3 ms·

Smallest program I ever sold, for near-5-digit profit, was a "REBOOT.COM" which saved a sysadmin from hand-rebooting 200 machines, daily, and which earned me $9

by mmjaa 8y ago

Smallest program I ever sold, for near-5-digit profit, was a "REBOOT.COM" which saved a sysadmin from hand-rebooting 200 machines, daily, and which earned me $9,000 on account that it was my monthly rate at the time, and its all I did that month, by circumstance, anyway ... it was a different time, and I honestly felt I deserved it, then[1]. C:\> debug.com n JMP FFF0 w reboot.com q ^Z (or at least, it was something like that...) [1]- Now, not so much.

Someone 8y ago
Reminds me of GO.COM. It was smaller, and made its programmer money, too (http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55) (Sorry, source code not available)
- weinzierl 8y ago
  > (Sorry, source code not available) ISWYDT;-) Spoiler: GO.COM is 0 bytes long, yet was incredibly useful back at the time.
dfox 8y ago
You can do "warmer reboot" in even smaller code: int 19h (assembles into 0xcd 0x19). One surprising thing about that is that it confuses the hell out of ntldr, but to do fast reboot from DOS to linux through grub it works perfectly.
- exikyut 8y ago
  What happens with NTLDR? (I don't have any VMs set up at the moment)
  - dfox 8y ago
    When executed from DOS by means of INT 19h and NT MBR it complains that there is not enough free conventional memory. This shows that somebody though that it is good idea to write ntldr as valid DOS program, that actually cares about the state of DOS on which it runs. (ntldr actually is concetanition of 16b MZ EXE and two COFF images, ie. something that DOS is perfectly willing to load and execute)
exikyut 8y ago
I'm really curious - why 200 machines needed rebooting - how this program achieved that without any form of networking -- Also, the closest other thing I'm aware of with a similar size-to-profit ratio is K: > Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.” > Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled. - http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320* http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320*
- mmjaa 8y ago
  The machines needed rebooting because of bugs further upstream in the stack - these were the bad ol' days of DOS, and each system was really being used as a client to the database backend. For whatever reason, the sysadmins decided to reboot them daily as part of their shutdown procedure - if I recall, it was because of a bug in one of the myriad TSR's that were loaded to make the systems work properly on the network, something to do with not getting accurate clock settings from the network - and indeed, they were all networked over 10Base2 .. so maybe that was it. It was a really fun and easy hack to make. ;)

by mmjaa 8y ago

Someone 8y ago

Reminds me of GO.COM. It was smaller, and made its programmer money, too (http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55 http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55) (Sorry, source code not available)

weinzierl 8y ago
> (Sorry, source code not available) ISWYDT;-) Spoiler: GO.COM is 0 bytes long, yet was incredibly useful back at the time.

dfox 8y ago

You can do "warmer reboot" in even smaller code: int 19h (assembles into 0xcd 0x19). One surprising thing about that is that it confuses the hell out of ntldr, but to do fast reboot from DOS to linux through grub it works perfectly.

exikyut 8y ago
What happens with NTLDR? (I don't have any VMs set up at the moment)
- dfox 8y ago
  When executed from DOS by means of INT 19h and NT MBR it complains that there is not enough free conventional memory. This shows that somebody though that it is good idea to write ntldr as valid DOS program, that actually cares about the state of DOS on which it runs. (ntldr actually is concetanition of 16b MZ EXE and two COFF images, ie. something that DOS is perfectly willing to load and execute)

exikyut 8y ago

I'm really curious - why 200 machines needed rebooting - how this program achieved that without any form of networking -- Also, the closest other thing I'm aware of with a similar size-to-profit ratio is K: > Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.” > Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled. - http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320* http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320*

mmjaa 8y ago
The machines needed rebooting because of bugs further upstream in the stack - these were the bad ol' days of DOS, and each system was really being used as a client to the database backend. For whatever reason, the sysadmins decided to reboot them daily as part of their shutdown procedure - if I recall, it was because of a bug in one of the myriad TSR's that were loaded to make the systems work properly on the network, something to do with not getting accurate clock settings from the network - and indeed, they were all networked over 10Base2 .. so maybe that was it. It was a really fun and easy hack to make. ;)