...and as an addendum, run a search for the following string in EXEs in the system32 directory of 32-bit Windows, there were other files copied wholesale from MS-DOS 5 as well - unsurprising, of course, considering that NTVDM is essentially MS-DOS 5 running in a virtual machine.
MS DOS Version 5.00 (C)Copyright 1981-1991 Microsoft Corp Licensed Material - Property of Microsoft All rights reserved
No, this is where you point out that EDLIN.EXE (an awkward line editor), as supplied with Windows 7 32-bit, is byte-for-byte the same as that included with MS-DOS 5 back in 1991.
Windows 1 applets won't run under Windows 3 and up without modifying the header. The guy in the video would have got modified versions from here, more likely than not: http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html
(Really - every PC with a BIOS will handle it just fine, and Windows 7 support implies VGA which is enough for display purposes. Hard drive access will be handled by BIOS (or BIOS emulation on current EFI machines) and thus Windows will be fine with it. You will need to fiddle with system.ini for some versions of Windows, though, as for example Windows 95 freaks out if you have much more than 512MB).
ISA slots lingered into the early 2000s, as they were still useful for things like proper SoundBlaster cards (the ones which worked under DOS without having to load any drivers in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS. There is still ISA enumeration going on even in 64-bit Windows, for things like the system timer and maths co-processor; you can see them by going into Device Manager and chooseing "view resources by type".
A modern PC, even a brand-new i7, will happily run all versions of Windows providing you have the correct media to run it from. Versions prior to NT will simply use BIOS (or BIOS emulation if on an EFI system) to access the hardware - and yes, you will get "Drive C is using compatibility mode paging" type warnings in Win 9x. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to turn on 32-bit file or disk access in Windows 3.1/3.11 either.
Quite impressive, really, considering that this August will see the 30th anniversary of the original IBM PC.
Indeed, I booted MS-DOS 7.1 (ie the Windows 95 OSR2 version of MS-DOS) from a USB stick with zero issues on my brand-new i7 with EFI. The only weird thing is that due to the way the BIOS emulation works, it only sees a total of 629K of low RAM rather than the full 640K!
Windows 3.0 applications will generally run fine under 32-bit Windows 7 - they're using the NTVDM, which is a form of virtualisation (albeit one which has been around since 1992). Then again, it depends on what you determie virtualisation to be... Windows 3.0 was capable of running multiple DOS sessions via the virtual 8086 mode found in 386s and up, which again is a form of virtualisation.
If you really want some fun, check out Toastytech - they've got the Windows 1 applets which will still run on Windows 7 (32-bit):
Fantastic! I bet the people around where I live will really enjoy the ~30kbit/s connection they'll get from their Three dongles on these new PCs. There are hundreds, if not thousands of villages where 3G coverage is nonexistant.
I fancied playing an old platform game called Galactix, which I registered back in 1993 when I was using an IBM XT. I found the 5.25" disk, inserted it into my 5.25" drive and copied the file over, then ran it in DOSBox. The disk worked flawlessly, unlike some of the 3,5" disks I've had the misfortune of using at work.
I'm one of a handful of people who have a 5.25" drive on their Windows 7 machine - Win7, like Vista, has a nice shiny 5.25" disk icon, unlike XP which reused the Windows 2000 icon.
My machine is a Core2 Duo box and I'll be replacing it with a new Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) build within a month. You can't buy standard FDD controller cards any more, so it looks like I'll be buying an ASRock motherboard - as their socket 1155 mottherboards are the only ones I've seen with a floppy connector still.
Quake was really, really tied performance wise to your FPU. Get an Intel DX2/66 and - although chuggy especially in open areas - it was playable, sort of. Try it on an AMD or Cyrix DX2/66 and you'd be better off watching a slideshow of screenshots instead. I took my (Intel) 486 SX/33 to a shop to get a DX2/66 chip fitted and Quake was utterly awful on it. It was only years later when I was dismantling the thiing that I noticed I'd been sold an AMD chip instead of an Intel one. Doh!
Doom used to have a command line option (I forget what it's called) where you could work out your FPS. On the SX/33 it was in the low 20s most of the time, on the DX2/66 it would on occasion hit the maximum 35 fps. (Doom was limited to 35 fps IIRC to reduce motion sickness).
Microsoft released add-ons for both NT3.51 and NT4 which allowed you to use Presentation Manager apps under NT (piggybacking off the OS/2 subsystem that was part of NT up to and including Windows 2000).
