMNED SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY KILOBYTES THAT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE clear of TSR bullcrap so I could actually make my programs run.

Did you tried to move it to the area between 0xB0000 and 0xB8000 and 0xC0000 and 0xF0000?

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

Did you tried to move it to the area between 0xB0000 and 0xB8000 and 0xC0000 and 0xF0000?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGHHHHH! (kill me now, please.)

[Scotty 1,061]

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGHHHHH! (kill me now, please.)

I may have been late to the party when if comes to computers, always needed someone to load programs for me on a C64, and the Tandy 1000RL my parents bought was entirely floppy disk driven. But when we upgraded to the 486 IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 that I started learning about how to mess with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to try to get EMS and XMS memory to work properly with certain games, I had a stack of boot disks made up with custom settings for each game that needed more than the base 640k.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Sorry. Bad old memories from struggling to get enough of those DAMNED SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY KILOBYTES THAT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE clear of TSR bullcrap so I could actually make my programs run.

When I worked tech support for Apogee Software / 3D Realms (before I got promoted to Music and Sound Director), we'd have contests in the tech room to see who could get the most base RAM free. I regularly won, and with systems that were actually usable. I was the oddball software user—when everyone else used QEMM, I'd use 386Max or Helix NETROOM—so I had more to mess with.

Then I became the tech room's official OS/2 guinea pig, and my RAM problems went away.

[hkmaly 490]

5 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I may have been late to the party when if comes to computers, always needed someone to load programs for me on a C64, and the Tandy 1000RL my parents bought was entirely floppy disk driven. But when we upgraded to the 486 IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 that I started learning about how to mess with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to try to get EMS and XMS memory to work properly with certain games, I had a stack of boot disks made up with custom settings for each game that needed more than the base 640k

DOS 6.22 supported multiple configurations in single config.sys. I think I had around ten. Wait ... I probably still have it somewhere ... 18. But some of those were just experiments. (Also, QEMM386 probably gave me big advantage. Not sure where I got it but it was great.)

I don't remember having 3.11 ... I saw them, sure, but they seemed useless to me. Win 95 later, those were different case, some games didn't worked without them, but I didn't had anything which would need 3.11 ...

[Scotty 1,061]

2 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

DOS 6.22 supported multiple configurations in single config.sys. I think I had around ten. Wait ... I probably still have it somewhere ... 18. But some of those were just experiments. (Also, QEMM386 probably gave me big advantage. Not sure where I got it but it was great.)

I don't remember having 3.11 ... I saw them, sure, but they seemed useless to me. Win 95 later, those were different case, some games didn't worked without them, but I didn't had anything which would need 3.11 ...

Yeah I didn't know about that until I took an IT course in 2006, which was 10 years after the fact, funnily enough I was the only one in the class that was able to create a boot disk without instruction from the professor.

[ijuin 572]

I have plenty of games from the DOS era that I still like to play, so I familiarized myself with DOSBOX early.

[Vorlonagent 442]

11 hours ago, ijuin said:

I have plenty of games from the DOS era that I still like to play, so I familiarized myself with DOSBOX early.

For me it's just the original Master of Orion.  It transfers poorly to a touchscreen by the way.  What were the devs thinking?

[ijuin 572]

The deva probably were not expecting players to be using a setup other than mouse and keyboard. Touchscreens as a main interface for consumer devices was not yet a thing during the 1990s.

As for the "640k is enough for anyone" line, it was enough for anyone who was running a first-generation IBM PC with DOS 1.x. The model 5150 (base 1st-generation model) shipped with no more than sixty-four kilobytes, so the designers were allowing for a tenfold expansion in RAM. Their error was in not future-proofing it, but this was back in the days when IBM made customized operating system versions for every new model of computer, so they probably figured that they would raise the ceiling in a later version, only they never bothered to do so.

[Vorlonagent 442]

2 minutes ago, ijuin said:

As for the "640k is enough for anyone" line, it was enough for anyone who was running a first-generation IBM PC with DOS 1.x. The model 5150 (base 1st-generation model) shipped with no more than sixty-four kilobytes, so the designers were allowing for a tenfold expansion in RAM. Their error was in not future-proofing it, but this was back in the days when IBM made customized operating system versions for every new model of computer, so they probably figured that they would raise the ceiling in a later version, only they never bothered to do so.

IBM made the mistake of looking at the PC as a trivial side-project.  Which is why they published the PC's schematics.  They couldn't be bothered to develop all the peripheral devices their PC might need so they made it possible for 3rd parties to pick up the slack.

