Re: [Freedos-user] How to unload a driver?

[dmccunney]

n Fri, Nov 4, 2022 at 2:38 PM Michał Dec  wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm loading a bunch of drivers during startup, but I'd like to try and unload 
> them after all the setup is done. What \
command is for unloading drivers? I know LH and DEVLOAD are for loading.

I  don't offhand think there is such a command

LH and DEVLOAD have the same purpose:  load drivers and ?TSRs high to
get them out of conventional memory.  But in general, you wanted them
present and available during your session, and didn't want to unload
them.

I do have a Unix machine which has an experimental capability to
unload drivers, but it was experimental.  Nowadays, the efforts are to
have things loaded in user space, and unloadable if you no longer need
what they do.

What drivers are you loading in startup?  A driver, by definition,
provides access to hardware, and if you want to use the3 hardware you
need the driver.

I did have utilities back when that I could use to optimize the
loading of TSRs.  Most took memory when loading and initializing, but
that memory cuold be freed and only a small portion thaat was the
actual TSR needed to remain resident, so I got to play games h the
ortder in which TSRs loaded to leave space for the loading an
initialization of subsequent TSRs.  That technique was not applicable
to drivers.

Tell us what you'reloading in startup? Maybe we can help optimize the process.

> Michał
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Re: [Freedos-user] Semware has released TSE as Freeware

[dmccunney]

I recall Qedit, and used it back in the day, though it was never my
primary editor.

It got renamed from Qedit to TSE due to a trademark issue.  Qedit author Sammy
Mitchell was unaware there was another editor called WEDIT, provided
by Hewlett-Packard for their midrange multi-user systems line.  Oops!

If memory seres, Qedit itself got renamed TSE, Jr., and was identical
to Qedit.  Full TSE was a shareware product intended to be a
significant improvement on Qedit.  What is offered on the Semware
website is TSE Pro 2.5, a significant upgrade to TSE 2.0, and a
commercial product.

I haven't looked at the Windows and Linux versions that aer now
freeware, nor have I had a chance to look at the DOS offering,  But I
was in email contact with Sammy back when he was developing the
Windows and Linux versions.  I don't think they have much in common
with the DOS product.  Among other things, Sammy was creating a new
language that could be used to write editors in.  I very much doubt
what was done in the Semware Editor for Windows and Linux is
*possible* under DOS.  It requires memory, a multitasking OS, and a
more advanced file system than DOS can offer,

I have to drop Sammy a note, but I suspect he made the Semware Editor
freeware because it was no longer a viable commercial product,
Competition in that area is brutal.  There are various commercial
editors for tjhings like Java development still out there, but the
most popular current general purpose programmers are Microsoft's
commercial Visual Studio product, and their free and open source
Visual Studio Code product, based on the Electron framework first
introduced for Github's Atom editor.  Github has since sunsetted the
Atom project, and it will see no further development. VSC ate it for
lunch.

If you are running DOS, the new freeware TSE Pro 2.5 produuct may be a
very nice upgrade oer what ou have, and I'm pleased to see it offered,
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Re: [Freedos-user] TeX (emTex et al.)

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2022 at 4:55 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> (Disclaimer: I've never personally used TeX but am still aware of it.)

I have used it a bit,  but can't imagine doing it under DOS

TeX is another gift to the computing world from  Donald A Knuth,

The primary usage I've seen for TeX is typesetting mathematical
equations.  Non-ASCII characters. superscript and subscript and the
like a grist for TeX's mill,

The reason I can see for trying to use TeX under DOS is having  a TeX
source file I want to render.  That would likely be to a printed page,
and would presume a printer capable of properly rendering the file.
(I'm not aware of a TeX viewer for DOS. though I suppose if you could
dump the out as an image file a DOS image viewer might serve.)
_+_
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Re: [Freedos-user] ot: perhaps, processor emulators?

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 9:43 PM Karen Lewellen  wrote:
>
> On the dectalk discussion, someone shared  some sources for the dec
> version 4.2 or so that requires actual digital equipment corporation
> processor alpha architecture.
> apparently dec in 1996, was already working on 64 bit processors for their
> own machines.

64 bit architecture isn't the [problem.  Instruction sets are.  You
need to intercept the instruction intended for the real CPU and
convert iut on the fly to a comparable instruction on the CPU you are
actually using.

What you need is a Hardware Abstraction Layer, and such things have
been around for some time.  As an example, I am an old Palm PDA user.
The original Palm PDAs used a 32bit Motorola Dragonball CPU.  But
there were architectural limitations in the Dragonball CPU chip that
made things Palm might want to do down the road difficult or
impossible.

Palm's solution was to switch to an ARM Cortex CPU design foe the new
generation of devices that would run Palm OS 5.  But there was an
enormous amount of existing Palm OS software for Dragonball  machines,
so Palm included a Hardware Abstraction Layer in the new devices to do
the Draghonball -> ARM conversion in software.  It worked because ARM
devices were *much* faster.  My last Dragonball based device ran at
33mhz.  My first ARM device ran at 200mhz.  The overhead of on the fly
instruction set conversion was not a problem.

Curiously, Palm SDKs still built code for the Dragonball, not ARM.  It
was possible to create ARMlets - bits of ARM code callable from the
Dragonball code - for time critical stuff, but you couldn't code Palm
apps entirely in ARM code.  ()I am aware of one all ARM Palm program,
but that was a special case, but never did learn how the developers
were able to create it. It would have required permission and help
from Palm to do it.)

On that line, a chap named Dmitry Grinberg did a lot of stuff for Palm
devices that wasn't supposed to be possible.  (IIRC, he's at Google
these days doing something he's not allowed to talk about.)  He
successfully got Linux to boot on an *8bit* Atmel CPU.  He was
intimately familiar with the ARM instruction set, and  wrote a HAL for
fhe Atmel that converted ARM instructions to Atmel instructions.  It
took Linux hours to actually boot on the Atmel device, but it did
boot.  Doing anything with it once it booted was another matter. (I
posted about the effort to another tech list and got a "We have drugs
for that sort of thing nowadays", referring to Dmitry's obsession
about doing it, and I had to agree.  I admired Dmirtry's ability to
make it happen at all, but felt there were likely better uses for his
time.)

Is there a software HAL letting you test Alpha code on a different
architecture?  QEMU. I think.  Will anything like that be possible on
16 bit machines under FreeDOS?  Given whar Dmitry did getting Linux to
boot on an 8bit CPU, I suppose it's technically possible. But I
suspect you would start your emulator, feed ii cede, and see what, if
anything, you got when you woke the next day. If you're going to do
hardware emulation in software, you need a *fast* machine to do it
usably.  If you have a machine that fast, FreeDOS likely won't be what
you'll be running on it as your production OS.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Assembly Language and BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2022 at 8:30 PM Daniel  wrote:
>
> I am unfamiliar woththe C languages,  but does it also allow one to mix both 
> assembly in with the C source code?  Are there any other languages that 
> allows mixing of assembly in with the language code?

Not in the manner you are thinking of.

C was developed to be a language used for systems programming.  It was
originally created by Dennis Ritchie at AT Bell Laboratories at
Murray Hill, NJ, as part of the effort that created the Unix OS.
Ritchie started with a language called BCPL, and enhanced that to
create C.  C was intended to be a high level language efficient enough
that you didn't have to write in Assembler to get performance, and
relatively easy to port to other architectures.

The developers of Unix were programmers unhappy with the support for
program development provided by the OS on the Digital Equipment mini
computer they were using.  There was a similar machine essentiallty
unused they could get time on, so Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan
began development of a new OS called Unix.  The early versions of Unix
were coded in Macro-11, the assembly language of the DEC machine.
This continued through Unix v6.  As of v7, C was mature enough to be
used, and most of Unix was rewritten in C.  About 10% of the code was
low level code that talked to the hardware, and was still in Macro-11.
Later versions of C campiled directly to object code, and the
intermediate assembly step went away.

On early Unix systems, the C compiler was CC.  It translated C source
into asembley language for the supported architecture. That was
assembled into object code by AS, the system assembler, and the object
code was combined by LD, the linkage editor, into a finished
executable.  It was possible to interrupt the process at the point
where cc had translated C to Assembler, and hand optimize the assembly
code before continuing the process.

A key point here was that programs were modular.  There would be more
than one C source file making up the completed program, so there
wasn't really a need for inline assembler.  If performance wasn't what
was hoped for, you profiled the C code to see where the problems were,
and rewrote the offending C code, or coded it in  assembler as needed.

High level language development on DOS in BASIC or Pascal tended to be
in one big file, so being able to have Assembler inline was a boon.
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Re: [Freedos-user] From BTTR: FAT32 ramdisk, SvarCOM shell, Doszip commander

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 7:17 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 5:57 PM dmccunney  wrote:
> >[..]
> > I haven't read through the entire thread, but I am curious about why
> > the person whose email request was referenced *wanted* a RAMdrive for
> > DOS targer than 8GB.
> >[..]
> > With a big enough RAMdrive, you could create it on startup and copy
> > *everything* you used to it and run entirely off the RAMdrive.  I
> > could do something like that with the Win64 RAMdrive.  You can define
> > an image file to be loaded to it after it is instantiated, and I could
> > theoretically load everything I use to it, but the benefits don't
> > justify the effort.
>
> It's an interesting technical achievement, to be sure. So on that end,
> I think it's cool. But I'm not convinced an 8 GB RAM drive for DOS is
> the best way to use that memory.

I concur

> + pros: When the system boots up, you can copy all of DOS into the RAM
> drive, and everything will run faster after that.
>
> - cons: The initial copy is slow because you're copying everything.
> And changes in the RAM drive aren't preserved when you reboot.

I dealt with that setting up Firefox to use a profile on the RAMdrive.
It proved to be *much* faster to keep the profile in a Zip archive on
HD, which was extracted to the RAMdrive using a cmmand line unzip in
my Windows startup process, onstead of using  copy operations on scads
of files.

Capturing and preserving changes was a similar issue.  Ordinarily,
Firefox execution was wrtpped in a script, and exiting Firefox
normally triggered a shutdown step that zipped the entire RAMdrive
profile back to a Zip archive to preserve changes in that session.
Win7 (and 10) Pro had access to Group Policy Manager,  Using GPM, I
could listen for and trap shutdown/reboot event signals, and run the
script that zipped the Firefox profile back to the Zip archive if
those events occurred.

And my script preserved 5 days worth of Zip files. If I made an error
that trashed the current file, I could unzip an older copy instead.
At most, I lost a day' s work. Once I got it properly set up, it Just
Worked, and it was fun setting it up, but I'm just as happy to not
need to do it now. Hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and
cheaper, and SSDs are close to making HDs obsolete.

> RAM drives make sense on DOS for cached files or a temporary area ...
> but does DOS need an 8 GB temp area?

Does it need a *4GB* area?  I'd still love to know what the
requester's use case was.
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Re: [Freedos-user] From BTTR: FAT32 ramdisk, SvarCOM shell, Doszip commander

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 10:50 AM Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> > RDRVSX32: FAT32 RAM drive for HimemSX (Announce)
> >
> > posted by jadoxa, Queensland, Australia, 13.03.2022, 13:58
> >
> > I had a request (via email) to create a RAM drive greater than 4GiB.
> > It sort of works (works on his and mine 8GiB AMD, but has issues with
> > his 32GiB Intel) so if anyone has the time and inclination to test,
> > that'd be great. You will need more than 4GiB RAM (in order to access
> > super-extended memory), preferably more than 8GiB (in order to test
> > accessing beyond 4GiB). Our testing has been simple so far: just copy
> > large files (he was able to create a 28GiB RAM drive, copy hundreds
> > of 64MiB files, but it fails copying a 1GiB file).

I haven't read through the entire thread, but I am curious about why
the person whose email request was referenced *wanted* a RAMdrive for
DOS targer than 8GB.

On bare metal DOS back in the PC XT days, Ihad an AST 7-Pak card that
added an extra megabyte of RAM, with software that could use it to
create a RAMdrive and/or a disk cache.  I did both, with a 512KB
RAMdrive sees as Z:\. and  256KB disk cache.  My AUTOEXEC.BAT file
copied frequently used utilities likew Vern Buerg's LIST and my
texteditor to the RAMdrive, and various things that could be told
where to create temp file like PKZIP used the RAMdrive when they
created them.  Z:\.was the first entry in my DOS %PATH%.  That and the
disk cache sped things up a treat.

I still use a RAMdrive under Win10 Pro. I found an open source 64bit
Windows RAMdrive driver that would allocate arbitrary amounts of
physical RAM to one or more RAMdrives. Here, I hafe 20GB RAM, and
512MB is allocated to Z:], a RAMdrive used for browser cache.
(Firefox makes that easy.  Chrome requires serious hacking.)  I don't
do development on this machine. If I did, I'd likely find other uses
for the RAM. On my prior desktop running Win7, I had Firefox set up to
run entirely from the RAMdrive, with the profile iyt used stored tehre
too.  The currrent machine boots of a 256GB SSD, and testing revealed
no observable speedup from rthe profile on the RAMdrive vs having it
on SSD, so I didn't bother recreating the previous setup.

With a big enough RAMdrive, you could create it on startup and copy
*everything* you used to it and run entirely off the RAMdrive.  I
could do something like thet with the Win64 RAMdrive.  You can define
an image file to be loaded to it after it is instantiated, and I could
theoretically load everything I use to it, but the benefits don't
justify the effort. .
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Re: [Freedos-user] Keyboard issue

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 1:47 PM Daniel  wrote:
>
> In DOS I was able to press and hold a key and the key would repeat.  Great 
> for arrow and page keys.  For some reason this stopped workin and I can only 
> press a key once and holdin a key would do nothin.
>
> Does anyone know how to fix this?

What's your environment?  Are you running DOS on the bare metal on an
older PC, or are you running in an emulator or a virtual machine?  Was
it working before?  When did it stop working?  What changed between
wen it worked and when it didn't?

If you are running DOS in an emulator or VM,  the problem probably
isn't in DOS itself, it's in the environment in which it runs.
Without knowing what that is, it's hard to suggest dixes,
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Re: [Freedos-user] Super Charging Windows 3.1 ?

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 10:05 AM Martin Iturbide
 wrote:
> I was wondering if you know some links, articles, hints about all the 
> software and fixes that can be installed on Windows 3.1 .Like if someone did 
> the exercise on how he will tune/pimp his own Windows 3.1 today.

I ran Windows for Workgroups, 3.11. a sort of corporate flavor of
Windows 3.1, for some time.  I don't recall security patches for it as
we have now.

The thing to remember is that Win 3.1 was a 16 bit multitasking shell.
running on top of single tasking DOS. Windows serialized
communications with the file system so DOS could be used.

I had a Unix machine at home before I got a PC running DOS. DOS from
version 2 bprrowed concepts from Unix, like tree structured
directories, pipes, and I/O redirection, but implemented them
differently due to DOS limitations,

When I got a PC, I wanted it to look and act as much like Unix as
possible.  The best solution proved to be a commercial product called
the MKS Toolkit.  It was created by Mortice Kern Systems, a consulting
engineering firm in Canada, They wrote it for internal use, but when
they felt it was sufficiently developed, they released it as a
product.  It became "the tail that wagged the dog", and their primary
business.

The biggest enticement for me was a complete implementation of the
Ubix Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous background
processes (because DOS didn't *have* those.)  It also had a full
implementation of the Vi editor.

Installed in fullest Unix compatibilty mode, the Toolkit's INIT,EXE
program replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell.  Turn on the PC, and
when booting completed, you saw a screen with a Login: prompt.  Enter
a userid and optional password.  INIT called LOGIN, which looked in a
Unix compatible /etc/passwd file for it.  If it found a match, it
changed to whatever was defined as that ID's home directory, and ran
whatever was defined as its shell.

I had IDs that ran COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, the Toolkit Korn shell. and
DesqView.  Exit them, and you returned to INIT, which presented a
Login screen.  I could switch environments without rebooting.  Just
log off and back on again.

The XT clone had a meg of additional memory courtesy of an AST 6-Pak
card, with 512K allocated to a RAMdisk and 256K to a dick cache.
Drivers for those and my mouse were loaded in CONFIG.SYS and available
in all environments.

When I was logged into the Korn shell, you had to dig to discover you
*weren't* on a real Unix machine.

When I migrated to a 386 machine capable of running Win 3.1, I kept
the setup, and used it to expand what I might do with Windows.  When
you booted into Win 3.1, by default Program Manager was your GUI.  But
it didn't have to be.  There were an assortment of shareware and
freeware Program Manager replacements you could substitute. Which
Windows used was defined by an entry in the SYSTEM.INI file.

I could shift between Windows GUIs the same way I shifted DOS
environments.  I had IDs defined to use custom versions of SYSTEM.INI.
When I logged into one of them, the custom version got copied over the
SYSTEM.INI file Windows read when it invoked, and it came up usimg the
GUI the ID specified.  Exit Windows, and I was back in INIT and could
restart it using  different GUI without rebooting (or not run Windows
at all, and log  into a DOS session.)

The replacement GUI I wound up normally using was Workplace Shell for
Windows, a freeware product from an IBM developer that implemented as
much of the OS/2 Workplace ahell as possible under Win 3.1.  Among
other things, it eliminated Program Manager imposed limitations on the
number of Program Groups, and permitted icons on the desktop.
Transition to Win95 when that appeared was simplified because I
already had a lot of th new capabilities Win95 offered.

Lacking something like the Toolkit to make switching GUIs easy, you
can still play with the replacement GUIs.   You'll just have to boot
to DOS and diddle the SYSTEM.INI file with a text editor.  *Finding*
them may be a challenge,
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Re: [Freedos-user] Installing freedos to virtualbox them copying dice contents to an actual computer

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 2:40 PM John Vella  wrote:

> So, I've got the 486 computer working and am ready to install freedos and 
> wordperfect.
>
> I'm thinking there are a couple of advantages to installing onto a virtualbox 
> machine, then formatting the physical hard drive and copying the contents 
> over.
>
> It would be a lot quicker to install and I'd have a clean image if I ever 
> need to reinstall.

What machine will VirtualBox be running on?  If your VirtualBox host
machine can run it acceptably, you *may* have a plan.

Getting FreeDOS working in VirtualBox can be non-trivial. Jim Hall and
others here can provide pointers

> Is there an obvious flaw to my plan?

If your main intent is a quicker install, it's likely to be faster to
just install FreeDOS and WP on the 486 on the bare metal instead of
creating an image in VirtualBox.  (It will take the same time to do it
in VirtualBox, with the added overhead of getting it to run in
VirtualBox in the first place.)

In the old days, when you got a new machine, you booted DOS from
floppy, formatted the HD from DOS with format /s (which copied the DOS
system files to the HD,)then removed the floppy, rebooted from the HD,
and carried on.

That is likely still your best option.

Personally, were I to install FreeDOS in VirtualBox or another virtual
machine, I'd do it because I wanted a full working FreeDOS
installation, and I didn't *have* an Old Skool machine to do a bare
metal install on.

> John.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Issue: FreeDOS on PCem emulating a NE2000

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 2:19 PM Louis Santillan  wrote:
>
> See - https://gitlab.com/FreeDOS/net/fdnet/-/blob/master/BIN/FDNET.BAT

*sigh*  That's what I get for posting before I've had my second cup of coffee.

Quite right - "try" refers to a label in the batch file, not an
external command.

It's been long enough since I've done anything significant in batch
language that I forget that was doable.I sit blushingly corrected.

(The last significant batch stuff I did was using CMD under Windows
7,Pro as part of a setup to run Firefox from a RAMdisk  Iwas inspired
to try that by what I used to do with a RAMdisk on the old DOS PC.

The batch file ran on Windows startup, and unzipped an on disk copy of
the Firefox profile to the RAMdis to do it, and a shortcut started
Firefox using the on RAMdisk profile. Worked a treat, and sped up,
performance a lot.  The fun part was saving changes made in that
session back to the zipped copy on the RAMdisk.That required being
able to intercept a Windows Shutdown event, and do something when it
was detected.  The shutdown script zipped the changed RAMdisk copy
back to HD. Group Policy Editor would let me define a shutdown script,
but GPE is only available on Windows Pro and above.

These days I'm on Win 10 Pro, booting off an SSD.  While I have a
RAMdisk, the SSD is fast enough that there is no benefit in running FF
from it.)
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Re: [Freedos-user] Issue: FreeDOS on PCem emulating a NE2000

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 12:18 PM Brandon Taylor
 wrote:
>
> Now, from what I've read in previous posts, it sounds like others have had 
> success by replacing "start" with "try," such that the line now reads "call 
> %dosdir%\bin\fdnet.bat try",

Other [psts where?

Start is a command. implemented by CMD.EXE in Windows, and can be used
to start a new process in a window from the command line. I've used it
to do that.  It does nor exist in pure MSDOS batch as implemented by
COMMAND.COM

Try/Catch is an exception handling routine, present in JavasScript and
C# (and I think in Java.)  Just what is supposed to be  handling the
try here?

I'm not surprised you are getting an error.

> Brandon Taylor
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Re: [Freedos-user] GNU Cobol in the FreeDOS ...

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 1:27 PM Liam Proven  wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 at 05:54, dmccunney  wrote:
> >
> > (Just for the record, I don't think it's *possible* to implement .NET
> > under DOS. It assumes a multitasking OS with 32 bit or better
> > architecture.)
>
> You might be surprised. :-)
>
> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/net-everywhere-apparently-also-means-windows-311-and-dos
> https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/SeeSharpSnake
>
> A Snake game in _8 kB_ of .NET code. But using custom libraries and
 disabling a lot of functionality.

Uh huh.  And what was it *built* on?  Cross-compiling for other
targets is common, Like writing and compiling C code to be run on an
ARM target.

This chap was able to build an 8K C# game that runs in MSDOS.  Neat,
but he didn't *build* it on MSDOS, and I doubt he could.  (And unless
I miss my guess, he's doing static linking and compiling C# to x86
machine code.)

