27 ms·

“Was isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486. Built my own late 80s OS”

1284 points by shalmanese 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Igglyboo 12y ago
What was your experience level before you started this? I'm about to graduate with a degree in computer science and I would love to work on a long term project like this but I feel like I could never accomplish something remotely close to the complexity involved in your project, especially without outside help like the internet.
- percept 12y ago
  Reminds me of the story recently about the guy who built a game over what, ten years or so? (Can't find a link right now.)
  - reefab 12y ago
    "Babylonian twins"? Made by a Iraqi starting in the 90s. http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.p...
  - abbeyj 12y ago
    Tobias and the Dark Sceptres? http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/ http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/
  - Lrigikithumer 12y ago
    Dwarf Fortress? Who's development is ongoing?
  - percept 12y ago
    Ha, no IIRC he began in college in the 90's, developing for the Windows platform, and finished it many years later, and his post documented its evolution and had the same sort of feel of working with outdated technologies, but seeing it through to the end.
- shalmanese 12y ago
  Note: I am not the person in the imgur. The title was changed after I submitted to one that is, IMHO, much more confusing. (original title was "An Australian, isolated from 1999-2006 with a 486. Built his own late 80s OS").
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  My experience level with computers was minimal; I had basic knowledge of running games from the DOS prompt or a particular type of DOS Shell that my dad had set up on our home computer. Other than that, I had no knowledge. I didn't know anything about processor power, RAM, etc. I'm not sure if it's used for anything anymore, but QBASIC is, I believe, freely available on Microsofts legacy FTP. It's a very safe and easy to use environment to learn about putting together some basic programs (hence the name BASIC?). If you learned to say, build a calculator in QBASIC, it wouldn't be hard to take that programming knowledge and move it across to a modern language like C.
centizen 12y ago
This OS is interesting enough on it's own, but I want to hear more of the story of how and why it was created.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I wrote it up as best as I could in the imgur description, but I'll see if I can summarize it here. Basically, I was without any modern resources for quite some time. I had a 486, QBASIC and EDIT.com to play with; the rest of the DOS exes etc I didn't want to touch out of fear of buggering up my system as I wasn't very computer literate. My library had two 1970s books on BASIC which I loaned out (Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan) and with nothing else to do in the hours after school, I decided to try my hand at it. I played around with it for a bit and built a really primitive "DOS Clone", which relied on a simple series of INPUT's, PRINT's, IF / THEN statements and GOTO. I then also began experimenting with the ASCII Character map which was included in the QBASIC help file, and realized that if I used the correct ASCII codes, I was able to form visualizations on the screen, simple GUIs etc. I combined the two and began adding more and more functionality to it until I eventually named it "OSCI" ("Aussie"). That's pretty much all there was to it. How: An old 486, QBASIC, and lots of free time Why: Boredom, curiosity.
WoodenChair 12y ago
The story sounds like it has some significant parallels to that of Julian Assange in his teenage years (at least as depicted in the movie Underground). Is he an inspiration to you?
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I haven't seen the movie, but I have read once that he used to sleep to orange lights as he believed humans would sleep better to it after being accustomed to sleeping by the light of a fire for many many years. I'll have to look into his early years and see, although I was probably nowhere near. I was a very emotionally unstable and unusual kid after the move to the country. I had zero social skills and a lot of post traumatic stress disorder from events at home. My methods to socializing and living in general were very odd. I hoarded food and possessions as the cupboards at home were often (but not always) padlocked to keep me from picking my own food out. I would hunt around in bins for discarded food or 5 cent coins to save for canteen food and was referred to as a "scab" quite a bit, but I tended to ignore this, even though I was probably seen as one of "Those oddball kids". I had very little value placed on my reputation. A lot of my possessions were often confiscated, and anything of special value (ie gifts from my dad) were often smashed and broken in front of me. I had a beautiful Carramar Lava Lamp once that he purchased for me which was destroyed by my stepfather to stop me from staying up at night and using it to read. The trait still sticks with me now; I don't hoard general junk, but I am extremely protective of my current possessions. Not sure if this ties in with Julian Assanges story. Again I'll have to check it out. He sounds like a very intriguing person.
pm 12y ago
I relate somewhat to poster's situation, as one of my half-brothers had a somewhat related experience in rural NT, sans the happy ending. If the poster is reading HN, I'd be happy to catch you up on the state of Australian tech. My e-mail is in my profile.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I'm certainly reading! And with great interest at that, it's very interesting hearing of the other Australians who were in similar situations. I find it interesting too how a lot of those from America and other countries are quick to criticize the story and are shocked at how "you didn't have a mobile phone at age 13!?" or "I don't believe for a second that he didn't have an ADSL connection in rural Australia in 2002", or even the assumption that all our public schools in the outback of Australia were equipped with the latest in Pentium technology when in fact, some were as far back as 15 years out of date. Thanks for the invite too. I don't know where I'd start with modern tech. I've been building up more knowledge over the years and started by purchasing each individual part to build my own system in 2009. I'm no whiz but I'd say I have a reasonable degree of literacy nowadays. The one thing I could use help with is getting started in modern programming. My head appears to still be stuck in the idea of using a simple text-editor-style compiler with no additional libraries, headers, (linkers?) etc required. I had a bit of trouble finding good tutorials that actually supplied the relevant libraries, headers etc for the code they were explaining, so it became difficult when they would expect that every new programmer knows straight away what the SDL header is for example, and where it can be acquired from.
  - pm 12y ago
    Outback public schools are lucky if they're equipped with more than one toilet. There are many good tutorials on the Internet for a lot of things, but many make assumptions for things that aren't specifically code-related (libraries, linking, etc) that can be frustrating when you're starting. Consider it a rite of passage. If you have any questions on anything (there's no such thing as a dumb question), again feel free to e-mail.
lake99 12y ago
Fascinating story. If it's any consolation to the author, some of us still use Vi/Emacs, do batch processing in shell scripts, run complicated commands from the command prompt. And when it's time to take a break for some gaming, launch NetHack or some other roguelike -- in a terminal. To hazard a guess, the biggest "wow" programming languages for the author now would be Python and JavaScript.
dpcan 12y ago
