8 ms·
Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jasonpeacock 5y agoI love this. This is what makes the internet the beautiful, amazing place that it is - anyone can publish and you get these highly specialized, well-written, informative articles on esoteric topics.
- kingcharles 5y agoEspecially stuff you might have come across 40 years ago and it's been sitting at the back of your brain ever since. I recently closed a 20-something year mystery to do with a weird TV advert from the UK in the late 90s. I could never figure out why a certain poster for a musician was on the wall in a room. Fast forward to 2021 and I managed to hunt down the writer of the advert who had some background info, and then put me in touch with the director and we figured it out and had a laugh about it. And I contacted the musician who was very happy to also have the mystery closed. It's nice to check off a 20-year-old item on your TO DO list.
- jnsie 5y agoThat sounds really interesting. Any chance you could share more details?
- thom 5y agoVery much seconded!
- kingcharles 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847039
- creeble 5y ago3rded!
- kingcharles 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29847039
- kingcharles 5y agoSure! So, this advert went out in I think, 1998, according to the writer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKS_yw4MqAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKS_yw4MqAA It features a poster of Griff Pilchard on the wall. Now, when I was 16 my crush loaned me a tape of Griff Pilchard which she treasured. It was totally bizarre, but I love it in its weird way. But, as far as the Internet was concerned in the 90s and into the 2000s, Griff Pilchard did not exist. Even in 2022, very little exists about the man and his music. He is a ghost. Anyway, when that advert aired in 1998 it was the only reference I had seen anywhere, outside the cassette, to the man's actual existence. The man himself did finally turn up on Facebook, but he was as baffled as I was about the advert because: a) No-one on Earth has heard of him b) He's never had any posters c) That isn't his face on the poster So, to have "his" face on a poster on a major national TV advert that ran constantly for months was unexplainable. Anyway, I recently managed to find the writer of the advert. He explained that the director had decided on the subject of the poster and had dressed up in a wig to make it. He'd mentioned Griff Pilchard to the rest of the staff, but they had no idea who he was talking about. It was nice to get an explanation after 20 years of it bugging me. The advert would pop up from time to time in the media and each time it did I couldn't figure it out. Now I've been able to check it off. I sent the info to Griff Pilchard and he was very happy to also know what the fuck it was all about.
- jnsie 5y agoThat's amazing! :-) Thanks for sharing!
- ComputerGuru 5y agoThere's a really good NPR podcast about this very kind of thing, where there's a guy who's been hunting down a particular "musical tone" for more than a decade, and it talks both about how hard it is to be the kind of person that needs those answers, the process of arriving at an answer (including many, many false starts and red herrings), and the satisfaction that comes from figuring it out. I don't want to spoil it, but the tremendous tragedy/irony is that a certain class of people within the IT industry could have answered the guy's question (or at least put him definitively on the right track) after hearing it just one time, which I think is actually a really important lesson to fully internalize: whatever thing that's been haunting/daunting you, if you get lucky enough to just mention it in front of that one right person you'll be immediately closer to an answer than if you spent literally ten years chasing it without their insight. I'm not a huge podcast (or any audio/visual media) advocate, but this one is worth listening to if you're stuck in the car or something: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/516/stuck-in-the-middle/act-one-3 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/516/stuck-in-the-middle/act...
- Hallucinaut 5y agoIf you like that one, you may enjoy this one too (which has much more of a mystery to it imho) https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx
- pilsetnieks 5y agoI was listening to that episode while riding a bus and I was almost screaming internally the whole time. I knew exactly what that song was and by whom, and had a dusty old low quality mp3 still on some harddrive at home, possibly acquired through less than legal means at least some 15 years ago.
- Hallucinaut 5y agoAmazing! That must have been very interesting as the show did a good job leading one to think it was a dead end.
- LaserDiscMan 5y agoThis is exactly why I miss IMDB's "I need to know" board. You could post a partially correct memory snippet from decades ago and someone would chime in with the answer. I had memories of movies I'd watched on TV as a young child. I had no name or context, but simply little moments stuck in my brain, and someone was able to resolve those to a title. The closing of the IMDB message boards was a terrible loss IMO. You could visit an obscure actors message board, and you might run into someone who knew them. You could discuss a movie's intricacies with someone, and share theories, etc, on the specific board for that movie. It was a goldmine for movie fans, and I still miss it.
- jacquesm 5y agoI've had the same with some music and even from pretty vague descriptions about tempo and content some people were able to find a couple of pieces that I thought I'd never hear again.
