I wanted to get some research into some early space flight, and look into that magical transition when everything went from Cowboys & Indians to moonmen & the race to space. Granted Toy Story covers cultural touchstone pretty well, reading period pieces is fun too. I had a few CD-ROM’s containing the 1980’s National Geographic CD-ROM’s when they were sold up in decade sets, but what always escaped me was the fancy collectors box with the whole thing.

I always figured this was going to be one of those weird collectors’ items that probably was under produced, over sold, and lost to the winds of time. Looking on eBay for a 1950’s and 1960’s set .. and thinking about the 1970’s as well, and it was going to get close to £40. Ouch. So for the heck of it, I look for the fancy box set.

I was surprised for as much as I was going to end up paying for one or two sets, I could get the entire thing. In the legendary fancy wooden box. I got mine, shipped for under £20. Much wow!

Okay what is the catch?

Wait a minute, these National Geographic CDs are obsolete! – Christopher Elliott

I always was running mine on MacOS using Cockatrice III with the monitor resolution set to the absolutely absurd resolution of 1152×870 provided by the 1991 21″ monitor. I couldn’t imagine why these CD’s wouldn’t work. And of course the first step was to rip the CD-ROM’s. There was 31 National Geographic, and an additional clip art disc in my box. I fired up my XP machine to have it’s hard disk give up and die on me. Luckily since I had removed the mechanical disk from the iMac G5, I had a spare SATA disk handy. I didn’t feel like fighting the XP installer, and I’m impatient, so I made a netboot.xyz bootable flash drive, and installed Debian 10 over the internet. Very nice. Now I could get down to ripping CD’s. Luckily the drive from the DVD-RAM drive disaster reads at 48x, so it took me under 4 hours to rip them all. In case you are wondering:

32 File(s) 17,894,987,776 bytes

The flash drive I used is 32Gb. I got it in a 3 pack from Tesco. I think I paid £10 for it. That means UTZOO + NatGEO all fit one of the drives. I wonder if they’ll ever offer high resolution scans on a USB drive in a fancy wooden box?

For the hell of it, I used 7zip to decompress all the ISO’s and that’s when I noticed that although the files were spread over discs there was a clean decade break between volumes from the 1900’s, and that they had a logic to them.

On the NGS_1956_1959 CD-ROM there is a hierarchy something like this:

E:\IMAGES\256I

The 2 is for the 20th century, and 56 is the year. I is the month; in this case I is September. Since we live in the future, and rendering jpeg’s is quicker than real-time, 256IC01A.JPG can be shown to be the cover. The next pattern is for the adverts, 256IA02A.JPG – 256IA30A.JPG are the into adverts. Now, we get to the interior content 256I0287.JPG – 256I0426.JPG. Next is the closing/trailer advertisements 256IZ01Z.JPG – 256IZ13Z.JPG. And Finally the back of the issue, 256IB14Z.JPG is the rear of the magazine.

So we now have some understanding of the format. Putting this into order could be done with something simple like this:

find ./ -name '2[0-9][0-9]IC[0-9]*.JPG' > interior
find ./ -name '2[0-9][0-9]IA[0-9]*A.JPG' >> interior
find ./ -name '2[0-9][0-9]I[0-9]*.JPG' >> interior
find ./ -name '2[0-9][0-9]IZ[0-9]*Z.JPG' >> interior
find ./ -name '2[0-9][0-9]IB[0-9]*Z.JPG' >> interior

Doing so makes a nice list file of what images should go in which order. I could probably use ffmpeg and painstakingly check the images for ‘pullouts/double wide’ ones, and have it stitch the rest together as a two pager ( ffmpeg -i left.jpg -i right.jpg -filter_complex hstack combined.jpg ), but that still sounds like a lot of work. Also the images are very low quality, It’s a shame they didn’t use black & white on the text, and scan the images separately, but that’d require something like PDF, and no doubt a LOT of time. Although Kodak did sponsor the set, the developer, Mindscape didn’t go with fancy PDF technology of the late 1990s, instead it’s just the blurry jpeg scans we have today.