I'd love to go back to those days... 486 with DOS and QBasic, maybe a Borland C compiler if you're lucky enough to have a local computer store that sold copies. Myself and a friend tried to create our own version of Windows 3.1 in QBasic when we were in middle school. I wish we would have saved our progress. I don't think it was as far as long as I remember. I know it read INI files, and we could drag windows around. Not sure how much else. OP got to learn how to program the fun way, like a lot of us did in the 90's. Grinding away at crazy side projects on old DOS systems with lots of limitations. That opportunity just isn't available to kids anymore. High powered computers are everywhere and accessible, no reason to make an old PC do new tricks. But I guess they have the web to do crazy things with, so it's not so bad.
twoodfin 12y ago
Nitpick: It's essentially impossible that a 486 would come with 64KB of RAM. My 8088 XT clone in '88 came with 640KB. 4-16MB would be more common for the time.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  Was it a PC-compatible? If so he might have had more memory but been unable to address it because he was running in Real Mode.
  - metric10 12y ago
    I'm not aware of a non-PC compatible that had an 80486. In any event, real mode can address up to 1MB of memory, with 640KB available to programs. But I do think you are right. If all he had was DOS and QBASIC, he had no way to go into protected mode. He probably just dropped the 0 by mistake.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      No, he means 64 kB segments, which is what he had to deal with in the menu based file manager he wrote in QBASIC. That much should be clear if you read between the lines (the goto based text adventures etc.).
- rsync 12y ago
  from another comment... "The confusion likely stems from the various limits which existed when running qbasic in real mode on a 486. Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS. Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic."
phpnode 12y ago
Something about this story does not sound quite right to me. If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian_isolated_from_1999_to_2006_with_a_486/cmtpdr5 http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian...
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  People who get big projects done don't really play lots of games. Carmack, for example, has said he doesn't actually play any. It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.
  - Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
    Check out Notch's Twitch broadcast history[1]. Since Mojang was sold he has been playing a variety of games, but scroll down a bit and it mostly turns into live programming and Team Fortress 2. 1. http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      The earliest broadcast is titled "Notch: Creator of Minecraft," from August 2011. Minecraft was released in 2009. So those videos aren't really evidence one way or the other in regards to what I'm saying: people who do big solo projects don't seem to play many games during the time they're hammering out features. And while Notch's LD sprints are impressive, he hasn't really shipped a big project since Minecraft.
      - sillysaurus3 12y ago
        Whoops, I just noticed I phrased my original comment like "I wonder how many games Notch plays" (present tense) which is exactly what you showed. I meant to phrase it in past tense. Sorry, that was my bad.
stuff4ben 12y ago
I had a similar although not as tragic story of my own. My parents were poor (dad was in the USAF) so we couldn't get a Commodore 64 or Apply IIe/IIc like everyone else had. We got a Commodore Plus/4 because they were literally giving them away. Since I couldn't buy any games for it and there was hardly any software available, I taught myself BASIC and made my own games. Fast-forward 30 years (geez I'm getting old) and now I'm fairly successful (in my own mind) as a software engineer at a Fortune 100 company. I credit being deprived by my parents for becoming interested in computers like I am today.
- percept 12y ago
  At least it had real keys...
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Starting on an Atari 400 probably is the reason I have become so picky about keyboards.
    - pronoiac 12y ago
      I remember having indented fingertips.
- dmpk2k 12y ago
  Likewise here. In my case it was a Dragon 32 in the 486 era.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    That was an absolutely awesome little machine. Did you ever figure out that it really has 64K of usable RAM?
    - dmpk2k 12y ago
      I think the Dragon 32 really did only have 32KB RAM, but yeah, the full 32KB wasn't typically accessible. Part of it went to video RAM, and part of it went elsewhere, so quite a bit less was available to use by default. However, there was some hackery you could do to get close to usable 32KB for your program, although I never did that. My tape drive never worked properly, so my programs were naturally very short… When I graduated to a 286 (in the Pentium era), that was a pretty special moment. It had a 42MB HD!
wslh 12y ago
i) In 1990 I was using a VAX computer in high school shared by a whole class and programming in Pascal. The compilation process (executed in a compilation queue) could take a few minutes or half an hour depending of how many people and processes were running that day. I wanted to imitate this stuff in my Amiga 500, so I joined a friend who knew about electronics and he removed a Commodore 64 keyboard and made the interface to connect to the Amiga as a second keyboard. I made the software in assembler to use the same computer with a single monitor in two windows using two keyboards. A bizarre but funny project. ii) In 1992 I wanted to make my own graphical operating system. Not in the real sense but in the Windows 3.0 sense. I started doing this in Turbo Pascal and at some point I stopped because my multitasking was cooperative just realizing a few years later that Windows (and Apple!) used this basic strategy too. I felt ashamed of them.
- stuff4ben 12y ago
  you were spoilt by the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking. It's funny I recall "pre-emptive multitasking" being a big selling point of the Amiga's OS, but I never understood it at the time, I just knew it was better.
  - wslh 12y ago
    In which project (i) or (ii) ? On (i) I took advantage of the preemptive multitasking being able to use the computer by two people in the same computer monitor. On (ii) I knew that the Amiga was superior than a PC but I had access to more documentation and better programming languages (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++) on the PC. In the Amiga you ended up doing multimedia stuff with a lot of hardware information about the coprocessors and DMA while in the PC was more straightforward.
andsmi2 12y ago
This quote hurt my head "Windows 2000..., which was basically like 98, but crappier." But provided context for the entire thing.
- tbrock 12y ago
  Agreed, basically the most incorrect thing I've ever read on the Internet. Windows 2000 was amazing.
  - ArcticCelt 12y ago
    Windows 2000 is one of my favorite OS. I barely used XP because I liked it so much I almost went straight from 2000 to windows 7.
    - stevekemp 12y ago
      Mine too - All the stability of Windows NT 4, but with the addition of USB so I could use "modern stuff". Of all the versions of Windows I've ever used 2000 was my favourite.
  - pmarin 12y ago
    All depend on which hardware it runned.
- chambo622 12y ago
  That quote definitely doesn't make sense. Maybe he's thinking of Windows ME, widely regarded as being worse than 98? It's an odd thing to mix up for anyone familiar with the two.
  - tripa 12y ago
    It's quite possible he was not familiar with 2000 at the time (consumer vs enterprise), and conflated the both afterwards, because no one really talks about ME anymore.
- guessbest 12y ago
FrankenPC 12y ago
Where did he get the books? When I was a kid, the DOS interrupt bible was something I turned into a dog-eared nightmare. I wonder if he had access to technical books through his school maybe?