- jorvi 5y agoI wish there was something like that for books. I remember reading a book in my youth about a kid that lived in a shielded city with an AI controlling it with the assignment to keep everyone ‘happy’ (= docile). He/she breaks protocol and gets ejected through a trash chute. Meets an old man. Crossed a wasteland and finds old ruins, learns something and then blows up the shielding of the city to make it free again. In the Dutch translation either the old man or the main character was called ‘gull’ or ‘sea gull’. I’ve posted on a few subreddits and forums with people pretty much ignoring, and I have scoured Google without much results neither.
- kingcharles 5y agoHere's the one for books: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthatbook/ https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthatbook/
- quercusa 5y agoTry https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-identification https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-ident... - they solve this kind of thing all the time.
- iforgotmypass 5y agoPerhaps someone could help out solve my 20 year old mystery? When I was a kid, I had briefly access to a computer. My memory might be mistaken on the details, but I just can't find on Google what kind of computer it was. It had 5 inch floppies, I am pretty sure that games on it only used four colors (cyan, magenta, white, black). I think it had joystick similar to Atari's. It had Bubble Bobble game. Edit: Photos of Commodore computers look really close to what I remember, but not exactly. Also, Latvia (where I live) just recently had regained independece from USSR and it was a time when the market was flooded with clones for everything. E.g. instead of NES kids had famiclones like Zhiliton, UFO or in my case, I think it was Dendy. Edit: Floppy reader was in-built, not external, as far as I remember. Edit: Sorry, more like 30-year mystery. Somewhere around beginning of 90s. Edit: I think it also had game Alley Cat. Edit: Thank you everyone for chiming in! This inspired me and gave extra keywords for further investigation and narrowing down the exact model / make. Gonna continue searching on Sunday.
- gtirloni 5y agoCheck here: https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/
- jacquesm 5y agoThat sounds like CGA. Could have been any IBM compatible, can you describe the shape of the case and whether or not the floppy drive(s) were built in or external?
- samwillis 5y agoI think we need a little more info, roughy date, location? Some computers were very regional.
- mewse-hn 5y agoYou could click through the different platforms bubble bobble was released for on mobygames to see which one looks familiar. The DOS version seems to have had a CGA 4-color mode but it wasn't cyan/magenta. Amstrad CPC looks like a candidate: https://www.mobygames.com/game/cpc/bubble-bobble/screenshots https://www.mobygames.com/game/cpc/bubble-bobble/screenshots
- jonny_eh 5y agoIs PC DOS the predecessor to MS-DOS, made strictly for IBM? How many versions were there and when did Microsoft change it?
- thanatos519 5y agoIt was IBM's OEM version of MS-DOS, more or less. Random Google result: https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/my-dos-version-can-beat-up-your-dos-version/ https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/my-dos-versi...
- guerrilla 5y agoYes. PC DOS 7.1 was the last version, i.e. it continued development in parallel with MS-DOS. The whole history can be found here [1]. All versions including their amazing (they're really good) manuals are available on WinWorld [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS 2. https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-dos/1x https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-dos/1x
- nigel_bree 5y agoYeah, just to confirm that for v7.1, we got a full source license of it for Symantec Ghost because Microsoft had withdrawn permission for us to distribute anything at all to do with MS-DOS, and we had a lot of customers still using DOS boot disks. Prior to that I believe we had a distribution license for PC-DOS but around that point IBM no longer wanted to maintain it and we had small things we needed to do, so we got the source license and just distributed builds we made as part of the Ghost Boot Wizard disk builder. What was more interesting from a software archaeology point of view was when I found Symantec had acquired the assets of the then-defunct Quarterdeck; so the source for QEMM and Desqview eventually turned up in the corporate Perforce server and that was certainly fun to read, having made all kinds of things for QEMM back in the day, like a replacement overlay manager for Turbo Pascal (and Turbo C++) that would run overlay code segments directly out of the EMS page frame - this meant pretty much any program we built with the Borland compilers could be turned into a TSR with only the data segment resident. The one thing that I never did find, though, was the source for the Whitewater Group's Actor. When it was announced that Symantec had acquired those assets from Borland I tried as hard as I could to see if the Actor source code was included but no-one I was ever able to find knew about that. Actor 3.0 was my first introduction to the Smalltalk way of building software, and I still sometimes fire it up in a VM to play enough with its VM format.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 5y agoThe first person to make this discovery (as far as we can tell) was Daniel B. Sedory aka The Starman, whose illustrated PC DOS 1.1 boot sector page is much nicer than anything I could put together. I highly recommend his site too --- there's plenty of boot-sector analyses there, explanations of the PC boot process, and other low-level information presented in fast-loading, script-free ad-free HTML from someone whose goal isn't to make a quick $$$, but rather to share information freely. In other words, a great resource of the "document web". As for this article, it also reminds me of "junk DNA" sequences, which could have similar relevance to biological historians.