That’s when I found out about Tesseract. Running it against this one paragraph reveals:

Voyager is watching two small moons
that-seem to be playing tag as they race
around Saturn in almost the same orbit. The
trailing moon is traveling faster than the
leader, and should catch up with the leader
in January 1982 (pages 20-21). The two pre-
sumably have been playing this game for
billions of years, Through what sleight of
physics do they avoid colliding?

National Geographic, July 1981

I have to admit, that’s pretty good! And how amazing that I have a LOT of files to scan.

188553 File(s) 11,061,111,690 bytes

That is a LOT of files. Okay that’s nice, but can Tesseract read the list that I generated per issue? YES. The only thing that I’d love to see Tesseract do is create PDF’s with the scanned text embedded. OH WAIT, IT ALREADY DOES THAT!

How on earth did I not know this?

I put together a few scripts, and I was able to separate out all the images into years & months, then I created the needed list files with all the images in the correct order. It’s not a fast process I think it may take me a week or so to do this.

So far, I’m up to 1903, so I’ll update with some rough idea of when this finished.

So, the applications needed are old and obsolete Win16 or Classic MacOS needed machines, with an optical drive. Yes they still work (with emulation) on modern machines, although you still need to read the physical discs. Thankfully the images are easily mapped into the right order, and you can map them as your own. Neat!

I saw this video and I was like sold! I have this PowerMac 6400/180 so I figured this would be good. The problem was my network card was acting up so I figured instead of troubleshooting it I’ll just format it and go from there.

the machine is very much an Old World Macintosh, so that limits me from OS X. It’s 603ev CPU it’s not all that advanced either. I have an 8.1 ISO that I’ve been using under 68k emulation but the limit it has is old multimedia stuff ins t 68k compatible as nobody would imagine emulation putting 68k at speeds above a gigahertz.

I went looking for a 8.6 ISO, and that is where the fun hit me again that many so-called ISO images aren’t. Rather they are giant floppy disk images with the media headers and/or partition tables being obliterated. As an ISO they don’t detect at all, and as a giant floppy, of course they don’t boot as MacOS checks if it is on read-only media.

very annoying

I did manage to finally find one that does work however!

I forgot where I found it though. I did save it to archive.org, since I have another 5 versions of this downloaded, none of which will boot. https://archive.org/details/mac-os-8.6-working-iso

I should also add the MacOS 8.1 CD-ROM image Ive been using as again,l I have the same issue where so many are headderless ‘floppies’ and not actual CD-ROM’s that don’t work in Cockatrice III or an actual Mac using BlueSCSI.

Sorry the image shows in black & white, but as you can see from the CD-ROM background it is in fact booted from the CD-ROM. You can download it from here: https://archive.org/details/mac-os-8.1-iso_202401

In no time, I was able to get online only to find that the power Mac plugin’s seem to be unavailable for anything and unsupported.

but the rendition of the old Netscape page was a treat!

Now I do have a Windows Surface RT tablet, and sure enough pluggin the proxy values, and YES the video site does work!

Very cool! So it turns out Protoweb can actually save all those old devices that work fine enough, but not fine enough for ‘Modern platforms’.

jsteve@piorun:~/atar-boot/qemu/ppc-softmmu$ objdump -p qemu-system-ppc | grep NEEDED
NEEDED libvdeplug.so.2
NEEDED libncursesw.so.6
NEEDED libtinfo.so.6
NEEDED libz.so.1
NEEDED libxml2.so.2
NEEDED libpixman-1.so.0
NEEDED libutil.so.1
NEEDED libnuma.so.1
NEEDED libnettle.so.6
NEEDED libgnutls.so.30
NEEDED libfdt.so.1
NEEDED libgthread-2.0.so.0
NEEDED libglib-2.0.so.0
NEEDED librt.so.1
NEEDED libstdc++.so.6
NEEDED libm.so.6
NEEDED libgcc_s.so.1
NEEDED libpthread.so.0
NEEDED libc.so.6

So using the same atar qemu git dump, I found the newer config string a bit more refined:

./configure --target-list=ppc-softmmu --disable-sdl --disable-vnc --disable-gtk --disable-gnutls --disable-nettle --disable-gcrypt --disable-spice --disable-numa --disable-libxml2 --disable-vde --disable-werror --disable-seccomp --disable-capstone --disable-vhost-net --disable-vhost-crypto --disable-vhost-scsi --disable-vhost-vsock --disable-vhost-user --disable-tpm --disable-live-block-migration

Another fun think is that there is submodules from other servers, and it seems their certs have expired.. Which also means it’s inevitable at some point this will become impossible to build. Be sure to set this environment variable in order to build:

export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true

As always Qemu will try to sneak a few things in there that we don’t need like audio support. As an example here is what I trimmed from config-host.mak:

$ diff -ruN config-host.mak config-host.mak-cutdown
--- config-host.mak 2022-11-08 09:37:41.104441392 +0000
+++ config-host.mak-cutdown 2022-11-08 09:37:25.084441253 +0000
@@ -27,8 +27,8 @@
CONFIG_SLIRP=y
CONFIG_SMBD_COMMAND="/usr/sbin/smbd"
CONFIG_L2TPV3=y
-CONFIG_AUDIO_DRIVERS=oss
-CONFIG_AUDIO_OSS=m
+CONFIG_AUDIO_DRIVERS=
+CONFIG_AUDIO_OSS=n
ALSA_LIBS=
PULSE_LIBS=
COREAUDIO_LIBS=
@@ -72,7 +72,6 @@
HAVE_STRCHRNUL=y
CONFIG_BYTESWAP_H=y
CONFIG_TLS_PRIORITY="NORMAL"
-CONFIG_TASN1=y
HAVE_IFADDRS_H=y
HAVE_FSXATTR=y
HAVE_COPY_FILE_RANGE=y
@@ -164,7 +163,7 @@
DSOSUF=.so
LDFLAGS_SHARED=-shared
LIBS_QGA+=-lm -lgthread-2.0 -pthread -lglib-2.0
-TASN1_LIBS=-ltasn1
+TASN1_LIBS=
TASN1_CFLAGS=
POD2MAN=pod2man --utf8
TRANSLATE_OPT_CFLAGS=

And this cuts down the needed dll’s to:

jsteve@piorun:~/atar-boot/qemu/ppc-softmmu$ objdump -p qemu-system-ppc | grep NEED
NEEDED libncursesw.so.6
NEEDED libtinfo.so.6
NEEDED libz.so.1
NEEDED libpixman-1.so.0
NEEDED libfdt.so.1
NEEDED libglib-2.0.so.0
NEEDED libm.so.6
NEEDED libgcc_s.so.1
NEEDED libc.so.6

which is a bit better. I’m still annoyed at it’s reliance on pixman despite not having any framebuffer support, I’m guessing I could amputate it if I looked further.

Since nothing has fundamentally changed, I can still use my original bootflags:

./qemu-system-ppc -M 40p -bios q40pofw-serial.rom -serial telnet::4441,server -hda disk0.vmdk-post-install -vga none -nographic -net none -cdrom /mnt/c/temp/xlc13-gzip.iso

And for the heck of it, this is the steps I used to get xlC 1.3 up and running:

restore -f /tmp/xlc/xlccmp2
restore -f /tmp/xlc/xlccmpmE2
chmod +x /usr/bin/xlc
chmod +x /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/xlcentry
chmod +x /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/dis
cp /usr/lpp/xlccmp/inst_root/etc/xlc.cfg /etc
cp /tmp/xlc/cpp /usr/lib/cpp
chmod +x /usr/lib/cpp

and with that all in place we can compile a simple hello world!

# cat mt.c
#include <stdio.h>
void main(){
printf("hi from C\n");
}
# xlc -v mt.c -o mt
exec: /usr/lpp/xlc/bin/xlcentry(xlcentry,mt.c,mt.o,mt.lst,-D_ANSI_C_SOURCE,-D_IBMR2,-D_AIX,-D_AIX32,-qansialias,NULL)
exec: /bin/ld(ld,-H512,-T512,-bhalt:4,-o,mt,/lib/crt0.o,mt.o,-lc,NULL)
unlink: mt.o
# ./mt
hi from C
#

xlC is also capable of building a running GNU Chess. And I updated the git so that book building works. Not that I expect anyone to care.