DJ Delorie maintains DJGPP, which ports a GCC toolchain to DOS.  But
it requires at least a 386 processor and various DOS extensions to
work at all.  I suspect DJ might be able to build the Mono code
implementing .NET in  similar fashion, so I partially retract what I
said about the possibility.,

Edvardo wants to implement Gnu COBOL under FreeDOS 1.3.  The bit he
hasn't started is what he will do with it once he has. My assumption
is that he wants to write and compile COBOL code under FreeDOS.

There *were* DOS versions of COBOL back in the day.  If memory serves,
Microsoft had one.  Such things still exist.  About 30 seconds of
Google search yielded two archives containing binaries for what were
claimed to be COBOL implementations/  (One had a README file warning
that it dod not implement ANSI COBOL, and some features from ANSI
COBOL were missing.)  I have not tried to test either, but they
existed. Personally, I'd look for and install an existing DOS COBOL
version that worked back when, rather than trying to reinvent the
wheel and get Gnu COBOL working, unless I wanted to write code that
only Gnu COBOL could successfully build.

Unless otherwise specified, I assume people talking about stuff like
this want the language to be self hosted, and allow them to write and
compile DOS code in whatever language on the DOS machine that is the
target.  An environment that can build DOS code on another machine
that can then be transferred to the target system will be very much a
second choice.
 --
> Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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Re: [Freedos-user] GNU Cobol in the FreeDOS ...

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 1:24 PM Liam Proven  wrote:
> > The main problem is that you will need the whole GCC tool chain for this to 
> > work...
>
> I did not know that GNU COBOL compiled to C when I answered, but yes,
> I agree, ultimately this is the problem.

An approach like this is increasingly common. Micro Focus currently
offers a cross-platform version of Open COBOL.  It works by
transpiling COBOL code to Java. Java is "write once, run anywhere",
and compiles to a tokenized binary actually executed by the Java
runtime on the target system.  The tokenized binary is the same
regardless of the system it was written and compiled on, and can be
run on any system with a current JVM.

Micro Focus also offers a version that transpiles to .NET.  Same
difference - the compiled code is executed by the .NET runtime.  MS
has made .NET open source.  I ran into a chap at a party developing on
a Raspberry PI using C# as the language.  A version of the .NET
runtime is available for the ARM processor used by the Pi., and C#
(and the functional language F#) are built into .NET.  If you have
.NET you can code in them.

(Just for the record, I don't think it's *possible* to implement .NET
under DOS. It assumes a multitasking OS with 32 bit or better
architecture.)
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Re: [Freedos-user] GNU Cobol in the FreeDOS ...

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 8:10 PM Everaldo Bernardo Cunha
 wrote:
>
> I would of to install GNU Cobol in the FreeDOS 1.3. Someone here can help me 
> that work??? I'm using the FreeDOS in a virtual machine DOSBOX-X, in the 
> Debian 11.2 LXDE 64 bits ... I'll await future contact.

This sounds like a significant challenge.

Problem 1: GNU COBOL is known to work on various flavors of *nix,
Windows, and MacOS.  DOS is not a supported target.

Problem 2: GNU COBOL works by translating COBOL code to C, which is
then compiled by the native C compiler on the host OS.  That opens the
question of what C compiler you will use under DOS and whether GNU
COBOL will work with it if you *can* successfully install it under
FreeDOS.

I won't say it's impossible, but I would call being *able* to do this unlikely.

> Everaldo
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Re: [Freedos-user] Looking for easy to follow instructions on how to connect to Samba share

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 8:41 PM Sean Warner  wrote:
>
> Not sure if you saw my more recent post... I now have a version of FreeDOS 
> 1.2 with the NIC and MS Client installed and working. I went with v1.2 
> because after some googling I read that 1.2 is more stable than 1.3 for 
> network sharing and things. Maybe that is not true anymore?
>
> At my work I use a DOS application. It is "installed" onto a network share on 
> a file server and by mapping this share as a network drive I and my 
> colleagues are able to run that DOS application in Windows 7 32-bit which we 
> are still using as our daily driver OSs on our work laptops.
>
> My IT dept wants to upgrade the OS of that file server and our laptops to Win 
> 10. So I am trying to find a new way to host that DOS applciation and make it 
> available to the two or three people who still use it, sometimes 
> simultaneously.

> My idea is to have Win 10 on my laptop and use Virtualbox to run FreeDOS 
> which would run this DOS application which would again need to be located on 
> a network share... or such is my understanding... in order that more than one 
> person can use it potentially at the same time as others using it or maybe 
> when no one else is around and their computers are turned off.

I think you are making this far more complicated than it needs to be.

Right now, you can access the DOS application and run it from a drive
which is mapped as a network share.  If the company upgrades the
server OS on the machine mapped as a share, why would that change the
mapping, or the ability to access the network share and the DOS
application that lives on it?

When you run it now, you are loading it from the network and running
it locally.  How many must use it simultaneously is irrelevant.  You
are each running a local copy of the application, that happens to be
run from a network server instead of being loaded from a local drive.

You are using 32 bit Win7 because it still supports NTVDM, which
provides enough of the DOS environment to load and run a 18 bit DOS
application.  Microsoft removed the ability to run 16 bit applications
in 64 bit Windows, so if you need to do that you need a VM of some
sort to run them in.

One possibility is a 32 bit build of Win10.  Those do exist, and will
still run 16 bit apps using NTVDM, but it isn't the direction I would
go,.  What happens if you need to run a 54 bit Windows application?

These days, the preferred method of running 16 bit DOS applications on
bit Windows is to use a VM, but it doesn't require VirtuaBox or the
like.  What most folks here do is run DOSBox or vDOS Plus.  DOSBox is
a VM designed to allow gamers to run DOS games on things that aren't
DOS PCs.  It provides enough of a DOS environment to run the games.
and provides emulation for various graphics and sound functions that
aren't available on things like PCs that don't have a Creative Labs
Sound Blaster ISA card to provide the audio for games written to use
it, or a specidfic supported video card for EGA/VGA modes..  DOSBox is
cross platform.  I used an ARM port to run several DOS apps on an
Android tablet using an ARM Cortex 7 CPU.  (I had to find one that
passed Ctrl-key combos to the running app, as a WordStar style editor
was one of the things I wanted to use.)

If your application is pure character mode, you can use a fork of
DOSBox called vDOS Plus.  vDOS Plus only runs on x86 architecture, but
that's not an issue for you.  It's specifically intended to run
character mode applications like editors and spreadsheets, and drops
the specialized video and sound support..  I use it here to run the
old VDE editor, a WordStar clone that originated under CP/M and was
ported to DOS, as well as some character mode games ported from Unix
like Larn and VMS Empire.

I run them from a shortcut.  The shortcut runs vDOS Plus, but starts
it in the directory where the DOS program is stored.  Local config
files in the directory do the setup to run the program.  Exit the
program and I'm back in Windows.

And for that matter, I don't see the need to host the DOS application
your folks use on a network server.  Does it ever *change*? Is there a
reason you and your coworkers can't each have a local copy you run
from your own PC, without needing to access a network share?  You
likely want a master copy on a network share as a backup, but I see no
need to load and run if across the network.

Tere may be specific things about the DOS app that will be problematic
herfe, but right now it sounds like you are way overthinking the
problem.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Country Code

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 3:04 PM Deposite Pirate  wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Dec 2021 19:21:36 +0100
> Liam Proven  wrote:
> > AFAIK XP *must* be installed in an NTFS partition. It cannot be
> > installed on FAT. DOS can't boot from NTFS and can't read NTFS without
> > additional drivers. So I still don't know what you're doing here.
>
> Windows XP can indeed officially be installed and boot from FAT32.
>
> https://kb.iu.edu/d/ajqm

You might be*able* to.  I encountered a guy years back adamant that
Win2K should be run from FAT32. He thought it was faster. (I thought
he was a fool.)

Why you might *want* to is another matter.  "A file system DOS can
read and write" is generally not a sufficient reason.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Video complains that DOS should not be maintained

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 5:47 PM Wengier W via Freedos-user
 wrote:
>
> I certainly hope to see more people using DOS/FreeDOS as the only (or 
> primary) operating system. However, without things like full support for 
> Internet and modern hardware (modern sound card, USB devices, etc) this 
> cannot occur, unfortunately. IMO, DOS/FreeDOS need to support things just 
> like a typical "modern" OS (e.g. Linux) does, so that the general public 
> won't consider DOS a "legacy" OS, or a system that is limited to very 
> specific uses.

Got access to lots and lots of money to throw at the problem?  No?
Assume it won't be solved.

Aside from the questions of whether some of what you see as needed are
*possible* on a single-tasking, single threaded system in a 16 bit
environment, what you want will require serious system level hacking.
The folks who *can* do that do it for a living and expect to be paid
comparable salaries. They aren't going to spend the time and effort
involved to contribute it as open source software to a hobby project
that isn't even their hobby.

If you want support for things like a modern OS like Linux does, *run*
Linux.  Assume DOS of any flavor will never have that level of
support.
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> Wengier
>
> On Friday, December 24, 2021, 05:35:06 p.m. EST, John Vella 
>  wrote:
>
>
> I'm going to make it my new year project to finish getting the 80486 pc 
> working, and once I've upgraded the memory, (4 Meg isn't going to be enough, 
> is it?) I'll be using freedos as the only operating system for my distraction 
> free writing pc.
>
> On Fri, 24 Dec 2021, 22:00 Jim Hall,  wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 2:11 PM Jon Brase  wrote:
> > They're not talking about it in the context of log4j itself, they're
> > talking about it in the context of other open source projects, that
> > don't have something like the Apache foundation behind them, that
> > are critical infrastructure, but have one or two maintainers working
> > on them as a labor of love alongside a day job, and the potential,
> > as such projects become legacy software, for them to still be
> > half-maintained (and maybe maintain a significant user base) long
> > after an institutionally maintained project would have officially
> > been EOLed.
> >
> > And there is something of that kind of risk with any DOS variety
> > still in use. Any remote execution vulnerability, through any
> > network-aware DOS software, is basically automatically a remote root
> > vulnerability by the nature of the system. Now, most FreeDOS users
> > are probably using it for retrogaming and such and not for anything
> > business-critical, but anybody using it in an embedded setting needs
> > to be really careful about exposing it to the network.
> >
> > I really wonder how that would effect DOS, after all there is no
> > web interface, nor any Java in (Free)DOS. So (without having watched
> > this rather long video yet), any such conclusion seems to be a bit
> > far fetch IMHO...
>
>
> The statement in the video (starts at about 24:00, for others who want
> to watch it) was awkwardly made. This person makes the statement that
> some open source projects should just shut down rather than keep going
> (I'm paraphrasing broadly here). And gives the example of "If MS-DOS
> were open source" he opines that it shouldn't go on.
>
> Putting aside the fact that Microsoft did eventually release (early
> versions of) MS-DOS under an open source license, this guy is just
> wrong. Lots of people use DOS and FreeDOS to do useful things, like
> running classic DOS games or applications, and supporting some
> embedded systems or control systems.
>
> I usually try to see the other person's point of view - but in this
> case, he's off base. Whatever.
>
> Jim
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] Video complains that DOS should not be maintained

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 7:50 AM Bryan Kilgallin  wrote:
>
> The comment against open-source DOS is at the end of this discussion.
> See after 26 minutes.

,<...>

The concern I see is "legacy" code.  There are millions of lines of
legacy code in production.  They were tested and debugged, and
considered bug free.  So you get things like the problems with "bind"
years back, where bad actors found a vulnerability they could use to
compromise systems.  The threats resulting did not exist when the bind
code was written, and it got incorporated into an enormous number of
things.

The Log4J vulnerability is another example.  Almost no programs are
self-contained now.  Just about everything uses libraries, which are
*inte3nded* to promote code reuse.  Log4J got incorporated into huge
numbers of Java projects.

So everyone faces the issue of fully understanding all of the parts
that make up their application, with what library functions are
called, and the practical impossibility of doing a full security audit
on all of it.  (Open source is one thing, but what if there is
proprietary code you can't get source for tmpm do the audit?  And no,
proprietary code will not go away in favor of open source. Tough.
Deal. And it assumes you are *competant* to perform a full security
audit.  Odds are, you aren't.)

Things will get fixed when someone *breaks* them.  Till then, everyone
has other things to do.

I'm aware of the Log4J vulnerability, but did not (and won't) wat6ch
the video.  I can *read* far faster than I can watch, and my scarce
resource is time.

But that said, I don't *care* that the chap on the video suggested DOS
should go away.  I'm a little surprised other folks do care. DOS, in
both commercial and open source versions, is still in use, and isn't
going away. It won't go away till folks stop using it.  His opinion is
simply irrelevant.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Question about FreeDOS 3.0

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 2:56 AM Ivan Ivanov  wrote:
>
> Laptops with FreeDOS / Linux instead of Windows - are really valuable!

To whom?

Dell offered systems through Walmart a while back that did not have
Windows per-installed.  They dropped the offer.  The systems without
Windows did not *sell*.  (If you are Dell, selling through Walmart,
"sales" will be measured in  tens of thousands of systems. If you
aren't selling that sort of volume, you stop trying to do it that
way.)

The market for such a system is too small for a major computer
manufacturer to bother with.

> At least because the price of the Win license is included in the
> laptop price, and nobody in their right mind wants to pay an extra $30
> for this glitchy "air". I'd spend these $30 on a RAM upgrade, or
> donate these $30 to some open source software - to make this world a
> better place, instead of filling the greedy M$ pockets.

The savings is not significant in terms of the total cost of the
machine. I don't know offhand what MS charges PC makers for bundling
Windows on new PCs.  But let's go with $30.  If you are looking at
laptops, it's easy to spend $3K on a machine without pushing hard.
That Windows license is *1%* of the cost of the machine

Note that Windows in no longer a major component of MS's revenues.
Yes, Windows and Office are still decent slices of their business, but
the real money these days is in gaming and cloud services.  Azure is
*huge* for Microsoft.  They are competing in that space against Amazon
AWS services, Oracle, and Google.  (And Office is shifting to the
cloud.  MS is pusing Office 365 hard, as  subscription based cloud
service  Depending on who you are and what you do, you may not *need*
a local installation of Office on your PC.0

And no, MS is not being "greedy".  I'll spare everyone a lecture on
the financial markets and why things work the way they do.  I'll
simply state that MS has reasons for its behavior that are driven *by*
the financial markets..
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Re: [Freedos-user] Question about FreeDOS 3.0

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 8:01 PM richardkolacz...@hotmail.com
 wrote:
>
> I am new to trying to setup FreeDOS as bare-metal configuration to use 
> instead of Windows 10 for programs I am writing.

Why on Earth do you want to do *that*?

> I notice that HP computer company has FreeDOS 3.0 as an option for Available 
> Operating Systems. Is this anything to do with this forum? Any advantages for 
> me to use this instead of RC1.5 version etc.

HP's spec sheet is *wrong.* There *is* no FreeDOS 3.0.  FreeDOS
current release is 1.3.  If you go the HP_'s top level site and search
for FreeDOS 3.0, it will find nothing.

And this is not a machine you want to try to set up FreeDOS to run
from the bare metal on.  Too much of the hardware is simply not
supported by any form of DOS.  DOS stopped being sold and supported
long before some of it existed, and it uses UEFI, not a BIOS, so
getting DOS to boot on it will be a real challenge.

You haven't specified what sort of software you want to develop, but
unless you are dedicated Old Skool, who wants to develop on a pure DOS
PC using only development tools available when DOS was current, you
are better served to get a decent Win10 Pro machine with current
development toolchains, and compile to 808X.binaries than can run
under DOS and run DOS in emulation.

If I wanted to do this sort of thing, I'd start with a Win10 desktop,
not a laptop.  The one I'm using at the moment is a refurb
ex-corporate workstation that came with a quad cone Intel i5 cpu 2
356ghx, with a built in turbo mode up to 3.9 ghz, 16GB of RAM, Intel
HD 4600 graphics, and Win10 Pro on a 256GB SSD,  It cont *one tenth*
of the price for the laptop in the specs.

If you absolutely must run DOS on the bare metal, look at the links
for new gear posted earlier, or look around on someplace like eBay for
old PCVs that were designed to run DOS.

Buy the HP laptop advertised, and you will spend a lot of money on a
machine that cannot be used for what you want to do.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Speaking of (tiny) DOS gaming PCs

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 12:02 PM Ivan Ivanov  wrote:
>
> Dennis, thank you for sharing. First of all, if you'd like to get a
> Vortex86 CPU-based PC, better to get those which are supported by the
> opensource coreboot BIOS, instead of the proprietary closed-source
> BIOS.

Thank you, and noted.  I'm not personally interested.  I'n not a DOS
(or any other kind of)  gamer.  I want to run some DOS applications,
and my needs are met by emulation.

What fascinated me here was a tiny computer with built in hardware
support for DOS video modes, and especially for Soundblaster
compatible audio.  How do I get *sound* in my DOS games is a regular
question when using an emulator.

This also looks like it will be useful to Old Skool folks who want to
boot DOS and run it directly on the bare metal, instead of in an
emulator or VM.

I suspect others here might reach out to you for more information, and
thanks for being ehre to provide it.
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Re: [Freedos-user] How to redirect STDOUT and STDERR to file

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 7:54 AM saito yutaka  wrote:
>
> How to redirect STDOUT and STDERR to file.
> I want to redirect to file as follow.

This is not doable directly in COMMAND.COM or FreeCon from FreeDOS.

By default,file descriptor 1 is STDIN, file descriptor 2 is STDOUT,
and file descriptor 3 is STDERR.  All are assigned to display on the
console. DOS does not let you treat STDOUT and STDERR separately.  You
can redirect STDOUT, but not STDERR,

If you use 4DOS instead, it *will* let you do this. Do it like this;

 >&> error.txt

The ">&>" is the magic command line sequence, and what follows it is
the filename you want STDERR to be redirected to.

> Saito Yutaka
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[Freedos-user] Speaking of (tiny) DOS gaming PCs

[dmccunney]

https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/weeCee___Tiny_DOS_Gaming_PC.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USHvvSbYmJA
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Re: [Freedos-user] Announcements seen on BTTR: Lynx web browser, NDN file manager, DOSBOX emulator

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 1:33 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 8:06 PM dmccunney  wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 7:20 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> > > On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:36 PM dmccunney  
> > > wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:19 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Bocke adds this: (I think FTP is just broken in the major browsers 
> > > > > now,
> > > > > alas!)
> > > >
> > > > It is broken and will *not* be fixed.
> > >
> > > I assume this is moreso due to unneeded extra maintenance rather than
> > > just dislike for it.
> >
> > No, it's because it is no longer *necessary*.  You can do the same
> > thing in other ways.  If you can, why bother with FTP?
>
> In case you haven't noticed, FTP is much simpler to implement than
> Curl or Wget. Those are incredibly complex, especially for DOS.
> However, it's unavoidable these days, things are too complicated
> elsewhere to rely on "simple" FTP exclusively (or if at all).

I *have* noticed.  That is irrelevant to the decision to deprecate it
in *browsers*.  Browsers already had support, but it is going away.

> > And please note, I said it was deprecated and would not be fixed *in
> > the browsers*.  This does not mean it won't live on in other places.
>
> I still assume this is more of "we don't need it, we don't have time"
> rather than "we don't like it" reasoning.

All three.  They have reasons for disliking it, it is not *needed* in
a browser, and it will be one less thing to maintain and perform
security audits on..

> > FreeDOS (and any other form of DOS) is increasingly locked out of
> > access to the wider world, because it does not and *cannot* support
> > the methods now used.
>
> I get it, FreeDOS will never rule the world and will never support
> 100% of everything. Even if it IS possible (as most things are),
> there's not enough skilled workers to do it. Those with the skills
> lack motivation and/or time. So it won't get done. However, it's not
> true that FreeDOS can do "nothing". The fact that we don't have
> Javascript in a web browser is less of an impossibility and more of a
> simple lack of effort.

Nothing simple about the lack.JavaScript is an evolving standard.  The
current standard is ECMAscript 6, but development is continuing.

To give you an example, when you compile code in current compilers
like GCC, it's a two step process.  A front end parser examines your
code and attempts to convert it to an architecture independent
Intermediate Representation Language.  The back end code generator
converts that to object code for the architecture you are developing
for.  (That is why you can set up GCC to cross compile, and develop
code under X86 that will run on ARM.)

It is now possible to use JavaScript *as* the IRL.  In many cases, you
may not bother compiling to object code.  Your target has a JavaScript
engine already present, like Google's V8, that does JIT compilation to
object code on the device.  Just compile your source language to JS
and send that to the target.

I won't say it's *impossible* to get that level of JS into a DOS
browser, but I do think it's highly unlikely.  And even if you can,
you need to understand what current websites will send to the browser
and expect it to make sense of, to know whatJ > S support you need.

> DOS can at least crunch numbers, edit text,
> compile stuff, and run some games, even multimedia (within reason).
> It's just not "do everything like Linux or Windows". And that's okay.

I never said FreeDOS could do *nothing*.  It does all sorts of things
and people do those things with it.

The pain points for using FreeDOS are in two areas.

1. 64 bit Windows (and I 8think* 64 bit Linux) dropped support for 16 bit code.

If you are a Windows user used to 32bit XP, which provided NTVDM and
let you run 16 bit code under it, it means you either use an emulator
like DOSBox, or run a full blown virtual machine with WinXP as a
guest, and DOS apps running in it under NTVDM. (The latter is a "You
are going through far more trouble than you need to..." thing.)

Or, you're Old Skool, and want to boot and run DOS on the bare metal
on old hardware.  That's a different set of challenges.

2. The Internet ate the world, but *connecting* to the Internet has
become increasingly difficult for *any* flavor of DOS.

HTTP is deprecated, and all communication must use https and be
encrypted both ways.  (And encryption standards are changing, as folks
find vulnerabilities in older forms.The current standard is TLS 1.1,
but TLS 1.2 is in beta and will become the standard soon.)