When I was at school we had a suite of brand-new 486SXs running RM's version of Windows 3.1. There was also a batch of RM Nimbuses running Windows 2.03 in the DT workshop - I didn't even realise it *was* Windows at the time, as it looked absolutely crummy.
I really liked Windows 3.1 and wanted a copy for home use. Alas, all I had was an IBM XT with 640K of RAM. I acquired a copy of Windows 3.0 from the small ads in the local paper and - annoyingly - it just wouldn't run in colour, despite having a VGA card and SVGA monitor. (Years later I found that the colour graphics drivers all use 286-level code). It was really slow, unusably so really - you'd go into Write, bring up the font dialog and watch as the border appeared, then the liitle surrounds around the items, then the radio buttons etc.
When I left that school to go to Uni (12 years ago) I asked for (and got!) the school's Windows 1.0 manual. It's an RM-specific binder and I daresay there aren't many around now...
Indeed, it really ought to be. Unfortunately some people who know better than the rest of the world decided to launch a crusade towards some weird-sounding prefixes which they want to use to supplant the language currently in use.
If they'd focused their energy into coming up with a new prefix for their SI measurements (ie 1 SIKB = 1000 bytes), we could all just have ignored them. But no, they decided to try to redefine already-accepted prefixes which has just left things in an utter mess.
For further reading, see the various flame-wars over on Wikipedia (Binary Prefixes and Mebibyte, Megabyte are good places to start).
Because they are comparable in scale, security issues and criticality, right?
Definitely. Imagine 1700 users eager to break out of the firewall, eager to get to places they shouldn't do and to install programs that they're not allowed. At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net! That's not including the 100 or so teachers and 100 support staff, some of whom would (and indeed did, until we blocked it) install anything they find with a "click here" button.
And I'm sure there are government departments with fewer PCs and users than ours.
What a load of rubbish that "too expensive" excuse is. I work as a technician in a school with around 700 PCs (several hundred each of laptops and a mix of old/new desktops) and we ditched IE6 ages ago. The cost was near zero for the curriculum PCs, as RM issued an IE7 patch ages ago. Allocating it was as simple as selecting lists of PCs and clicking "allocate". We upgraded teacher laptops on a rolling programme, the same with desktop PCs. We're now redeploying Windows across the whole site - teacher machines now have Windows 7 so it's not an issue, while the curriculum builds of Windows XP have IE8 in the base image.
The only "expensive" bit was a day of my time fixing issues with some rubbishy Java applet that is used in the library, which isn't very happy with IE8. A day of my time is worth £40, so it wasn't exactly expensive to fix!
If a school can do it, I'm sure government departments can too.
...with some of the images I've uploaded to wikipedia - google duma_roll.jpg to see what I mean.
Thing is, I couldn't care less as anything that goes on the Web is going to get ripped off left, right and centre anyway. That's why I released my newer pictures as public domain, people are going to do whatever they want anyway...
Reminds me a bit of Bittersweet Symbphony, the Verve song that was deemed to have ripped off an obscure version of The Last Time by the Stones.
I guess a lot of that goes on, whether intentional or not.
he existing BIOS system has changed little in design and form in 25+ years of PC work.
Actually, it's changed greatly. The original PC (and PC-XT) didn't even have a BIOS settings program, you had to manually flip DIP switches on the motherboard. Just having a BIOS setup program was a major step forward, the next major step forward was being able to set bus speed, clock multipliers etc from the BIOS (before the late 90s it was all done via jumpers on the motherboard).
So, alas, apparently I *once again* need to point out: Local temperature != global temperature. Seriously, people, how many times does this have to be repeated before you start to actually get it?
Yes, yes, I get it - which is why I pointed out "in the UK" rather than globally. Your patronising attitude is misplaced in this case.
Incidentslly the REASON it's suspected to cause colder weather on a local - but not necessarily global - level is as follows. When solar activity is weaker, this tends to promote a weaker jetstream across the Atlantic and/or one which lies further south than normal. A weak jet in the winter means a lack of "dartboard" lows zooming in from the Atlantic, the sort of thing that was commonplace in the early 2000s. Notably the late 2000s have seen a marked lack of these lows, which means less mild conditions for the UK. Indeed, a southerly jet means we end up to the north of lows, resulting in a greater incidence of easterlies, snow and generally cold weather. Note that the same pattern in summer results in hot Continental air wafting over the UK, so low solar activity doesn't mean cold summers.
In short, I know full well that it's not as simple as low solar activity = cold world, but I didn't say that. I said that low solar activity = cold UK, perhaps next time you may want to actually read the post you're commenting on.
One of my hobbies is meteorology and as I'm in the UK there's no shortage of discussion about the weather!
