Linus DECUS ’94 talks found!

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As I’m sure this will be making the rounds from Facebook (yes how tragic it’s on that thing of all things), and YES you have to login as King Zuck-my-users-are-idiots-erberg demands to know if you are reading this.

This is written by Jon “maddog” Hall

This is the long-promised Christmas present to all those good little girls and
boys who love GNU/Linux.

It was November of 1993 when I received my first CD of what was advertised as "A
complete Unix system with source code for 99 USD".   While I was dubious about
this claim (since the USL vs BSDi lawsuit was in full swing) I said "What the
heck" and sent away my 99 dollars, just to receive a thin booklet and a CD-ROM
in the mail.   Since I did not have an Intel "PC" to run it on, all I could do
was mount the CD on my MIPS/Ultrix workstation and read the man(1)ual pages.

I was interested, but I put it away in my filing cabinet.

About February of 1994 Kurt Reisler, Chair of the UNISIG of DECUS started
sending emails (and copying me for some reason) about wanting to bring this
person I had never heard about from FINLAND (of all places) to talk about a
project that did not even run on Ultrix OR DEC/OSF1 to DECUS in New Orleans in
May of 1994.

After many emails and no luck in raising money for this trip I took mercy on
Kurt and asked my management to fund the trip.   There is much more to this
story, requiring me to also fund a stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC to run
this project on, but that has been described elsewhere.

Now I was at DECUS.  I had found Kurt trying to install this "project" on this
stinking, weak, miserable Intel PC and not having much luck, when this nice
young man with sandy brown hair, wire-rim glasses, wool socks and sandals came
along.  In a lilting European accent, speaking perfect English he said "May I
help you?" and ten minutes later GNU/Linux was running on that stinking, weak,
miserable Intel PC.

I sat down to use it, and was amazed. It was good. It was very, very good.

I found out that later that day Linus (for of course it was Linus Torvalds) was
going to give two talks that day.  One was "An Introduction to Linux" and the
other was "Implementation Issues in Linux".

Linus was very nervous about giving these talks.   This was the first time that
he was giving a talk at a major conference (19,000 people attended that DECUS)
to an English-speaking audience in English.   He kept feeling as if he was going
to vomit.   I told him that he would be fine.

He gave the talks.  Only forty people showed up to each one, but there was great
applause.

The rest of the story about steam driven river boats, strong alcoholic drinks
named "Hurricanes", massive amounts of equipment and funding as well as
engineering resources based only on good will and handshakes have been told
before and in other places.

Unfortunately the talks that Linus gave were lost.

Until now.

As I was cleaning my office I found some audio tapes made of Linus' talk, and
which I purchased with my own money.  Now, to make your present, I had to buy a
good audio tape playback machine and capture the audio in Audacity, then produce
a digital copy of those tapes, which are listed here.  Unfortunately I do not
have a copy of the slides, but I am not sure how many slides Linus had.  I do
not think you will need them.

Here is your Christmas present, from close to three decades ago.   Happy
Linuxing" to all, no matter what your religion or creed.
An Introduction To Linux
Linux Implementation Issues In Linux

I’ve also archived the slides & audio files on archive.org.

Merry Christmas

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I had a bunch of stuff in my head for this year. Really. Some 'new' Commodore 64 game reviews. some random g2a action, and just some all around fun. Then my schedule slacked and log4j happened. On the one hand none of the stuff I ran was immediately impacted as it was inward facing. I had already gutted the 'magical nonsensical scripts' t hat kids these days use to deliberaly complicate running simple services. So adding the right flags to disable this crap in the Java runtime was something I could do quickly. Sadly the rest of the organization didn't fare so well.

Things are bad.

But life finds a way.

So in the words of the late George Carlin, Merry Christmas, and try to do the best you can.

Can you trust a man in a van with your virtual plan?

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Once upon a time this was a legitimate ad. Tad from VM-limted.com. Sadly the domain has all but lapsed and finding any reference to this ad is pretty much impossible to search for. You’d think with the ‘glamp’ of vanlife and living in a van that people would love to take notes from the Microsoft VM-limited 70’s style conference van.

Nissan NV350

Instead I was getting crap like this Nissan NV350 which looks so 1960’s SciFi that it’s just unlivable and unusable. Compare that pod living thing to this incredible 1970’s themed van from VM-limited!

So comfortable!