It's also why they outsourced the OS-writing duties to some geeks at a small no-name software company called "Microsoft".

[The Old Hack 2,448]

43 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

IBM made the mistake of looking at the PC as a trivial side-project.  Which is why they published the PC's schematics.  They couldn't be bothered to develop all the peripheral devices their PC might need so they made it possible for 3rd parties to pick up the slack.

It's also why they outsourced the OS-writing duties to some geeks at a small no-name software company called "Microsoft".

IBM made lots of genius decisions like that. At one point two oddballs came to them with a device they had cobbled together in their garage. It could photographically replicate pages of documents at a rather impressive speed. They got told that IBM could not see any possible application for such a device in any modern office.

The two guys shrugged, ambled off and formed a company named Xerox.

[hkmaly 490]

59 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

As for the "640k is enough for anyone" line, it was enough for anyone who was running a first-generation IBM PC with DOS 1.x. The model 5150 (base 1st-generation model) shipped with no more than sixty-four kilobytes, so the designers were allowing for a tenfold expansion in RAM. Their error was in not future-proofing it, but this was back in the days when IBM made customized operating system versions for every new model of computer, so they probably figured that they would raise the ceiling in a later version, only they never bothered to do so.

IBM made the mistake of looking at the PC as a trivial side-project.  Which is why they published the PC's schematics.  They couldn't be bothered to develop all the peripheral devices their PC might need so they made it possible for 3rd parties to pick up the slack.

It's also why they outsourced the OS-writing duties to some geeks at a small no-name software company called "Microsoft".

And those geeks bought a quick hack called QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System - modified it to run on IBM PC and sold it. Which forced IBM to never do the raise of ceiling, because DOS was written so badly it was not possible.

[Don Edwards 548]

And (according to legend) IBM went with Microsoft because the junior vice president in front of the PC project called up the company that owned CP/M - an OS with several years of history and a significant-for-the-time stock of applications - and said "I'm coming to talk with your president tomorrow about this project" and the reply was "well, he's on vacation in Europe with his wife and children, so he won't be here tomorrow. The vice president will be available tomorrow. Or we can make an appointment for two weeks from now."

[Vorlonagent 442]

45 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

IBM made lots of genius decisions like that. At one point two oddballs came to them with a device they had cobbled together in their garage. It could photographically replicate pages of documents at a rather impressive speed. They got told that IBM could not see any possible application for such a device in any modern office.

The two guys shrugged, ambled off and formed a company named Xerox.

I didn't know that. 

I consider IBM's decision RE the PC to be a necessary stupidity, if such a thing can exist, for the PC to become what we now know today.  The crucial thing was them publishing the schematics.  Not only could someone make devices to plug into the PC, they could make their own PC without paying a dime to IBM.  I consider that opening up of the market to be crucial since all other microcomputers were company-centric ecosystems the way Apple still is today.  IBM still defined the PC specification.

It took a second stupidity to completely pull IBM's fingers off the PC.  When Intel developed with the 80386 chip, IBM's execs looked at it and turned a bit pale.  They declined to make a computer around it.  They were concerned a 386-based PC would cannibalize their minicomputer sales.  A third-party PC-maker named Compaq picked up the challenge.

36 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

And those geeks bought a quick hack called QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System - modified it to run on IBM PC and sold it. Which forced IBM to never do the raise of ceiling, because DOS was written so badly it was not possible.

 

26 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

And (according to legend) IBM went with Microsoft because the junior vice president in front of the PC project called up the company that owned CP/M - an OS with several years of history and a significant-for-the-time stock of applications - and said "I'm coming to talk with your president tomorrow about this project" and the reply was "well, he's on vacation in Europe with his wife and children, so he won't be here tomorrow. The vice president will be available tomorrow. Or we can make an appointment for two weeks from now."

I wasn't aware of these stories either.  I knew DOS was a CP/M clone but I thought Microsoft developed it in-house. 

[hkmaly 490]

32 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

And (according to legend) IBM went with Microsoft because the junior vice president in front of the PC project called up the company that owned CP/M - an OS with several years of history and a significant-for-the-time stock of applications - and said "I'm coming to talk with your president tomorrow about this project" and the reply was "well, he's on vacation in Europe with his wife and children, so he won't be here tomorrow. The vice president will be available tomorrow. Or we can make an appointment for two weeks from now."

I find more likely that they wanted too much money. But I wouldn't be surprised if attitude was SOME factor.