Using a browser?  Web standards are moving targets, but you are
currently expected to have support for HTML5, C

Re: [Freedos-user] Announcements seen on BTTR: Lynx web browser, NDN file manager, DOSBOX emulator

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 7:20 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:36 PM dmccunney  wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:19 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
> >
> > > Bocke adds this: (I think FTP is just broken in the major browsers now,
> > > alas!)
> >
> > It is broken and will *not* be fixed.
>
> I assume this is moreso due to unneeded extra maintenance rather than
> just dislike for it.

No, it's because it is no longer *necessary*.  You can do the same
thing in other ways.  If you can, why bother with FTP?

And please note, I said it was deprecated and would not be fixed *in
the browsers*.  This does not mean it won't live on in other places.

(Personally, I used a dedicated Windows FTP client, and did not try to
access FTP sites through my browser except as a last resort.)

> > FTP is deprecated and is going away.  It is ancient, ill maintained,
> > and a yawning mass of security holes.
>
> But not everything needs to be "secure". You mentioned below "games",
> and as long as they run in a sandbox (DOSBox) where they can't delete
> or format anything, who cares? Email is (usually) plain text, too! Are
> you going to deprecate everything old? UNIX is 50! (It had some good
> ideas, to say the least.)

> Simple things don't need to be secure. A simple AWK script or a
> (textual) "diff" to build, say, NASM in DOS is not worthy of ten
> layers of encryption.

When you are building it, certainly.  Once again, the requirement
kicks in when you wish to communicate across the *Internet*

It should be quite possible to create a local network of machines used
for development and testing that happily use FTP to sling things
around internally.  But that network will be behind a router and
firewall, and nothing *outside* it can get in, and stuff inside it
goes through a secure gateway machine to get out. (Does the machine
you use to participate here connect directly to your ISP with no
firewall and all ports open?  I didn't think so.  Why should machines
on your local network?)

As far as current development is concerned, anything traveling over
the Internet needs to be secure.  That means encryption both ways,
using current encryption methods (and those are continually changing,
as folks find vulnerabilities.)  Do *you*. need it?  Possibly not.
Does every website you browse really *need* https, and plain http with
no encryption may be fine?  Possibly. But what you and I might need do
not drive these decisions.

> > HTTP is going away in favor of HTTPS, which adds encryption to the
> > connection.  SFTP never caught on.  SCP is the protocol of choice in
> > locked down corporate environments.
> >
> > Essentially, *all* communications must now be encrypted *both* ways,
> > which requires current encryption protocols baked in.  Bare minimum, I
> > believe this would require an SSH library for DOS.
>
> You missed the bit about the recent update of the DJGPP port of Lynx,
> where it said this:

<...>

I did *not* miss it.  But it also said JavaScript was *not* supported.
This breaks it for use all over, unless the site ahs accommodations
for things like screen readers. the vast majority of websites in
existence now require access over https, and support for HTML5, CSS3,
SVG, and  reasonably current JS engine.to provide anything like a
satisfactory browsing experience.

Lynx under Windows or Linux would not work for me, because I need
precisely the things it does not support.  Fortunately, I don't *have*
to use Lynx, and don't *care*.

FreeDOS (and any other form of DOS) is increasingly locked out of
access to the wider world, because it does not and *cannot* support
the methods now used.

> > If you are using a DOS emulator like DOSbiox X, you can rely on the
> > host to imp[lement such things.
>
> DOSBox-X also runs atop FreeDOS, thanks to HX (yes, I tried it). So
> does that mean DOS is now magically secure?

Not in that config, it doesn't.

I assume DOSBox X will run under something like a current version of
Windows, (And in fact, I have it installed here for testing and it
seems to work.)  Linux, or OS/X. They can be adequately secured, and
if something you do under DOS needs to reach the outside world, it has
a secure host to reach it through.

I suppose it's significant that you *could* get DOSBox X to run on top
of FreeDOS using HX, but why would you *do* that?  What do you get
from doing it?.

I am honestly curious about what use case you might have beyond "Let's
see whether I *can*... '  (I wouldn't.  I have too many other things I
want to do to devote the time to that sort of testing.)

> > If you are running DOS on the bare metal, you will have problems.  You
> > may still be able to set up an FTP server on a host that your pure DOS
> > machine can connect to, but it will *not* be part o

Re: [Freedos-user] Announcements seen on BTTR: Lynx web browser, NDN file manager, DOSBOX emulator

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:19 PM Eric Auer  wrote:

> Bocke adds this: (I think FTP is just broken in the major browsers now,
> alas!)

It is broken and will *not* be fixed.

FTP is deprecated and is going away.  It is ancient, ill maintained,
and a yawning mass of security holes.

HTTP is going away in favor of HTTPS, which adds encryption to the
connection.  SFTP never caught on.  SCP is the protocol of choice in
locked down corporate environments.

Essentially, *all* communications must now be encrypted *both* ways,
which requires current encryption protocols baked in.  Bare minimum, I
believe this would require an SSH library for DOS.

If you are using a DOS emulator like DOSbiox X, you can rely on the
host to imp[lement such things.

If you are running DOS on the bare metal, you will have problems.  You
may still be able to set up an FTP server on a host that your pure DOS
machine can connect to, but it will *not* be part of a browser.

(Most interest I see in DOS these days is in running old DOS *games*,
where communication with the outside world is not a factor.  Those
folks won't care about FTP, and may have never used it.).
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Re: [Freedos-user] FlWriter Textprocessor with GUI

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 10:46 AM Thomas Desi  wrote:

> Hi there,
>> If someone is looking for a nifty text editor which looks quite "un-dos" 
>> with a GUI, Georg Potthast has one:

<...>

Also documented here:  http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FLWriter

> Just in case someone is looking for something like this.
> Works very well on DOS-BOX, too.
>
> Th.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Clairifcation on USB drives.

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 10:51 PM joseph turco  wrote:
>
> i'm looking at installing freeDOS on an older (XP era) computer. I'm sorry 
> for my ignorance, but i'm trying to figure out usb support. I read somewhere 
> that USB drives are not read by the OS while it's already booted, but WILL 
> read USB drives if it's inserted upon boot. Is this correct? Many thanks 
> ahead of time. I plan to get a floppy drive for the computer (found one for 
> sale for 10 bucks) so that I won't rely on USB drives, but I need it to get 
> QBASIC on the system.

The issue will be FreeDOS.  USB did not exist when DOS was the
dominant PC OS.  FreeDOS attempts to be an open source clone of MSDOS,
so it does not have support for stuff introduced after DOS was dead.

You would need a USB driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS to access the USB
drives from FreeDOS.  There is an attempt to create that, but
I'm not sure about the current status. (It didn't work to access USB
ports on a machine where I multibooted with FreeDOS as one of the
OSes.). My memory suggests it needed support for a USB function not in
that driver.  That was a few years ago, and things may have improved.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Command succeeded

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2021 at 7:45 PM Bryan Kilgallin  wrote:
>
> > Something like formatting a disk might not complete (eg hardware
> > error)
> "The command didn't complete.", or "The command hung.".
>
> "or it might complete unsuccessfully (disk is not usable)."
> "The command failed."

If the command returns a status code at all (and as I recall, some DOS
programs didn't), the return code would be 0 for normal completion and
1 for anything else.  Some commands (on *nix*, at least,) will return
codes greater than 1 to give a better idea of *what* anything else
was..But what gets returned will vary by program.

There is no overall cross platform standard I am aware of for return
codes to be adhered to..

*Wanting* more meaningful error messages is one thing.  Being able to
*get* them is another matter.

I would not hold my breath.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Diskman in our Ibiblio collection

[dmccunney]

On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 5:52 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
> On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 4:00 PM dmccunney  wrote:



> > You don't host non open source software on Ibiblio.

> > I am principal maintainer for a site called TextEditors.org  The focus
> > is what it says in the site name.  It's a wiki anyone can update.  If it's
> > a text editor running on a device, the wiki wants to document it.  The
> > hardware it runs on might be anything from an IBM Mainframe to a
> > pocket calculator.
> >
> > Licenses also vary.  An editor may be explicitly commercial,
> > shareware, freeware, open source, or abandonware, where the code and
> > docs are available but the author has long since vanished from the
> > Internet.  I don't care.  I just specify what the license *is*, The
> > one area where I draw a line is abandoned shareware. If it's
> > abandoned, but the editor is fully functional without being
> > registered,, I'll host it.  If it's abandoned shareware that will not
> > fully function without a license, and it's not possible to register it
> > because long gone authors, I see no point to listing it.
> >
> > A lot  of stuff I host is historical and long gone., as is the
> > hardware it ran on.  I do my best to provide pointers to documentation
> > so viewers can learn about what it was, did, and its place in computer
> > history.
>
> Interesting wiki. I looked up BRIEF but didn't find a download link on the 
> wiki:
> http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Brief

No download link because I couldn't find a legit one.

Once upon a time, an outfit called Mark of the Unicorn made an editor
for CP/M called Mince, which was an acronym for Mince Is Not Complete
Emacs.  It used the Emacs design and keyboard mappings, but there were
limits to what you could do in CP/M where you *might* have 48K to hold
OS, program, and data. It was ported to MS DOS by MOTU.  As far as I
can tell, it was then acquired by a company called Underware and
sold/supported by them.

Borland acquired the product from Underware, and released a version as
The Final World.  Final Word was then released in a new version and
renamed Sprint.  Sprint was a popular word processor for MS DOS,
notable for an extensive macro language making it more like "real"
emacs..  As DOS became moribund and Windows took over.  Borland
withdrew Sprint from the market.  I have a copy of Sprint sent to me
in the original distribution archive, but he didn't specify where *he*
got it. Lacking provenance, I *didn't* make it available for download
from TextEditors.  I just documented that it used to exist.

I now discover there *is* a valid link to download something called
Brief.  The publishers apparently rewrote it from scratch as a Windows
application, but it seems to look and feel  and have the same features
as the DOS version. I may post a link to it.  My problem is that I
have no idea who actually did this.  They just call themselves
BriefSoftware, and I really like to put things like the actual
author's names on stuff I document.

Borland has been gradually releasing ancient stuff under a Community
license, and things like Turbo Pascal and Turbo C are available as a
free download and free to use. If memory serves, source is available
too, but of questionable use.  Good luck acquiring the proper
toolchain and being *able* to change and rebuild.it.

I recall Brief being promised, but not available the last time I
looked.  Should it *become* available. I\ll link to it on TextEditors/

> I also found WordStar but didn't see a download link on the wiki:
> http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStar

There *isn't* one.  WordStar was never formally made freeware.  It was
simply abandoned. Note that the WordStar.org site explicitly *states*
you will not find binaries there, and why..  It's front and center on
the site..

It *is* relatively easy to find unauthorized archives, install,
configure, and use it, but you won't find pointers to them on the WS
site. (You *will* find extensive discussion in the site forums on. how
to set it up and get it running on Windows10 using the open source
vDos Plus  emulator, vDos Plus is a fork of DOSBox, an open source,
cross platform DOS emulator, aimed a folks who want to play old DOS
games in things that *aren't* DOS PCs. I have it up here as proof of
concept.  It's not hard once you grasp a couple of underlying
concepts. :-)

DOSBox/vDosPlus provide enough DOS functionality to let you boot and
run DOS games on platforms that may not be PCs or use x86 CPUs.  The
big lack is the shell, which provides just enough functionality to
load and run the games. You can add that missing stuff with  FreeDOS
COMMAND, or 4DOS (my preference) and have a functional DOS emulator
which can load things like  TSRs

(It has no equivalent of CONFIG.SYS and cannot load drivers that
expect to be loaded in the bo

Re: [Freedos-user] Diskman in our Ibiblio collection

[dmccunney]

On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 5:17 PM Thomas Desi  wrote:
>
> Hi Dennis, I *love* your TextEditors.org site! Thanks for your work!

Thank you. I don't believe the site is high volume, but I don't care.
Every once in a while I get an email from someone thanking me because
TextEdiors provided info or a download for something they had been
looking for for a long time.  I smile happily.,. That's why I maintain
the site and what makes it with doing.

> Coincidentally, I was just this moment browsing 
> http://www.lanet.lv/simtel.net/msdos/editor-pre.html
> and it looks like all are broken links.

Likely because Simtel.net no longer exists.  I can usually find the
stuff in other repositories, but I don't know I have to till someone
like you points it out

Keeping links updated is an ongoing challenge I haven't usually got
the time to devote to.

My reference was simply explaining my thinking about licenses. I want
editors to be available.  I don't *care* what the license is.  What
the user does because of a license is up to them. I don't get to tell
them what to do, and *shouldn't*..

> -Thomas
>
> NB: Some authors of an earlier era still living up to the idea that holding 
> the software and/or source or sort-of-registration-process/registration fee 
> etc. might still yield some income. Software market dynamics have changed so 
> much since then (1990ies, DOS times) that more is lost then free the software 
> at least for archives to study, try, play or even work with it. Most of it is 
> of little commercial use on a large scale. (This should/could be read in the 
> light of the »FSF« ideas, too.)

If there are authors still attempting to monetize their work, and are
still actively supporting it when the user buys a license, I'm
thrilled.

I simply see a need for Freedos users to *find* them, starting from
the Freedos page.  Fine by me if that location isn't on Ibiblio,  but
there needs to be a pointer *from* the Freedos site to where it is.

> Maybe it would need a broader manifesto about this issue and distributed in 
> time before most of it is lost in digital oblivion? (See editor-list above 
> and many many other sites/links)

Possible.  I am all about preserving software and data like this.  I
am *not* fussy about the method.  I am only concerned that it *works.*
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Re: [Freedos-user] Diskman in our Ibiblio collection

[dmccunney]

On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 3:26 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
> On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 10:59 AM Eric Auer  wrote:
> >
> > Hi! Recently I have noticed that our ibiblio contains "DM21"
> I'm not sure why that was on Ibiblio. We can only include open source
> software on the Ibiblio site.

You don't host non open source software on Ibiblio.

Fair enough, but there needs to be a place to put "Free to use" but
*not* open source that will be of use to Freedos (and DOS in general
users) and useful used on DOS/Freedos.  It requires written permission
to host for download?  What if the author has long since vanished and
the product is abandonware and you can't *get* it? Being in violation
of the license wouldn't  be a concern here.  Who on Earth might go you
after about it?

I am principal maintainer for a site called TextEditors.org  The focus
is what it says in site name.  It's a wiki anyone can update.  If it's
a text editor running on a device, the wiki wants to document it.  The
hardware is runs on might be anything from an IBM Mainframe to a
pocket calculator.

Licenses also vary.  An editor may be explicitly commercial,
shareware, freeware, open source, or abandonware, where the code and
docs are available but the author has long since vanished from the
Internet.  I don't care.  I just specify what the license *is*, The
one area where I draw a line is abandoned shareware. If it's
abandoned, but the editor is fully functional without being
registered,, I'll host it.  If it's abandoned shareware that will not
fully function without a license, and it's not possible to register it
because long gone authors, I see no point to have it available.

A lot  of stuff I host is historical and long gone., as is the
hardware it ran on.  I do my best to provide pointers to documentation
so viewers can learn about what it was, did, and its place in computer
history.

I think there needs to be a repository for stuff like Eric mentioned,
with a pointer to the site from the Freedos.org home page explicitly
stating "Only free and open source software may be hosted on Ibiblio.
This URL points to a site not on Ibiblio with software that was
recommended by Freedos user as generally useful DOS sofwaret that is
free but *not* open source.  If interested you may find it *here*."

My concern is providing copies of and information *about* DOS and  DOS
software.  If the software is free to use but *not* open source, I
don't care.  It may not be posted *on* Ibiblio, but DOS/Freedos users
should be able to *find* it, with a pointer on Freedos.org to
somewhere other than Ibiblio where it might live.

> Jim
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Re: [Freedos-user] Print via USB / deprecate or improve PRINT queue tools?

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 10:23 AM Eric Auer  wrote:

> >> I have just connected my Brother HL-3150CDN laser printer to my Dell>> 
> >> OptiPlex GX270.
> > I used the FreeDOS "print" command, unembellished.
>
> That is only needed for background printing. A more straightforward
> way is to send the printer data to the printer port: COPY x.txt PRN
> or COPY x.pdf LPT1 or similar.

The PRINT command installed as a resident TSR.  It provided the
earliest  example I am aware of of time slicing under DOS.  (If memory
serves, you could specify the number of foreground and background
ticks for fine tuning. I believe the default was 6 and 2.)  It was
intended to ease the lives of folks doing writing they needed to
print, like secretaries,  so they didn't have to stop and sit in their
hands waiting  for a print job to finish before they could work again.
Programmers disassembled MS's code to see how they did that, and a new
class of TSR got  created.

I ran the MKS Toolkit under DOS, which provided the most complete
implementation of all the Unix commands that made sense in a single
taking environment.  When I was booted in the Toolkit, I could use
Korn shell aliases and shell functions to duplicate the functionally
of the unix lp command, including adding, stopping, and deleting print
jobs. Fun. :-)


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Re: [Freedos-user] DOS word processors / text editors

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 8:58 AM Thomas Desi  wrote:
>
> Hi John,
> thanks for your experience account and software list.
> I am intrigued - as »collecting« word processors/text editors in the "quest 
> for the best« - I managed to find
> the following. 
> (https://winworldpc.com/download/c3806cc3-a010-c2a4-0911-c3a6e280947e)

You might want to look at http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MsDosEditors

> What version woud you advice or are you using? There is a significant 
> difference in size between v.1.00 and 1.01 as you can see…

There is a long and tangled history there. Borland Sprint began as
Mark of the Unicorn's Final Word !! product.  And Final World II had
roots in MINCE (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs), originally developed for
8 bit micros running CP/M, and able to run in 48K RAM.

I have a version installed of Sprint here. It can be very powerful,
but has a substantial learning curve.

The original Emacs editor is huge and powerful, and got used under
Unix back when as the user's shell.  Their login profile specified
emacs as the shell, and they did everything on the system from within
the emacs environment.

But with great power comes great responsibility.  Gnu Emacs is
essentially a Lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is written in
the dialect of Lisp. it interprets.
To fully use emacs you must customize it. Doing that requires gaining
fluency in that flavor of Lisp.  (I had fun years back getting emacs
to use WordStar keybinds, so I didn;t have to retrain my fingers ,
rather than wrestle with Emacs Ctrl/Alt/Shiat/Meta, syntax.

There is an equivalent level of compl;exity in Borland Sprint.

You might also want to look at http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Freemacs

> thanks for your opinion on this. (I am currently working with VDE)

VDE is my DOS editor of choice.  Tell me what it *doesn't* do that you
might want to see?

(If you haven't encountered it, the VDE Home Page is
https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/  I think you'll find useful
information.)

> regards, Thomas
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Re: [Freedos-user] FSF?!

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 4:30 AM Adam Nielsen via Freedos-user
 wrote:
> > I do dare to ask a dumb question, after reading several post about FSF.
> >
> > Can anyone explain what is FSF, i'm just a simple tech guy!
>
> One thing they also do - perhaps the most important in my opinion - is
> that they keep companies who make use of free software honest.  They
> will commence legal action against companies that take advantage of
> open source software by using it without complying with the licence.

They do not do that generally.  They are concerned solely with code
licensed under the GPL.

The GPL requires that you make source available for code you license
under it.  (And it's more complicated. because you can't just point to
your repository as the place to get if.  It must be the specific
*version* of the code used to build the executable you are
distributing.  The person who gets the code must be able to reproduce
the build environment and produce an exact duplicate on their own
system of the executable they distributed. Just pointing at HEAD in
the repository will get code changed from what they built from,
unlikely to reproduce the executable they distributed.)

If you want to get GPLed code and make a closed source fork, you
*can*, but you must negotiate an agreement  with the copyright holder
of the code permitting you to do so.

And whether the FSF gets involved will depend on the product in
question. They *can't* sue on behalf of everybody.. One open source
product under the GPL I made extensive use of back when was Plucker.
Plucker was designed to scrape websites, and convert the HTML pages it
got to a form viewable on a Palm OS device using a Plucker PalmOS
viewer product.  Plucker worked fine converting locally stored HTML as
well as stuff scraped from website.  A good chunk of the programs I
dealt with as a Unix admin had documentation in HTML form.  I could
convert the docs to things viewable by Plucker and carry a
documentation library in my pocket. (It was a hop, skip, and jump to
converting other things, and I have about 4,000 converted HTML Plucker
documents in an archive.)

The Plucker folks had problems with a vendor who grabbed the code and
made a closed source fork without getting a license.  *Bringing* suit
was beyond the means of the Plucker devs, and it wasn't a big or
important enough product that the FSF would take a hand. The Plucker
devs bit their tongues and put up with it.  Open source licenses are
gentlemen's agreements that assume all concerned *are* gentlefolk and
will comply. Sometimes that's not the case.

The bigger problem with the GPL is that it's *viral.*  The GPL states
that code *linked against* GPLed code *becomes* GPLed, even if that is
not the license *it* was issued under. That bit is a breaker for
*many* people, and the source of license incompatibilities I
complained about elsewhere. Google, for example, creates and uses
enormous amounts of open source code.  Nothing with the GPL may be
incorporated. (I follow an Android development project that must
reinvent the wheel and recreate stuff available under the GPL. That
situation *existing* is a source of profound irony.)

> Adam.
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Re: [Freedos-user] FSF

[dmccunney]

Ultimately, this discussion is pointless.

1.  Stallman has been known to be difficult for about as long as he's
been active.  He's easy to work with - he's the smartest one in the
room, and just do things his way.  No?  Expect problems.

2. The FSF is increasingly *irrelevant*. Open Source has *won*. It is
long past the days when an advocacy organization was needed to promote
it and make it acceptable.  *Microsoft* bought GitHub, for heaven's
sake, and is heavily involved in open source efforts of their own
(like open sourcing the .NET framework.  MS engineers are major
contributors to the Mono project that implements .NET.)  Look at the
number of open source repositories, like GitHub, GitLab, Sourceforge
and others, and the many thousands of projects out there.  Look at the
rate of take up of open source by business organizations. I've been an
open source advocate at employers. Their concern was "Who do we call
if it breaks?", and might prefer a commercial solution to have someone
to call.because they had a support contract.  Red Hat makes its living
being who you call.

