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R.I.P. MS-DEBUG 1981 - 2009
AlphaZeta writes "After 28 years, MS-DEBUG is finally being phased out in Windows 7. Over the years, people have been using MS-DEBUG for writing code (virus/malware, you name it) and debugging. "
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Acutally, the debug command was removed in Windows Vista & Windows Server 2008.
Really? At least my Vista installation still has it.
-a 100
jmp 100
w
x
?
?
?
quit
end
crap
sit
vi?
... a new sourceforge project called Open-Debug is being created to replace it.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
They killed debug.
You bastards!
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Everyone confirming or denying the presence of MS-DEBUG on their windows machine, is confirming their use of windows, and getting their precious slashdot ID number increased by 50% and a free copy of Windows 7 because MS is tired of having to keep hosting Windows 98 SP 2 updates for every time you reformat
Seconded. Just checked a Vista box installed here at the office. It was Vista Ultimate.
Does version make a difference?
It's removed from 64 bit copies of Windows, including XP 64 bit.
Removed or they couldn't or wouldn't get it working?
Depends, is it still the same old 16-bit exe in the versions of Vista people are reporting it to be present? If so, probably "didn't bother to get it working". Many DOS utilities of that time were written in assembly, so getting it working in 64-bit would have basically consisted of rewriting it.
So much fond memories...
The Debug.exe was actually my first contact to programming and the first language I learned, was x86 assembler.
It was MS-DOS 2.xx and all my friends played with C64s and coded all kinds of cool things. My parents couldn't afford a C64 but they somehow got an old PC free. Demoscene was a new and hot thing in those days and me and my friend programmed our first demo completely using the Debug.exe. Merging the two code-bases was an interesting task, when all you had was two pieces of binary and some unused memory space for copy 'n' paste. The demo actually was quite cool. Unfortunately I have lost my only copy.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft even created it in the first place..... not like THEY used it or anything.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Their webserver was built using MS-DEBUG
moox. for a new generation.
I hope Mr. Debug gets over his loss soon.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Afaict debug is a 16 bit does tool for creating and debugging 16 bit dos apps. Since 64 bit windows doesn't support dos apps (or 16 bit windows apps for that matter) it wouldn't make much sense to include something that both is one and is a tool for working with them.
P.S. I find it amusing that wine on 64 bit linux can run 16 bit windows apps yet 64 bit windows can't.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Using it to change this string in command.com
"Abort, Retry, Fail?"
to
"Abhor, Retch, Fume!"
Note that it fits in exactly the same number of bytes. That's important.
It's not like it hurts by sitting there on the harddrive, taking up a whopping 28K (or however big it is)....
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Some of us still code in notepad, you insensitive clod! Now get off my lawn!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This article is entirely wrong. DEBUG.EXE hasn't been removed from Windows 7. It's just not included in 64-bit editions of Windows. That goes for 64-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. This is because the 16-bit emulator is no longer included in the 64-bit versions of Windows due to the fact that the x86-64 CPUs cannot switch to 16-bit mode. So it's not DEBUG.EXE that is gone, it's all of DOS that is gone.
Vista 64 users can always use dosbox.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Shouldn't the headline read "R.I.P. MS-DEBUG 1981 - 2010" or " - 2011"? ( ...do I hear 2012?)
Most of the stuff on
MS-DEBUG 1981 - 2009
May 8, 2009, 11:16 am
Earlier this week (May 5) Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate was released to the general public and like many technology enthusiasts I downloaded a copy early in the morning hours on Tuesday, shortly after Microsoft made it available on its website.
The RC build of Windows 7 (build 7100) has many tweaks over the previous beta build I have (build 7000) and I have not yet played with it long enough to come up with any meaningful conclusions. However, this is not the point of this article. As you might have noticed from the title of this article, I was not about to talk about my experience with Windows 7 (maybe I will write about it later). What I noticed the first thing in Windows 7 is that the DEBUG command is nowhere to be found.
