I guess we were all at this point at some time or other.when we thought we had a brilliant idea and then realised that our plans were more than just a little fanciful. I spent the best part of 1992 and 1993 writing a rather fancy GUI library that worked on EGA, VGA, a weird-arse 512K Realtek SVGA card and a Cirrus Logic 1MB SVGA card, until a good friend - the owner of the machine with said Cirrus Logic card - asked me if I had ever heard of something called "Windows" and that, although looking slightly more bland than my creation, it had a lot more features to it.
The upside was that I learned so much about programming in the process, it served me well all my professional life. In fact some of the things I learned about programming hardware drivers in 1992 helped me get me a very well paid job in 2012, so you never know when such stuff can come in handy. On Sun, 15 Dec 2024 at 04:47, Steve Nickolas via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > On Sat, 14 Dec 2024, Ben Collver via Freedos-devel wrote: > > >> A lot of FreeDOS novices seem to want to turn it into Linux, the same > >> way a lot of Linux novices seem to want to turn it into Windows - and > >> I think it probably galls some of the old-timers here. > > > > Seems to me there is an old tradition of trying to turn DOS into Unix > > that predates even MS-DOS 5, the target of the FreeDOS spec. There have > > been DOS ports of BSD utils since the 1980's and there is also the > > GNUish project mirrored on the FreeDOS file repo. Why get curmudgeonly > > over it now? > > I was part of that; you'll find my name in GNUish (it's been there for > probably 25 years now). I think I even brought a version of bc over to > FreeDOS right here on this list a couple years ago. > > But this whole thing I've seen about people trying to turn FreeDOS into a > modern OS with a GUI, multitasking and native AMD64 support and failing > because they can barely write hello world...it's because they've got stars > in their eyes and don't really "get" DOS the same way someone who grew up > on systems with MS-DOS 3.3 and even more primitive operating systems > would. I mean, you could see me 25 years ago on the old list being a > total n00b, but I wasn't trying to make DOS anything but DOS. (I learned > C because of FreeDOS.) > > -uso. > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
