2 ms·

Nice, I hadn't heard of this project before! In particular BOOTSTRA [1] looks really fun. I have also toyed with the idea of using MS-DOS 3.30 as a guaranteed

Nice, I hadn't heard of this project before! In particular BOOTSTRA [1] looks really fun. I have also toyed with the idea of using MS-DOS 3.30 as a guaranteed-ubiquitous build environment. It comes with a filesystem, a text editor (EDLIN.EXE), an object file linker (yup!), a debugger/assembler (DEBUG.EXE is an amazing tool), a programming language with decent string handling (GWBASIC.EXE), and a command interpreter with batch file scripting to glue it all together. Not sure I would write the assembler as batch files though, that is really hardcore. :) That entire build environment would fit on a single 360KB floppy. [1] https://github.com/mniip/BOOTSTRA https://github.com/mniip/BOOTSTRA

pabs3 6y ago
I don't think that BOOTSTRA is in any way involved in the process bootrappable.org are working on, which starts with hex0 (the 512B machine code binary seed), proceeds through a ton of layers and eventually reaches non-interactive bash. https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...
- gigel82 6y ago
  That repo is very cool. I want to see them build further on it, go through recursive gcc / clang versions, etc. all the way to a kernel.
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
What is "guaranteed-ubiquitous" about DOS 3.30?
- kiwidrew 6y ago
  There are (still!) a lot of copies floating around -- both online and offline -- and it runs on the most pervasive commodity platform that ever existed: 16 bit real mode x86. Those binaries will boot on anything from an ancient IBM PC with an 8088 CPU all the way through to fairly recent x86 systems (if they still have legacy BIOS boot support).
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    You have a different meaning of "guaranteed" and "ubiquitous". It wouldn't be defensible to use those descriptors for Windows XP. In a word, it would be wrong. Calling DOS 3.30 "guaranteed-ubiquitous" is even wronger than that.

pabs3 6y ago

I don't think that BOOTSTRA is in any way involved in the process bootrappable.org are working on, which starts with hex0 (the 512B machine code binary seed), proceeds through a ton of layers and eventually reaches non-interactive bash. https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...

gigel82 6y ago
That repo is very cool. I want to see them build further on it, go through recursive gcc / clang versions, etc. all the way to a kernel.

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago

What is "guaranteed-ubiquitous" about DOS 3.30?

kiwidrew 6y ago
There are (still!) a lot of copies floating around -- both online and offline -- and it runs on the most pervasive commodity platform that ever existed: 16 bit real mode x86. Those binaries will boot on anything from an ancient IBM PC with an 8088 CPU all the way through to fairly recent x86 systems (if they still have legacy BIOS boot support).
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  You have a different meaning of "guaranteed" and "ubiquitous". It wouldn't be defensible to use those descriptors for Windows XP. In a word, it would be wrong. Calling DOS 3.30 "guaranteed-ubiquitous" is even wronger than that.