3.  The reasons for Open Source given by advocates are often more
statements of religious faith than anything else.

Consider who uses open source and why.  Most folks get and use open
source code because it's "free as in beer".  They don't have to *pay*
for it.  The vast majority have no use for and *can't* use the source.
They aren't developers, don't have the toolchains, and wouldn't
understand the code. if they looked at it.

"Open source is more bug free and secure because the code is open and
anyone can look at it."  Is it?

Open source advocate Eris S Raymond said "With enough eyes on the
code, *all* bugs are shallow!"  True enough.  The problem is *getting*
enough eyes on the code.

Offhand, I'd say 95% of the open source projects I've looked at never
gained traction, the code never got looked at by anyone *other* than
the original developer(s), and chances are they are orphaned products
whose developers have moved on to other things. And there have been
too many instances of vulnerabilities found in supposedly mature and
bug free software, because no one had looked at it for years and the
sort of vulnerabilities that could be exploited were not something
ever thought of when the code was written. It was only *after* a bad
actor saw a way to exploit the code for nefarious reasons that people
discovered there was a problem.

And consider *what* gets open sourced.  *Every* product has a life
cycle, including software.  It goes from something shiny and new that
*creates* a market and becomes the new must have to something that
becomes a commodity with commodity pricing and paper thin margins.
(And it does so *very* quickly in the computer industry.)

Most of what is open source these days has long since ceased being
something anyone will *pay* for. There's no reason not to open source
the code, as it no longer has monetary value.  (Of course. good luck
with support...)

4.  The single biggest open source issue I see these days is
incompatible open source licenses.  It is a matter of profound irony
when one open source product cannot use code from another, no matter
how good a fit it is, because the license under which it was issued
will not permit that inclusion.

The GPL is the single *biggest* source of license incompatibilities.
(GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv3, for $DEITY'S sake.).

Want to do the entire open source ecosystem a favor?  Do everything
you can to get *rid* of the GPL and use a license that doesn't put
roadblocks in the reuse of the code by other projects.  Outfits like
Google are already in that camp.  They create and use an enormous
amount of open source code.  Nothing licensed with the GPL is part of
it.

I have a fair bit of GPLed code installed here.  I have it because it
does something I need done, and it's the only thing that does it.  If
an equivalent tool was issued under a more permissive license, I'd
switch in a heartbeat. (I consider the GPL to be the worst thing RMS
did to computing.)

Meanwhile, I'm beyond caring about Stallman or the state of the FSF.
Both deserve whatever happens to them.
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Re: [Freedos-user] links v2.22

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 5:17 PM Karen Lewellen  wrote:
>
> One thing I have never gotten confirmed is if Links supports cookies?

You might try looking here: http://links.twibright.com/  It's the home
page for development.

The source for the version andrea936 pointed to contains a file called
cookies.c  Code comments are in Czeckoslavakian, sp precisely what
support is provided is unclear.
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Re: [Freedos-user] formatting floppies

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 9:09 PM  wrote:
>
> I need to low level format a bunch of older 1440k floppies that are starting 
> to lose their integrity.  A low level format often works to revitalize them.  
> But, I could not get the FreeDOS formatter to do anything but reformat the 
> directory area.  Can a full low-level format of 1440k floppies actually be 
> done on FreeDOS?  What am I missing?

It *is* still possible to buy 3.5" floppy disks: https://www.floppydisk.com/

That might be a better alternative than trying to resurrect old ones.
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Re: [Freedos-user] COWGOL programming language

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 8:21 AM TK Chia  wrote:
>
> > No recursion and no floating point will be blockers users need to keep
> > in mind, but being able to build for 8bit micros like the 8080, Z-80,
> > and 6502 is a definite plus..
>
> The Cowgol page (http://cowlark.com/cowgol/index.html) says that the
> lack of recursion is because most of the target platforms "don't really
> support stack frames".  I wonder if that means there will also be a
> problem writing, say, thread-safe routines or re-entrant routines.

Likely.  But if you need to do that, why would you write in cowgol?

I am trying to imagine Honest to $DEITY threaded code on an 8 bit
micro, and failing.

Re-entrant code is a bit less of a stretch, but you'll still need
stack space to keep track of the recursion, and that will bite hard.

> Incidentally, the Cowgol author, Mr. David Given, also currently
> maintains the Amsterdam Compiler Kit
> (https://github.com/davidgiven/ack), which was reportedly used in Minix.
>   I think ACK might also be potentially useful for MS-DOS program
> development.

I missed that.  I'd heard of th Amsterdam Compiler Kit.  It might indeed.

> https://gitlab.com/tkchia :: https://github.com/tkchia
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Re: [Freedos-user] COWGOL programming language

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 2:38 AM  wrote:
>
> Please forgive me if someone has already noted this, but yesterday I came 
> across another programming language which targets DOS and ultimately may be 
> able to be used to compile on DOS. Despite the odd name (COWGOL) is does seem 
> to be a totally serious, useful language. It can be found at 
>  and lists the following as things in 
> its favour:

Yet Another Programming Language.  I haven't seen this one before.
Added to my list, and thanks.

> a properly type safe, modern language inspired by Ada
> the compiler is written in itself and is fully bootstrapped
> a table-driven, easy to port backend (the 80386 backend is 1.2kloc with no 
> other compiler changes needed)
> tiny: the 80386 Linux compiler binary is 70kB (including ELF overhead) The 
> 8080 CP/M compiler 58kB (split across two executables)
> fast: on my PC it’ll compile itself in   80ms.
> global analysis: dead code removal and static variable allocation, leading to 
> small and efficient binaries

It may have been inspired by Ada, but I suspect ancestry in Algol.

An old friend with a PhD in Computer Science (who once worked for BB
and helped build DARPANet) talked about an optimizing Algol compiler
he encountered.  It was self hosted, and written in Algol.

You compiled the source, and got a slow compiler that generated slow
code. You compiled the source again with that compiler, and got a slow
compiler that generated fast code.  Compile a third time with *that*
compiler, and you got a fast compiler that generated fast code.

I think the Ada inspiration was the basis for table-driven, with a
compiler that separated from end analysis from back end code
generation.  That's pretty normal now, with GCC and LLVM both using
the strategy.

No recursion and no floating point will be blockers users need to keep
in mind, but being able to build for 8bit micros like the 8080, Z-80,
and 6502 is a definite plus..

Being able to host the compiler on those architectures is a laudable
goal, but I think most folks will happily cross-compile on a PC,
simply for speed.

> Bruce.
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 6:48 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 17:43 (UTC-0500):
>
> > The RAM here is all DDR4, same speed, and the only difference is one
> > stick is 8GB.  (I may add another 8GB sick at some point, but it won't
> > be soon.)
>
> > When I said I *saw* no performance difference I meant exactly that.
>
> > I have a simple attitude about stuff like this: if I cannot*perceive*
> > the difference in normal use, I don't *care*. I have better things to
> > do with the time than spend it running MEMTEST to detect a
>> performance difference I won't *notice* in use.

> > I appreciate your concern, but the only reason I ever ran MEMTEST was
> > if I had a memory fault, and the last time was years back..
>
> As fast as DDR4 is, I don't imagine many people can perceive the difference,
> especially running text DOS apps. That's why there are tools to measure with. 
> If
> you don't want to know that's fine and dandy. As the old saying goes, 
> ignorance is
> bliss.

I have no reason to *need* to know, which is better still.

I run a few text DOS apps, using DOSBox or vDOS Plus on my Win10
machine. But they are used occasionally.  Most usage is Win64 GUI
apps.  The most used program is my browser, and the production browser
is the current Firefox Quantum release.  (I also have current Firefox
DEveloper Edition and Firefox Nightly versions, mostly to track
development.  I also have current versions of MS Edge and Chrome.  If
I am awake and at the machine, I am usually in Firefox.

Another large application is Calibre, an open source, cross platform
application written in Pyhon, which I use to manage a large eBook
library.

I have other things like an old version of MS Office (but the only
part of that I use is Publisher to do DTP), Libre Offce, and some
other things, but they get run infrequently.

I don't compile large applications from a source tree, or do heavy
image editing in Photoshop, or video editing, and I'm not a gamer who
has a video card (or more than one) faster than my CPU..

What I am trying to imagine is what I might do on the machine where I
would actually *notice* the difference you think might be caused by
the RAM stick size mismatch.

> The first selection in my boot menus is MemTest86. I swap stuff around a lot.
> There's no fun in swapping parts if results can't be measured.

Fair enough.  I got cured of building my own PC from parts.  Current
off the shelf systems are good enough and fast enough that I don't
need to build my own to get performance.

That sort of thing is the reason why I went with Ubuntu as my Linux
distro when I was dual booting.  It did the best job I've seen in a
distro of figuring out what hardware it was being installed in,
configuring itself, and Just Working. I wanted to spend the time
*using* the system, not hacking to *make* it usable.

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 5:05 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-11 09:51 (UTC-0500):
>
> >> IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual 
> >> channel
> >> board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
> >> before
> >> and after the change?
>
> > No.  I simply made sure I had RAM that matched the specs of the other
> > sticks.  The only difference was that one stick is 8GB instead of
> > four. I was *not* using RAM of different speeds, and no mismatch was
> > involved..
>
> > I saw *no* negative performance impact, and would have been startled if I 
> > did.
>
> By not matching size of pairs, you disable dual channel. You should run 
> memtest86
> with and without the 4G and 8G sticks to see the difference in print on your 
> screen.

NO.

The RAM here is all DDR4, same speed, and the only difference is one
stick is 8GB.  (I may add another 8GB sick at some point, but it won't
be soon.)

When I said I *saw* no performance difference I meant exactly that.

I have a simple attitude about stuff like this: if I cannot*perceive*
the difference in normal use, I don\t *care*. I have better things to
do with the time than spend it running MEMTEST to detect a performance
difference I won't *notice* in use.

My needs are modest, I don't push the envelope on my system, and what
I have is actually overkill for what I  do. My concern is a stable
system that Just Works, and I have one.

I appreciate your concern, but the only reason I ever ran MEMTEST was
if I had a memory fault, and the last time was years back..

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] [OT] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 6:28 PM Aitor Santamaría  wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 at 23:57, Eric Auer  wrote:
>>
>> If you are interested in alive dragons, visit a Komodo Dragon.
>> Those lizards do have some dragon-like properties, but they are
>> not dinosaurs either - too "modern" species for that.

> Why wouldn't a dinosaur be modern?

Organisms live in environments.  Environments change.  The organism
either changes to adapt to the environment or becomes extinct.

> We live surrounded by some extant 10,000+ species of them which have adapted 
> very well to modern times. I see and hear them every day, as most of us folks 
> on this list.
> (What's more, in my personal belief, the second most alive intelligent 
> species after Homo Sapiens is one of them).

Referring to Stephen J. Gould's notion that dinosaurs were the
ancestors of  birds?  (And the African Grey parrot is likely the bird
you are thinking of.)

But while they may have evolved into birds, they are no longer dinosaurs.

For an example of something that has been around a very long time and
*not* really evolved, consider the cockroach.  They've been around
since the Carboniferous Era.  The only change was getting smaller.
(Carboniferous Era cockroaches could reach 2 feet in length.) The
environment they are adapted for has been present consistently, and
they are adapted for it, so no need to radically change.

> Aitor
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:31 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-10 16:56 (UTC-0500):
>
> >> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):
>
> >>> ...It has 20GB RAM
>
> >> What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?
>
> > Nope.  It has four DRAM slots, and came with 16GB as four 4GB sticks
> > in those slots.  I replaced a 4GB stick with a 8GB stick to bring it
> > to 20.

> Odds are that 32GB capable board features dual channel RAM.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture

Possible.

> IME when RAM is not used in matched pairs in correct slots in a dual channel
> board, RAM speed (memtest86) is cut by nearly half. Did you test RAM speed 
> before
> and after the change?

No.  I simply made sure I had RAM that matched the specs of the other
sticks.  The only difference was that one stick is 8GB instead of
four. I was *not* using RAM of different speeds, and no mismatch was
involved..

I saw *no* negative performance impact, and would have been startled if I did.

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 5:07 PM Jon Brase  wrote:
> On 3/9/21 4:35 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> > As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound.
> > The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to
> > be read from/written to disk.
>
> Actually, as a general rule, on a consumer machine, both the CPU and the
> disk spend most of their time waiting for user input to give them
> something to do. Disk waits are nothing compared to the eternity between
> the keystrokes of a fast typist, and that's if the user is neither away
> nor lost in thought.

I can't agree. We are not in the single-user, single tasking DOS days
when one thing was going on at a time. At any moment, there are a
number of things going on in a current consumer computer. Some of them
will be OS routines, and some will be programs.  Users may well start
a program that will take time to do what it does (like compile code to
create an executable,)  push it into the background, and do other
things in the foreground.  There may be an audio program so they can
listen to music while they do things like work on code in an editor,
or review documentation, and a download manager or a torrent client
uploading/downloading in the background.

The human is the slowest component in the chain, but waiting for the
human is *not* the only thing that machine will be doing.

I have occasionally started long running processes and gone to bed,
assuming they would be domn in the morning.  I'm out of the loop, but
the machine is not in a wait state.  It's still doing work.
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 3:00 PM Felix Miata  wrote:
> dmccunney composed on 2021-03-09 17:35 (UTC-0500):
>
> > The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an
> > automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz.  It has 20GB RAM
> What is that, a pair of 2GB and a pair of 8GB?

Nope.  It has four DRAM slots, and came with 16GB as four 4GB sticks
in those slots.  I replaced a 4GB stick with a 8GB stick to bring it
to 20.  The theoretical maximum for the mobo is 32GB, using  four 8GB
sticks.  I didn't actually need 20GB, but was buying other stuff and
my SO told me I needed to spend more to take advantage of financing
provided by the store brand credit card of the retailer where we
bought it.  Additional RAM was something to toss money at.

One thing I found for 64 bit Windows was an open source RAMdisk
driver.  Right now it has a 512MB RAMdisk dedicated to Firefox browser
cache ()since FF makes it easy to specify where cache is place if you
d0on'\t want it in the profuile direcrtory, but I may experiment with
large volumes for other purposes.  (The macghine the current destop
replaced had 8GB RAM, and I seldome used even half of that.  On ehg
prest machine, for my use cases, I have RAM to burn.)

> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:10 AM Liam Proven  wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:37, dmccunney  wrote:
> >
> > On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC
> > v20 CPU.  The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better
> > microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup.  It had 640K RAM and two Seagate
> > ST-225 MFM HDs.  I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another
> > megabyte of RAM.  AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk,
> > 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could
> > use it.  (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used
> > apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things
> > that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up
> > Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could  map unused video RAM
> > to DOS.  I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be
> > mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM.
> > Performance was acceptable, thank you.
>
> That sounds like a *very* seriously tricked-out XT-class machine! Wow!

I had fun with it.

I had a Unix machine at home before I got the XT clone.  I was Tech
Support Manager for a small Unix systems house that resold AT kit
when AT was in the computer business, and an AT 3B1 joined the
family.  The 3B1 was the beefier sibling of the UNIX-PC, an early
attempt at a single user Unix workstation.  It had a 10mhz Motorola
68010 CPU, with up to 4MB RAM (mine had 3.5MB) and a 72MB MFM HD.  It
ran Unix System V Release 2.  There was a well crafted GUI called FACE
that could be used on the mono console (and a character mode version
that could run on attached terminals.  The keyboard had a variety of
special keys that did things when pressed.  One of the things I wanted
was compatibility between apps I used on the 3B1 and on the PC.  I was
able to compile Daniel LAwrence's MicroEMACS "out of the box" for the
3B1, and had fun writing an ME macro that examined KB input and would
do the appropriate things when I pressed one of the special keys.

Because I started as a Unix guy, I wanted to make the XT clone look as
much like a Unix machine as possible.  (I also got my SO a 3B1, and
she thought DOS was a brain damaged Unix.  Well, yes.  As of DOS 2.X,
MS adopted a hierarchical file system, tree structured directories,
I/O redirection and other Unix concepts, but implemented thyem very
differently.)

After looking at an assortment of freeware and shareware versions of
Unix commands, I bought a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit.
The toolkit was a product of Mortice Kern Systems in Canada.  They
were consulting engineers who wrote it originally for internal use,
and released it as a product when it was sufficiently developed.  It
became the tail that wagged the dog, and their principal business.

The toolkit implemented full versions of all Unix commands that made
sense in a single user, single tasking environment.  The selling point
for me were complete versions of the Unix vi editor and Korn shell.
(The Korn shell had everything save asynchronous background processes
because DOS didn't *do* that.)

Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, when the PC was booted,
CONFIG.SYS got processed.  It loaded the RAMdisk, cache and mouse
drivers that were common to everything. But instead of COMMAND.COM as
a boot shell, the Toolkit's INIT.EXE was loaded.  INIT printed Login:
on my screen.  Enter a userid and (optional) password and INIT called
LOGIN.  LOGIN looked for the ID in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file.
IF it found a match, it changed to whatever directory was specified as
that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's
shell

I had IDs that ran the Korr shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and
DesqView.  Exit those programs and INIT was reloaded.  I could switch
environments *without* rebooting.  When I was booted into the Korn
shell, you had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on an Honest-to
$DEITY Unix machine. (And I was able to craft an equivalent of the
Unix lp print spooler using the DOS print command and Korn shell
scripts and aliases.)

The Toolkit stayed in use when I got a 386 and started running Win
3.1.  The shell for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but you could
substitute something else. What was used was defined in the SYSTEM.INI
file.  I had custom SYSTEM.INI files to run different shells, and
Toolkit IDs that copied them over the real one so Win3.1 ran the one I
wanted to use.  But because Win3.1 was a multi-tasking shell on top of
DOS, I could choose not to run it, and boot into COMMAND.COM, 4DOS,
DV, or the Korn shell.

Lots of fun while it lasted.

> MS OSes were always a work thing for me. My own computers went
> Sinclair -> Amstrad PCW (the last new CP/M computer) -> Acorn
> Archimedes.

Right. You were in the UK.  I'm aware of the stuff you 

Re: [Freedos-user] BIOS weirdness with SATA/IDE adapter (was IDE <-> CF adapters)

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 4:41 PM Liam Proven  wrote:

> Installing a CPU upgrade in an old PC was rarely worth the hassle, but
> if you replaced a small hard disk (especially if compressed with
> DoubleSpace or something) with a big more modern one, and maxed out
> the RAM, the performance improvement was often very gratifying for a
> relatively small spend.

As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound.
The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to
be read from/written to disk.

More RAM is one speedup - it allows the OS to do a better jo9b of
caching disk access.  A faster disk is another.

On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC
v20 CPU.  The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better
microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup.  It had 640K RAM and two Seagate
ST-225 MFM HDs.  I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another
megabyte of RAM.  AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk,
256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could
use it.  (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used
apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things
that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up
Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could  map unused video RAM
to DOS.  I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be
mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM.
Performance was acceptable, thank you.

The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an
automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz.  It has 20GB RAM, and boots and runs
from a 256B PAnasonic SSD.  Performance is lovely.  There are faster
machine out there, but since I'm not doing things like heavy video
editing or compiling a large application from a source tree, it's
moare tyhan adequate for what I do.

> Liam Proven
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Re: [Freedos-user] Command line

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 11:05 AM Jose Senna  wrote:
>
>  Did anyone else look at this ?
>   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00263-0
>  Command line is still (much) alive.

Those who think it isn't need to get out more.

I had a Unix system at home before I got an XT clone running MSDOS. (I
still have it.)  Mine was an early machine intended to be a single
user Unix workstation.  The bigger ones I administered for a living
were multi-user systems that assumed you would access them remotely,
and would log in as a terminal to a command line.  Mine had a
well-crafted GUI, but I still used a command line for things that
weren't well suited to a GUI.

These days, I run Win10 Pro on my desktop, but installed an open
source tabbed console emulator called ConEmu, that lets me have
multiple command lines in a single tabbed interface, and what is on
those command lines may differ.  Here, the default if it's installed
is JPSoftware's TCC-LE, a freeware limited version of their commercial
Take Command GUI interface.  TCC-LE looks an  awful lot like (and its
design is based on) the popular 4DOS command.com replacement for DOS
PCs.  Bit I can also run MS's PowerShell, Windows CMD-EXE, and Win32
ports of things like the *nix bash and zsh shells, or DOS character
mode applications run using the vDOS Plus fork of the popular DOS
emulator designed to let you run old DOS games on things that aren't
MSDOS PCs.  (A have a few DOS programs on an Android tablet using an
Android port of DOSbox.)

Most of what current users do is best done through a GUI, but there
are things like commands run in pipelines that need a command line to
be able to do that.Most folks simply don't need a command line, but
you can get one if you do.

Another issue is the shift to mobile devices for computing.  While you
can *get* a command line on something like a smartphone or tablet,
trying to use it can be actively painful if you don't have an external
keyboard you can attach.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Windows 95

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 10:47 AM Bonaventura de'Vidovich
 wrote:
>
> Win 3.11 is a interface, in that case DOS is the real operative system.
> Win95 is an operative system (no comment). There is no DOS.

Er, no.

Win 3.1 was a multi-tasking, 16 bit, protected mode shell running on
top of DOS, and using DOS to perform file system operations. It
required a 386 processor.  Win 3.1 serialized access to DOS functions.
You could choose not to run Win 3.1, and boot to a pure real mode DOS
session.

I did this routinely.  I had a Unix machine at home before I got a DOS
PC.  I went looking for DOS software to provide stuff I was used to on
Unix.  I found a commercial package called the4 MKS Toolkit.  The
Toolkit provided versions of all of the Unix commands and utilities
that made sense under a single-user, single tasking OS.  Big wins for
me qwere full versions of the Unix Korn Shell and vi editor.  The Korn
shell implemented everything save asynchronous background processes,
because DOS didn't do that.

Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit replaced
COMMAND.COM as the boot shell with INIT.EXE.  Init ran and printed a
Login: prompt on the screen.  Provide a userid and (optional)
password. and INIT called LOGIN, which checked to see if the ID
existed in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file.  If it did, it changed
to whatever was specified as that ID's home directory, and ran
whatever was specified as that ID's shell.  I had MKS IDs to run the
MKS Korn Shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and DesqView.  Exit
whatever was defined as the ID's shell and INIT resp;awned and printed
Login: on the terminal.  I could completely change operating
environments *without* rebooting the PC.  (Drivers for things like my
mouse, RAMdisk, and disk cache were loaded from CONFIG.SYS before INIT
ran, and were common to all environments.)

When Win3.1 joined the party, Toolkit use expanded.  Win3.1 used
Program Manager as the default shell, but you could change that.  An
entry in the Win3.1 SYSTEM.INI file controlled what Win3.1 used as the
shell. I had an assortment of Win3.1 Program Manager replacements I
played with.  I had MKS IDs for them, and logging on with that ID
copied a version of the SYSTEM.INI file specifying the shell I wanted
over the master copy, and Win3.1 ran using it.  It worked fine.

Win95 was similar in concept, but it represented the beginning moves
to a full 32 bit virtual mode OS not requiring DOS.  DOS was still
present, and you could open a DOS window  on Win95 and perform DOS
command line functions, but only one real mode session could be run at
a time..

Win98 also used DOS, but DOS was strictly a real mode loader for the
OS.  Once Win98 was up and running, it performed all functions, and
DOS was out of the loop. (You could run a real mode DOS session in a
windows as you could with Win96, but again, only one at a time.

WinNT completed the transition away from DOS, and introduced the NTFS
file system,  Win2K was the first consumer OS that offered it by
default.  (IIRC, it was technically possible to run Win2K on top of
FAT32, but doing so wasn't recommended.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Spaghetti

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 1:00 PM Bryan Kilgallin  wrote:
>
> I have been editing the OpenGEM code. It's a dog's breakfast! First it
> assumes that I didn't put the OpenGEM directory where I did. Then it
> cross-references jumps between batch files in an opaque way. And the
> writes to screen do not say where you are in this maze!

Out of curiosity, how much confusion might have been avoided if you
had placed the OpenGEM directory where the code assumed it would be?
(And why *didn't* you place it there?)

Most development projects make assumptions about things like that that
you change at your peril, and you think hard about why you are
changing things before you do it.
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Re: [Freedos-user] PXE/Serva

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 11:13 AM Tomas By  wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Jan 2021 17:09:10 +0100, dmccunney wrote:

> > What he is trying to install FreeDOS *on* using it would be nice to know.
>
> It's an `Aopen Digital Engine.'

Okay - a small form factor device intended for digital kiosk, POS,
smart signage and other retail solutions.

You *can't* install FreeDOS, or any *other* OS.  It only supports ChromeOS

https://aopen.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205720439--Chrome-device-Can-I-install-other-operating-systems-to-my-AOPEN-Chrome-device-i-e-Windows-Linux-

> /Tomas
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Re: [Freedos-user] PXE/Serva

[dmccunney]

n Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 10:44 AM Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>
> Hi! Not sure what Serva is, but as you mention PXE,

I believe Serva is this:https://www.vercot.com/~serva/

What he is trying to install FreeDOS *on* using it would be nice to know.
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Re: [Freedos-user] yt-dl in dos?

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 8:00 AM Joao Silva  wrote:
>
> I think not, solution windows firefox addon downloadhelper should do the trick

Assuming you are running Firefox or Chrome on a Windows or Linux
system.  Neither the browsers nor the extension run under FreeDOS.

The OP wants to do this from *FreeDOS.*  The answer is almost
certainly "Not *possible*".
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Re: [Freedos-user] yt-dl in dos?

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 6:58 AM Thomas Mueller  wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 6:46 PM  wrote:
>
> > > You think is there any way to configure youtube-dl in Dos?
>
> > *Extremely* unlikely.  It requires Python 2.6 or 2.7.  The most recent
> > version of Python built for DOS is a DJGPP port of Python 2.4.2.
>
> Python 2.4.2 and 2.6 are obsolete, and 2.7 is heading that way.

I simply quoted the requirements stated on the youtube-dl site for building it.

> Package developers on open-source OSes, mainly Unix-related and not including 
> FreeDOS (ReactOS?), are busy converting their packages to use Python 3.x and 
> kick 2.7 out the door.

That's a slow process.  There's a lot of resistance among Python devs
who disagreed with breaking changes in 3.x. There are lots of things
out there being built on Python 2.X that don't actually need Python
3.X for what they currently do, and efforts to convert to 3.X are
essentially future-proofing.  It's not a current *requirement*.

> Not sure about Cygwin and MinGW.

Cygwin and MinGW will be similar.  The purpose of both efforts was to
port the *nix development toolchain to Windows, and use MSVCRT as the
runtime code would  link against.  Cygwin implements a POSIX runtime
as a dll, and Cygwin apps compile using it.  A lot of *nix code builds
out of the box because the DLL provides the system calls the programs
expect to see.  AT's uWin environment did the same thing.

> Perl and Python are vital parts of any (quasi-)Unix OS, but FreeBSD is far 
> behind.

And differences in BSD provide challengews for Mac OS/X developers,
because it has a BSD kernel under the hood.

> I too think any attempt to port youtube-dl to FreeDOS would be an exercise in 
> frustration, even more so for any other DOS.

I concur, and don't understand why anyone might *try.*

FreeDOS attempts to be compatible  with an OS that has not been
developed, sold, or supported in over 25 years.  Lots of things people
want to deal with now didn't *exist* when DOS was current, like USB.
DOS was developed in the days when hardware was an order of magnitude
more expensive and less powerful than what we commonly use now, and
was intended for resource constrained environments.

There are *many* things DOS simply cannot do, and if you need to do
those things you run Windows or Linux.  (And there are things DOS
*can* more or less do which are like the old joke about the dancing
bear - "The miracle is not how well it dances, but that it dances at
all."  Web browsing is a case in point.)

I still want to know what the OP would use to *view* YouTube videos
under DOS, regardless of how he got them there.

> Tom
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Re: [Freedos-user] yt-dl in dos?

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 6:46 PM  wrote:
>
> You think is there any way to configure youtube-dl in Dos?

*Extremely* unlikely.  It requires Python 2.6 or 2.7.  The most recent
version of Python built for DOS is a DJGPP port of Python 2.4.2.

What do you expect to use under FreeDOS to *view* the videos if you
*can* download them?
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Re: [Freedos-user] install freedos on eeepc 1201NL

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 12:58 PM Joao Silva  wrote:
>
> Trying to install Freedos 1.3 rc fullusb on a eeepc 1201NL but got a problem, 
> can't find hdd with windows 10 installed.
> Could be because of the ntfs fat?

Unlikely.  FreeDOS won't be able to read an NTFS file system, but you
are reporting the FreeDOS installer doesn't even see the *disk*.
That's a BIOS level issue.
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Re: [Freedos-user] What do you do with your FreeDos PC?

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 3:19 PM Marv  wrote:
>
> I know I'm late to the FreeDos party, but it would help me and maybe other 
> newcomers to know what you guys do with your FreeDos PCs. I was thinking of 
> utility type things that are easier or more quickly done in DOS, but I'm wide 
> open to any ideas.
>
> So far I've got programs like Supercalc, Wordstar, GWBasic, DBase, etc 
> working. I transfer files back and forth to my Windows PC using FTP over my 
> local network.

I'm odd man out, as I don't currently have a dedicated FreeDOS PC.

I originally installed FreeDOS in a multi-boot setup on an ancient
notebook. The machine was a pass-along from a friend who had upgraded
but didn't want to see it thrown out.   It was a Fujitsu p2110
machine, the a Transmeta Crusoe CPU (and early attempt at a power
saving design, a 30GB IDE4 HD, Intel graphics on the motherboard, and
a whopping 256 *MB* of RAM.  The Crusoe CPU grabbed 156MB off the top
for "code morphing", there were 240MB usable.  She said it was "Slow,
slow, SLOW."  Well, yes.  It came to me with WinXP SP2 installed.  XP
wants 512MB *minimum*.  It took 8 minutes to simply boot, and much
longer to do anything once up.

I pulled the 30GB HD, swapped in a 40GB model from a failed laptop,
and started hacking. I reformatted and repartitioned the HD, with a
20GB slice formatted as NTFS with Win2K on it, tow 8GB slices
formatted as Linux ext4 with Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, a 2GB slice for
Linux swap, and a 2GB slice formatted FAT32 for FreeDOS.

*Getting* it to boot FreeDOS was an involved process. I have no idea
which of the config tweaks I made actually did the trick, but I had a
machine that could boot Win2K, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS
from a Grub2 menu.  Win2K actually more or less ran in 240MB ram,
after I removed everything from Startup that *could* be removed, and
disabling Windows Update (since it would no longer *get* updates  That
saved me a SVCHOST.EXE process and 10MB RAM.) Ubuntu and Puppy also
more or less ran. (Puppy was designed for old hardware, and Puppy
itself ran well.  Linux *applications* installed were another matter.)
 FreeDOS *flew.*
Linux could read NTFS vis NTFS3g,  Win2K could read extfs via an open
source driver.  Everything could read FAT32, but FreeDOS couldn't read
anything else. I had no need to and didn't care.

A problem that required reinstalling Wn2K broke the multiboot and I
couldn't get it to work again.  I didn't care.  The process had been
an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of ancient
hardware without throwing money at it. It was fun to try and I learned
things, but the real work was done elsewhere, so losing the machine
wasn't an issue.

These days I run Win10 Pro on a refurbished HP SFF desktop with a
quad-core Intel i5 CPU, Intel HD4600 graphics, 20GB RAM, and OS and
programs boot from and live on a 256GB SSD.

I still have an assortment of DOS applications, and run them using a
DOS port of the DOSBox MSDOS gaming emulator, or the vDOS fork of
DOSBox specifically aimed at supporting character mode DOS
productivity applications. I do so to flex mental muscles and keep my
hand in.  It's a hobby activity done for fun.  Actual work happens on
the Windows side, and most of that simply can't be done in FreeDOS.

(I also have some old DOS apps running on an Android tablet courtesy
of an Android port of DOSBox. It raises the occasional eyebrows.
"What's *that? "It's the Unix Larn game, ported to MSDOS, adn running
on Android via a DOS emulartor." "" :-p)

I think I admire a couple of folks here who still seem to use DOS for
everything.  I can't do that and wouldn't try.
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Re: [Freedos-user] 2 printers on DOS

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 10:15 AM Dale E Sterner  wrote:
>
> I think you're an expert on DOS.
> Can you tell me if there is a way to get DOS to detect 2
> printers on 2 different ports?
> It can only see 1 printer, the second is ignored.

As already asked, how are the printers connected, and what are you
trying to print *from?*

IIRC, what DOS itself sees is *ports*. What is connected to the ports
is the business of what will be using the connected device.

I'd guess you have one printer on a Centronics parallel port, and
another connected to a serial port.   Hooking up to a Centronics port
was the default assumption in DOS days, and stuff trying to print
would send data to that port.  Depending on what you are trying to
send stuff to print, you may need to either go into program
configuration to tell is there *is* a printer on a specified serial
port, or you may simple not be able to use a second printer.

If the second printer is connected to a serial port try,

ECHO "Some line of text" >COMx

where x is the number of the com port and see whether anything prints.
It will at least tell you whether data can be sent to that port to
that device.

(Stuff like this is why folks migrated from DOS to other OSes.)
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> DS
>
>
>
>
>
>
> **
> From Dale Sterner - MS organic chemistry
> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
> ***
>
> 
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>
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> It's a Very Good Day for Elon Musk
> http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/5fb3e860ec5fb68600e4ast03duc3
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] Possible zoom metting?

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 5:39 PM  wrote:
>
> Are you guys planning another Zoom meeting?  Depending on the time and day, I 
> might be able to join in also, but, I seem to have lost the original mail 
> about it.

Please note that the previous gatherings have *not* been *Zoom*
meetings.  Jim uses a different online meeting package he uses in his
consulting work.

Zoom is the most popular current package, but there are a variety of
others like WebEx and MS Teams, and all concerned are busily trying to
acquire market share as virtual meetings and in many instances the new
normal.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Floppy fetish search

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2020 at 3:30 PM Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> > Yes!  Please send them somewhere to be scanned and OCRed!  Get in touch
> > with Al Kossow of the Computer History Museum in Sunnyvale CA.  See
> > http://www.bitsavers.org/ and http://www.bitsavers.org/.
>
> Nah I do not want to get in trouble with Microsoft by sending
> them to some abandonpaper website like bit savers ;-) I was
> thinking of somebody who likes the manuals for private use.

Microsoft will not  *care*. DOS has not been a sold or
supported product for decades, and the people on their legal staff
concerned with IP have far better things to do with their time than
come after you for that.

As a rule, the IP  lawyers get involved when *preserving* property
rights are a concern, or there is enough potential *revenue* that
might be lost that piracy is a real issue. Neither of those are true
here.

> I see that so far, bitsavers.org has only the MS DOS 2.0
> programmers reference manual as English PDF, by the way,
> so they seem to be careful with Microsoft, too.

This has nothing to do with MS caring.  Bitsavers relies on third
parties like you to scan and digitize old documentation.  Once they
have it, they will host it, but *they* don't do the scanning. They
only have the DOS 2.0 programmer's reference manual in English because
that is all anyone has sent them.  If they were *that* concerned about
MS, they wouldn't have *it* online.

If you don't *want* to do this, that's fine.  We all have two hands
and 24 hours in a day, and must decide what we will spend our time.on.
If this is more time and effort than you wish to invest, so be it. But
"MS might object" is not a valid reason for not doing it.

> Cheers, Eric
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Re: [Freedos-user] Run Linux & Linux binaries on DOS

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 12:53 PM Jason Pittman
 wrote:
>
> I know nothing about BusyBox, so I'm going to ask a dumb question. Does DSL 
> allow you to, say, install apt (or another package manager), gcc, make, etc., 
> or does it only allow you to run the common linux commands shown on the 
> BusyBox website?

Busybox collects cut down versions of standard Linux utilities and
provides them as a single archive file.  You can run commands in the
busybox file as "busybox ", but the usual installation will
create symlinks to the commands in the busybox archive.  Busybox is
popular in cases where you have low end machines where disk space may
be a scarce resource. It is a program you can install the same way you
install any other program, and unrelated to what you can install.

Apt is a package manager for flavors of Linux built on Debian, like
Ubuntu.  Red Hat Linux uses on called yum.  Package managers are
specific to distros, and you use whatever your distro provides.

> (And on a side note, has anyone actually gotten it to work? I'd already know 
> the answer to my question above if I could get it to do something other than 
> crash the VM when I run "dsl.com")

What is dsl.com?  It is not a command in busybox.  What VM are you in
when you try to run it and what are you attempting to do?

If DSL refers to Damn Small Linux, see
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.html

Installing stuff not part of the DSL installation appears to require
using MyDSL extensions.
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Re: [Freedos-user] ssd on eeepc

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 7:34 PM Joao Silva  wrote:
>
> I'm from Portugal and here a ssd are around 39.67 us dollars / 34 euros for 
> 240gb, and i don't know if there are lower sizes anymore... still expensive.

That's about what I'd expect to pay in the US for a 240GB SSD,
depending upon brand.

But "expensive: is relative.  Prices on such things have been steadily
falling.  About a year ago, a chap elsewhere recounted upgrading a
server he managed.  It was a database machine running a "NoSQL"
database like MongoDB. He replaced 16TB of SATA HDs with 16TB worth of
2TB Samsung SSDs.  He got a quantum increase in performance.  The
machine *screamed* through queries and updates.  The significant bit
for me was that prices had dropped enough that he could *afford* to do
that upgrade.  Two years ago he wouldn't have been able to afford it,
but poces fell a lot, and still are..

> To install 2 OS, i would go with Windows 95 SE or 98 SE to copy files (games 
> for me), i don't know but i'm sure that freedos will read pen drives as long 
> they are plugged in before booting.

Linux is quite capable of doing the copies.  You *dn't* need Win95 or
98 SE just for that.  You will need a FAT file system to install them
to, which is why I suggested partitioning, but Linux and read and
write FAT file systems and place stuff on them.

> Linux would do, but has you said, had to be a very low resources.

Lubuntu using Lxde, or Xubuntu using XFCE is one option.  Another is
something like TinyCore Linux.

> The idea was for freedos to be the main OS, but i will take in mind your 
> recommendation.

If you can get it working and all that is needed is FreeDOS, fine.
But having an actual Linux distro installed gives you the option of
doing things that *can't* be done with FreeDOS.
__
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> João
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 12:17 AM dmccunney  wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 6:15 PM Joao Silva  wrote:
>> >
>> > I have a eeepc laptop originally came with windows xp and i switched to 
>> > windows 10 N, but sadly is too slow... turtle mode.
>>
>> Win10 needs 4GB RAM *minimum*.  The sweet spot is 6GB.  No surprise
>> performance was poor.
>>
>> > I was thinking of installing Linux Xubuntu for it's low resources.
>>
>> I did that on an ancient notebook that had a whopping *256MB* RAM.
>> Xubuntu would install, but performance left a lot to be desired.
>> Posters on the Ubuntu list said Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea
>> of what "low end" was, and that too much Gnome had crept into XFCE.
>> What I wound up doing was following their suggestions and installing
>> from the Linux Minimal CD.  That gave me a working command line Linux
>> installation, with networking and video.  From there I could install
>> apt-get, and DL specific packages.  I used Lxde as the lowest resource
>> GUI desktop, and Lxde brought along Xorg.  I installed to an ext4 file
>> system.  The result actually ran, though it wasn't anything you would
>> call fast.
>>
>> The ancient notebook came to me with WinXP SP2.  XP wants 512MB
>> RAM minimum.  I reformatted, repartitioned, installed Win2K Pro (which
>> would sort of run in 256MB RAM,) two flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS,
>> multi booting under Grub2. Win2K was on an NTFS slice, Linux was on
>> ext4, and FreeDOS was on FAT32.  It was mostly an experiment to see
>> what performance I could wring out of ancient hardware *without*
>> throwing money at it.  I haven't booted it in a long time.
>>
>> > A friend of my IT guy "is nagging" me a year now to get an ssd, so i was 
>> > thinking get one ssd 240, stick it to eeepc and install freedos.
>>
>> You don't even need 240.  I got a 120GB budget SSD from my preferred
>> retailer for $20 US.  The intended use is in another old notebook
>> device replacing the HD.
>>
>> > My issues are:
>> >
>> > 1 - Will freedos work well with atom cpu
>>
>> Sure.  The Atom CPU is an Intel x86 design, and FreeDOS will run on
>> any of them.  (Getting it to *boot* is another matter unrelated to the
>> CPU.)
>>
>> > 2 - Can freedos detect 2Gb of ram
>>
>> I believe so, but for FreeDOS, how much do you *care*?
>>
>> FreeDOS will use 640K as user RAM where it and your programs will load
>> and run.  With EMS/XMS, you may be able to use RAM beyond 1MB for
>> things like disk cache and RAMdisk.
>>
>> > The idea is to carry the eeepc with me to play and to also to show my 7 
>> > year old girlfriend nephew the games I played back in 1988 and forward.
>>
>> I'd install a low resource requirement version of Linux 

Re: [Freedos-user] ssd on eeepc

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 6:15 PM Joao Silva  wrote:
>
> I have a eeepc laptop originally came with windows xp and i switched to 
> windows 10 N, but sadly is too slow... turtle mode.

Win10 needs 4GB RAM *minimum*.  The sweet spot is 6GB.  No surprise
performance was poor.

> I was thinking of installing Linux Xubuntu for it's low resources.

I did that on an ancient notebook that had a whopping *256MB* RAM.
Xubuntu would install, but performance left a lot to be desired.
Posters on the Ubuntu list said Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea
of what "low end" was, and that too much Gnome had crept into XFCE.
What I wound up doing was following their suggestions and installing
from the Linux Minimal CD.  That gave me a working command line Linux
installation, with networking and video.  From there I could install
apt-get, and DL specific packages.  I used Lxde as the lowest resource
GUI desktop, and Lxde brought along Xorg.  I installed to an ext4 file
system.  The result actually ran, though it wasn't anything you would
call fast.

The ancient notebook came to me with WinXP SP2.  XP wants 512MB
RAM minimum.  I reformatted, repartitioned, installed Win2K Pro (which
would sort of run in 256MB RAM,) two flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS,
multi booting under Grub2. Win2K was on an NTFS slice, Linux was on
ext4, and FreeDOS was on FAT32.  It was mostly an experiment to see
what performance I could wring out of ancient hardware *without*
throwing money at it.  I haven't booted it in a long time.

> A friend of my IT guy "is nagging" me a year now to get an ssd, so i was 
> thinking get one ssd 240, stick it to eeepc and install freedos.

You don't even need 240.  I got a 120GB budget SSD from my preferred
retailer for $20 US.  The intended use is in another old notebook
device replacing the HD.

> My issues are:
>
> 1 - Will freedos work well with atom cpu

Sure.  The Atom CPU is an Intel x86 design, and FreeDOS will run on
any of them.  (Getting it to *boot* is another matter unrelated to the
CPU.)

> 2 - Can freedos detect 2Gb of ram

I believe so, but for FreeDOS, how much do you *care*?

FreeDOS will use 640K as user RAM where it and your programs will load
and run.  With EMS/XMS, you may be able to use RAM beyond 1MB for
things like disk cache and RAMdisk.

> The idea is to carry the eeepc with me to play and to also to show my 7 year 
> old girlfriend nephew the games I played back in 1988 and forward.

I'd install a low resource requirement version of Linux on ext4, carve
out a separate FAT partition for FreeDOS, and multi-boot.

I wouldn't try to make FreeDOS the primary OS.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Run Linux & Linux binaries on DOS

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 7:35 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 6:06 PM Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>>
>> [..]
>> I remember there was a DR-DOS 8 that used GPL parts from FreeDOS, but that 
>> had to be withdrawn from the market due to legal challenges, using 
>> open-source GPL parts in a closed-source system.
>>
>
> Yes, I was one of the folks who contacted them about it at the time. I posted 
> a newsitem to the FreeDOS website at the time, to document my interaction 
> with them. http://www.freedos.org/history/press/2005-drdos.txt
>
> I didn't mind that they included FreeDOS programs in DR-DOS. That's fine. But 
> I objected that they did so without providing the source code. They did not 
> follow the GNU GPL; they either had to provide the source code for the GNU 
> GPL'd programs, or they had to provide a written offer to do so. That's 
> defined in section 3 of the GNU GPL version 2.