Chess
book
Compiling book, please wait…
186 games added, 3384 positions added, 3383 total positions in book

It has the same desire to move pieces back and forth for thousands of moves, but it’s doing a heck of a lot more than any modern C compiler.

Since we don’t have any networking, Everything is on the console. I’ve found making CD-ROM images being a much easier way to get data in, and I’m still using uuencode to get data out from the console. I guess I should setup Z-modem at some point but that’s very futuristic. Or just break down and learn how to use C-kermit.

My go to quality of life startup is:

export TERM=vt100
stty erase ^?
export LIBPATH=$LIBPATH:/usr/lib
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Sure not perfect but it makes it slightly more usable. As a follow on, I got networking working here: Networking on AIXI 4.3

Frustration of the early 1990s

Something that used to annoy me to no end back in the early 90’s was nearly empty CD-ROM’s from big companies. Back then dialup was the norm and I was ‘lucky’ enough to have a 2400 baud modem back in 93. I wanted a 32bit processor and at least 4MB of ram to join that elite home based 32bit computing to finally feel like I’d upgraded well beyond the Commdore 64, but money was tight and that 2400 baud modem I got on sale from BrandsMart USA was ‘good enough’. I’ve had a 300 baud modem on the c64 so I knew the feeling of absolute painful downloads.

Heck internet access wasn’t so prevalent, and dialing up to BBS’s was super common. It’s a BBS where I stumbled across Linux on CCUG, which was both great for being local but also letting me download at night at 2400 baud as many BBS’s kicked me for being too slow. Thanks Doug!

But here we had this awesome era of CD-ROMs, I managed to snag a NEC Intersect single speed external from TigerDirect, who would have these annual sales to clearance all kinds of RMA’s. It was a great time to get stuff for pennies on the dollar as they say. It was amazing to have access to nearly 700MB of data per disc. But it was amazing how empty so many were.

One such opportunity to ship as much as possible to the users was absolutely missed in OS/2 2.1/3.0 Looking at the EN-US release you find the OS/2 2.1 for Windows CD-ROM contains just the OS, both extracted and disk images:

Volume in drive E is OS2_CD_ROM
  Volume Serial Number is 4384-1BD8
 Directory of E:\
 [DISKIMGS]    [MMPM2]       OS2SE20.SRC   [OS2SE21]
                1 File(s)             10 bytes
                3 Dir(s)               0 bytes free

 Total Files Listed:
          645 File(s)    292,279,546 bytes
          135 Dir(s)               0 bytes free

with 300MB on the disc that left space for another 300MB. What could they have put on there? Obviously the best answer is 3rd party drivers, any and all SDK (Although we are talking about IBM who famously priced the OS/2 1.0 SDK for $3,000), demos, utilities, free software?!

Enter OS/2 2.1J Beta of Japan

While on the Discord some cheap OS/2 CD-ROMS popped up and @plaman was nice to image them for me. I was more interested in Borland C++ 2 for OS/2 but there was also this Japanese beta of 2.1. Normally I wouldn’t be all that interested as I was thinking it was for PC-98 but but’s the ‘DOS/V’ variant which is mostly like a normal PC. But mounting the CD-ROM showed it was far more interesting:

Volume in drive F is V_MAG9310
  Volume Serial Number is DD59-9766
 Directory of F:\
 [DOS_WIN]     [OS2BETA]     [OS2DEMO]     [OS2FREE]     OS2SE20.SRC   [OS2SUPP]     [PCGAMES]     README.1ST
 [VMAG]
                2 File(s)          2,187 bytes
                7 Dir(s)               0 bytes free

 Total Files Listed:         2867 File(s)    501,115,944 bytes
          637 Dir(s)               0 bytes free

PC Games?! Demos?! What is this! And sure enough it has a tonne of game demos including a bunch of Sierra, LucasFilm and even an Electronic Arts Syndicate demo!