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I had access to two programming books; Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan which I loaned out (and frequently over-loaned) from my high school library. I searched intensely during lunch periods at the library for other books on anything related to computers and programming, but I don't recall any other notable computer books. The books I had loaned out however were dated 1977 - 1978 according to a recent google search. Very obsolete for the time. I'm tempted to call the high school library and see if I can buy them, since they'd be even more so useless for any student who wants to get into programming now. Better yet, it's just given me an idea, if they still haven't updated their books on programming, I might even see if I can buy a few good modern books on C / Python etc and donate them to the library, along with software. Who knows, it might stop someone else from ending up the same way I did.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wtbob 12y ago
> I took another shot at coding this year to see if I could build anything interesting in C++, but the difference between something like QBASIC and a full blown C++ IDE just ended up baffling me more than anything else, and I struggled for a bit. That's a really damning statement about our modern software ecosystem. You see what this guy was able to put together as a kid, and it's impressive. Sure, it was close to 20 years out of date, but it was good-looking and (appears) usable. Why isn't it as easy for him, with the knowledge he's accumulated, to build software with modern languages, modern tools and and modern libraries as it was for him to build software with BASIC?
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  I think that's a great question and I could list some contributing factors but I think a thorough answer could upset a lot of people. I lost 100+ karma just for some criticism of Apple ;-) Yeah, let's critique all the modern languages, tools and libraries--that will go over real well here.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Who says it isn't? Maybe C++ just wasn't a good choice for someone coming from BASIC.
- Lrigikithumer 12y ago
  I would definitely put that down to experience, C++ is a much different beast to QBasic. Qbasic being geared towards beginners, C++ being geared towards professionals. I mean it's the difference between a tool box 70 years ago (Software lives by dog years) and a tool box today, the tools you will find are vastly different, and even though you can build a house with the tools from 70 years ago, that does not necessarily mean you will be able to travel forward in time and build a house with todays tools because you have zero experience with it.
- Rygu 12y ago
  The truth. Take web development. If you're willing to look objectively at the state of HTML5 and the lack of feature support for browsers (that stick around), then yes we've established many good specs and communities, however for the enduser comparing it to Flash back in the days, nothing different. At least Flash development was easy. goes back to building JS and CSS files with his frontend build system, and testing in IE8
codezero 12y ago
I had a 486 in 1991. If this person had one from 1999 to 2006 I'm amazed it didn't suffer repeated hardware failures. Hard drives die often. I want to believe this isn't true because it's too depressing. I want to believe it's true because people deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- inDigiNeous 12y ago
  Why wouldn't it be true? The terms used in the article are misleading though, like many people have already pointed out. Not an OS, a shell, I don't even know if you can build an OS with QBASIC alone, maybe with some assembler support, but I don't recall qbasic supporting assembler, at least without any binary tricks ?
  - orangecomputer 12y ago
    I've amended the original imgur post to reflect this. You're 100% correct, it's not an actual OS. but rather a primitive GUI of sorts that is an imitation/representation of what I perceive to be an 80s OS.
    - unexistance 12y ago
      heyya OP, I love CLI, so I really dig what you did here :D for now it runs under QBasic only?
      - orangecomputer 12y ago
        Yep, so far it's just for QBASIC. I can't see much point in resurrecting it or attempting to port it, but if I ever get into C#/C++/another modern language, I will likely focus on writing new and more interesting apps.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Today I still have a working Pentium 1 with hard disks in full operating order. As for the 486, I brought it down to my dads when I moved, and switched to using his much more modern system. It did eventually "die" in 2007-2008. My dad threw it out after the clock chip failed on the motherboard. I was pretty bummed because it sounds like a fairly straightforward fix / such a minor issue, but he's as sentimental as I and referred to it as "an old clunker".
iamcreasy 12y ago
Astonishing story. I'd like to meed this guy and have a coffee with him. I have a similar story but not as harsh as his. I started programming basic(not sure which variant) on a small hand held system CASIO PB700. One this system I've created a Paranoid clone and a 4 frame ascii animation. My father saw my aptitude on programming he introduced me to his more advanced systems. He was a computer engineer and had an habit of buying new systems in 1980s. On the newer systems(I don't recall the name) I learned Turbo Pascel. Back then those systems didn't have any storage. MSDOS had to be booted from one 5 inch floppy drive and a new disk had to be inserted to get the different programs. Every time you compile and run a program, it would take a couple of minutes to read the compiler from the 5inch floppy disk. Those floppy disks were fragile and they had a tendency to developed bad sectors after a frequent read-write session. To circumvent this, my father deployed a ramdrive on the system. A drive would be created inside the ram every time the system boots up, and it would copy the Turbo Pascel compilers and all relevant libraries to that ram drive. So next time you hit 'run', it would take seconds instead of minutes. This solutions still blows away my mind. Another thing about these old machines, they all came with monochrome monitors. It was all green and had a very low refresh rate. Every time there was a large change on the display, you could still see the previous characters being faded away. Like matrix. Later I had access to better machines(Pentium 1 133Mhz), but haven't forgot those days. I wish I had more information about those systems to post here, but I am long way from home. Back at home those systems are still all packed up and stacked on top on one another. The funny thing - all them work as if they are 'brand new'.
- anopheles 12y ago
  My first programming platform was basic on the Casio FX-702P, I remember reading the manual and realising what programming was all about... oh the sense of wonder and possibility on a 9 year-old. The peak of my achievement was a version of E.T. for it (my cousin had an Atari 2600 and to my little brain that was a pretty cool game). I saved my programs by writing them down on a notebook, as my dad never got any peripherals for it...
  - iamcreasy 12y ago
    Going through the wiki page of Casio FX-702P reminds me how far we've come. Fascinating.
curiously 12y ago
did a similar thing in the late 90s. I didn't have a computer besides an old 286 with monochrome monitor because my parents would not let me use a brand new computer because it would affect my school studies as I would play games (they weren't wrong). I discovered a program called qbasic and started fooling around with it. I did whatever I could on it. It was so interesting. Then after about a year I got a fast computer because my dad felt sorry for me and I just started using the internet to download emulators and roms. I lost the same level of patience back when I used to have a 286. Anyways I still remember those times. Magical moments like figuring out how to program. I wonder what would've happened if I had kept going. Sadly, the internet and video games completely took over.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Exactly what happened to me in 2006 when I left the country. I wanted to catch up on everything; I had Deus Ex, the Quake series, DOOM etc to get through. Now if I try and code something, there are too many distractions, yet when you're sitting in a silent basement, your ideas tend to fill your head pretty quick (+ many a hot dull afternoon at school).
pjbrunet 12y ago