From leather chairs, rolodexes, tube televisions to the mandatory ashtrays, wood paneling and shag carpet how could this not be a ‘work from the road’ thing today? While looking at other solutions for working on the road they seem to be so boring and unlived in that they feel about as legit as that new starwars hotel that looks like a telephone game of ‘space conflict’.

As far as I can tell it started as a print campaign in 2011 to be launched the same time as the big VMware convention (vmworld?!) back then.

2011 print ad

I do have to admire the very Atari-esque look of it. Apparently it was good enough to get some videos shot in the van:

And along with that was a TADTalk. I mirrored it on my site, and with a bit more searching I found some more and put them on archive.org.

It’s too bad the domain lapsed, and Microsoft didn’t hop onto the van-life trend with their future thinking retro 70’s conference van.

Anyways to help me google/bing it in the future Microsoft man in van selling virtualization.

Anyone else living the nomadic life? I guess with wife + kids it’s hard, but I’m sure someone is doing it.

Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Library dropdown menu insanity!

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I don’t know what is so exciting about this feature but Microsoft has paged me about 2-300 times this morning about this exciting feature.

Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Library dropdown menu

As of 10:25 BST/HST it’s still going off. I had to mute the Office 365 Admin application. Talk about either over excited or just plain broken. Over on reddit yeah, it’s everyone else.

Do people even use sharepoint anymore?

nonsensical benchmarks

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So I was messing with quake1 & DJGPP/DOSBox. So yes that means this table is largely nonsense. My larger goal was to see if a strictly softfloat could run Quake1. The answer, is no.

However I got some weird answers from messing around with the flags & fps from a timedemo of demo1

FPS
67.7
113.4
130.1

131.9
101.3

73.0
71.7
31.1

44.6
32.7
CFLAGS
-O0 -m386 -m80387
-O2 -m486 -m80387
-O2 -m486 -m80387 -mhard-float -mno-soft-float -mieee-fp -mfp-ret-in-387
-O2 -m386 -m80387
-O2 -m386 -m80387 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations
-O2 -m486
-O2
-O2 -msoft-float -m386 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -fexpensive-optimizations
-O2 -msoft-float -m386
-O2 -msoft-float -m486

This needs to be a table! it’s unreadable!

So surprisingly -O2 -m386 -m80387 produced the fastest code using GCC 2.7.2.3. On DOSBox so yeah that means literally nothing. Rebuilding DOSBox with no floating support code gave a weird error about the pov being out of range.

Obviously the next thing to do is run this stuff natively.. .which means GCC 2.7.2.3 for NT. Oh this is going to be fun, but utterly pointless. Or maybe not.

I re-ran the tests using VMware. There is no audio drivers involved just plain MS-DOS. The red is DOS-Box while green is VMware for the graph with FPS being the measurement. Interesting how the numbers aren’t as varied like DOSBox, however the -m386 -m80387 proved the be the worst for VMware, while the 386 soft float was so incredibly slow on DOSBox but performs great on VMware. yay?

Cloud Functions Bucket File Editor

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

The title is little complicated so let me explain! Ever since dawn of the web I been running some web server to host various websites. In the beginning it was a physical machine under my desk, then a colocated server, then a VPS Virtual Machine, then a container. Eventually all the websites that I look after or host for friends/family ended up in “the cloud”. Storage buckets to be precise, as they offer a super cheap and simple way of hosting static websites. I no longer have to maintain machines, look after updates, security or configuration. Just upload HTML and done.

However here lies a problem. You can’t just “edit” a file in a bucket, you can only download it, edit locally and re-upload. This typically is done via Storage Browser UI or gsutil cli utility (in case of GCP). Or some sophisticated IDE with storage API support or sometimes a FUSE client. In any case it’s hard and cumbersome. Why can’t there be a simple Edit function in the UI?

Why isn’t there a File Edit Option????

I have recently discovered that there even is a brand new Cloud Shell Editor which is a VScode instance bound to your “cloud shell instance”. It allows you to virtually edit files “in the cloud” but of course not in storage buckets! WHY NOT?

While this been bothering me for a while I also got interested in so called “cloud functions” which are small pieces of code that you can run “in the cloud” without need for a VM or even a container (although surely they run in one behind the scenes). Just paste the code and run… somewhere. Cloud Functions or AWS Lambdas have been notoriously abused by crypto miners. I wanted to play with these for legitimate reasons and finally decided to create a simple web based text editor that would allow to edit text files in storage buckets. So CFEdit was born.