I was just old enough to remember the very early days of DEBUG under MS-DOS. In fact, I was fascinated with such a small and yet powerful tool that came with every version of MS-DOS distribution. the DEBUG command was so powerful that you could do almost anything with your machine with sometimes just a few key strokes.
For a long time, I used DEBUG to learn x86 assembly language and to learn about disk (both floppy disks and harddrives) structures and file systems. And occasionally, I would use DEBUG to edit binary files.
I remembered that I could use commands like
-l 100 0 0 1
-d
to load the boot sector from floppy A and inspect whether the boot sector was infected with any virus and if so, I would find a clean floppy disk and using DEBUG to write its boot sector to the disk that was infected.
And routinely, I would use the following commands to inspect the partition table of my harddrive to make sure that it was free from any infections:
mov ax, 0201
mov bx, 1000
mov cx, 0001
mov dx, 0080
int 13
int 3
-g 100
-d 1000
Remember this one?
jmp ffff:0000
I remembered that someone at my high school used to play the pranks by changing the very first few bytes on floppy disks to EA:00:00:FF and placed the disks in computers in the lab so that whenever someone turned on the computer, it would enter an infinite reboot cycle.
And when CIH stroke in the late nineties, my friends and I would use DEBUG to inspect the virus's code to see how the instructions could actually be used to cause real physical damage to the hardware.
After Windows came along, I still used DEBUG often. After all, deep inside Windows (up till Windows ME), there was MS-DOS and for years, user were allowed to operate in real mode if they so inclined to. With the advent of Windows 2000 and then later Windows XP people started to forget about DEBUG since the operating system became true 32bit and the DOS prompt became just an emulator. You could still view files and write assembly code within DEBUG, but it was in a protected environment and everything you do was pretty safe and you couldn't really do anything harmful to the hardware (of course, you could still overwrite sectors in floppy disks if you wanted to).
Ah, those were the good old days. Just like QBasic disappeared from later versions MS-DOS, DEBUG has gradually become obsolete. It remained in Windows Vista, but it is no where to be found in Windows 7. At last, Windows has shed one of its last vintage applications from the MS-DOS era.
Here is another former TASM user piping up.
I remember when I was kid (pre-TASM) and my dad got a blazing fast internal ISA 2400 baud modem (hee hee). But it would not work right in Windows 3.0, it worked fine in a DOS program. Back then you had to assign an IRQ and port. The internal cards used the same as COM1 and COM2, but it should have been okay. The ISR should have checked the first card and then chained to the next. But it simply was not working, we had a serial port mouse and the other serial port was used for a printer (the machine had two printers one for carbon copy forms the other a laser printer for letters on the parallel port).
So after trying everything that I could think of I called MS support. Back then things were VERY different. The lady that answered spoke pacific NW English and was incredibly competent. She explained that some BIOSes were buggy and did not do the IRQ chaining correctly. We could not find an IRQ that was free that the modem card had a jumper for so she walked me over the phone commands to do in debug to patch a driver in Windows 3.0 to get around this issue. I was a freshman in high school at the time, that really left a mark on me. I had just learned how to use edlin before that. Soon after I got a copy of Turbo Pascal from this Polish guy I knew and I never looked back.
Before then I had only done Basic and later TASM (no relation Turbo ASM, that is what the cartridge+floppy interface was called, probably Tandy ASM) programming on a CoCoII. But that few minutes in debug got me hooked on modern systems and led to C/C++ TASM by the time I finished high school. I got a summer job just so I could afford Borland C++, it was something like $400 (student discount, I could not sell programs I compiled), the printed manuals it came with were incredible. DOS, Windows, dBase, WP all had incredible printed manuals too. Man have times changed.
Before TASM I sure did used debug a lot. It was a cheap assembler, disassembler (I needed to figure out some VGA routines from Borland), and you could use it a lot like you would dd on unix too.