Looks like typical apps we all created during the early 90s. I taught my little brother Pascal in what seemed like a few minutes (I think he was in 5th grade) and within a weekend he created a file manager that would blow this one away. My brother is very smart but my point is, coding some DOS games or a file manager is not anything remarkable, even if you only had the manual to work from. Most developers during that time period worked from a manual. We did not have StackExchange, haha. Where do you think RTFM comes from? I'm surprised this is trending. If you want to see what was typical of the early 90s, take a look at the Graphics Gems books http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/0122861663 http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/012... every bookstore in the US had Graphics Gems.
brandonmenc 12y ago
This isn't an OS - it's closer to a DOS shell, like Central Point's PC Tools.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Yep, it's more or less a shell. I probably should've clarified it a bit better in the imgur description. It's basically a dos shell representitive of my rendition of a "late 1980s OS".
  - marvin 12y ago
    Would just like to say thanks for your really fascinating story :) This is the intellectual highlight of my day. Don't let the naysayers get to you. Not sure what you're doing at the moment, but I'm sure you've directed your technical skills towards something that pays well and acquired new ones in the meantime :) The projects you describe here are obviously works of love that show great technical talent. Too bad you didn't have access to better learning resources at an earlier point in time, but learning is thankfully a multi-decade project. (I also hope your P.O.S. stepfather got what was coming to him in the end).
    - brandonmenc 12y ago
      > Don't let the naysayers get to you. Clarification of facts is not naysaying. I think what they did was impressive and interesting.
      - marvin 12y ago
        I wasn't referring to you; I just found a plausible place to reply to OP. There were plenty of real naysayers in the thread, though. And even more that were just very insensitive. (Again, I'm not referring to you).
    - orangecomputer 12y ago
      Thanks for your comments. Technically, the naysayers haven't bothered me too much, but a lot of people seem irked (and rightfully) that it was initially mistermed as an Operating System when in fact a simple shell of sorts. I have amended the imgur description since however. As for what I'm doing at the moment, I'm a Lead Quality Assurance Analyst for a video games company. I love what I do, but as for pay, it's less than half the minimum wage. Goes to show that I REALLY love what I do I suppose, but I would really like to do something more technical someday. Perhaps special effects or something of the like. I'd say the works were definitely a very important part of my life, although they were not necessarily a technical triumph by any means. I still claim that they're nothing more than a series of cheap hackery and tricks, but hey, even a Magicians work will entertain and amaze, even if it's not "really" happening you know? My stepfather is still out there, but both time and emphysema will catch him in the end, so I try not to concern myself too much with it. Nature and tobacco will do its work.
adrusi 12y ago
While I don't have a story quite like OP's, I wanted to share my experiences with old-school programming in more recent history. In middle and high school (2008-2014), I had access to modern hardware, the internet and all those lovely things at home. At school, though, I didn't have access to a computer most of the time, and yet I wanted to program. What I did have though, was a TI-84+SE graphing calculator, with a z80 cpu clocked at 15MHz and 24/128K accessible/total RAM, and 1.5/2.0MB of ROM. Most teachers didn't really care if I just stuck my nose into that thing for the entire class, so often I did just that. For those not familiar with the calculator, it ships with an OS that provides a shell where the user can input mathematical expressions, as well as a graphing interface. It also provides a program editor where the user can write what are essentially shell scripts for the main interface in TI-BASIC, or run machine code written in hex if the program starts with the AsmPrgm token. It also lets you transfer files from a PC using a usb port on the calculator. You could download and install "Apps" for the calculator. When I was 12-14 I mostly wrote small programs, like Pong and a quadratic factorization utility, in TI-BASIC, and played games that I downloaded in class. After a while I tired of TI-BASIC because it was slow, and that limited the possibilities. I downloaded Axe, an App that modifies the code in RAM of Kernel's TI-BASIC editor to allow for programs written in a different language, which was basically assembly + a lot of macros and a standard library useful for writing games, or like C without a type system. This code was compiled to machine code on the calculator, and therefore the code ran at a reasonable speed (keep in mind it's still just a 15MHz cpu from the 70s). With Axe I made some more interesting programs. Unlike with TI-BASIC, where learning the language was easy since the calculators main interface was basically a REPL for the programming language, Axe was hard to learn. I needed to look at external documentation to know what I was dong in Axe, but even though I had a smartphone at this point, I couldn't use it in class, so I printed out the manual to reference it in class. I wrote a bunch of programs in Axe, like a cellular automata simulator, a game of life program, a 4-level grayscale sprite editor (which worked by flickering the pixels of the 1-bit display which had a slow enough response time to create a static gray color if alternated quickly enough). I also learned z80 assembly and used an on-calc assembler and editor called mimas, but editing assembly on-calc was too bothersome with a 64x96 display, so I mostly stuck with Axe. Eventually I stopped being the nerdy kid who played with his calculator all day, but I had fallen in love with the platform, so even though I wasn't writing code in class, I wrote code for the calculator at home, sometimes on my PC and sometimes on the calculator just because I liked that experience more. I'll be sad to see these ancient calculators finally phased out of the math curriculum in the US, so that kids no longer get access to that last stronghold of 80s computing. Raspberry Pi is cool, but it's still so much more modern than the calculators, which hurts its coolness factor for me, but more importantly, kids won't have access to it unless their parents want them to get into computing. Soon I see kids only having hardware that seems impenetrably locked down, which is a real shame.
mariuolo 12y ago
Nice to see how necessity is (still) the mother of invention. BTW, is the guy in jail now?
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Sadly not as far as I know. As proven with the recent attack in Sydney (the guy had been walking free with 40 charges against him), my stepfather was in the precise same position. Multiple charges but walking free because the justice system had catastrophically failed.
robotkilla 12y ago
Throwing my story in the mix: I owned a 386 and a 486 when I was around 9. Hand me down computers. My family was poor and we didn't have the internet and I'm not sure it would have mattered if we did back then. I learned QBASIC and Dos from library books and help files. Made lots of text adventure games and later games with minor graphics. I'm a professional developer now (have been for 12 years). I know multiple languages including python and I still make games on the side as a hobby. I keep seeing stories similar to mine. I really think we (humans) have lost something with new tech. Simple UI breeds users whereas hard seems to breed developers. Edit: typed that out on my phone - made some typo fixes. Also forgot to mention - I never went to school for CS and I dropped out of community college which I attended for graphic design.
ghinda 12y ago
