In case you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ll know that Oracle has bought out just about all the real competition to their flagship product and basically driven the developers out.. Just as they have strangled SUN’s products in some vain attempt at a lawsuit against Google, they basically have killed mysql.
Well enter, drizzle.
I haven’t loaded it yet, but it’ll certainly be something worth investigating going forward since MySQL is effectively dead.
Well today Internet Explorer 9 has been released… I guess they timed it for the pi day thing yesterday (3/14!).
You can find all the languages & versions here.
So how does it perform? Well the CP/M Javascript page doesn’t work at all in IE9 mode. In compatability mode, it can’t execute commands with an argument so booting or loading disks seems not to work. It’s such a shame.
The javascript NES emulator not only works, but seems to perform pretty well I get just under 60fps. Oddly performance is just slightly slower then Chrome, yet the sound in IE is far smoother. That was really unexpected, but still interesting.
Outside of that, I’ve only used it for 10 minutes now so I really can’t say. But we all know that for better or worse, IE always holds the largest ‘surface area’ so it will remain the most targeted. But for now it’l be fun to play with, but I’ll be lery of remaining on it.
So while browsing around k7tty, I came across this file, internet.zip, that pretty much has everything you need for a windows 3.1 machine to get into the internet using Trumpet Winsock.
I used a packet driver, along with Qemu’s built in ne2000 and it works pretty well!
While I never used Trumpet back in the day, setting it up for LAN access was pretty easy, and while Trumpet 1.0 loads on Windows 3.0 I never could find any applications that actually work with it. Trumpet 2.0 seems more along the line of the finalized Winsock 1.1 stacks, with applications abound to run with it and Windows 3.1
The things I see go through my blog… Well someone googled that (blogger.com shows me top hits, on what people search, and how they got here).. and I have to admit it made me laugh.
But my exposure to Watcom really didn’t start until I was in college, and I found some $99 offer to buy Watcom 10.0 CD only package. At the time I thought it was super exciting, because it not only included 32bit tools, but also the 16bit stuff. At the time, I still had a 286 running OS/2 so for me this was awesome!
So for my $99 I got a 32bit MS-DOS,OS/2,Windows NT & Novell Netware compiler, along with a 16bit MS-DOS, Windows & OS/2 compiler.
Ok, so that’s the ‘good’. All the documentation was online, which was ok, but it was in like 30 different files…. The UI was weird, but really in the early 1990s everyones UI was odd. Heh even Microsoft ended up taking over the UI from QuickC for Windows as their ‘professional UI’.
Now what of the Watcom Legacy? Well sure we all know that the iD software guys, used Watcom as their 32bit compile to ship DOOM to the MS-DOS world. Just as 3D Realms used it for Duke Nukem 3d!. But I’d suspect this was mostly because of the DOS4G/W DOS Extender, and it’s royalty free redistribution with Watcom C++. From what I understand Pharlap TNT was *VERY* expensive to license, with regards to it’s royalty price.
Also at the time, Watcom C++ was the fastest compiler available.
But time and competition wasn’t kind to Watcom. Eventually the language company slipped, was purchased for a side product sold off and killed. It’s kind of funny that a language company that produced a SQL server as a necessity ended up being the only product that people sought, and didn’t want to let discontinue.
So sure Watcom C/C++ was a great compiler for it’s time, but the time has passed. In the meantime we are lucky that it’s been open sourced so it hasn’t faded off to oblivion.
Although the C/C++ is what people know them for most, Watcom had a lot more, as seen in their source, they did have support for the Dec Alpha. also did have a Fortran compiler. Back a long long time ago, this Waterloo Ontario based company used to supply computer languages to all kinds of Canadian endeavors. It’s a shame that us kids never got to really see them, but rather it was more so for research as I’m lead to understand.
So really what separated Watcom from say Microsoft? Maybe it was their proximity to research? Maybe government contracts? Perhaps reluctance to enter the operating system business? I don’t know it’s really hard to say, I’m sure it’d make an interesting documentary but I’m afraid the audience would be pretty small.
But then again the Canadian government does like to green light this kind of thing, so maybe someone out there will take it up.
At any rate, I’m sure others may want to chip in on how they feel about Watcom.
—-
edit
I see now that the phrase actually comes from doom
‘!’, // shift-backslash – OH MY GOD DOES WATCOM SUCK
This is in the heads up code, hu_stuff.c
So I guess that ends that eppisode.
So I saw this post on /. talking about the IE 6 countdown page from Microsoft.
So, after helping someone verify the needed flags to install Windows NT 4.0 on Qemu 0.14.0 ( C:\temp\qemu-0.14.0>qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu pentium -hda nt4.disk -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -cdrom “\install\nt4workstation.iso” -m 16 ) I thought I’d try this sucker in Internet Explorer 3.0
IE 6 countdown, on IE 3
Hell you’d think they’d at least make the page VIEWABLE in older browsers.. I didn’t even try IE 2.0 just yet, as I almost bet it can’t even pop the page…. Seeing that IE 2.0 isn’t even HTTP 1.1 compliant.
What is interesting is the high numbers in China, India, and South Africa. I wonder how many of those IE6 users are on NT 4.0? I wonder how many IE 5.5 users are running Windows 95? How many are simply using older computers that these new modern titan operating systems simply will not load on.
At any rate, here is the site on IE6 / Windows 2000…
IE6 countdown on.. IE6
Oh well my $0.02 on the whole thing.
while checking out some random link on some vintage ads, I found this exciting development..