In the freeware directory its a selection from Hobbes, including EMX 0.8F, and the GCC/2 port. Also hidden in there is ‘S_O2OBJ.ZIP’ which is the source to a program to convert GAS i386 a.out object files to OMF for use by LINK386 (yes that adventure is ongoing), and all kinds of other fun things. What is nice is that the source code archives are included as well. Thanks IBM of Japan!

In addition there is of course one of those ‘OS/2 demo’ slide show apps

It’s just a simple slide show thing to go over how to use the new desktop

Transform your ‘old’ desktop to the new metaphors of the past:

Into the OS/2 future! Of course you have to understand it’s 1993 by now, and the vast majority of the world is using either Windows 3.0 or 3.1. The new OS/2 2.00 UI is so radically different that even Windows 10 doesn’t attempt the same level of object integration. Although leaving it like the above would be more of a ‘Bob’ type of move, the real world result was this:

Of course in the demos the backdrop per folder thing in OS/2 always looks great, but in real life it was never the same. Perhaps it was the limitation of editing tools of the time, or how OS/2 had a different bitmap format from Windows, which really limited the ability to interchange images.

Compare this to the clutter of the Windows 3.0/3.1 desktop:

Obviously the ‘winning move’ was the Windows 95 desktop which reduced icons to mere shortcuts to give the illusion of something like the OS/2 desktop, but without anywhere the level of complexity and integration made for something far more lightweight. Of course I don’t even want to talk about the binary ini files, their ability to corrupt and booting off diskette to rebuild the desktop by hand. When things failed on OS/2 they failed in the most amazing ways.

At the end of the day;

I still haven’t tracked down a release version of OS/2 2.1 for the Japanese market to see if the CD-ROM version shipped with anything beyond the OS. Perhaps it was simply a beta thing. But these shovelware discs always have a great accidental archives of the era. And it’s nice to see that some OS/2 stuff got preserved for once.

If you are interested you can download the ISO on archive.org here: OS2J21_Beta

 I compiled 4.4BSD to get pmax and sparc binary, from CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4
source code.

    http://www.netside.co.jp/~mochid/comp/bsd44-build/

  pmax:
    - Works on GXemul DECstaion(PMAX) emulation.
    - I used binutils 2.6 and gcc 2.7.2.3 taken from Gnu ftp site,
      as 4.4BSD src does not contain pmax support part in as, ld,
      gcc and gdb.
    - Lack of GDB. I got rid of compile errors of gdb 4.16, but that
      does not work yet.
    - gcc included can not deal c++ static constructor. So, contrib/groff
      can not be compiled. Instead, it uses old/{nroff,troff,eqn,tbl..}.

  sparc:
    - Works on sun4c. I use on SPARCstation 2, real hardware.
      TME sun4c emulation can boot to single user, but it locks up in
      middle of /etc/rc.
 
 CSRG Archive CD-ROM #4's source code (just after Lite2 release) seems
have differences from CSRG's binary distributions before (2 times),
e.g. mount systemcall is not compatible.

 I used NetBSD 1.0/sparc, NetBSD 1.1/pmax for 1st (slightly) cross
compiling. NetBSD 1.0/sparc boots and works well on TME emulator.
SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris7 works too, but this 4.4BSD binary doesn't..

-mochid

So this is a heck yes, let me boot this thing up! It’s been a while since I last messed with GXemul, but even this old version runs 4.4BSD!

And yeah it’ll boot up! Exciting.

As mentioned it’s based off the CD #4 from the CSRG set. Really if you are interested in old UNIX, be it BSD or AT&T get this set!

On the back you can see it’s the last source dump including all the SCCS tags. This plus the extra “historic content” is what you need! Maybe it’s the emulation, maybe it’s the last cut of 4.4 but mounting a CD-ROM just works. So nice. Although the source on the CD isn’t directly buildable. There is some issue with the MIPS locore which needs a patch from mochid, but with the fixes in place it’ll build and run!

Obviously the unanswered question is where is the i386. And that is probably the greatest 90’s software bungle that is either conspiracy to profit or just incredible lack of vision when it comes to platforms. It’s certainly easy to have an off version of reality in University, especially with nice OEM hardware grants to see the world in one light, Just as the Amiga/Atari home computer wars both ignored the vastly inferior PC for it’s laughable beeper, CP/M like OS and woefully inadequate CGA graphics. But the PC was modular and it was an open platform, the industry didn’t have to wait for IBM to make a 32bit PC, instead you had people adding 386DX processors on 286 motherboards complete with 80287 coprocessors, and custom memory controllers to retrofit the memory bus.