I went around this on the Cygwin list years back.  An open source
developer using Cygwin wondered if he was required by the GPL to
bundle source* with* his executables. My take, which a couple of
Cygwin maintainers agreed with, was "No.  You do not have to bundle
source with your binaries.  But you must make the source available,
*state* you will, and specify how to get it."  (The latter was likely
a digital download of a source archive.)

But it was a bit more complicated than that, because a requirement was
that the end user must be able to get your source, reproduce your
documented build environment, and build binaries on thier system that
would be *identical* to the ones you supplied.  So the source you made
available had to be the exact version of the source you used to build
the binaries you supplied.  You could not simply point to your
repository to get the source, because you may well have made changes
since you released your binaries and grabbing whatever the current
source was would not work.

> Jim
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Re: [Freedos-user] Run Linux & Linux binaries on DOS

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 11:41 AM Louis Santillan  wrote:
>
> The author freely admits running DOS & Linux side-by-side this way is
> a fragile coordination [0].  I doubt that redirection would work as
> one might desire.  The recently updated ascii demo [1] shows calling
> various DOS and Linux commands, and, shows creating a text file with
> `dsl vi hello.txt` and then later opening that same file with `edit
> hello.txt`.  Interestingly, the file appears written to the filesystem
> as `HELLO.TXT`, as MS-DOS 6.22 is case insensitive (w/o a LFN driver).
> I wonder what would happen if an LFN driver was added to the mix.

My first thought on hearing about this was "If you have a machine that
*can* run Linux, just run Linux"  There are an assortment of Linux
distros meant for lower end hardware.

I note from Y-Combinator post that this boots DSL (Damn Small Linux).
DSL gained traction back when for small ISO size.  It bundled Linux
and various other things into a 50MB ISO file, and was popular before
broadband became as pervasive as it is now, and you could DL the DSL
ISO and get it running without growing old and grey waiting to get the
ISO over a modem dialup. DSL finally hit a wall when they could no
longer fit everything they wanted into a 50MB file. Components they
wanted to bundle got larger.

I kind of wonder if this might also be implemented using TinyCore
Linux.  It's also a small distro, but the initial download includes
just enough to get Linux itself installed, running, and connected to
your network.  From there, you pick and choose software you want to
use from TinyCore's repository.  (See http://tinycorelinux.net/)

It wasn't a surprise to see this effort was essentially running DOS in
a Linux VM, but there will be the issues mentioned of two-way
communication.

And the issue solved by LFN drivers isn't case sensitivity - it's file
name *length*.  Aside from case insensitivity, DOS is limited to 8+3
file names.  Stuff like this I've looked at before will accept a long
file name, but a directory list (under Windows) will show an 8+3 short
name as well as a long one.

I've seen issues elsewhere on software which was cross platform in
trying to move source between Windows and Linux.  Windows honored case
but did not preserve it, and normalized case by converting it to upper
case.  If you had a file on Windows and Linux where the distinction
was the case of the file name,  you got a name collision because
foobar and FOOBAR were the same as far as Windows was concerned.

It's possible that adding an LFN driver to DOS will help with case
sensitivity under Linux , but I suspect it won't.

Speaking personally, what I normally want to do is run old DOS
*applications*, and I can do that under Windows with vDOS or vDOS
Plus, and under Linux with the cross platform DOSBox VM.  I don't need
FreeDOS itself in the mix.
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Re: [Freedos-user] FDD issue

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 12:34 PM ZB  wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 12:15:04PM -0400, dmccunney wrote:
>
> > My old 32 bit desktop has a half height combo 3.5"/5.25" floppy drive.
> > It was originally seen as drives A: and B:, and which was seen as
> > which was controlled by a jumper setting on the drive.  That went away
> > in an emergency motherboard replacement.  The new mobo would see only
> > *one* of the drives as A:, and I had to pull the drive and change the
> > jumper setting if I wanted to access the 5.25" drive instead of the
> > 3.5" drive.
>
> Indeed it seems to be the same "feature".

Yes.

> > The new machine doesn't have floppy slots on the mobo, so while I have
> > the drive I can't hook it up.  I *do* have a USB 3.5" floppy drive
> > which is seen as A: when connected and works fine, but I have no
> > current way to access 5.25" diskettes.  (I have some old stuff I'd
> > *like* to access)
>
> Yes, I had similar problem a few years ago... finally I just prepared long
> cables to connect big FDD as kind of "external drive". ;)

Won't help here.  What would I connect those long cables *to*?

> > (For that matter, I still have my original XT clone on a shelf, with
> > two 20*MB* Seagate MFM hard drives where the drives do not have
> > onboard controllers and connect to a card on the mobo.  I'd *love* the
> > get the contents of the drives copied to a USB flash drive, but
> > haven't found a way to do it.)
>
> A solution exists:
>
>  http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/xt-cf-lite

Not a solution for me.  The XT clone is an *XT* clone.  That's an IDE
CF Adaptor card, and the old XT clone doesn't have IDE slots.  It
predates IDE.

The old 32 bit desktop has them, but has other problems. I multi
booted WinXP and Linux.  The NTFS partition with Windows is damaged
and I haven't been able to cure it.  It *will* boot Linux, but I can
only access the Linux partition and an IDE CF card won't work.  Even
if it could, I still wouldn't be able to access 5.25 floppy drives,
and the stuff I want to get off the old MFM Seagate drives in the XT
isn't on any of my preserved floppies.

I have feelers out to folks who also have old hardware.  I suspect I
can solve the problem by throwing money at it, and shipping the
Seagate drives to a contractor who can extract the contents and save
it to a USB flash drive.  Once that's done, the old XT clone can go
away.  (The XT clone hasn't even been booted in 20 years, and there
are no security concerns about anything on the drives.  The XT *will
boot - I believe I still have a compatible keyboard and I can plug a
monitor into the VGA port.  But I had to have the case open and a fan
blowing on it the last time I booted it because another card had
overheating problems, and even if I boot it and copy data off to 5.25"
floppies, I have no way to read them.  It predates the Internet and I
can't connect it to my local network, nor is there anything I can call
via a modem and upload to.)

I appreciate the pointers, but they don't address my issue.
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Re: [Freedos-user] FDD issue

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 9:26 AM ZB  wrote:
>
> completed lately my DOS machine with additional 1.2 MB 5,25" FDD for
> occasional use of my old diskettes. So I have 3,5" FDD as drive A: and
> 5,25" FDD as drive B: now.
>
> But there is a problem: I can only access the drive A: - never both drives
> on a whim. So to access 5,25" drive I have to "swap drives" in BIOS setup
> first, and only then I can read that bigger diskette.

I'm willing to bet this is a motherboard/BIOS issue.

My old 32 bit desktop has a half height combo 3.5"/5.25" floppy drive.
It was originally seen as drives A: and B:, and which was seen as
which was controlled by a jumper setting on the drive.  That went away
in an emergency motherboard replacement.  The new mobo would see only
*one* of the drives as A:, and I had to pull the drive and change the
jumper setting if I wanted to access the 5.25" drive instead of the
3.5" drive.

The new machine doesn't have floppy slots on the mobo, so while I have
the drive I can't hook it up.  I *do* have a USB 3.5" floppy drive
which is seen as A: when connected and works fine, but I have no
current way to access 5.25" diskettes.  (I have some old stuff I'd
*like* to access)

(For that matter, I still have my original XT clone on a shelf, with
two 20*MB* Seagate MFM hard drives where the drives do not have
onboard controllers and connect to a card on the mobo.  I'd *love* the
get the contents of the drives copied to a USB flash drive, but
haven't found a way to do it.)

> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] Some networking present

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 2:02 PM ZB  wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 07:52:05PM +0200, Mateusz Viste wrote:
>
> > And the Trumpet TSR itself does not appear to be free:
> > http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/products/tcpip-driver.html
>
> From what I see there it's paid only for >=10 units (so probably in case
> of "corporate use" or similar)

See http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Networking_FreeDOS_-_NTCPDRV

> regards,
> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 9:50 AM ZB  wrote:
>
> If I'm correct, Dosemu uses "virtual x86 mode" of 386 and later processors.
> But Dosemu of course needs "host OS".
>
> I wonder does there exist any utility that offers "virtual x86 mode" and
> acts as "host" by itself? Suppose we have (quite modest for today) computer
> with 386/486 and 4 MB RAM. Theoretically it should be possible to run quite
> comfortably four DOS "instances" each one having 1 MB just for itself - and,
> say, switching among them with - like among consoles in Linux.

What you are talking about are full blown Virtual Machine setups. The
VM sits between the host machine's hardware and the OS to be
virtualized.  Examples in the commercial software world include things
like VMWare, and in the open source world we have Oracle's Virtual
Box.  For that matter, Microsoft has a virtual machine setup,
specialized for running more than one Windows instance.  With a full
VM, the *OS* can be virtualized as well as the applications running
under the OS, because the "hypervisor" sits between the OSes and the
hardware.

I used VMWare at a former employer.  We were a streaming video
provider.  Our preferred servers were 1u Dell rackmount units with
dual 3ghz Xeon CPUs and 32GB RAM.  Servers under VMWare were running
CentOS, the open source flavor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  (Linux is
open source, and you can get the code free.  What Read Hat sold was
*support*.)  Spinning up a new server under VMWare was a trivial
exercise.   (Depending on the OS.  A co-worker had a *lot* of fun
trying to spin up a virtualized WinXP instance...)  We had load
balancing on traffic coming into the servers, so requests got routed
to whichever running server had the capacity.  (And what we did did
not require maintaining state and history, so new incoming requests
could go to whichever server  happened to be available.)

The concept is an old one.  I worked at a bank that was an IBM
mainframe shop in the 80s.  IBM had a virtual machine OS called
VM/CMS.  You could load other IBM mainframe OSes under it, and it
imposed about 10% overhead.  A popular use case was a shop currently
running IBM's DOS/VSE OS who wanted to migrate to OS/MVS.  Making the
move was non-trivial. There were all manner of changes you needed to
make to your workflow and your applications to do this.  So you ran
VM/CMS, brought DOS/VSE up under it in a production partition, and
OS/MVS in a test partition.  Normal workloads connected to the DOS/VSE
instance.  Applications being migrated and tested to make sure they
ran as designed were in the test partition.  Once migration was
completed and fully tested to confirm everything worked correctly,
DOS/VSE could be taken down and OS/MVS became the production
environment.

But as you might guess, you need a powerful machine to be able to
support this usage, and server class machines generally have hardware
designed to make it easy to run a VM. The goal is maximizing hardware
usage.  I went through that exercise at another employer with lots of
dedicated servers for different purposes, some of which were barely
used.  Instead of adding more and more servers (which required more
and more power and cooling) install VMWare and consolidate.  It got
nowhere because a British sister company had tried to do that and
failed.  I thought they simply didn't know what they were doing and we
*could* do it, but the decision not to was made several levels above
me.

> So concentrating on using DOS - because 486 is much too "weak" for Linux of
> today - I mean utility whose duty is just to switch CPU into "virtual x86
> mode", split RAM among established "instances" and then just share hardware
> resources (keyboard, CD-ROM, video, sound... everything) among them.

Just what do you mean when you say 486?  They came in a variety of
makes/models. A 486 *can* run Linux, with reasonable performance
depending on what you want to do.. Mostly, you want to give it as much
RAM as the machine can accommodate.  Linux distros exist intended for
older, less powerful hardware.

You *might* be able to configure a Linux instance on that hardware
that would let you multi-boot using Grub2 or the like, and pick which
flavor of DOS you wanted to run that session.  You almost certainly
*won't* be able to have multiple different instances of DOS running
simultaneously.

> No idea - maybe it had been aleady created, just I didn't stumble upon it yet?

It doesn't exist. See above for why.

> regards,
> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] Dosemu on its own - does it exist?

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 10:10 AM ZB  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 03:56:26PM +0200, Mateusz Viste wrote:
>
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
>
> Indeed I recall that name - but somehow never used it before. Does it do
> exactly what I've described? Like - for example - I could "split" 486 into
> four x86 CPUs, then I can use one instance to boot FreeDOS there, the second
> one to boot DOS 6.22 (for comparison), the third one for, say, DR-DOS etc.

No, you can't.

I ran it, back in the day.  Think of it as a multitasking character
mode GUI shell running on top of DOS. You were *not* running multiple
copies of *DOS*.  You were running multiple *applications* under DOS
at the same time.  DOS was single-tasking.  DV serialized access to it
by the various DOS applications, so it was the single task DOS was
supporting.

It used round robin time slicing, doing a bit of work on each process
running under it and moving to the next.  It really wanted a (by the
standards of the day) fast and powerful machine to be used
effectively.  A chap I knew back when was a BBS Sysop, and had four
nodes of Wildcat BBS software (a popular choice back then) running on
a single 25mhz AT clone with a 286 CPU.  Other sysops found themselves
running multiple PCs on a LAN if they wanted more than one node of the
BBS at a time.

You needed to experiment with DV to get settings correct to best
support what you did, with allocation of foreground and background
time slices being key.

Conceptually, Windows 3.1 was the next step beyond DesqView.  It was a
multi-tasking bit-mapped GUI shell on top of DOS.  The transition
Windows faced was from 16 bit to 32 bit applications.  Win95 made a
start on that, but DOS was still under the hood.  Win98 was the next
step.  DOS was still there because Win98 needed a real-mode *loader*,
but once it was initialized and running, it took over all OS functions
and DOS was out of the loop.

Win2K was a fully virtualized 32 bit system, and had no need for DOS.
(It *did* provide DOS emulation for folks who still wanted to run DOS
programs wia the NTVDM DLL.)

Win7 and later were aimed at 64bit systems.  On a 64bit system,
support for 16bit programs went away.  If you really needed them, you
ran some form of VM under Windows and ran the DOS programs in it.
(The vDOS Plus package discussed here is essentially a VM for running
16bit DOS apps.)

> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] A few suggestions to improve debug

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 5:47 AM tom ehlert  wrote:
>
> UNIX System V certainly was connected to serial terminals (Televideo,
> VT100, ...)
>
> and it had the VI visual editor with definitively cursor movement
> across the screen, even when the terminal had no cursor keys.

I was a system administrator for setups like that.  (At one shop, I
had 90 dumb terminals connecting to a SysV, and later a Solaris,
machine.)

The vi editor relied on the TERM variable being properly set in the
login profile.  (And vi is a "moded" editor.  In Insert mode, things
you type are inserted into the file you are editing.  In command mode,
keys on the keyboard become commands. H, J, K, and L move the cursor
left, down, up, and right respectively.  So you can use vi on machines
that don't have arrow keys.)

Unix used a database called termcap (short for terminal capabilities)
to tell how to communicate with the terminal.  The $TERM variable got
set to an entry in the local termcap file.  An ANSI termcap entry
looked like this.  It was provided with a DOS port of the Unix Larn
D style game (and required the ANSI.SYS driver to be loaded.) \E is
the escape character (ASCII 27).  A command sequences begin with
escape left bracket

#
# Monochrome IBMPC.
#This is a termcap for the NANSI.SYS device driver.
#It is the same as the ANSI termcap, except NANSI supports
#line insert (al) and delete (dl) while ANSI does not.
#
ibmpc-mono:\   Name of termcap entry
:co#80:\   Number of screen columns
:li#24:\ Number of screen rows
:ho=\E[H:\Home the cursor
:cl=\E[;H\E[2J:\Clear line
:bs:\Terminal has backspace key
:cm=\E[%i%2;%2H:\Cursor motion
:up=\E[A:\   Up arrow
:xd=\E[B:\   Down arrow
:nd=\E[C:\   Right arrow (non-destructive space)
:bc=\E[D:\   Left arrow
:ce=\E[K:\   Clear entry
:cd=\E[J:\Clear display
:ti=\E[m:\Terminal mode init
:te=\E[m:\   Terminal mode end init
:so=\E[1m:\ Standout mode (usually boldface)
:se=\E[m:\   End standout
:us=\E[4m:\ Underline mode
:ue=\E[m:\   End underline
:al=\E[L:\ Add line
:dl=\E[M: Delete line

This is a simple example.  More complex ones existed.  But there were
limits in how complex - terminal definitions had to fit into a 1K
buffer in memory.

Terminals fell into two broad categories - ASCII and ANSI.  Earlier
terminals were ASCII terminals, and the typical example was the DEC
VT52 or the Wyse 50.  The VT100 was the typical ANSI terminal.  The
principal difference was ANSI terminals using ANSI escape sequences
for terminal commands, which were a subset of the ANSI 3.64
specification.  The latter made life easier for admins.  The Wyse 50
ASCII terminal, for example, had a backspace key and a left arrow key.
*Both* sent ^H when sent, with no way to determine which of those keys
was pressed when the system got a ^H from the terminal.

> cursor movement is not tied to memory-mapped devices, and even old DOS
> Software (MS Word and friends) were derivative of CP/M software where
> they also have to live with serial terminals. they (for the most part)
> used only BIOS functions for screen control.

And CP/M had a configurable BIOS you could customize to best support
your hardware, because there was wide variation in what vendors
offered.

Likewise, early PC clones took a bit to get IBM PC BIOS emulation
correct.  Earlier versions of the VDE editor mentioned here could be
configured to use the BIOS for cursor movement if the particular brand
of machine wasn't fully PC compatible and didn't support the expected
control sequences.  Using BIOS calls was slower and more expensive
than direct addressing, so all breathed sighs of relief when it
stopped being needed.
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Re: [Freedos-user] A few suggestions to improve debug

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 1:35 AM Jon Brase  wrote:
>
> > Not that convincing rationale considering rather modest overhead necessary.
>
> Recall that FreeDOS isn't just about having a FOSS alternative to MS-DOS for 
> modern machines (where you're really better off just using Linux and DOSBox), 
> or for your early-90s 486 retrogaming machine, it's also meant to be an 
> alternative to MS-DOS for the very oldest PC hardware, all the way back to 
> the original IBM 5150. The core software might therefore be expected to work 
> in very little RAM. As I recall, the minimum configuration for the 5150 had 
> only 16k of RAM. A decent laptop these days will have more 16k blocks of RAM 
> than a minimal 5150 had *bits* of RAM. So for FreeDOS to work on such 
> machines, it has to treat kilobytes like young whippersnappers like me treat 
> gigabytes. 500 or 800 bytes starts looking pretty expensive at that rate.

And just who still *has* a working 5150 with 16KB RAM and doing what
with it if they do?  (For that matter, who is still running original
ancient hardware that *hasn't* taken it to the full 640K of supported
user memory?)

The earliest 5150 model could take 64K on the motherboard, but later
models increased that.  (The 640KB limit for user accessible RAM was
an IBM decision.  The 8088 CPU has a 1MB address space.)

The earliest versions of DOS looked a lot like CP/M under the hood,
which is unsurprising.  The previous range of machines the IBM PC was
designed to replace were boxes from manufacturers like Osborne and
used the Intel 8080 or Intel compatible Zilog Z80 and ran CP/M.  Those
earlier CPUs had a 64K  address space (and some of the machines came
with 48K of RAM.)  A design goal for the earliest PC was to make it
easy to port software originally developed on CP/M machines, like
WordStar and VisiCalc, to the new architecture.

While early PCs might have been released with as little as 64K of RAM,
more was common.  (A machine at a former employer had 256K.)
Pretty much everything got extended to the full 640K main memory to
accommodate RAM hungry applications.  (Think Lotus 123, and larger and
larger spreadsheets.)

Complaints that changes like this make them harder to run on really
old kit are only meaningful if someone is *trying* to. I think even
the "pure DOS machines" folks here who
*only* run DOS have machines with 640K, and possible expansion RAM in
EMS or XMS flavors.
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Re: [Freedos-user] A few suggestions to improve debug

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 8:43 PM ZB  wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 05:07:14PM -0400, dmccunney wrote:
>
> > One of the most popular was Chris Dunford's CED.  The following from
> > the CED docs is relevant:
>
> Thanks, I'll try to examine it. Still my suggestion is to make all these
> tools of FreeDOS, that offer command line - better. There's really no valid
> reason _not_ to use these few keys present on every PC's keyboard. Neither
> there was any in the past as well - as I think about this today maybe
> "command history" had to be invented, but why MS$ didn't order their
> programmers to make use out of that keys too - no idea. Maybe simply
> "because those utilities were still usable with poor quality command-line".

> Not that convincing rationale considering rather modest overhead necessary

On something like *nix, the GNU readline library can provide it.
Overhead is low because it's a shared library rather than inline code
in applications that use it.  But it requires the OS to support a
shared library function, and the GPL can be a deal breaker.  The GPL
is viral, and the license makes any code that links against Gnu code
also covered by the GPL.  That's a deal breaker for a lot of open
source products that are explicitly *not* issued under the GPL.  (As a
huge example, Google does not use GPLed code in anything they do, and
won't.  They need to reinvent that particular wheel due to
incompatible licensing.)

Granted, the *hardware* resources required for something like this is
low.  The main resource constraint is *developer* time.  Just who will
*make* these changes?  (A lot of what people have expressed a desire
for on the FreeDOS list is sophisticated system level programming, and
the kind of folks who can do it tend to want to be *paid* for that
sort of effort.  They won't do it for free.)

The advantage if available for using a TSR is that it's effectively a
shared library whose functionality can be available to any DOS
programming running where it is installed.  In the case in question,
CED (and other similar products) features are available to any
application using DOS function 0AH to get input.

You might start by looking at what DOS programs you think could
benefit from this use to get input.  A change to using 0AH makes the
functionality of a TSR like CED available in them, and is likely
simpler and less intrusive than building in command line recall and
editing.  And the TSR can generally be loaded "high".