I also have a similar, but definitely not tragic, story. In the late '90s my dad got us a ZX Spectrum, so me and my brother learned BASIC and played Deathchase. Around ~2000 we got a Pentium "75", that is - 75mhz, 16mb ram, 500mb hdd with no cdrom or sound card. I think it had a 2mb S3 video card, and came with Windows 95. At some point, after some tweaks, you could play Mortal Kombat 4 in a very small window, installed from multi-rar archives on around ~20 floppys. We had a lot CDs with games from gaming magazines, with "cool" (or so I thought at the time) HTML/JavaScript autoruns, that ran with Internet Explorer 4. Since most of these games (eg. NFS 3) wouldn't run on my PC, I found out how to "View Source", and I basically learned HTML/CSS/JS from them. In 2003 I sold my first "DHTML" menu widget.
leke 12y ago
When I started reading this, I imagined the author was going to say, isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486 on an island living with a group of scientists called The Dharma Initiative, with no connection to the outside world.
stuaxo 12y ago
He should learn python, after wbasic it was the first language I used that was as easy or fun(after years of java).
kokey 12y ago
I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.
kokey 12y ago
I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.
reitanqild 12y ago
Totally impressed. Yes, not an os but a shell but still impressive. Boredoom can easily lead to creativity it seems. And this guy is smart.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Indeed, I've re-worked the title to include quotes around the "OS" parts as everyone who states that it is a shell is actually correct. I should've termed it better. Indeed having no inspiration or having a lot of boredom leaves the mind to create its own entertainment and innovation, however I'd disagree that I'm smart. My code is merely a series of hackery and visual tricks. It technically -does- do what it is supposed to, but it is nowhere near as maintainable, optimized and well written as the code of that of a talented or seasoned programmer. Thanks for your kind words!
byEngineer 12y ago
And of course the court granted custody to mother wanting to live with a psychopath. So much about sex discrimination in real life. Very different from liberal media portrayed world now, isn't it?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- boomlinde 12y ago
  Yes, those details of the divorce proceedings that you just made up are very different indeed.
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    Oh, details, details, we never look for them when deciding to give three young children to a psychopath ran family
    - boomlinde 12y ago
      The point isn't that they are details. It's that you made them up. You seem to be imagining a scenario where there was a dispute over custody where a court was involved, and that the court, knowing that the mother would move in with a psychopathic criminal, handed custody over to her. I'm not sure what article you read, but the one linked mentions none of that, so I'll assume that this is a figment of a very bitter mind.
      - byEngineer 12y ago
        So you can't draw conclusions? This is basic reading comprehension skill we are talking about here dude.
        boomlinde 12y ago
        I am able to draw conclusions, but when there is no basis for drawing conclusions I won't. What you call conclusion in this case is a pretty elaborate and unreasonable fantasy.
pwr22 12y ago
This guy's mother made a terrible and selfish choice :(, I feel terrible for him
agumonkey 12y ago
Reminded me of the classic 'stuck in a room' reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_exp...
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I guess I've answered the threads question in a sense. Though I wish I'd at least had a basic copy of Windows XP, and a good C++ compiler + some reference books.
sauere 12y ago
QBasic... those were the days. I actually started programming around 2002/2003. At that time QBasic was of course already horribly outdated. But that was what my school teacher was using. We used it to have direct PEAK/POKE access to the LPT-Port (the big, bulky printer port!). So we connected LEDs and other Stuff to the LPT Pins and made them blink with QBasic (and Windows 2000). I still sticked to QBasic a while because i refused to learn anything else and C-Style languages just looked scary to me. By the way, if you are looking for a cool, modern, cross-platform BASIC Compiler take a look at FreeBasic. It started out as a QBasic-kompatible Interpreter but now is a Project on it's own.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  Now that would've been more interesting. I never got to experiment with printing or connecting anything to my own system, but it would've been fun to make something like what you've described. Indeed C was a bit intimidating to me at first. I took up a TAFE games programming course in 2008 to learn it, but our teacher was an ex-banker and didn't seem to really have any enthusiasm for games, and there wasn't really any "games programming" in the course. I left after getting mugged in broad daylight on a busy road (Mount Druitt is absolutely atrocious, never going back there again!)
drinchev 12y ago
I only imagine what would've happened if OP was stuck with a UNIX or even better Linux with source code files included. It would be a really different story I guess...
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I really wish that I had Linux around that time. It's always piqued my curiosity but I fear I wouldn't be able to think of a practical purpose for it (however that probably also stems from a lack of knowledge about Linux itself and what it can do). I have as much knowledge of Linux and its capabilities as a 3 year old would in driving a car.
VLM 12y ago
Two oddities, there's a technical difference between a GUI desktop environment and an operating system, even if the commercial vendors insist they're conjoined twins and alternatives to that worldview are a thoughtcrime. So this is an OS of the Gnome variety, not a OS of the retroBSD variety. The other oddity having lived thru a slightly earlier era in high school, we did TONS of sneakernet peer 2 peer filesharing using floppies. The stuff he needed would be getting would be kinda obsolete, on the other hand the school had stuff laying around so if you wanted a "turbo C" it was literally sitting in the library waiting for you to copy it. Anyway I'm surprised he never found anyone to trade "warez" with. In '99 when the story started I already had 5 or 6 years of experience with a linux desktop at home, first with SLS floppy based installs off a BBS, but by 99 I had a couple years experience with Debian, makes you wonder what would have happened if the guy had been on an abandoned isle with a linux distro instead of quickbasic...
abhididdigi 12y ago
If there is one story that changed me today, it's this. Kudos to you sir. With no internet/help you still pursued your passion and built this from Ground UP. Thank you for the inspiration, and have a great career ahead.
doctorstupid 12y ago
I'm saddened that most of the comments here are of the "me too, time for my story" variety. The amount of self references is disheartening.
- kragen 12y ago
  By contrast, I'm delighted every time I come across another "me too, time for my story" comment in this thread, because those are the interesting ones.
- pekk 12y ago
  I'm saddened that you're saddened by nerds relating to each other, talking about things they actually liked and feeling nostalgia. Everyone, let's be sure we stick to the real business of HN: gossip about companies which were started for no reason other than to get sold, fighting over the brands of fetishized personal electronics, hagiographies of people like Steve Jobs and Edward Snowden, flamewars about women in tech, and preening about how we personally are the top 1% of software engineers and only hire people like ourselves. Otherwise, someone might feel saddened.
  - doctorstupid 12y ago
    My point is that they are not relating to each other. Modern conversation seems to be morphing into the art of using others' comments as triggers for one's own monologue. Instead of having the discipline of quieting ourselves in order to comprehend what others are saying, we isolate ourselves into narcissism by placing mirrors onto their heads. An awareness of this trend may surprise you about how little we actually relate to each other. Rather, we use others to relate to ourselves.
