Legacy OSes Archive

Yes, I am playing Dope Wars on a Palm Pilot inside my iPhone. It’s thanks to The Internet Archive, which is once again launching a giant collection of software you can instantly play on any web browser, up to and including your touchscreen-equipped phone. There are currently 565 classic Palm apps in all, including games, widgets, and even free trials from both the greyscale and color eras. This is probably the easiest way to experience Palm OS applications now. I will still opt for any of my dozen or so real devices, but having so many applications safe and sound on the Archive is amazingly awesome.

Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lost. But just try misplacing a Commodore SX-64. And any thief who tries to grab it and run gets a free hernia truss from the prison infirmary. I want to see someone carry an SX-64 into a coffee shop to authenticate something. Please.

But still, CP/M was, for a while, the industry-standard microcomputer OS, making Digital Research a powerful and important company. Wealthy companies that lose dominance over a market they formerly controlled don’t tend to just give up. Digital Research put a substantial R&D effort into expanding and enhancing CP/M, creating a large family of OSes. It had some significant wins and big sales. Some of those products are still in use. All those products are arguably “CP/M derivatives”, and as such, Bryan Sparks’ 2001 edict might have just open-sourced them all. One of the many giants we lost along the way.

Atari 8-bit fans have long hankered after a GUI similar to GEOS on the Commodore 64. Diamond GOS went some way to addressing this deficiency, and since then there have been several creditable attempts at implementing a GUI OS on the A8. Now there’s another one in the pipeline: an as yet unnamed project which aims to bring a pre-emptive multi-tasking graphical operating system to the 8-bit Atari. This is a seriously impressive project with ambitious goals, and it looks great considering the hardware it’s running on.

The new FreeDOS 1.3 is now available for download! This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy Edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system… And much, much more! There’s lot of changes, fixes, and improvements in here, so go get it and play with it.

After writing about the likely origins of IBM code page 852, I thought I should revisit the homegrown Czech alternative solution, the Kamenický brothers encoding and their keyboard driver. Its existence is well documented, and the so-called (somewhat misnamed) KEYBCS2 encoding even has its own Wikipedia article. The encoding itself lives on in various conversion tables, and utilities to convert text to or from the Kamenický encoding are easy enough to locate. But finding the actual KEYBCS2 utility turned out to be ridiculously difficult. I scoured the Internet for it. I could not find it. At all. I found a fair amount of text talking about it, but not the actual utility. A nice investigation into the past for a Sunday.

MicroWeb is a web browser for DOS! It is a 16-bit real mode application, designed to run on minimal hardware. This is a thing that exists. Incredible.

So. What is DESQview/X? Many people, in the current day and age, may have never even heard of this system from the mid-1990s. Its predecessor, DESQview (without the “/X”) which was first released in 1985, was a multi-tasking, windowing system for DOS. It allowed someone, with very modest PC hardware, to run multiple text-mode DOS applications at the same time. With overlapping, resizable windows. Pretty darned cool. This multitasking wasn’t the cooperative multi-tasking that we saw in early Windows (through 3.11) and MacOS up through version 9. No sir-ee bob. DESQview had true, preemptive multi-tasking. Fast. Stable. Lightweight. It was downright impressive. But it was all text-mode. Then DESQview/X came along, in the 1990s, bringing a complete X11 (aka X Windows) graphical interface with it. Impressive, for sure. I have heard of it, but never actually used it or even tried it. This article has piqued my interest, and I’m definitely going to fire up a VM and play around with this. For more in-depth information, there’s a book called DESQview/X: A Technical Perspective from 1990 on Archive.org.

In the brutal future of Frank Herbert’s Dune, computers are outlawed and high level computations are done by specially trained and bred humans called mentats. In Herbert’s world, there’s something elegant about old solutions to new problems. Good then that Oscar winning Dune screenwriter Eric Roth banged out the screenplay using the MS-DOS program Movie Master. Roth writes everything using the 30-year-old software. “I work on an old computer program that’s not in existence anymore,” Roth said in an interview in 2014. “It’s half superstition and half fear of change.” Roth wrote the screenplay for Dune in 2018 and explained he was still using Movie Master on a Barstool Sports podcast in 2020. That means Dune was written in an MS-DOS program. There’s really no reason to stop using software that you like, assuming you can make it secure and ensure your work is properly backed up. It’s trivial to set up a DOS environment, and it’s trivial to ensure not just the files you’re working on, but the entire DOS environment itself is backed up. This applies to many old and outdated platforms – there’s countless ways to virtualise, or to go on eBay and buy some original hardware.

