Guest post by From an Imgur Post of the same title:
I was moved out to an extremely remote country area in the middle of NSW Australia to live with people I didn’t want to live with and isolated with no internet for 7 years during my childhood/teenhood. Using the 1980s reference books from my high school library, I decided to build my own OS so that I had a more manageable way of dealing with files than the standard DOS structure.
A short but interesting read about the author’s experience with pictures of the finsished product.
Loved the article, thank you for sharing!
Just a DOS shell.
Well, the guy thinks that Windows 2000 is almost the same as Windows 98 (but “crappier”….) so what would you expect?
I’m also pretty sure you couldn’t write a “DOS Clone” in BASIC.
Going NT was a mixed blessing. Yep, it was stable as a rock. But 9x, much like Linux, could take being moved to a new motherboard virtually in stride.
NT balks, or at least did with 2k, and ask you to do a repair. This then basically resets the whole thing back to pre-patch state unless you have the service packs rolled into whatever media you are using.
These days, fuck if i know. I can’t even seem to reliably get into the BIOS/UEFI on a recent Windows laptop. The docs says to hit a certain key, it hit said key and nothing happens.
Frankly computing is going to the dogs thanks to the insistance of big media and other entities that want to put the PC cat back in the bag…
2k/XP/etc only balked because of mass storage drivers. All you have to do is set the driver to a generic for data or IDE and it will boot and install the right one. I do this all the time.
Getting into UEFI on a new machine is a hassle mostly because of, in the case of 8.x, the Hybrid Boot/Fast Shutdown. It does this by default. You can perm disable it or hold down shift when telling the machine to shut off to disable it for that shutdown. After you do that, you can jump into the UEFI firmware with ease.
Not knowing how something functions doesn’t make it bad
Actually it does. Every feature you build is worthless until the user knows it exist and how to use it.
Yeah, the phrase “OS” gets tossed around a lot, often incorrect. I recall installing alternative operating systems developed for the TI83 calculators; they weren’t operating systems at all, mostly just file explorers.
And don’t even get the Linux folks started.
No shit. They come up with a term like “distribution” instead of calling it what it is.
0brad0,
…which is what?
An operating system.
And there’s how to start a knock-down drag-out with Linux users, call the operating system “Linux” instead of “GNU.” Or call RedHat / Mandrake / CentOS an “operating system” instead of a “distribution.”
It’s no wonder that some kid living in seclusion in the Aussie outback might mistake a shell or CLI for an operating system.
Bobthearch,
In a discussion specifically about the correct semantics, such as this one, it’s worth pointing out. However I wouldn’t really care in a ordinary discussion what anyone called it passively. OS/Distro/kernel, as long as we know what the other is talking about that’s good enough for me.
Haha! Yea there’s always a risk of that
Edited 2014-12-16 21:44 UTC
0brad0,
Calling Linux an “operating system” is still confusing because linux is technically a kernel, but even ignoring this the whole “distribution” nomenclature came out of recognition that various linux distributions have so much in common.
If the difference between one linux “OS” and another can be summed up by “bundles different packages” and “different directory layout”, then it’s not really a distinct operating system in my opinion. It’s merely a different configuration, personally I have no problem calling it a distro.
I never said Linux was an OS. You did.
That concept of distribution might make sense if there ever was an OS called Linux but there never has been and never will be.
I don’t agree. It’s those differences that do make them distinct OS’s and there are a lot of them.
Using that logic to the most extreme I could say AIX, HP-UX and Solaris are all distributions. They’re all UNIX. They follow the same design concepts.
Personally I do because it doesn’t even make any sense.
0brad0,
I didn’t say that. To me, your posts read as though you wanted to replace “Linux Distribution” with “Operating System”, however I was forced to extrapolate this from your extremely terse posts. I’m sorry if I misunderstood you.
If we take an OS and redistribute it with some changed packages (as many do), you can call it a new OS if you want to, but some of us see it as more of a continuous scale. How about an analogy (since we know how analogies are infallible…haha)
OS:Species
Distro:Breed
Having a different implementation of the code base makes them different operating systems – at least in my eyes. Take Windows NT as an example, it took many “design concepts” from VMS, but it was still a new operating system implementation. A more striking example is ReactOS, since it seeks to be a windows clone. However it is a new implementation and doesn’t share the same code base, therefor it isn’t merely a “windows distribution”. Notice these circumstances are quite different from Linux distributions where they generally do share the same tool chains/kernels/and code bases/etc.
You may not agree with the importance of this distinction, but that’s why it exists.
Edited 2014-12-16 23:14 UTC
What a fascinating story!
It’s like Walkabout, except Jenny Agutter is played by a nerdy computer geek.
> the TAFE college was running obsolete systems with Windows 2000 on them, which was basically like 98, but crappier.
Um no. Windows 2000 is not like 98, but crappier. It’s like Windows NT, but better, because that is, in fact, what it is.
No shit. That is so ass backwards it is not funny. Clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Also, Crysis (not Crisis) was released in 2007 not in 2004-2005. Maybe he mean Far Cry.
It’s only his perception, i think the problem was that they tried to run Win2000 on Win98 era pc’s which are massively outdated to run that OS.
Yeah, that makes sense. WinNT requires a considerable amount of resources more than 98. If he tried running it on an early basic win 98 computer, I can see why he’d think it was bad.
Also, its possible that he didn’t understand that Win 2k was Win NT 5.0 and not the latest Win 9x branch.
Edited 2014-12-16 14:24 UTC
Or his coding that worked on Windows 98 suddenly no longer worked.
It’s an interesting story regardless.
So they were systems that were under spec’d to begin with.
N/T