    - kowdermeister 12y ago
      > Modern conversation seems to be morphing into the art of using others' comments as triggers for one's own monologue I'm pretty sure in real life it happens that in a coming together somebody has a spark and tells a story in 5 minutes. This is in no way different.
nashashmi 12y ago
I find it painful to know that there are people like this who live like this painfully everyday: * people with old computers because they cannot get new ones, * people with old crappy android phones because they cannot get the new kind of phones, * people who are poor and are working on some rundown computer that does not work very nicely because it is worn down, and other people who are just stuck with whatever they have and how we will never hear their story because ... well. And when I say people, I really mean kids. Heartbreak!
lupinglade 12y ago
486s typically had 4-16MB RAM. To access this memory in DOS a special driver needed to be loaded, EXTMEM386.SYS or something like that from what I remember. This article really is somewhat misleading, as that is not an OS, rather it is an application running on DOS. Did the same sort of thing as a kid on an Atari 130 XE. Was a lot more graphical though. It's something you do when your computer is essentially useless :)
swatow 12y ago
In the late 1990s, my parents divorced, and my mother took my brother and myself and had us go live in a very rural area of Australia with a psychopath who was wanted in 3 states. This was our new stepfather, so we were to remain in isolation so that he wouldn't be found. This being said, we were not allowed to leave the house after school hours, nor use the internet, nor own mobile phones. Truly shocking that this could happen in Australia. Where were the child support services? Why didn't the teachers notice anything? The rest they say, is history. Mum finally ditched the guy who made our life hell. I was allowed to move back to civilization and had my mind absolutely BLOWN away by Crisis screenshots. I wonder how old the author was when this happened? Was he still being kept captive as an adult? This story raises serious questions about the adequacy of child protection and law enforcement in Australia.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Consider that in the late 90's cellphone penetration was still low enough that not being allowed cellphones was fairly common, and certainly not something anyone would react to. Not being allowed to leave the house after school hours, or use the internet is still a fairly common situation for kids in many sects that are not considered problematic enough to interfere with. What you describe as "being kept captive", others would consider protecting their children from corrupting outside influences (I'd like to emphasise that I absolutely don't think that is right). That the stepfather in this case seems to have been motivated by hiding from the authorities doesn't make much difference - the point is most schools have students that are in similar situations, so it's not something most schools would see as exceptional and something they can interfere with. It's a difficult tradeoff in terms of child protection, because the traumatic experiences of being taken into care or disrupted by lots of interference can easily become worse than what the interference is meant to fix, and because the moment you start passing moral judgement over peoples parenting, you're in for a crazy struggle over how it is acceptable for people to raise their kids.
  - orangecomputer 12y ago
    That's a very very logical perspective of it, considering it from both sides. A lot of times, my parents (mother and stepfather) played it off as "he needs to be disciplined etc", although they omitted certain truths when it came time to talk to the police. A punch to the side of the head was a "clip over the ear" etc. The police however seemed not to care, I will never forget hearing their "Ah yeah." reactions to it, but again they face the same thing as mentioned above. Even if you're not legally allowed to hit a child now, it's still seen in some places here as an unwritten omission of law to discipline your child if it is "Reasonable", such as a smack on the bum etc. Indeed being kept inside the home wasn't really the bad part of it all. I have always been much of a loner, and it was very likely I wouldn't have done much outside of the home. I did sometimes "Run away" for nights, and I would walk through the city or walk out into the country for a very very very long time at night wondering where to go or what to do. Now that I look back on it, I'm actually very surprised albeit greatful that I never was abducted or robbed. But at that point, I didn't really care where I went or what happened because anything seemed better than what was going on at home.
scoot 12y ago
"Was isolated from 1999" So why label it (c) Copyright 1995? http://i.imgur.com/XSDOXEZ.png http://i.imgur.com/XSDOXEZ.png
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  That's a very good question. I can't actually remember any particular inspiration for using 1995 as a start date, but it was probably just a random year to give it an "Authentic" look as if it had been some old shell system for the TAFE that had been in use for ages (ie much like how most software will have "copyright 1996-2014" to certify the date on which the copyright was filed and what the current year was. It was however, never meant to be an authentic piece of software or have any significant numbers, merely written as a brief demonstration that used a few simple commands to list file and directory structures. 2006 was the year that code would've been made though.
DaveSapien 12y ago
Yes, write a book. It would sell like hot cakes to us. You've inspired the shit out of me today!!
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I'd love to write a larger and more in depth recount of it, and release it alongside the codes someday. I would more than likely release it for free, or if it ever got published, donate a lot of the proceeds to a domestic violence charity.
foo-licious 12y ago
Pretty sure everyone that started programming on an x86 and pre windows 95 already did this exact same thing. I did this when I was 8 and did it in a few days. No story here except OP is a slow learner. Sorry but this is true.
mironathetin 12y ago
Great story. Is it fair to say, if he had had internet, television, cinemas and tons of friends around, he would never have achieved that? I see our kids every day staring at various screens, being miles away from any creative impulse and getting really mad, if we discuss (or execute) internet access limits.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  It's very hard to say. Right before leaving for the country, circa 1997-1998, my best friend was trying to get me into C++, as he was a games dev / games fanatic like I was. I had always wanted to get my hands into C++ and start working with it. It never really transpired sadly as I had no idea where to start.
gedrap 12y ago
I have a little bit similar, just not so sad story. I was ~12 years old (around 2004), I really wanted to learn programming but all I had was a cell phone (one of the first budget class phones with GPRS, Nokia 3510i). I had very little access to internet / pc (about 30min/week) and couldn't speak English, Russian, or any other major language. So I tried to get my hands on any PHP code examples, type it in using my phone, and upload to FTP using some online forms. Eh, funny times. I wrote a bit more about it http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-cellphone-back-in-2005/ http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-ce...
jdbiggs 12y ago
Hey, OP, I'd love to talk to you. Email me at john @ biggs.cc. Everyone else can email me too!
vivin 12y ago
This is amazing. This took me back to the 90's when I was learning BASIC by scrounging for books in our school library. I grew up in Oman and there weren't too many programming resources. So I had to make do with random BASIC books that were often in different dialects (Apple BASIC for example). I also reinvented the wheel many times and wrote a bunch of silly little programs. It was a great and fun experience and this story really took me back.
Zen101 12y ago
Amazing story!