Philip Pemberton’s 3b1 emulator.
While a work in progress, he’s getting there, so far it’s capable of booting the diagnostic diskette, although I couldn’t get it to run any programs….
3b1 emulator
I’ve personally only dealt with the 3b2’s so I don’t know all that much about the 3b1’s short of them running some SYSV (r2?) Unix, and it was some half hearted attempt by AT&T at marketing Unix to the masses.
I’ve built the emulator under windows, and compressed it up here.
It’s interesting though, and more interesting to see where it will go…
I really have no idea why anyone would want it, but here it is.
“sail – multi-user wooden ships and iron men”
It is described more as a “computer version of Avalon Hill’s game of fighting sail originally developed by S. Craig Taylor.”
Sailing away…
For anyone wanting to check it out, the easiest way is to just run 4.2 BSD.
There is plenty more afoot regarding various emulators, and I just have to write them down… but not tonite.
OK they aren’t virtual, but it’s still fun to see the old hardware.
And finally.
I don’t make much of a secret of it, but while I was in high school, and the first year of college, I loved Pascal. And not just any Pascal, but Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5 .
While in highschool, we used these Unix “like” work stations, the “ICON” running QNX. Since it was another one of those built by Canadians for Canadians type thing we couldn’t use Borland, instead we used this knockoff called Turing. While the bootleg floppy I had of Turing gave up the ghost (bad sectors, argh!) I recall that it was strictly interpreted, and they did have a version that ran on MS-DOS..
Anyways, fast forward and I moved to the United States, and of course we didn’t use weird knockoffs, we used.. Borland Pascal.
And it compiled.
Oh, and it could build TSR’s!
Man it was AWESOME. I even could coax it to run in protected mode, along with dosx.exe, the dos extender bundled in Windows 3.1 . Although much to my dismay, only ‘tiny’ or programs restricted to 64kb could run in this mode, as the libraries were not even slightly protected mode safe. In my opinion between the industry at the time holding so dearly to the brain dead 80286, and charging a FORTUNE for protected mode tools, it really did drive people mad.
Anyways I eventually had to come to terms with C, but I’ll admit, for the first while, I used EMX under OS/2 and p2c (GNU p2c Pascal), as a great crutch.
So while browsing around, I came to some bbs source code page, And I was surprised to see a few things… An early BBS for Unix SYS III, another one for Xenix, and WWIV when it was all in Pascal, ported from version 3.0 to 7.0. And they (among all the others) include SOURCE CODE!
Then searching with a ‘known known’, I turned up this excellent resource in Russia, pascal.sources.ru, which has a good amount of pascal source.
A while back, I did take the Pascal source to TradeWars 2001, and port it to C, so maybe I’ll do something with this wealth of Pascal source…
And of course, for anyone feeling retro, don’t forget, that Turbo Pascal 5.5 is free! (like beer), and runs under DOSBox.
This is great news to some of us! Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, Windows 95 had issues running on CPU’s running over 300Mhz. Any attempt to do so will yield the following error:
While initializing device IOS:
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
Then there was an “AMD” fix (that worked fine on intel cpu’s) that would raise the bar to 2.1 Ghz. However beyond that point, the networking would break, and cause Windows 95 to fail with the following error:
While initializing device NDIS:
Windows Protection Error. You need to restart your computer.
Well it seems that the device drivers from the Dial-up networking update 1.4 actually address this issue, however it’s hard to install an update that gets bound into a ‘blob’ when you can’t boot.
However, the LoneCrusader on MSFN has come up with a fixpack!
And it’s simple to apply, just start a normal Windows 95 install (I’m using Windows 95a, the first CD version) and then once it reboots, just boot off the provided floppy image, and it’ll slipstream in the fixed kernel, ndis handler and a bunch of other stuff. Then reboot again, and carry on.
It works so well, that I loaded it on my 3 Ghz P4, however I got this disastrous message:
Insufficient memory to initialize Windows.
Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and restart your computer.
Which after a little bit of searching, comes down to the fact that I have 1GB of ram in my P4. A lot of people talk about tuning the vcache as it’ll initialize far too big, and not leave enough memory for Windows 95 to actually operate. I had no luck there, but with more searching I found an easier fix..
Instead, just limit the amount of memory that Windows 95 will initialize. KB184447 talks about this, and I’ve found this works as an optimal setting for my system.ini:
[386Enh]
MaxPhysPage=39900[vcache]
MinFileCache=65536
MaxFileCache=131072
chunksize=2048
namecache=4096
Using these settings, I’m limited to 921MB of ram, but honestly an environment that was built to run on 4MB systems, and comfortably in 8MB of ram, 921MB is just fine. So far I’ve installed Internet Explorer 5.5 on my P4, and all is well. In addition, it works great on Virtual PC, as even some emulators are fast enough that they too run into these old timing bugs.
Naturally, PCI bus users (is that everyone now?) will want this update from intel, (infinst_enu.exe / mirror) which will update a bunch of core components in Windows 95 to allow it to function better. I should add that both on Virtual PC, and my p4, that once the PCI update is installed, I went into the device manager, and removed the default VGA adapter, and my graphics was running correctly. The only weird thing is the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro PCI (mach32) would crash Windows 95 if I ran it at 256 colors, however it works fine in both 16 color and 16bit (65536 color) mode.
Windows 95 921MB of ram
Just remember to NOT overwrite the newer files, otherwise Windows 95 won’t boot anymore.