> regards,
> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] A few suggestions to improve debug

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 3:47 PM ZB  wrote:

<...>

Recall that in  the old days, DOS *COMMAND.COM* did not have command
line recall and edito\ing.  To get it, you installed a TSR that added
it.  There were a number of them.

One of the most popular was Chris Dunford's CED.  The following from
the CED docs is relevant:

"CED is active either at the DOS prompt, or when an application
program requests buffered keyboard input from DOS (DOS function 0AH).
There are a few such programs (DEBUG and EDLIN are two); but the main
use of CED is at the DOS prompt."

Do you use a TSR command line editor in your DOS sessions?  If you do,
DEBUG might already have a lot of what you like because the TSR
command editor is active in it.

FreeDOS includes JPSoftware's 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, but I tend
to load a DOS TSR command editor high in a DOS session, so it's
available if I shell out of the DOS app, which may not have memory
left when shelled out to reload 4DOS.,
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Re: [Freedos-user] VDE editor and variety of other interesting tools

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 5:41 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
...
> > In the early DOS days, VDE was a shareware product, along with editors
> > like Qedit.  These days it's copyrighted freeware.  Use it and pass it
> > along all you like, but you can't get the source.
> >
> > So VDE isn't something you might want to mirror on Ibiblio, but it
> > *is* something people might find worth running under *DOS.
>
> That's why I was asking (mirror on ibiblio).

That was my assumption.

> I had remembered VDE from its shareware days. I had missed that it was 
> re-released as copyrighted freeware. (See below - highlights are mine.) 
> That's interesting - I'll have to try it again.

It ceased generating actual revenue, so Eric's incentive to have it as
shareware diminished.  But it was fairly widely used, and he didn't
want it to become the bane of shareware's existence - packages you had
to register and pay for to get full value, but the authors have
abandoned it and it *can't* be registered.  Freeware it became.  The
last release in 2009 was a bugfix release, but it's mature enough that
there weren't many bugs left to squash.  If you want a WordStar style
editor, and you can run it under real DOS or an  emulator like DOSBox
or vDOS Plus, grab it and use it.

(I run it here on Win10 under vDOS Plus, but that's keeping my hand
in.  It's not my production editor or word processor.)

> From the "About" page:
> https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home/about-vde
>
> > VDE started out as freeware; the DOS version switched to shareware
> >(with licensing required for commercial use) from 1988 to 2002, and has
> >since returned to freeware status.  Even during its shareware period, VDE
> >was released in fully functional form without nagging displays, and
> >individual use was still freely allowed (a spelling-checker module was
> >offered as an incentive for registration).  VDE has been widely distributed
> >by software libraries and online, and bundled with outdated computers for
> >use by the disadvantaged.  It's been my own most-used software for over 20
> >years, and my wish has always been that it should also be useful to as many
> >others as possible.
> > -- Eric Meyer (April 2009)
>
> Thanks for hosting the VDE website. This is a cool piece of history.

I'm not technically hosting.  The Home page is a Google Site and the
mailing list is a Google group.  I was simply in a position to make
those happen.

I was a VDE user in the DOS days, and it was something I believed
should be preserved and made available.  And  I believe in preserving
history and documenting how things got to their current state, so the
early CP/M version, several DOS versions, and other things are there,
available, and documented.

You're quite welcome, and your response is a major reason why I did
it. It provides value to folks who visit.  There may not be a lot of
them, but that's not the point of the exercise. (I also maintain the
TextEditors.org site, that tries to list and document everything used
as a text editor on a computing device (that may be a mainframe or a
pocket calculator.) It's also low traffic, but I get occasional
grateful emails from folks who discovered the site and found something
that they wanted.  I smile and say "My work here is done..." :-) )

> Jim
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Re: [Freedos-user] VDE editor and variety of other interesting tools

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 4:33 PM Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 11:39 AM ZB  wrote:
> > >  https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home
> > >
> > >  (see "Files Section")
> > >
> > > it seems it may be interesting to some
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 11:38 AM dmccunney  wrote:
> > I'm the person who created and maintains that site.
> >
> > VDE is a clone of the WordStar editor and uses the WordStar command set,
> >
> > VDE's home page had been on the Short Stop DOS software site created
> > by Steve Adelewitz.  Steve died of a heart attack and Short Stop went
> > off the air suddenly.  VDE also had a mailing list hosted on the
> > Topica site.  Topica changed its business model and mailing lists went
> > away.  In cooperation with VDE author Eric Meyer and List Mommy Ben
> > Cohen, I  migrated the mailing list to a Google Group, and in
> > cooperation with Eric created a new VDE home page.
> [..]
>
> I'm curious if the source code to VDE has even been released. I don't
> see any source code on the website, so I suspect the answer is no.

Correct. It has not been released, and won't be. Why should it?  VDE
is pure assembler, and IIRC, the assembler Eric used is no longer
available.  You would have challenges trying to build and extend it if
you *had* the source. (And given the issues getting folks to update
FreeDOS and other packages, who would actually try to do anything with
the source? ASM programmers are something of an endangered species,
because hardware is fast and cheap enough that you don't *have* to
write in  assembler to get needed performance.)

In the early DOS days, VDE was a shareware product, along with editors
like Qedit.  These days it's copyrighted freeware.  Use it and pass it
along all you like, but you can't get the source.

So VDE isn't something you might want to mirror on Ibiblio, but it
*is* something people might find worth running under *DOS.

> Jim
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Re: [Freedos-user] Bexome Endorsed By The FSF! Opportunity

[dmccunney]

Trying to get listed by the FSF is an exercise in futility.

The FSF has long ago ceased being about technology.  It's a religion,
and Richard Stallman is its prophet.  (I've met him, and know people
who've known him for decades. He's an odd person. In Stallman's world,
all software is FOSS, issued under the GPL.  No surprise various Linux
distros don't pass his compatibility tests.)

And open source has fragmented.  My irony meter pegs off scale when
one open source product cannot incorporate code from another because
they are issued under incompatible licenses. (And Gnu is a Worst
Offender - my understanding is that GPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2.
That's just hopelessly stupid.)

FreeDOS began as an effort to produce an  open source OS compatible
with DOS.  It mostly succeeded.

But people buy computers to do work or play, and the OS sits between
the user,. the program they run, and the hardware.  A *lot* of
programs people want to run *aren't* open source, and won't be.
Consider the popular DOSBox DOS emulator.  *It* began as an effort to
create an emulator that would let people play old DOS games on things
that weren't DOS PCs.  Those games were not open source, nor likely to
become so. And folks here want to run DOS character mode emulation for
productivity applications like word processors and spreadsheets.
Those are highly unlikely to be open source, and even if open source
products exist, people will want to run what they used back when.  If
what you ran is Lotus 123,  there may not be a shareware or open
source product that *can* replace it because they will lack Lotus 123
features you relied on.

Even if it were possible for FreeDOS to get listed by the FSF, what
would FreeDOS get out of it that would make the hoops worth trying to
jump through?

Ignore the FSF.  The rest of the world increasingly is.  Developments
I'm following these days are generally under MIT or 2 clause BSD
licenses, precisely to make the license as open and unrestricted as
possible, and allow code sharing to happen.
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Re: [Freedos-user] VDE editor and variety of other interesting tools

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 11:39 AM ZB  wrote:
>
>  https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home
>
>  (see "Files Section")
>
> it seems it may be interesting to some

I'm the person who created and maintains that site.

VDE is a clone of the WordStar editor and uses the WordStar command set,

VDE's home page had been on the Short Stop DOS software site created
by Steve Adelewitz.  Steve died of a heart attack and Short Stop went
off the air suddenly.  VDE also had a mailing list hosted on the
Topica site.  Topica changed its business model and mailing lists went
away.  In cooperation with VDE author Eric Meyer and List Mommy Ben
Cohen, I  migrated the mailing list to a Google Group, and in
cooperation with Eric created a new VDE home page.

VDE originated under CP/M as an alternative to WordStar which began
there.  VDE was implemented as a single executable that did not
require overlays. Eric moved development to DOS, and another developer
picked up VDE for CP/M and continued it as ZDE.  There was also a
conversion of VDE from ASM to C and a static build port for Linux.
Copies of all of them are on the VDE site. VDE includes a macro
facility which WordStar lacked, and a number of VDE macro packages and
a VDE macro compiler are hosted on the site.

The site also hosts tools that can be used alongside VDE or called
from it, with pointers to other DOS software sites.

Eric still uses VDE daily, but development stopped around 2009.  The
mailing list still exists, but is very low traffic.

I run VDE here using the vDOS Plus package available for Windows. vDOS
Plus is a fork of the DOSBox emulator originally written to allow
users to run old DOS games on things that weren't DOS PCs.  (I use an
Android port of DOSBox to run some DOS programs on an Android tablet.)
 vDOS Plus is intended for DOS character mode productivity
applications and drops the specialized video and sound support.

If folks here know of other things that ought to be on the VDE site,
drop me a note. If I agree that they fit I'll add them.

> regards,
> Zbigniew
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Re: [Freedos-user] zip programs and pure DOS?

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:46 PM Karen Lewellen
 wrote:
>
> It  appears that the edition of info zip's zip and unzip programs are not
> current, from 2008 and 2009, according to my google.
> Unfortunately sourceforge no longer lets you download from there without
> JavaScript,  these days.
> So my goal is the most current edition, which does not seem to be what you
> provide at the freedos site?

You probably don't *care*.  I don't believe any updates made after
2009 affect the DOS versions.  InfoZip is *very* mature technology,
and updates past what the FreeDOS site has are almost certainly for
Windows and Linux ports.  (I just browsed current issues and patches.
All are for Linux, POSIX, or Win64.)  I suspect no patches that would
affect use on DOS were in the older versions you found.   DOS has been
dead for 25 years.  Patches only happen when someone reports a bug and
someone else is motivated to create a fix. Given how long it has been
since DOS ceased to be a widely used OS, I'd be startled if anyone
actually found a bug in more than 20 years that *required* a fix.

If you really want to be that fussy about " current" editions, you
bite the bullet, install a version of Linux that will work on your
hardware, and run DOS applications using DOSBox or DOSEmu.

But the underlying issue you reported still exists.  You have Zip
archives that return errors when you try to open them with PKUNZIP.
Where did they come from?  Did you get them from elsewhere or create
them yourself?  If you created them yourself, where are they stored?
(Please tell me it isn't on floppy disks.)  Switching to Infop-ZIP
isn't likely to magically fix the problem if the archives are
damaged..

If you really need to get at the contents of those archives, you'll
need to use a tool that can try to repair damaged archives.  It's been
a while since I've used it, but foggy memory says archive repair was
not something the Info-Zip packages offered.  I believe DOS versions
of 7-zip do offer repair
capabilities.

> Karen
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Re: [Freedos-user] Emulation

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 4:19 PM Alvah Whealton  wrote:
>
> Please forgive this post for straying from the topic of Freedos, itself. It 
> relates to the subject of DOS emulation, as aspects of that subject are 
> frequently addressed here.

And elaborating on my previous comments. there are native versions of
DOSBox for Linux.  You do not have to set up and do things through
Wine.  Wine is intended to support GUI *Windows* programs.  DOSBox may
be all you need.

Install a native version of DOSBox and play with it.  You may discover
vDOS Plus through Wine is not needed to run PC Outline, and you are
going through more trouble than you have to to do what you want..

> Al Whealton
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Re: [Freedos-user] Emulation

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 4:19 PM Alvah Whealton  wrote:

> Would someone be willing to do this old man a favor by taking the time to 
> explain, at a conceptual level, what VDOS-PLUS is doing that DOSBOX does not 
> do?  I am not a coder.

The difference between vDOS Plus and DOSBox is mostly in what it leaves out.

The core of DOSBox is a specialized virtual machine that reproduces
enough of an x86 PC environment that DOS programs can run under it.
DOSBox is cross-platform, and can run on other things.  I've used
DOSBox to run 16bit PC applications under Linux.

DOSBox was intended to allow folks to play old DOS games on machines
that weren't DOS PCs, so it included support for specialized DOS
graphics and sound.  For instance, DOS games would often write
directly to video memory rather than using the BIOS, to get better
performance. DOSBox provides emulation so those games can write to
what they think is video memory but which is actually being provided
by DOSBox.

vDOS Plus aims to support character mode DOS productivity
applications, and drops the specialized graphics and sound features as
not needed. It adds things like long file name support.  But vDOS Plus
is *not* cross-platform.  It is specific to running in Windows.  IF
you need support for a diifferent platfor,, you use DOSBox.

I have an assortment of things up under vDOS Plus on a Win10 machine here.

I also have some old DOS stuff up using DOSBox on an Android tablet,
because Android ports exist.

> Al Whealton
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Re: [Freedos-user] Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 9:37 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 12:26 PM dmccunney  wrote:
> >
> > > DJGPP make is mainly just a port of GNU make, is it not?
> >
> > Well, as part of a port of the entire Gnu/Linux toolchain, including
> > GCC.  Things like Scons are displacing make in some contexts, but make
> > isn't going away.
>
> Make is a fairly useful util and a great idea, but it's also a
> portability nightmare (isn't everything?). So it's hard to do anything
> perfectly.

I have unfond memories of trying to build stuff with make, and
discovering that the make I was using required *tabs* as separators in
some areas, and would fail if spaces were used instead. (Editors I use
tend to convert tabs to spaces.)  I don't recall that particular
requirement being *documented* anywhere, and since tabs are
non-printing chars you have to jump through various hoops to
explicitly display, looking at the makefile was no help, because you
would see blank spaces and not realize they were generated by tabs
instead of space chars.

But make can be considered a language, and folks have done stuff in
make that has nothing to do with building code.

> Scons relies on Python, as do many things. POSIX Make seems somewhat
> rare, so many projects just use GNU Make as the "portable"
> alternative. CMake is popular, so is Meson (with NInja). But I'm not
> directly familiar with most of them.

There are other things as well. A partial list is here:
http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UnixMake

> GNU only recommends these utilities:
>
> * 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Utilities-in-Makefiles.html

And for good reason.  Make may be portable.  The code you build using
it may not be, and architectural differences in the targets can bite.
"Make relies on the following tools. Make sure versions of them are
available on the system  where you are building" is sound advice.  So
is advice like "Don't create symlinks in make, because they may not be
available on the target of your build."

> I know nothing about C++, but the latest '20 standard has modules,
> which will probably speed up and simplify makefiles in the future
> (hopefully). But I don't think major compilers are quite there yet
> (but fairly close).
>
> * https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html
>
> This is a big change and important to do correctly. So I don't blame
> them for taking their time (not to mention that C++17 wasn't that long
> ago and is generally fully supported).

C++ has come a *long* way.  Bjarne Sjoustroup created it while at
AT  AT Unix's first C++ compiler was cfront.  Cfront was a front
end that parsed your c++ code and converted it to standard C, which
could be compiled by cc to asm, assembled by as, and linked by ld to
create an executable.  I asked about that at a talk Sjoustroup gave at
a Unix users group meeting.

He said that people had been wishing for years for a truly portable
assembly language, and they finally realized that's essentially what C
was.  C was designed to be portable, and efficient enough that you
didn't have to write in assembler to get performance.  Unix was
originally written in the MACRO-11 assembly language provided by DEC
in the system used to originally develop Unix.  When C became mature
enough, most of Unix was rewritten in it.  If memory serves, perhaps
10% of the really low level code that talked to the hardware remained
in assembler.

AT implemented the original C++ as a parser converting to standard C
because the hardware to support a native C++ compiler wasn't generally
available.  As more powerful hardware became available, true C++
compilers appeared.

> (I did buy a DOS-based, pre-standard C++ book [1995] in 1998 with a
> floppy containing Turbo C++ Lite. How quaint. I half read it but
> didn't stick with it. There are better modern C++ books nowadays,
> obviously.)

More than I can count.

> > > As for the AWK portion, I have tested my script for munging the
> > > GW-BASIC source files with both GNU awk (gawk) and mawk.
> >
> > Were any changes required to your original script to get it to work as
> > expected in gawk *and* mawk?
>
> There's always "dark corners" (as GAWK would call it), but mostly it
> should work okay. Just be sure to rigorously test everything before
> publishing (or at least mention exactly what version and OS you tested
> on somewhere). Yes, I found some avoidable quirks by testing various
> AWK interpreters on some simple scripts. Standards are good, but
> actual testing of existing implementations is more crucial than
> theoretical success. (Don't be a purist! Make it work with what you
> have available.)

The problem with standards is that everyone will have their own take
on how to implement them, and I haven't seen a 

Re: [Freedos-user] Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 5:30 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 11:26 PM dmccunney  wrote:
> > On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:35 PM Rugxulo  wrote:
> >
> > > So no, I haven't tried rebuilding this (yet?), and I'm no *nix fiend,
> > > but I do think AWK is a cool tool, maybe cooler than GW-BASIC (don't
> > > kill me!).
> >
> > AWK is a cool tool.  But it's not a full programming language for
> > building stand alone apps.  GWBASIC is.
>
> I don't think this particular BASIC is a compiler, only an
> interpreter. (The very first BASIC was a compiler.)

Doesn't matter.  You can create an entire application in an
interpreted language, and people did.  And BASIC being interpreted on
early machines was likely a matter of hardware available.  Kemeny and
Kurtz were working on larger multi-user systems. Consider the
Commodore 64, which had MS BASIC v2 embedded.  When you booted it, you
were in the interpreter, talking to BASIC.  BASIC on that machine was
embedded in a 8KB ROM.

> But there actually are compilers for AWK out there, even REXX! But
> most implementations don't do that. (Why bother? Interpreted is often
> fast enough.)

Awk and REXX are script languages, and were generally interpreted.
Awk is used in things like pipelines, where you call awk to query and
process a text file and pass the results to something else.  REXX was
the next generation of script language on IBM mainframes, intended to
provide more power than CLISTs.  (I was a dab hand at CLIST
programming back when.)  But you got REXX as a component of IBM's
VM/CMS OS.  VM was actually intended as a hypervisor, allowing you to
run other IBM mainframe OSes under it.  It was popular for cases like
taking code written for DOS/VSE and converting it to run under OS/MVS.
You could bring each up in a partition, with a production partition
running DOS/VSE, and a test partition where you handled conversions
and made sure things worked as expected under MVS.  Once you had
completed conversion and testing, with verification that everything
worked as designed, you could take down the DOS/VSE partition and make
the MVS partition the production environment.  (IIRC, VM/CMS imposed
about a 10% overhead, which is remarkably good. REXX subsequently got
brought up under other architectures.  (I have a version that works
under Palm OS.)

But hey, there are compilers for DOS batch files... :-p

> (untested by me, but just FYI)
> * http://awka.sourceforge.net/index.html

Convert awk to C, then compile to an executable.  I recall hearing
back when that AT was working on an awk compiler.  I have no idea if
this bears any relation to that effort.

> I'm actually a bigger fan of Sed, but that's much more limited
> (intentionally?). Also, AWK vaguely reminds me of REXX in
> functionality (although that, too, I only lightly dabbled in).
> Obviously, REXX was more known on IBM mainframes and OS/2.

Intentionally.  It has a different use case than awk.  SED is a stream
editor, explicitly intended to be called in a pipeline to perform
*scripted* edits on what is fed to it.

One bit often missed by DOS folks back in the day was that *EDLIN*
could be used that way.  Advanced batch programmers in environments
like corporate installations where they weren't allowed to install
third party code used EDLIN where they might otherwise have installed
SED.

> In recent years, BWK wrote a book on Go. That language has come a long
> way and done a lot. A lot of people from Plan 9 still work on that.
> Oh, one guy did write a compatible implementation of AWK in Go!

The main honcho behind Go is Rob Pike, with Ken Thompson and Robert
Griesemer contributing.  (Griesmer was a main developer for the V8
JavaScipt engine.)Pike and Thompson were colleagues of Kernighan
back the AT Bell Labs in Murray HILL NJ when Thompson and Kernighan
were designing Unix and Dennis Ritchie was developing the C language.
Go is specifically intended for concurrent programming, and addresses
weaknesses in C/C++ (primarily in memory management) that bite when
you are trying to create concurrent code.  Go's intent is to handle
the memory management for the developer, so they can just develop code
and not have to worry about it.

Open source advocate Eric S. Raymond has largely switched to Go these
days.  A paying project he's technical lead on is updating NTP.  That
was a morass of security holes and being used in DDOS attacks.  The
first challenge was scraping away decades of accumulated cruft in the
form of special case code for various old architectures and
environments.  The last I knew, his current version of the core NTP
code is about 70% smaller than the C code it replaced, and is far more
secure.  Many recent security bugs filed against NTP don't exist on
his code because his code removes the attack surfaces they target.  Go
turned out to be just the thing to use for the project.

> > 

Re: [Freedos-user] Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 10:50 AM TK Chia  wrote:
> >> On a side note, you're using GNU Make and AWK (to cross-build?). I do
> >> wonder if DJGPP Make (or even other AWK implementations) would work
> >> for us here.
>
> DJGPP make is mainly just a port of GNU make, is it not?

Well, as part of a port of the entire Gnu/Linux toolchain, including
GCC.  Things like Scons are displacing make in some contexts, but make
isn't going away.

> As for the AWK portion, I have tested my script for munging the
> GW-BASIC source files with both GNU awk (gawk) and mawk.

Were any changes required to your original script to get it to work as
expected in gawk *and* mawk?

> > Awk is still useful on *nix - various things like build recipes may
> > use it in scripts - but for most purposes, perl has replaced it.  (I
> > consider that a pity.  Awk is smaller and faster, and perl may be
> > overkill for a lot of what you might need to do.  Former Busybox
>
> Agreed.  In fact I wrote an earlier version of my source-file-munging
> script in Perl, but later rewrote it in AWK. :-)



On the Linux side, I am seeing distros that no longer use text files
for configuration, and do everything in Python. Python is a cool
language, but if perl was overkill, Python is mass destruction.
Config files in plain text you can look at to see what they say and
how things are configured have attractions.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:35 PM Rugxulo  wrote:

> So no, I haven't tried rebuilding this (yet?), and I'm no *nix fiend,
> but I do think AWK is a cool tool, maybe cooler than GW-BASIC (don't
> kill me!).