1284 points by shalmanese 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

What was your experience level before you started this? I'm about to graduate with a degree in computer science and I would love to work on a long term project like this but I feel like I could never accomplish something remotely close to the complexity involved in your project, especially without outside help like the internet.

percept 12y ago
Reminds me of the story recently about the guy who built a game over what, ten years or so? (Can't find a link right now.)
- reefab 12y ago
  "Babylonian twins"? Made by a Iraqi starting in the 90s. http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwshihab_en.p...
- abbeyj 12y ago
  Tobias and the Dark Sceptres? http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/ http://www.tobiasgame.co.uk/
- Lrigikithumer 12y ago
  Dwarf Fortress? Who's development is ongoing?
- percept 12y ago
  Ha, no IIRC he began in college in the 90's, developing for the Windows platform, and finished it many years later, and his post documented its evolution and had the same sort of feel of working with outdated technologies, but seeing it through to the end.
shalmanese 12y ago
Note: I am not the person in the imgur. The title was changed after I submitted to one that is, IMHO, much more confusing. (original title was "An Australian, isolated from 1999-2006 with a 486. Built his own late 80s OS").
orangecomputer 12y ago
My experience level with computers was minimal; I had basic knowledge of running games from the DOS prompt or a particular type of DOS Shell that my dad had set up on our home computer. Other than that, I had no knowledge. I didn't know anything about processor power, RAM, etc. I'm not sure if it's used for anything anymore, but QBASIC is, I believe, freely available on Microsofts legacy FTP. It's a very safe and easy to use environment to learn about putting together some basic programs (hence the name BASIC?). If you learned to say, build a calculator in QBASIC, it wouldn't be hard to take that programming knowledge and move it across to a modern language like C.

centizen 12y ago

This OS is interesting enough on it's own, but I want to hear more of the story of how and why it was created.

orangecomputer 12y ago
I wrote it up as best as I could in the imgur description, but I'll see if I can summarize it here. Basically, I was without any modern resources for quite some time. I had a 486, QBASIC and EDIT.com to play with; the rest of the DOS exes etc I didn't want to touch out of fear of buggering up my system as I wasn't very computer literate. My library had two 1970s books on BASIC which I loaned out (Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan) and with nothing else to do in the hours after school, I decided to try my hand at it. I played around with it for a bit and built a really primitive "DOS Clone", which relied on a simple series of INPUT's, PRINT's, IF / THEN statements and GOTO. I then also began experimenting with the ASCII Character map which was included in the QBASIC help file, and realized that if I used the correct ASCII codes, I was able to form visualizations on the screen, simple GUIs etc. I combined the two and began adding more and more functionality to it until I eventually named it "OSCI" ("Aussie"). That's pretty much all there was to it. How: An old 486, QBASIC, and lots of free time Why: Boredom, curiosity.

WoodenChair 12y ago

The story sounds like it has some significant parallels to that of Julian Assange in his teenage years (at least as depicted in the movie Underground). Is he an inspiration to you?

orangecomputer 12y ago
I haven't seen the movie, but I have read once that he used to sleep to orange lights as he believed humans would sleep better to it after being accustomed to sleeping by the light of a fire for many many years. I'll have to look into his early years and see, although I was probably nowhere near. I was a very emotionally unstable and unusual kid after the move to the country. I had zero social skills and a lot of post traumatic stress disorder from events at home. My methods to socializing and living in general were very odd. I hoarded food and possessions as the cupboards at home were often (but not always) padlocked to keep me from picking my own food out. I would hunt around in bins for discarded food or 5 cent coins to save for canteen food and was referred to as a "scab" quite a bit, but I tended to ignore this, even though I was probably seen as one of "Those oddball kids". I had very little value placed on my reputation. A lot of my possessions were often confiscated, and anything of special value (ie gifts from my dad) were often smashed and broken in front of me. I had a beautiful Carramar Lava Lamp once that he purchased for me which was destroyed by my stepfather to stop me from staying up at night and using it to read. The trait still sticks with me now; I don't hoard general junk, but I am extremely protective of my current possessions. Not sure if this ties in with Julian Assanges story. Again I'll have to check it out. He sounds like a very intriguing person.

pm 12y ago

I relate somewhat to poster's situation, as one of my half-brothers had a somewhat related experience in rural NT, sans the happy ending. If the poster is reading HN, I'd be happy to catch you up on the state of Australian tech. My e-mail is in my profile.