CSRG had TAHOE dreams, HP 680000 plans, then SPARC. All the while missing out on the unwashed masses with their 386 and 486 machines. I haven’t tried it, but I bet BSD/OS 1.1 will patch in pretty well for i386. And why would it? Because that was the ticket to the pre pre pre .com bubble of commodity minicomputer UNIX on the desktop. But that blasted 1-800-ITS-UNIX ruined it all, and this ‘hey guys’ project took the UNIX crown.

I’ve been playing with updating the GXemul ‘port’ I did along with integrating SLIRP so I can telnet it. The timing is very shakey and I’m not too happy with it. And I want to redo the disks and sources to be a cleaner ‘merge’ so it just ‘makes’ in the normal places like a native build. If I had crazy people money I’d want to port this to the Loongson-3A4000, but that’d be crazy, instead it’d be more worth my while to try to make an Amiga or Atari ST.

But what do I know, my cellphone runs Mach/BSD!

Or how I finally broke down and bought that MkLinux book after all these decades. When I did own a PowerPC Mac as my daily driver it was an iMac back in 1999 and I ran OS X Server. I later bought a G4 to only find out that OS X didn’t support the G4. Linux had issues too and I ended up running OpenBSD on the G4. Which was fun, although for the ‘work at home’ bit, I ended up needing Windows NT 4.0, so I ran that in OS 8 on SoftPC. Yay.

I didn’t have any luck with Linux on Power as MkLinux wanted the beige hardware, and by the time I felt like digging in again to Linux, OS X had finally been ported to the G4 Sawtooth’s so it really didn’t matter.

I’d seen this book in a store but it was pretty expensive, and geared to such a tiny market. Although Mach does compile on the i386, why they didn’t include it was well to push Mach/Linux as a platform well that’s beyond me. Then again looking at the stunning success of Darwin on i386/x86_64 I guess the reality is, why bother.

I ordered this on Ebay, for the usual $5 plus $10 to ship, and it just showed up today! What mysteries lie on the CD-ROMs? I know others have posted stuff, but I wanted to hold them in my hands myself.

I didn’t know if the CD-ROM’s were included, and I first thought I got lucky: not only were they included, neither had been opened up before! These CD’s had been packed way like this for the last 22.5 years! Now for the bad part.

See that stupid leaflet in the back? Yeah well it turns out that it was a really stupid idea. No doubt this thing sat in the bottom of a stack for decades where the ink had been pressed for so long against the disk that it has transferred to the surface.

HOW ANNOYING.

So yes, they actually advertise the book, namely the one that I had bought with some crap ink leaflet in the CD-ROM pouch and it’s transferred to the disc.

Sigh.

I tried rubbing alcohol but that had no effect. I tried rubbing with a credit card, and it got a little off, but I fear I’m just going to damage the surface more.

I can only imagine what other CD-ROM’s out there that haven’t been archived are sitting under hundreds or thousands of pounds of book weight having nonsense imprinted onto them.

At least the second CD-ROM doesn’t suffer this defect and I’ll be uploading it later.

No book review yet, I’m just sitting here with this impacted CD.

UPDATE

Thanks to Shawn Novak for uploading the R3 images so I can at least pull up the compatible machines:

The latest Qemu can pull it the image fine, however trying to boot up looks like the Mach kernel just isn’t compatible enough with the emulated Mac99 machine (which isn’t surprising).

I’ll need to mess with stuff to see if the G3beige can boot Linux on Qemu, and if the BootX (I think it’s bootx?) can load the mach kernel.

I ran across this, and thought it was cool. These CD’s are getting harder and harder to find, and unless you want the old physical disks, getting ISO images is, of course the next best thing.