AWK is a cool tool.  But it's not a full programming language for
building stand alone apps.  GWBASIC is.

AWK (the initials of Alfred Aho, Thomas Weinberger, and Brian
Kernighan, the authors)  was a tool intended for querying and
modifying the contents of text files.  It was initially written to
perform "one liners", where you invoked awk on a command line with the
commands to execute and the data to examine.  I attended a talk given
by Weinberger  decades ago where he described his shock on first
seeing a multi-line awk script.

Awk is still useful on *nix - various things like build recipes may
use it in scripts - but for most purposes, perl has replaced it.  (I
consider that a pity.  Awk is smaller and faster, and perl may be
overkill for a lot of what you might need to do.  Former Busybox
maintainer Rob Landley griped elsewhere about sending patches to
remove the dependency on Perl from Linux kernel builds, since awk did
all that was needed, only to find it reappear again.)
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Re: [Freedos-user] Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC

[dmccunney]

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 3:28 PM Random Liegh via Freedos-user
 wrote:
>
> The point about MS only open sourcing early and irrelevant versions is valid; 
> but there's another explanation. Those are the versions they have clear legal 
> rights to. On Hacker News someone was saying they wished MS would open source 
> Windows 2000. I strongly suspect that they couldn't even open source Windows 
> 3.1 without stepping into a legal minefield of other people's code.

Very likely.  Current OSes and applications are huge, and the vendor
of the code is vanishingly unlikely to have *written* all of it.
Third party libraries will be rampant.  They may *have* source to
them, but being allowed to *distribute* it is another matter.

An example is Libre Office, an open source, platform independent
office suite that can use and create MS Office compatible files, and
runs on Windows, Linux, and OS/X.

Once upon a time, what became LO was StarOffice, a freeware office
suite from a German vendor that could also  create and use MS Office
files.  It included equivalents of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and
Access.

Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice gmbh and rebranded StarOffice as
Open Office.  They wanted to make it open source, but ran into a
roadblock.  The database component of StarOffice was provided by a
version of a DBMS from Software AG called Adabas.   (I dealt with
Adabas long ago because the bank I worked for ran a version on a
mainframe.)  StarOffice had a  license from Software AG that woulds
let them distribute a free *binary* of the product, but they could
*not* provide source.  Sun substituted the Java language they had
created to handle database creation and updates, and you needed a
current Sun JRE installed to be able to *use* Base.  (LO will let you
*install* Base with no JRE present, but return odd errors if you try
to use it.)

Oracle bought Sun, and the status of Open Office was in question.
Various players who simply didn't trust Oracle forked the OO code to
create Libre Office.  Oracle finally got around to what they should
have done in the first place, and formally handed to OO code over the
the Apache Foundation, but the damage was done and development had all
shifted to LO.

I understand why someone would wish on Hacker News that MS would open
source Win2K.  What I don't understand is why MS *would*, even if they
had rights to offer source to all of the code.  What would be in it
for MS?  Note that MS *is* open sourcing other current stuff, notably
the .NET framework.  MS engineers are principal contributors to the
Linux Mono project to implement .NET under Linux.  A lot of other
stuff MS is doing now is being released as open source.

But *growth* these days is in cloud services like Azure, and Windows
hasn't been a main driver in MS revenues and profits for a while.  MS
continues to support and develop Windows because Windows runs on a lot
of what you use to *get* to Azure cloud services.

> MS dropped the ball with DOS in 95, and including GWBasic would be symbolic 
> of the way that FreeDOS has carried the torch for approaching 30 years now. I 
> feel like that's another reason to include it -symbolic continuity.

I don't think MS "dropped" the ball so much as *abandoned* it.  MSDOS
was a product specifically intended to run on on older and less
powerful 16 bit machines.  As 32 bit machines with proper hardware
memory management and virtualization, that could *run* multi-user,
multitasking OSes like Windows, OS/2, and Linux, and programs that
could take advantage of the hardware became available, MSDOS became
irrelevant.  How long has it been since DOS was actually *sold* as a
stand alone product, or major applications were still sold for DOS?
Development all migrated to Windows.

(I worked, years back, for a market research firm specializing in high
tech. A client was Lotus Development.  They thought there were still
lots of machines running DOS out there.   I had occasion to talk to
one of their reps and said "I understand you believe there is still a
substantial base of MSDOS users out there, but where are they?  The
*businesses* we call on your behalf to ask what they are using are all
running Windows and Windows programs. If you can tell us where to
*find* DOS users, we'll happily call them to chat.")

The people *running* FreeDOS these days are hobbyists playing with
retro tech for fun, people who still want to play old DOS games (but
you can use emulators like DOSBox to do that), or old timers who got a
DOS setup that worked and you will pry it from their cold, dead
fingers. :-p
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Re: [Freedos-user] IBM PS/2 clone system - UPDATE

[dmccunney]

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 1:53 PM Mattia Limonta  wrote:
> But... there are some issues with the serial ports. I am trying to figure out 
> the issue, but I guess the serial port on the clone system is too fast for 
> the metal analyzer hardware, and the software gets stuck on a "Configuring 
> ICS..." screen that on the IBM lasts about 3 seconds and then launches the 
> full program.

I don't think the issue is the port, but rather is the speed of the
underlying machine

This is a problem that has bitten various old PC games.  They made
assumptions about the hardware that were true when they wrote the game
but aren't true now, and the new hardware is much faster.  The game
fails to run because the underlying system is too fast.

You may want to look at TameDOS, which was written to solve problems
like this by slowing the host machine.  It installs and runs as a TSR.
Shareware but still sold and supported: http://www.tamedos.com/

> Mattia Limonta
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Re: [Freedos-user] Configuration options for DOS beep

[dmccunney]

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 11:56 AM Johnpaul Humphrey  wrote:
>
> I want to disable the beep in certain freedos applications.> Most importantly 
> COMMAND.COM

> So I think I have two options as far as freecom is concerned:
> 1. cut the wires, I want to avoid that if possible.
> 2. recompile freecom or any app that doesn't explicitly configure the bell.
> I thought before I sink a lot of time into recompiling, that I would
> ask around and see if there is some configuration file I missed.

AFAIK, no.  What hardware are you running on?  If you are running
FreeDOS in a VM, you can probably silence the speaker from the host
OS.  If you are booting FreeDOS as the OS on the machine, it's a
problem.  Some BIOSes back in the day would let you set speaker
volume.  Failing that, your option was usually to disconnect the
speaker.

A possible option is use of a TSR which will attempt to mute the
speaker.  Most of these work by continuously polling for speaker
events, so you will get some level of performance hit from running
them.  Go to https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=16= and search for
speaker in the listing for downloads on some.

Another possibility is https://www.pcorner.com/list/UTILITY/SIL2.ZIP/INFO/

I have not tested these and cannot say how well they work.
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.



> Johnpaul T. Humphrey
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] HP11 Streamer?

[dmccunney]

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 12:07 PM Jim Hall  wrote:

> But I'll see if I can ask someone at Microsoft about it. My guess is
> that they provide the download because they don't care about it
> anymore, and no one thought to create a web page for it.

That's my guess.  Copyright normally becomes an issue when there is
money on the table (or someone thinks there might be.)  Word for DOS
hasn't been sold for ages.  *MSDOS* hasn't been sold as a separate
product for ages. Who at MS is going to *care* that you can now get it
free?  It's not like they're losing money because you can.  The stuff
people will actually *pay* for all moved to the Windows side decades
ago.

Do you technically need a license?  Perhaps.  Is anyone going to come
after you if you *don't* have one?"  Vanishingly unlikely.  People
bring suit on stuff like this to protect rights and revenue streams.
MS rights are not in danger here, and there hasn't been a revenue
stream for this in many years.  Bringing suit costs time, effort, and
money.  Why would MS *bother*?  Their legal staff has better things to
do with their time.

FreeDOS is open source, and along that line, wants all software
available with FreeDOS or from its repository on Ibiblio to be open
source.  So having MS Word for DOS 5.5 on Ibiblio would be
inappropriate, but I don't personally see a reason the FreeDOS website
couldn't provide a pointer to it elsewhere, as "software not open
source but freely available that you can run under FreeDOS"

> Jim
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Re: [Freedos-user] HP11 Streamer?

[dmccunney]

Yes, my bad.  Thanks for the correction
__
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On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 3:52 AM Harald Arnesen  wrote:
>
> dmccunney [04.05.2020 03:52]:
>
> > Have fun.  EP was originally written for an 8 bit Atari microcomputer
> ^
> Altair
>
> --
> Hilsen Harald
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] HP11 Streamer?

[dmccunney]

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 8:10 PM Vincent Asaro  wrote:
>
> Dennis - Thank you for all the info!

You're welcome.

> I installed Linux Mint via USB on that machine, I just want to be sure FD 
> will "see" the ports, so to speak, but the FD page sez it's so, so it must be!

Seeing USB ports and being able to use them are different things.
Bear in mind that FreeDOS was intended to be a compatible open source
alternative to MSDOS.  USB did not *exist* when what FreeDOS was
trying to be compatible with was still being developed and sold.  An
assortment of things folks would like in FreeDOS fall into the "It
didn't exist in real DOS, and therefore doesn't in FreeDOS" bucket.
USB is a FreeDOS work in progress.  There is some support, but whether
there is support for what you require is another matter.  (Assuming
you can install FreeDOS *from* USB, can you then write *to* something
attached to USB, like a thumb drive?  How will you get stuff you
create *on* the HP off of it and to something else?  And yes,
networking will be another challenge.)

> I found the code for EP on Archive.org, mimeo of typewritten doc (!) it's abt 
> 4 pages long and I have every intention of punching in every character 
> manually LoL It's one of my Holy Grails, just to use that program :)

Have fun.  EP was originally written for an 8 bit Atari microcomputer
that did not use CP/M or DOS as the OS.  It was ported to CP/M by
other hands, and then to TRSDOS on the TRS-80 by yet other hands.  Do
not expect the source you found on archive.org in a scan of a
typewritten document to be usable as is, even if you successfully
transcribe it.

Since you were able to install Linux Mint (and I assume it ran), you
might be better served by installing DOSBox under Mint and using it to
run old DOS apps.  You would at least have USB support already extant.
(I'd want more RAM on the HP machine, but 2GB should work.  I have
Lubuntu dual-booting on an Acer Aspire1 notebook with WinXP Home.  The
Acer has 1.5GB RAM.  Lubuntu is not exactly speedy, but *does* run.)
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Re: [Freedos-user] HP11 Streamer?

[dmccunney]

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 4:28 PM Vincent Asaro  wrote:
>
> Eric,
>
> Thank you for the detailed response! I never played video games, actually, 
> I'm just nostalgic for the text interface experience and I really want to use 
> WordPerfect again but without installing a VM. As long as I can enter code 
> and also load DOS programs via USB, I'll get tons of mileage out of FD - 
> there are several legacy word processors I also want to try, like Electric 
> Pencil. A weird obsession, I know, but I'm a writer ;) Thanks again!

It depends on what you consider a VM.  There is an open source
cross-platform package called DOSbox, intended to let folks play old
DOS games on things that *aren't* DOS PCs.  A fork called vDOS is
specifically intended for supporting DOS character mode productivity
applications, but it is X86 specific.

I use the vDOSPlus fork of vDOS to run an assortment of old DOS
programs here under Win10.  In my case, I run  the VDE editor, which
is a WordStar clone that originated under CP/M and was subsequently
moved to DOS (though I have successfully run WS7 as well.), and a few
old DOS character mode games, like DOS versions of Unix Larn and VMS
Empire.  Word Perfect runs as well, and there's a fan site with
details on running it under vDOS here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/vdoswp.html

(I have also gotten them running on an Android tablet using an Android
port of DOSBox.  The problem there was finding an Android port of
DOSBox that passed ctrl-key combos through to the application, which
as an absolute necessity for running a WordStar style editor.)

DOSBox and VDOSPlus implement enough of DOS to run DOS applications
but you'll want to add things.  In particular, the provided shell you
talk to at a command line is a subset of COMMAND.COM providing just
enough to let you type in the name of a program to run.  For
anythi8nhg beyond that, you'll want to install FreeDOS command or 4DOS
which is also available for FreeDOS.

Running DOS apps here with vDOSPlus is a matter of a shortcut that
runs the vDOSPlus program, and runs it *in* the directory where the
DOS app lives. vDOS looks for autoexec.txt and config.txt files which
are the equivalent of autoexec.bat and config.sys and perform the same
functions and you run the program from auatexec..

You can find vDOSPlus here: https://www.vDosPlus.org

If you want to run  FreeDOS "on the bare metal", so to speak, your
hardware looks more than adequate, assuming you can install from USB.

Where did you find a runnable version of Electric Pencil?

> ~ Vincent
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Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos for IBM PCDOS 3.30 software

[dmccunney]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 1:49 PM Mattia Limonta  wrote:
>
> Good evening.
>
> I am a new user of the FreeDOS world, and I have a question. I would like to 
> install FreeDOS 1.2 on an old PC that we have at work because we have to 
> create a backup system for our 1987 IBM Personal System 2, currently running 
> IBM PCDOS 3.30 OEM. We still have this machine because it’s attached to a 
> metal analyzer that uses a software that exists only for PCDOS 3.30.
>
> Does this type of software run on FreeDOS 1.2? Is it possibile to get the 
> full compatibility?

PCDOS was simply IBM's branded version of MSDOS.  I used PCDOS and
MSDOS back when, and saw *no* differences in what software would run
under them.

Your metal analyzer was specifically released for IBM PCs running
PCDOS, but I don't see a reason why it won't run on another DOS
flavor.  FreeDOS tries to be 100% MSDOS compatible, so your PCDOS
software ought to run on it.

Set up FreeDOS on the spare PC and try it.  If it works, you are in
good shape.  If it doesn't work, tell us where it fails.

DOS shouldn't be your problem.  Reproducing the environment in which
the metal analyzer runs (like loading drivers needed to talk to
peripherals that do the analysis) sounds like the tricky part.

> Thanks!
> Mattia Limonta (Italy)
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Re: [Freedos-user] command.com exit status

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 8:24 PM Darrin M. Gorski  wrote:
>
> Wondering why FreeDOS COMMAND.COM doesn't exit with ERRORLEVEL like other 
> command processors.  main() in command.c ends with "return 0" where it should 
> really be "return errorlevel".

Like what other command processors?

> This way error codes are returned to the calling shell (or other program).

In the old DOS days, COMMAND.COM *was* the calling shell things
returned to, so not setting ERRORLEVEL was no surprise.  The
assumption was that it was the boot shell.  What might fail and
generate a meaningful ERRORLEVEL was the program you were running
*from* COMMAND.COM.

> For my purposes it is a requirement that the errorlevel is returned to the 
> calling shell/program.
> Any options?

What are your purposes?

What will the calling shell/program be to receive and take action
based on the ERRORLEVEL returned?  And under what circumstances might
COMMAND.COM exit with a non-zero ERRORLEVEL if it did set one?

I believe the alternative 4DOS shell can set an ERRORLEVEL, intended
to be useful when it is invoked as a sub-shell.

> - Darrin
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Re: [Freedos-user] WinWorldPC disk images...

[dmccunney]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 11:33 AM Bret Johnson  wrote:
>
> I personally like DOS WordPerfect a lot -- version 6.2 is what I have and 
> what I use to write the documentation for my DOS programs. I've never used 
> WordStar myself.

It's a matter of personal preference.  I learned WordStar in the early
days when the original IBM PC was first appearing on corporate
desktops as an engine to run the Lotus 123 spreadsheet.

WordStar was the second editor you learned, because the one you
preferred might not be available on the PC you needed to work on, but
WS probably was.

WS was keyboard independent.  It used Ctrl-key combos to specify
editing commands.  If your keyboard had a Ctrl key and standard
alphabetic characters, you could run WS.  WS originated on CP/M where
there was wide variation in keyboards used, so it made sense.  The WS
command set was implemented by a number of other editors as the
default or a selectable option.  I stayed fluent long after moving
away from original WordStar, and had Gnu Emacs customized to use WS
commands to avoid retraining my fingers.

MicroPro International, WS's vendor, took their eye off the ball in a
misguided attempt to diversify.  WP for DOS promptly ate them for
lunch and became the default standard.  WordPerfect took its eye off
the ball and waited too long to develop for Windows, and Microsoft
Word ate WP for lunch.

(And I recall much angst back when IBM changed their keyboard layout
from two rows of 5 Fkeys down the left side to one row of 12 Fkeys
across the top,  Many WP users had gotten used to being able to use WP
Fkey combos with the pinky of their left hand on the Ctrl key and and
other finger on the Fkeys.  They could do things without moving their
hands from the home row.  Then the KB layout changed and productivity
plummeted... :-p )

> Anyway, like Dennis indicated the files probably aren't "split" like you 
> might be thinking and need to be "combined" again before they are usable.  In 
> DOS programs there are usually just a bunch of separate files, several on 
> each floppy with the installation program on the first disk.  With many 
> programs, all you need to do is copy all of the files into a common directory 
> and install from there.  I think WP works that way, but don't remember for 
> sure.

That's my recollection.  I actually have a set of WP for DOS
installation floppies, but they are on 5.25" 360K floppies I can no
longer read.

<...>

> Also like Dennis mentioned, there is a lot of information about WP on the 
> website he mentioned.  It's run by Ed Mendelson who was a frequent 
> contributor to the venerable PC Magazine back in the day when DOS was still 
> pretty popular.  The site is mostly oriented towards running WP in a virtual 
> machine called vDosWP, a fork of DOSBox specifically oriented at running WP 
> under newer versions of Windows.  I'm able to run WP in other VM's as well -- 
> as long as it will run FreeDOS, it will probably also run WP.

vDos was a fork of DOSbox intended specifically for DOS character mode
productivity applications, like word processors.  It drops the
specialized support for DOS graphics and sound.  I run the vDOS Plus
fork of vDOS under Windows, but have successfully run DOS programs
under Linux and Android using ports of DOSbox.
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Re: [Freedos-user] WinWorldPC disk images...

[dmccunney]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 11:37 AM Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-user
 wrote:
>
> Do you know if they are literally one single disk image simply split into 
> pieces? If so, there are file joining programs to perform this function.
>
> Come to think of it, most un-archivers can reassemble the split files into 
> one, but it depends on how the file was split in the first place.

No, WP and the like had multiple floppies, and you installed by
inserting one at a time.  This was not one big image split into
pieces,

If he can open the floppy image files one by one and extract the
contents somewhere else, he can likely create a directory with a WP6
instance that may be usable.

Assuming he can get at the floppy contents, there's a useful fan site
detailing how to run it under vDOS (Windows only) or DOSBox (Windows
and Linux)
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/

I successfully run WS7 under vDOS,  and VDE (a DOS WordStar clone)
under both vDOS and DOSBox.  And I run VDE on an Android tablet using
an Android port of DOSbox.

I was never a fan of WP for DOS, and haven't played with it under
vDOS/DOSBox.  (I used WordStar at the time WP was taking over the
market, and saw no practical difference between memorizing WS Ctrl-key
combos and WP FKey combos.)
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Re: [Freedos-user] Off topic - hardware survival.

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 2:14 PM Cesar Gimenes  wrote:
>
> “An XT is the kind of computer that won't die all by itself.  You have to 
> kill it on purpose."
>
> I really liked it!
> it's a shame I don't have any machines from that time.

I have one.  They do die by themselves.  Mine had a component failure
on the motherboard that led to overheating.  If I wanted to boot it, I
had to have the top open with a fan blowing directly on the
motherboard to keep it cool enough to run.

I keep it around because at some point I need to try to get stuff off
the two 20MB Seagate ST-225 MFM hard drives. It does not have a
network card (and good luck finding one for an XT class machine), so
I'm looking at a cable to the serial or parallel port for
connectivity.  Real Soon Now...

> CRG
> https://crg.eti.br
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Re: [Freedos-user] Off topic - hardware survival.

[dmccunney]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 7:17 AM Tom via Freedos-user
 wrote:
>
> Hope you dont mind this  but I was just wondering about hardware
> survival rates. I have a 486 from 92 that still works but most of my
> later machines have died before being 5y old. Id did have a 20 year old
> 286 that had to go for space reasons even though it was still working. I
> was wondering how many old machines are still running out there and this
> seems a good place to find out!

The current production machine is an HP Small Form Factor desktop with
an Intel Core i5-4690 quad-core CPU @ 3.5ghz (with a Turbo mode up to
3.85ghz) Intel HD 4600 graphics, USB3.1, 16GB RAM, a 256MB Lexar SSD,
and 1TB and  500GB SATA HDs, running Win10 Pro.  The machine it
replaced dual booted Win10 Pro and Ubuntu Linux.  This isn't dual
booting yet.

I still have my first PC - an XT clone with a 10mhz motherboard and
NEC V20 CPU Hercules graphics, 640KB RAM, an AST 6PAK card with an
addirtion MB of RAM (split between RAMdisk, disk cache, and EMS
memory, and two Seagate 20MB ST-225 HDs.  It hasn't been booted in
quite some tine.

And I have an AT 3B1 - a single-user workstation designed by
Convergent Technologies and sold by AT  It has a 10mhz Motorola
68010  CPU, Green monochrome monitor, 3.5MB RAM, 5.25" 360KB floppy
drive, and 72MB Seagate MFM HD.  It runs AT Unix System V Release 2
(and will boot Unix and run acceptably in *1MB* RAM.  It still boots,
buit is in a closet because I don't have a place to set it up.  I had
this before I got my first PC clone listed above.

I also still have my old 32bit desktop, with an Intel Dual-Core CPU,
4GB RAM Ans several HDs, dual-booting WinXP Pro and Ubuntu Linux.
It's on a shelf under my computer desk and hasn't been booted in a
while.

I also still have a working Palm TX PDA and an assortment of Android devices.

I've had various other things over the years that got tossed for space
reasons, including a Mac that was the last PowerPC model,a Sun
workstation, and a Dell rackmount server, as well as several .PCs
running older 32 bit flavors of Windows.

> Tom
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