A number of years ago, the Computer History Museum together with Microsoft released the source code for MS-DOS 1.25 (very close to PC DOS 1.1) and MS-DOS 2.11. I never did anything with it beyond glancing at the code, in no small part because the release was rather poorly organized. The obvious gaping hole is the lack of any source code for IBMBIO.COM. I do not know exactly what arrangement IBM and Microsoft had at the time, but in the days of DOS 1.x and 2.x OEMs did not get the source code for IBMBIO.COM/IO.SYS suitable for PC compatibles. I toyed with the idea of writing my own IBMBIO.COM replacement, but eventually gave up because it’s not a totally trivial piece of code and I had no real documentation to work with (until much later). The MSDOS.ASM source code obviously uses the IBMBIO interface, but makes no attempt to document it. The provided IO.ASM source is quite useful, but SCP’s hardware was different enough from the IBM PC that it is of limited utility. So, disassembler it was, and I produced reconstructed source code for PC DOS 1.1 IBMBIO.COM. Actually assembling it turned out to be a bit of an adventure; more on that below. More early DOS shenanigans to brighten your day.

In 1985 Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. in order to build the NeXT Computer. It was ahead of its time and had amazing features thanks to the NeXTSTEP operating system, most famously used at CERN by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. NeXTSTEP later became OPENSTEP and when Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, they used it as the basis for Mac OS X and iOS. If you’ve done any Mac or iOS programming, you’ve seen the echoes of NeXTSTEP in the type names – NSObject, NSString, NSDictionary, and many others all come directly from NeXT (NS = NeXTSTEP). These computers cost about as much as a new car when they first came out, so they were out of reach for most people. What was it like to use a top of the line system in the early 90s? Let’s build our own and find out! Exactly as it says on the tin. A fun few hours.

Terry Davis may not be as well-known as Linus Torvalds, but his open source operating system may be a legacy that will live on forever. What is it, and how do you use it? I honestly never expected something like TempleOS and Terry Davis to make its way onto a popular YouTube channel like Linus Tech Tips (and OSNews even makes a small cameo). Linus and Anthony do a good job of providing an overview of TempleOS and its creator. Davis used to frequent OSNews, even during the harsher spells of his illness, and it wasn’t easy to deal with someone like him, even in a small community like OSNews. He didn’t just post religious ramblings, but also deeply racist ramblings. It’s sad that, like so many others, he wasn’t able to get the medical help he clearly needed.

The Counterpoint program launcher was supplied with the Amstrad PC5086 and other Amstrad PCs from that era. It acts as a user-friendly front end, replacing the full GUIs (Windows 2.0, or GEM) supplied with previous models. The Amstrad-branded version opens with a warning that it should only be used on Amstrad computers. However it appears to run successfully in non-Amstrad environments, such as the virtual machine used to make these screenshots. I love discovering user interfaces I’ve never known about this before, and this one fits the bill just right. Wild UI experimentation was the norm during the late ’80s and early ’90s, before we all settled on what we’re all using now. Digging into the past and learning from even relatively obscure footnotes such as these is fascinating.

I’ll be setting my system up on a Windows machine, but you could just as easily set it up on a macOS or Linux machine. When I first attempted this install, I used VMware Workstation 14 Pro for Windows. After going through most of the installation process I couldn’t get OpenStep in to a color screen mode no matter how much I tried. I eventually found out that VMware Workstation doesn’t support the proper VESA display modes, and try as you might you’ll get an error on boot that says “VESA Mode Not Supported.” Fortunately, Virtual Box – which is cross-platform between Windows, macOS, and Linux and completely free – does support the proper VESA mode and works great for the installation of OpenStep. Still, there are some quirks when setting up your VirtualBox VM initially. The VM must have 1 processor with 1 core, 64MB of RAM, and a 2.0GB hard disk on an IDE controller. You will need to configure one IDE CD-ROM drive and one floppy drive. The hard drive must be at IDE 0:0 (Primary Master), and the CD-ROM drive must be at IDE 0:1 (Primary Slave). You will have to edit the properties of the VM upon creation to ensure you adhere to these standards. All other default options of the VM during the creation wizard can be left alone. NextStep is a lot of fun to explore and play around with, since you can clearly see the early days of Mac OS X in there, for obvious reasons. It’s definitely worth it to set an evening apart and follow this tutorial.