4 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I consider IBM's decision RE the PC to be a necessary stupidity, if such a thing can exist, for the PC to become what we now know today.  The crucial thing was them publishing the schematics.  Not only could someone make devices to plug into the PC, they could make their own PC without paying a dime to IBM.  I consider that opening up of the market to be crucial since all other microcomputers were company-centric ecosystems the way Apple still is today.  IBM still defined the PC specification.

It was necessary to get computers to general public. No big company wanted to make computers cheaply enough. Cheap, yet still compatible PC clones created market which wouldn't exist otherwise. On the other hand, it's possible that if IBM wouldn't do it, someone else would.

6 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

It took a second stupidity to completely pull IBM's fingers off the PC.  When Intel developed with the 80386 chip, IBM's execs looked at it and turned a bit pale.  They declined to make a computer around it.  They were concerned a 386-based PC would cannibalize their minicomputer sales.  A third-party PC-maker named Compaq picked up the challenge.

They were RIGHT. 386-based PC and it's followers DID cannibalize their computer sales later. In fact, DESTROYED them.

9 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I wasn't aware of these stories either.  I knew DOS was a CP/M clone but I thought Microsoft developed it in-house. 

I hear a legend that Gates signed the contract that he will deliver the OS without having ANY, and only after the contract bought the QDOS. According to wikipedia, Gates did mentioned existence of QDOS and the need to obtain license ... but there is citation needed on that part

Anyway, Microsoft apparently did got some development (by hiring the person who worked on QDOS before) before it was ready for IBM PC. They just didn't started from scratch.

 

[Vorlonagent 442]

1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

It was necessary to get computers to general public. No big company wanted to make computers cheaply enough. Cheap, yet still compatible PC clones created market which wouldn't exist otherwise. On the other hand, it's possible that if IBM wouldn't do it, someone else would.

The public schematics made it easy to cement the PC as dominant in the economy.  Otherwise we would have seen the scattershot world of the 6502 computers continue until attrition cut the number of players back enough for one to achieve dominance.  IBM made it all happen faster. 

I doubt anybody would have published the design for their machine, especially those companies like Apple or Atari where these small computers (microcomputers) were all they made.  It took a big company with IBM's dominance in the pre-computer office environment and hidebound difficulty handling disruptive technology to make the PC what it is today.

11 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

They were RIGHT. 386-based PC and it's followers DID cannibalize their computer sales later. In fact, DESTROYED them

Yes they were right.  IBM wrongly assumed that they could hold back the future.  They were looking at their own obsolescence but had in their hands the means to survive and thrive.  Instead or rising to the challenge, they tried to protect what they already had and lost it all anyway, including this new market that might have sustained them. 

In fairness to IBM, it would have taken a lot of courage and vision to see what PCs could become, even though the hints were there by the time the 386 came on the scene.

[hkmaly 490]

26 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

45 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It was necessary to get computers to general public. No big company wanted to make computers cheaply enough. Cheap, yet still compatible PC clones created market which wouldn't exist otherwise. On the other hand, it's possible that if IBM wouldn't do it, someone else would.

The public schematics made it easy to cement the PC as dominant in the economy.  Otherwise we would have seen the scattershot world of the 6502 computers continue until attrition cut the number of players back enough for one to achieve dominance.  IBM made it all happen faster. 

Yes.

26 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I doubt anybody would have published the design for their machine, especially those companies like Apple or Atari where these small computers (microcomputers) were all they made.  It took a big company with IBM's dominance in the pre-computer office environment and hidebound difficulty handling disruptive technology to make the PC what it is today.

True, but IBM was not only candidate. Some other, similar company could've done it. Like .... DEC. Ok, I must admit DEC is only other possible company I found ... Sun or SGI, for example, started only afterwards, although they would likely start even without the IBM's "mistake" ... and Cray Research seem to be in TOO big computers ...

26 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Yes they were right.  IBM wrongly assumed that they could hold back the future.

Lot of people do.

26 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

In fairness to IBM, it would have taken a lot of courage and vision to see what PCs could become, even though the hints were there by the time the 386 came on the scene.

The success of computers surprised even the sci-fi writers. People who didn't had problem with travelling faster than light and finding civilizations on other planets though that the notion single person can have multiple computers ... in pockets ... absurd.

There are some pretty quotes from the industry itself about this:

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ... -- F. H. Wales (1936)

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equpped with 18,000 vaccuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons. -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year. -- Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new science of data processing), c. 1957

What the hell is it good for? -- Robert Lloyd (engineer of the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM), to colleagues who insisted that the microprocessor was the wave of the future, c. 1968

I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"

Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.

There was a computer in every doorknob. -- Danny Hillis, cca 1999

EDIT: Found where I got those from.