5 ms·

How old were you when you wrote this? Looks like a big system - was this your first major project? I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? Ho

• chubot 10y ago
  OS/2 and C compilers were readily available for downloaded on BBses. I'm pretty sure I downloaded Turbo C onto like 20 floppy disks over ZModem or something. Not only did it take forever to download, but installing it was a huge pain, with all the disk swapping. I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? I don't remember exactly. I never ran OS/2 but a friend did, and I'm pretty sure he downloaded it rather than paying for it. A primary form of social currency on BBSes is who had access to commercial software, i.e. the "zero-day warez".
  • apaprocki 10y ago
    Yeah Borland Turbo C in DOS was the way to go. My first board ran on multi-tasking DOS in DESQview before moving over to OS/2 -> Windows over the years.
    • 20after4 10y ago
      Heh same here. DESQview worked remarkably well, actually.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I guess the hard disk didn't have enough space for both the raw disks and the install? Floppy-disk-based installers were often hardcoded to use the A: drive so even if there was space for the install and the floppy installer on the HDD, you'd need to copy the installer to the floppies to use it, unless you had some workaround.
    • Narishma 10y ago
      I'm pretty sure MS-DOS had the SUBST command to alias drives and paths from an early version.
• rsync 10y ago
  "I seem to recall OS/2 and a C compiler cost money back? How did you get to be using those, through work or did you buy them?" His new user questionnaire asked new users to identify/define several warez release/courier groups. I don't think he was licensing software ...
  • henrikschroder 10y ago
    FLT is Fairlight and RZR should be Razor, but I can't remember what the last three were. Oh god the nostalgia.
  • mmccaff 10y ago
    I'm not even sure that I used that new user questionnaire myself. It was a feature of the software, for SysOps who ran warez boards. I actually had a licensed copy of OS/2. My dad taught computer science at a small college and was able to get it for me.
• Clubber 10y ago
  Most software back then was openly pirated and traded. Even non-warez BBS's had pirated software in the 1980s. It wasn't even considered a bad thing, just, "I have this, want a copy?" or "I need this, anyone have a copy?" We had Commodore meet ups at the local library and everyone openly copied software. Local governments had little idea what a computer even did. The SPA hadn't been considered or was in it's infancy. Computer nerd was barely a term yet. It was our own little world.
• mmccaff 10y ago
  It was towards the end of middle school and through high school. So, my early to mid teens. I had never worked on a larger project before that. It was great to have one single large project to work on, and to keep adding features to. I had messed around with code since I was about 7. It was based on the source code of something else which did the heaviest of lifting. My dad taught computer science at a small college and was able to get OS/2 and C compilers for me. I forget which C compiler I used, I think I might have switched from Borland to something else at the time -- but I remember the one C compiler came with a set of books in a box that was about 4 feet long. I used the box as a footrest when I'd code. Haha. I chose OS/2 because it was the first operating system that I knew of which allowed true multi-tasking. Two processes (instances of the BBS}) could actually run at the same time without one pausing the inactive one. It was also cool to try a new OS, to try something new.