Over on the various weather forums we've been discussing the solar minimum for the past couple of years, as in the UK at least there's a strong correlation between climatic cold spells and low sunspot activity (the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago coincided with the Maunder minimum, for example). There was another minimum in the early 1800s, again coinciding with a colder period in the UK climate. It was during this time that Charles Dickens popularised the idea of a White Christmas, something which hasn't occured in 40 years here (30 miles east of London).
The effects are pretty immediate in climating terms, with an onset of years rather than decades. Although yes, the Sun's becoming more active there's been a lot of discussion as to whether the low solar activity was responsible for the coldest winter in 17 years in England (and longer than that in Scotland).
The Sun's effect on the climate is probably beyond any numerical weather prediction models at the moment but it'd be fascinating to see what the effects would be if we were to experience a prolonged period of much lower solar activity than normal!
Windows 95 was the first windows what replaced some OS functions from the MS-DOS
Nope. 32-bit file access made it into Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - there was a checkbox lurking deep inside the control panel which, when turned on, stopped Windows using DOS routines to access the hard drive. Interestingly though, Wiki claims it was backported from Chicago. Seeing how similar the networking dialogs were in WfW 3.11 compared to Windows 95, I suspect other stuff was backported too!
PC magazines in the UK were hailing that little checkbox as a major advance in performance. Indeed, they said that for the average user that was the single best part of WfW, which was nicknamed "Windows for Warehouses" by PC Plus at least.
I was given an old IBM XT back in 1992 (thrown out by a company that was upgrading) and it was my introduction to PCs. It came with MS-DOS 5, but having used Windows 3.0 on the brand-new 486s at school, I wanted to try it at home. I acquired an 8-bit VGA card and a monitor in preparation.
The local paper had a guy who was selling his copy for ten pounds, so I bought it. I still have the massive manual, it's over 500 pages and over an inch thick. Anyway, after running it and selecting VGA, I got a nice colour title screen and then... nothing.
After dropping back to CGA (yuck), then trying EGA, I found out that VGA mono worked - but VGA colour wouldn't. (Years later it turns out the colour VGA driver uses protected mode code, which of course the 8088 couldn't handle).
Anyway, I now had a mono Win 3.0 desktop to play with. By gum, it was slow! If you brought up the font selection dialog in Write, for example, you'd see the frame appear, then a split second later the controls to select font and size, then the border around those and finally the buttons would appear. It wasn't low on RAM, merely a glacial machine. And yes, if you typed quickly into Write it'd take a while for it to catch up! Solitaire and Reversi both worked fine, thankfully.
A few months after that, in 1993, the school upgraded to Windows 3.1 and it was clearly a big jump: less crashes and the UI was more polished. (Little things like the max/min controls persisting in MDI windows without focus, in 3.0 they vanished). Alas, my XT couldn't run 3.1 and thus the saving-up started for a new 486.
Slashdot Mirror
...and as an addendum, run a search for the following string in EXEs in the system32 directory of 32-bit Windows, there were other files copied wholesale from MS-DOS 5 as well - unsurprising, of course, considering that NTVDM is essentially MS-DOS 5 running in a virtual machine.
MS DOS Version 5.00 (C)Copyright 1981-1991 Microsoft Corp Licensed Material - Property of Microsoft All rights reserved
No, this is where you point out that EDLIN.EXE (an awkward line editor), as supplied with Windows 7 32-bit, is byte-for-byte the same as that included with MS-DOS 5 back in 1991.
Windows 1 applets won't run under Windows 3 and up without modifying the header. The guy in the video would have got modified versions from here, more likely than not: http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html
Any PC with enough resources to run Windows 7.
(Really - every PC with a BIOS will handle it just fine, and Windows 7 support implies VGA which is enough for display purposes. Hard drive access will be handled by BIOS (or BIOS emulation on current EFI machines) and thus Windows will be fine with it. You will need to fiddle with system.ini for some versions of Windows, though, as for example Windows 95 freaks out if you have much more than 512MB).
ISA slots lingered into the early 2000s, as they were still useful for things like proper SoundBlaster cards (the ones which worked under DOS without having to load any drivers in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS. There is still ISA enumeration going on even in 64-bit Windows, for things like the system timer and maths co-processor; you can see them by going into Device Manager and chooseing "view resources by type".
A modern PC, even a brand-new i7, will happily run all versions of Windows providing you have the correct media to run it from. Versions prior to NT will simply use BIOS (or BIOS emulation if on an EFI system) to access the hardware - and yes, you will get "Drive C is using compatibility mode paging" type warnings in Win 9x. It probably wouldn't be a good idea to turn on 32-bit file or disk access in Windows 3.1/3.11 either.