The editor is super simple, no frills, just a file selector and textarea for editing files. You deploy it by creating a new function, either via the UI or CLI. You can restrict it just to a single bucket or allow editing in any bucket within a project. It doesn’t use IAM and thus doesn’t require Google accounts. I specifically wanted to avoid complexity of that and just went with own user database and HTTP Basic Auth.

Now I can create account for family members or friends and allow them to edit their web pages via simple web based editor rather than asking for uploading files or resorting to ftp/sftp GCS gateways or stuff like that.

In future I’m planning to add other function like create blank file, directory, upload/download etc. Let me know what’s needed.

CFEdit can be downloaded from github.com/tenox/cfedit, the readme describes in steps on how to deploy it.

YouTube Monday video Extravaganza!

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First up, a friend of the blog, NCommander has his 8.5 hour marathon ‘Porting 16-bit Windows 1.0 Applications to 64-Bit Windows 11‘

I was so tired I ended up sleeping through the whole thing. Sometimes it’s hard being on the other side of the planet. But for anyone interested in Windows programming it’ll be super interesting in how much has changed, and yet how much things haven’t changed.

Damn!

As an added bonus, 65scribe has also blessed us with not only another great retrospective on iMacs, but also our favorite museum in Ontario, but left us with a cliff hanger (minor spoiler!).

Blue and Ice

I never knew about the artic blue ice thing before. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but who knows?!

Revisiting Windows NT 4.0 MIPS on QEMU

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

This was previously well covered by Gunkies and Neozeed, however as almost a decade passed, some improvements could be made and annoyances fixed.

Firstly NT MIPS now works in 1280×1024 resolution under QEMU. It previously had issues with mouse tracking, but this is now fixed. So the new image has a higher resolution.

Secondly the old images were made with FAT filesystem which I didn’t like too much. The reason for that is the infamous RISC NT osloader needs to be placed on a FAT partition. Then, if NT is installed on a second NTFS partition the default drive will be D:\, C:\ being the just the osloader drive. This was super annoying in practice. So a common procedure was to just have one FAT partition for both osloader and winnt. I have fixed it by supplying a pre-partitioned disk and specified the second partition for osloader and the first for NT.

Also I only had just a bare/vanilla image with no additional software installed. The new image includes most of the available apps, including IE3, some editors, Reskit and Visual Studio.

Lastly I wanted to figure out all the right settings and flags for qemu as they were discrepancies between different sources and nothing seem to work smoothly. The correct flags seem to be:

qemu-system-mips64el -hda nt4.qcow2 -M magnum -global ds1225y.filename=nvram -L . -rtc "base=1995-07-08T11:12:13,clock=vm" -nic user,model=dp83932

The -rtc flag is not really needed if you are ok with having the current date in the guest.

Thanks to Neozeed for figuring out the network settings! Unfortunately the old/legacy -net nic -net user is no longer working while the new -device doesn’t like dp83932. The documentation was quite helpful.

Thanks to reader Mark for pointing out the correct NVRAM settings! See comments below.

The new image with all the apps preinstalled is here and a plain “vanilla” here.

Curiously this now works right out of the box on QEMU 6.1 and is pretty smooth and stable compared to what it was before. Good job QEMU team and thank you! Just in case I still keep the old binaries for Windows made by Neozeed here.

Update: I built Yori for NT MIPS! You can download here!

zeeDooM Xenix!

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So a few months ago, gattilorenz had told me he managed to work out how to do direct video under Xenix, and was able to get DooM running! He made the source available, and I meant to do something back then, but I must have gotten distracted.

So I went ahead and added the zeeDooM thing I had been working on a while ago which is a combination of the John Romero released maps, and the FreeDoom assets. So it’s not 100% the released version, it just looks that way.

I’ve gone ahead and created a qemu disk image (if you convert it, it does run on VMware, so probably far more 386 capable emulators than I can imagine), along with an old Qemu exe for some stand alone fun on archive.org.

There is no sound, nor music. I should look closer one day, and see if I can drive some direct music to an Adlib since it’s just IO ports, and maybe grab all the direct sound code from viti95’s FastDoom?

Anyways, it’s zeeDooM!.. on Xenix!