• Pre-Release Disk 1 – September 1992
• Pre-Release Disk 2 – January 1993
• Disk 3 – April 1993
• Disk 4 – Summer 1993
• Disk 5 – Fall 1993
• Disk 6 – Winter 1994
• Disk 7 – April 1994
• Disk 8 – July 1994
• Disk 9 – October 1994
• Disk 10 – January 1995
• Disk 11 – April 1995
• Disk 12 – August 1995
• Disk 13 – October 1995

• Microsoft Programmers Library 1.1a
• Microsoft Programmers Library 1.3

Granted these disks replaced the much older Microsoft Programmer’s Library. The new CD’s use a Windows based search & interface program removing the clunky old MS-DOS program that made it feel like trying to view the world through a straw. (Although the up side of the MS-DOS version is that you could easily dump the video RAM and save the contents to plain text).

And in this brave new post Windows 3.0 centric world of Microsoft just about everything regarding OS/2 was dumped, and the seeding of Win32 via Windows NT had started.

Naturally after winning this war, Microsoft withdrew many low end products and just couldn’t compete with the tidalwave that was GNU/Linux.

At any rate for the curious kids down the road that want to see what all the fuss was with Win16, and how Windows 3.0 had changed the landscape removing the force of IBM it’s worth a look.

I found this online a while ago, although it’s taken about half a year to pick it up, but here we are.

What is kind of cool about this, is that being from 1991 this is not for Windows, that this reference library instead targets MS-DOS using the MSL/Microsoft Library from the Programmer’s Library.  So the same advantage holds true, that the content can be scraped from the text mode video RAM.

So yeah, back in the day this was some really amazing stuff, the ability to search a few books in some incredibly fast and convenient, although as always lacking super depth.

Back then online services were crazy expensive, charging by the minute, and of course just like the stock MS-DOS client preventing you from being able to easily copy the text.  Outside of anything beyond gradeschool I couldn’t imagine the ‘encyclopedia’ being of all that much worth but the dictionary/thesaurus & quotations is okay enough, although in 2018 it really is showing it’s age.

Having your own private reference back then was a big deal, something like this would have been more apt in a library, but you’d have to wait in line, no doubt as the ability to look up stuff just by typing would have been great.  While using this online would have cost quite a bit quickly justifying the cost of a CD-ROM drive along with the program.

The common carrier and lower costs of delivering content over the internet has really made something like this an oddity of time, but for anyone that needs to work 100% offline, these are a real gem.

Another great use of extracting the books from the CD-ROM, is that you can take, say the “American Heritage Dictionary“, a 30MB file, and compress it with 7zip, yielding a file just under 4MB, or an 87%, or a 7.76:1 compression ratio.  So unlike other ‘dictionary’ test compression sets, this is using an actual dictionary.

For anyone wanting to take a dive, I put it on archive.org

PC Mag, January 1989

It’s weird I was discussing putting this online in a more human readable format, and then Jeff Parsons over at the incredible full system emulation in javascript site, pcjs.org just did it.

As you may or not be aware of, Microsoft hit it big as a computer languages company, before they added operating systems into it’s portfolio.  And for some weird reason after the whole OS/2 divorce thing, someone decided that everything that had been painfully learned in the earlier eras should just be expunged from history.  Which is a real shame to anyone interested in Basic, Fortran, Pascal, C and MASM.  Years ago I had gone through the steps of extracting the text the only way I could figure out easily, by writing a simple TSR that would dump the contents of the text video buffer, and write it to a file, then press the page down key, and keep repeating the process. The end result being that I had then dumped the MSPL aka the Microsoft Programmer’s Library.  I had put the text into an archive, aptly named Microsoft_Programmers_Library.7z, and pretty much used grep whenever I wanted any information and left it at that…

It’s really cool to see it slowly transitioning to more useful information.  You can read Jeff’s article Corporations Are Crappy Archivists about his quest for seemingly simple information about ancient Microsoft mice, and the archive of KB’s for Microsoft C.

One thing that is annoying is that information on CD from the late 1980’s seems to be darned near impossible to find.  I know that each generation of machines until about 2005 was exponentially larger than the previous one (post 2007 we hit the iThing world, along with most machines being ‘good enough’ for day-to-day usage).  I know this ad may seem insane, but Microsoft really was trying to push people to CD distributions.  As we all know that internet thing didn’t quite tickle their fancy.    Did they ever put resources like this online?  Like on BIX or Compuserve?  It seems like an ideal resource.  But I was a kid, and didn’t have that kind of money.