Quite impressive, really, considering that this August will see the 30th anniversary of the original IBM PC.
Indeed, I booted MS-DOS 7.1 (ie the Windows 95 OSR2 version of MS-DOS) from a USB stick with zero issues on my brand-new i7 with EFI. The only weird thing is that due to the way the BIOS emulation works, it only sees a total of 629K of low RAM rather than the full 640K!
Windows 3.0 applications will generally run fine under 32-bit Windows 7 - they're using the NTVDM, which is a form of virtualisation (albeit one which has been around since 1992). Then again, it depends on what you determie virtualisation to be... Windows 3.0 was capable of running multiple DOS sessions via the virtual 8086 mode found in 386s and up, which again is a form of virtualisation.
If you really want some fun, check out Toastytech - they've got the Windows 1 applets which will still run on Windows 7 (32-bit):
http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html
Fantastic! I bet the people around where I live will really enjoy the ~30kbit/s connection they'll get from their Three dongles on these new PCs. There are hundreds, if not thousands of villages where 3G coverage is nonexistant.
I've also got an IBM DeskStar 75GXP, 45GB model - works fine too (I use it as a dumping ground for downloads).
I'm one of a handful of people who have a 5.25" drive on their Windows 7 machine - Win7, like Vista, has a nice shiny 5.25" disk icon, unlike XP which reused the Windows 2000 icon.
My machine is a Core2 Duo box and I'll be replacing it with a new Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) build within a month. You can't buy standard FDD controller cards any more, so it looks like I'll be buying an ASRock motherboard - as their socket 1155 mottherboards are the only ones I've seen with a floppy connector still.
Doom used to have a command line option (I forget what it's called) where you could work out your FPS. On the SX/33 it was in the low 20s most of the time, on the DX2/66 it would on occasion hit the maximum 35 fps. (Doom was limited to 35 fps IIRC to reduce motion sickness).
Microsoft released add-ons for both NT3.51 and NT4 which allowed you to use Presentation Manager apps under NT (piggybacking off the OS/2 subsystem that was part of NT up to and including Windows 2000).
I really liked Windows 3.1 and wanted a copy for home use. Alas, all I had was an IBM XT with 640K of RAM. I acquired a copy of Windows 3.0 from the small ads in the local paper and - annoyingly - it just wouldn't run in colour, despite having a VGA card and SVGA monitor. (Years later I found that the colour graphics drivers all use 286-level code). It was really slow, unusably so really - you'd go into Write, bring up the font dialog and watch as the border appeared, then the liitle surrounds around the items, then the radio buttons etc.
When I left that school to go to Uni (12 years ago) I asked for (and got!) the school's Windows 1.0 manual. It's an RM-specific binder and I daresay there aren't many around now...
Indeed, it really ought to be. Unfortunately some people who know better than the rest of the world decided to launch a crusade towards some weird-sounding prefixes which they want to use to supplant the language currently in use. If they'd focused their energy into coming up with a new prefix for their SI measurements (ie 1 SIKB = 1000 bytes), we could all just have ignored them. But no, they decided to try to redefine already-accepted prefixes which has just left things in an utter mess. For further reading, see the various flame-wars over on Wikipedia (Binary Prefixes and Mebibyte, Megabyte are good places to start).
...if they'd broadcast pictures showing the - ahem - "wonderful" accommodation, or the frantic finishing of the athletics track...
No location given when I entered my MAC on the test site. Pah.
Definitely. Imagine 1700 users eager to break out of the firewall, eager to get to places they shouldn't do and to install programs that they're not allowed. At least government departments don't generally have people working in them who'd do anything to install crapware from the Net! That's not including the 100 or so teachers and 100 support staff, some of whom would (and indeed did, until we blocked it) install anything they find with a "click here" button.
And I'm sure there are government departments with fewer PCs and users than ours.
What a load of rubbish that "too expensive" excuse is. I work as a technician in a school with around 700 PCs (several hundred each of laptops and a mix of old/new desktops) and we ditched IE6 ages ago. The cost was near zero for the curriculum PCs, as RM issued an IE7 patch ages ago. Allocating it was as simple as selecting lists of PCs and clicking "allocate". We upgraded teacher laptops on a rolling programme, the same with desktop PCs. We're now redeploying Windows across the whole site - teacher machines now have Windows 7 so it's not an issue, while the curriculum builds of Windows XP have IE8 in the base image.