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoIf he's still updating the site, someone tell him that the mystery of the mystery bytes has been solved… https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/mystery.htm https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/mystery.htm https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/14309/ https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/14309/
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoUninitialised memory in development tools can have very interesting results! There's a Game Boy Color game that contained HTML from a porn site in an uninitialised region: https://tcrf.net/DynaMike https://tcrf.net/DynaMike
- dividuum 5y agoWow. That site is great. Thank for linking.
- stevefan1999 5y agoso did that mean...the game itself could be theoretically 18+ since it contained implicit references to pornography?
- TurkTurkleton 5y agoWhile there is precedent[0] for reclassifying a game based on content included on the distribution medium but not normally accessible within the game as released, I think you would have a hard time making that case here since you're probably going to have a much harder time inducing a GBC game to render an HTML document or JPEG image. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(mod) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(mod)
- anyfoo 5y agoI will recount one mystery that I personally wondered about for decades, and that coincidentally the author of this article might have shed most light on: The 386 was the first x86 processor to introduce four "Control Registers", CR0-CR3. The first one, CR0, was technically already introduced with the 286, but then still named "Machine Status Word" and manipulated with its own set of different , explicit instructions (that still survive to this day). Now, if you look at Intel's documentation of the 386, or any later CPU in the line--including today's Intel CPUs in Laptops, Desktops, and Servers--you will see that the second of those registers, CR1, is entirely "reserved". No single bit in it can be accessed, neither reading or writing. This is bizarre not only because CR1 was introduced by the 386 along with CR2 and CR3 (which are defined and common), but also because the successor, the 486, introduced a new Control Register, CR4, instead of starting to use reserved bits in CR1. This is despite CR4 sharing its characteristics with CR0 (and unlike e.g. CR2): It's mostly a bit field for global processor state. So while you could have assumed that CR1 existed as planned "overflow" to add new control bits to once CR0 became full, the seemingly simple addition of CR4 in the immediate successor goes against that theory. Decades ago, I even wrote to the 386's chief architect to try to settle that question... he must have not understood my question, because he just replied that according to Intel documentation, that register is "reserved". But incidentally, a while ago I talked about that mystery with the author of this article, and received the most plausible theory so far: It turns out that an early pre-release document shows that the 386 was originally planned to contain an on-chip cache. Evidently, that part of the plan must have been scrapped, because the 386 shipped without an on-chip cache, which was only added with the 486 (maybe they ran into problems with implementing a cache controller, or maybe at the time so much on-chip SRAM would have made for a prohibitive price point). It is therefore not unlikely that CR1 was once meant, and in prototypes maybe even did, control the cache. Once that cache was removed, CR1 was just made "reserved", and not repurposed in the 486 and later CPUs out of an abundance of caution for compatibility: Accessing CR1 reliably causes an Undefined Opcode trap, and maybe some important software at the time relied on that in a bad way.
- raverbashing 5y agoNow I wonder if inside the modern Intel processor silicon that register actually exists (and what's it actually plugged into?)
- Stratoscope 5y agoI had my own misadventure with uninitialized memory in the late 1970s when I was working at Tymshare. I was maintaining the assembler and linker for one of our machines (I think it was the PDP-10 but could have been the Sigma 7). The linker had a bad habit of leaving unused memory uninitialized. Every time you linked a program, the binary would be different. Functionally the same, but they wouldn't compare byte for byte. So my manager asked me to make sure the linker zeroed out all unused memory. After linking a program, the linker printed a message something like this: 8412 bytes used 439 bytes free The linker was a mess of spaghetti assembly code, and it was a real pain to find and fix all of the places where it failed to clear memory. My manager knew what a hassle this task was, and he was fairly chill, so just for fun I added a temporary message meant for his eyes only: 8412 bytes used 439 bytes free and it's pretty fucking clean I figured he would get a laugh out of this and then I'd remove it. Unfortunately he wasn't the first to see the message. His manager was giving a demo to a customer and they saw the message. Oops. Later we wanted to add a "weak external" feature to the assembler and linker, something like the "weak reference" that a few modern languages have. If the external was missing, then instead of failing the link step, it would leave a zero that you would check at runtime. The regular external directive was called EXTERN, and the tradition was for these names to be very short. I thought of calling it WEXTERN but then decided to call the feature a "secondary external", so the directive was SEXTERN!
- samus 5y agoIt sounds eerily like geneticists trying to decipher where a gene or a piece of "junk" DNA came from and what they do.