Awesome CD-ROM collection and drive, starting at a mere $899!

So in the interest of a bad idea, here is MSPL, aka qemu/curses in action.

Oh my god, what I have I done!?

Well as an addendum I thought it’d be cool to put MSPL online, via shellinabox.  First off I needed a 5MB MS-DOS disk, basically enough MS-DOS too boot up, run smartdrive, idle and the CD-ROM driver, along with the minimal MSPL install.  And to button it up, I added a reboot.com from the autoexec, so when you exit it’ll reboot the VM.  Great.

The reboot command was input via debug, as it’ll let you assemble code directly.  Although it isn’t a MACRO assembler, so you have to know exactly what you are doing.

DEBUG RESET.COM
A
XOR AX, AX
NOT AX
PUSH AX
NOT AX
PUSH AX
RETF
(return on a line by itself)
RCX
9
W
Q

And with that saved, now I have to setup Qemu.  Since I’m taking the shellinabox approach that means I need something text mode, and I was thinking this was light weight. Qemu has a curses output so that’ll work.  I set it up to use qcow2 and a backing store image so that way every forked user doesn’t eat 5MB of disk space, it’s more like 100kb.

#!/bin/sh
set -m
PID=$$
mkdir /tmp/$PID
cd /tmp/$PID
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b /usr/local/mspl/MSPL.qcow2 MSPL.qcow2
qemu-system-i386 -m 4 -cpu 486 -hda MSPL.qcow2 -cdrom /usr/local/mspl/Microsoft-Programers-Library-v1.3.iso -curses -no-reboot
cd /tmp
rm -rf /tmp/$PID

Then to tie it into shell in a box, it’ll just need the flag:

-s /mspl:nobody:nogroup:/:/usr/local/bin/mspl.sh

and this will run it as nobody and kick off the above bash script.  Now that’s great and all, but what about stale/abandoned sessions?  I wrote this quick script to clean them up.

#!/bin/bash

FIND=”find /tmp -type d -regextype sed -regex ‘.*/[0-9]*’ -mmin +30 | sed ‘s/\/tmp\///’>/tmp/kill_out.txt”
eval $FIND
while read process; do

KILL=”kill -9 ${process}”
eval $KILL
RMDIR=”rm -rf /tmp/${process}”
eval $RMDIR

done < /tmp/kill_out.txt
rm -rf /tmp/kill_out.txt

So it’ll find numerical directories that are at least 30 minutes old, kill them and remove their directory.  Probably very dangerous to run, but it’s isolated so Im not too worried.  Then just have root add that script to its crontab, and run it every minute, and it’ll kill the old stuff hanging around.

I’ll add a video later on how to use MSPL via this setup.  And maybe I’ll rig something to have RDP access as well, depending on how I’m feeling.

And much to my amazement, when I woke up, I not only got a reply but a link to a toast image.  Great, what is toast?  Well simply put toast is a format made popular by then Adaptec Toast.  Obviously, the sane thing to do is to find Toast, install it, and mount the disk image inside of a Macintosh.

Adaptec toast 4.0

But, honestly, where is the fun in that?

Instead let’s have Cockatrice III do it!  Now I never did get around to writing proper CD-ROM emulation, nor integrating it, but that doesn’t matter!  Instead, I’m going to rely on Daemon tools Lite, to do all the heavy lifting.  DTL will create a virtual SCSI adapter, add in a SCSI CD-ROM device, and mount the image.  Needless to say, I’m on Windows and that is where that part of the adventure ends, as Windows 10 cannot read HFS.

Now back to Cockatrice!

All I had to do was assign the SCSI 6 position to the mounted drive letter, and I’m set!  Just add this to the CockatriceIII_Prefs file:

scsi6 \\.\e:

And now I can mount the image from within Cockatrice III

Darwin 0.3 toast mounted

And there we go, now I can copy the files of just like having a real Mac.