operating systems

A Constructive Look At TempleOS

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640×480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums…

Richard Mitton

My Very First Operating System

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on 13 October 2018]

I’ve just written my very first Operating System! And I’m putting it here, online, so that you can give it a go if you like. And no, you don’t need to install it – just put it on a floppy disk and try it from there (no, you can’t boot it from a CD yet)!

Don’t expect too much. There’s no user interface (not even a command line). All it is is a bootloader and a kernel that ‘displays pretty squares’ (I stole the ‘pretty squares’ code from somebody else – my Assesmbly needs some work!).

Hardware Requirements
386SX/25MHz or faster processessor
520K or better memory
Floppy disk drive

Instructions For Use
1. Download the floppy disk image file [34K]
2. Download and install WinImage 6.1 (this program lets you write floppy disk image files to floppy disks).
3. Open the image file in WinImage, insert a floppy disk, and select “Format And Write Floppy Disk” from the “Disk” menu. The Operating System will be written to the floppy disk.
4. To run it, you need to reboot your computer with the floppy disk in the drive. If this doesn’t …

I AM Scared Of Bootloaders

I’ve spent the evening looking at bootloader source code (small programs, crucial to every Operating System, which do the first fundamental steps towards loading the kernel, the ‘core’ of the OS). Just to show you quite how scary this stuff is, here’s a snippet of code to “stop the floppy drive motor from spinning”:

mov dx,3F2h mov al,0 out dx,al

Common OS Myths Debunked

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

In this era of pro-Linux and pro-Windows hoo-hah, it’s good to see an article who’s writer really has his head screwed on: Common OS Myths Debunked is a wonderful piece; go read it.

Linux is not the answer!

Windows is not the answer either!

Don’t even get me started on MacOS…

Operating…

All We Need Is A Microsoft-Hating US Judge And…

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]

First, some info for the non-geeks out there, so you can truly appreciate the irony in what’s to come:

Lindows – manufacturer of a distrubution of Linux which is designed to be easy to migrate to for former Windows users – have been in court with Microsoft in the US for some time, who claim that their name infringes upon their trademarked name, Windows. The courts haven’t been friendly to Microsoft extending their tentacles in this way so far, and so Microsoft have mostly been trying to buy time, stalling proceedings, while they bring the case to courts internationally. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxumberg have already caved-in and declared Lindows illegal (interestingly, it’s now being marketed in these countries as Lin—-, pronounced Lindash, which Microsoft also claim they own).

Okay, now you non-geeks are up-to-speed:

Just announced – Lindows are taking …

I Wanna Wake Up Where You Are

Watching a Goo Goo Dolls concert on VideoCD.
They’re really quite remarkably good. I suppose you can’t help but respect the artistry that goes into making a song for which you need to re-tune your guitar such that five strings are tuned to the same note. I mean, can you see the conversation now? “Hey, Robby: tell you what, why don’t we see what this sounds like…” And Gutterflower is a simply stunning album.

Reading MMURTL v1.0 (Building Your Own 32 Bit Operating System)
It’s really quite remarkably geeky. I spent Christmas reading quotes from it to my family, Claire, and her dad. Claire understood bits of what I said. Sometimes. It’s great – a 600-page A4 book which contains at least 200 pages of solid assembly language (the most hardcore programming anybody could ever really justify doing) and another hundred of low-level C. It’s on a short print run – the attached CD-ROM is on CD-R media.

Missing Claire.