The only "expensive" bit was a day of my time fixing issues with some rubbishy Java applet that is used in the library, which isn't very happy with IE8. A day of my time is worth £40, so it wasn't exactly expensive to fix!
If a school can do it, I'm sure government departments can too.
...with some of the images I've uploaded to wikipedia - google duma_roll.jpg to see what I mean.
Thing is, I couldn't care less as anything that goes on the Web is going to get ripped off left, right and centre anyway. That's why I released my newer pictures as public domain, people are going to do whatever they want anyway...
Reminds me a bit of Bittersweet Symbphony, the Verve song that was deemed to have ripped off an obscure version of The Last Time by the Stones.
I guess a lot of that goes on, whether intentional or not.
Yes, yes, I get it - which is why I pointed out "in the UK" rather than globally. Your patronising attitude is misplaced in this case.
Incidentslly the REASON it's suspected to cause colder weather on a local - but not necessarily global - level is as follows. When solar activity is weaker, this tends to promote a weaker jetstream across the Atlantic and/or one which lies further south than normal. A weak jet in the winter means a lack of "dartboard" lows zooming in from the Atlantic, the sort of thing that was commonplace in the early 2000s. Notably the late 2000s have seen a marked lack of these lows, which means less mild conditions for the UK. Indeed, a southerly jet means we end up to the north of lows, resulting in a greater incidence of easterlies, snow and generally cold weather. Note that the same pattern in summer results in hot Continental air wafting over the UK, so low solar activity doesn't mean cold summers.
In short, I know full well that it's not as simple as low solar activity = cold world, but I didn't say that. I said that low solar activity = cold UK, perhaps next time you may want to actually read the post you're commenting on.
One of my hobbies is meteorology and as I'm in the UK there's no shortage of discussion about the weather!
Over on the various weather forums we've been discussing the solar minimum for the past couple of years, as in the UK at least there's a strong correlation between climatic cold spells and low sunspot activity (the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago coincided with the Maunder minimum, for example). There was another minimum in the early 1800s, again coinciding with a colder period in the UK climate. It was during this time that Charles Dickens popularised the idea of a White Christmas, something which hasn't occured in 40 years here (30 miles east of London).
The effects are pretty immediate in climating terms, with an onset of years rather than decades. Although yes, the Sun's becoming more active there's been a lot of discussion as to whether the low solar activity was responsible for the coldest winter in 17 years in England (and longer than that in Scotland).
The Sun's effect on the climate is probably beyond any numerical weather prediction models at the moment but it'd be fascinating to see what the effects would be if we were to experience a prolonged period of much lower solar activity than normal!
Nope. 32-bit file access made it into Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - there was a checkbox lurking deep inside the control panel which, when turned on, stopped Windows using DOS routines to access the hard drive. Interestingly though, Wiki claims it was backported from Chicago. Seeing how similar the networking dialogs were in WfW 3.11 compared to Windows 95, I suspect other stuff was backported too!
PC magazines in the UK were hailing that little checkbox as a major advance in performance. Indeed, they said that for the average user that was the single best part of WfW, which was nicknamed "Windows for Warehouses" by PC Plus at least.
I was given an old IBM XT back in 1992 (thrown out by a company that was upgrading) and it was my introduction to PCs. It came with MS-DOS 5, but having used Windows 3.0 on the brand-new 486s at school, I wanted to try it at home. I acquired an 8-bit VGA card and a monitor in preparation.
The local paper had a guy who was selling his copy for ten pounds, so I bought it. I still have the massive manual, it's over 500 pages and over an inch thick. Anyway, after running it and selecting VGA, I got a nice colour title screen and then... nothing.
After dropping back to CGA (yuck), then trying EGA, I found out that VGA mono worked - but VGA colour wouldn't. (Years later it turns out the colour VGA driver uses protected mode code, which of course the 8088 couldn't handle).
Anyway, I now had a mono Win 3.0 desktop to play with. By gum, it was slow! If you brought up the font selection dialog in Write, for example, you'd see the frame appear, then a split second later the controls to select font and size, then the border around those and finally the buttons would appear. It wasn't low on RAM, merely a glacial machine. And yes, if you typed quickly into Write it'd take a while for it to catch up! Solitaire and Reversi both worked fine, thankfully.
A few months after that, in 1993, the school upgraded to Windows 3.1 and it was clearly a big jump: less crashes and the UI was more polished. (Little things like the max/min controls persisting in MDI windows without focus, in 3.0 they vanished). Alas, my XT couldn't run 3.1 and thus the saving-up started for a new 486.