orangecomputer 12y ago
I'm certainly reading! And with great interest at that, it's very interesting hearing of the other Australians who were in similar situations. I find it interesting too how a lot of those from America and other countries are quick to criticize the story and are shocked at how "you didn't have a mobile phone at age 13!?" or "I don't believe for a second that he didn't have an ADSL connection in rural Australia in 2002", or even the assumption that all our public schools in the outback of Australia were equipped with the latest in Pentium technology when in fact, some were as far back as 15 years out of date. Thanks for the invite too. I don't know where I'd start with modern tech. I've been building up more knowledge over the years and started by purchasing each individual part to build my own system in 2009. I'm no whiz but I'd say I have a reasonable degree of literacy nowadays. The one thing I could use help with is getting started in modern programming. My head appears to still be stuck in the idea of using a simple text-editor-style compiler with no additional libraries, headers, (linkers?) etc required. I had a bit of trouble finding good tutorials that actually supplied the relevant libraries, headers etc for the code they were explaining, so it became difficult when they would expect that every new programmer knows straight away what the SDL header is for example, and where it can be acquired from.
- pm 12y ago
  Outback public schools are lucky if they're equipped with more than one toilet. There are many good tutorials on the Internet for a lot of things, but many make assumptions for things that aren't specifically code-related (libraries, linking, etc) that can be frustrating when you're starting. Consider it a rite of passage. If you have any questions on anything (there's no such thing as a dumb question), again feel free to e-mail.

lake99 12y ago

Fascinating story. If it's any consolation to the author, some of us still use Vi/Emacs, do batch processing in shell scripts, run complicated commands from the command prompt. And when it's time to take a break for some gaming, launch NetHack or some other roguelike -- in a terminal. To hazard a guess, the biggest "wow" programming languages for the author now would be Python and JavaScript.

dpcan 12y ago

I'd love to go back to those days... 486 with DOS and QBasic, maybe a Borland C compiler if you're lucky enough to have a local computer store that sold copies. Myself and a friend tried to create our own version of Windows 3.1 in QBasic when we were in middle school. I wish we would have saved our progress. I don't think it was as far as long as I remember. I know it read INI files, and we could drag windows around. Not sure how much else. OP got to learn how to program the fun way, like a lot of us did in the 90's. Grinding away at crazy side projects on old DOS systems with lots of limitations. That opportunity just isn't available to kids anymore. High powered computers are everywhere and accessible, no reason to make an old PC do new tricks. But I guess they have the web to do crazy things with, so it's not so bad.

twoodfin 12y ago

Nitpick: It's essentially impossible that a 486 would come with 64KB of RAM. My 8088 XT clone in '88 came with 640KB. 4-16MB would be more common for the time.

jschwartzi 12y ago
Was it a PC-compatible? If so he might have had more memory but been unable to address it because he was running in Real Mode.
- metric10 12y ago
  I'm not aware of a non-PC compatible that had an 80486. In any event, real mode can address up to 1MB of memory, with 640KB available to programs. But I do think you are right. If all he had was DOS and QBASIC, he had no way to go into protected mode. He probably just dropped the 0 by mistake.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    No, he means 64 kB segments, which is what he had to deal with in the menu based file manager he wrote in QBASIC. That much should be clear if you read between the lines (the goto based text adventures etc.).
rsync 12y ago
from another comment... "The confusion likely stems from the various limits which existed when running qbasic in real mode on a 486. Conventional memory was limited to 640kb. Access to higher amounts of memory either required switching to protected mode or using XMS. Additionally, there was the segmentation limit of 64k for pointers, which may have limited things in qbasic."

phpnode 12y ago

Something about this story does not sound quite right to me. If I were essentially locked up in that scenario, I would at least be confident of the names of the 3 games which were installed, since they'd inevitably be played to death, regardless of how good they were. Also there's this http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian_isolated_from_1999_to_2006_with_a_486/cmtpdr5 http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2p63rv/australian...

sillysaurus3 12y ago
People who get big projects done don't really play lots of games. Carmack, for example, has said he doesn't actually play any. It's strange how consistently true this has been. I wonder how many games Notch plays, especially during his prime when he was making Minecraft.
- Pxl_Buzzard 12y ago
  Check out Notch's Twitch broadcast history[1]. Since Mojang was sold he has been playing a variety of games, but scroll down a bit and it mostly turns into live programming and Team Fortress 2. 1. http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    The earliest broadcast is titled "Notch: Creator of Minecraft," from August 2011. Minecraft was released in 2009. So those videos aren't really evidence one way or the other in regards to what I'm saying: people who do big solo projects don't seem to play many games during the time they're hammering out features. And while Notch's LD sprints are impressive, he hasn't really shipped a big project since Minecraft.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Whoops, I just noticed I phrased my original comment like "I wonder how many games Notch plays" (present tense) which is exactly what you showed. I meant to phrase it in past tense. Sorry, that was my bad.

stuff4ben 12y ago

I had a similar although not as tragic story of my own. My parents were poor (dad was in the USAF) so we couldn't get a Commodore 64 or Apply IIe/IIc like everyone else had. We got a Commodore Plus/4 because they were literally giving them away. Since I couldn't buy any games for it and there was hardly any software available, I taught myself BASIC and made my own games. Fast-forward 30 years (geez I'm getting old) and now I'm fairly successful (in my own mind) as a software engineer at a Fortune 100 company. I credit being deprived by my parents for becoming interested in computers like I am today.

percept 12y ago
At least it had real keys...
- protomyth 12y ago
  Starting on an Atari 400 probably is the reason I have become so picky about keyboards.
  - pronoiac 12y ago
    I remember having indented fingertips.
dmpk2k 12y ago
Likewise here. In my case it was a Dragon 32 in the 486 era.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That was an absolutely awesome little machine. Did you ever figure out that it really has 64K of usable RAM?
  - dmpk2k 12y ago
    I think the Dragon 32 really did only have 32KB RAM, but yeah, the full 32KB wasn't typically accessible. Part of it went to video RAM, and part of it went elsewhere, so quite a bit less was available to use by default. However, there was some hackery you could do to get close to usable 32KB for your program, although I never did that. My tape drive never worked properly, so my programs were naturally very short… When I graduated to a 286 (in the Pentium era), that was a pretty special moment. It had a 42MB HD!

wslh 12y ago

i) In 1990 I was using a VAX computer in high school shared by a whole class and programming in Pascal. The compilation process (executed in a compilation queue) could take a few minutes or half an hour depending of how many people and processes were running that day. I wanted to imitate this stuff in my Amiga 500, so I joined a friend who knew about electronics and he removed a Commodore 64 keyboard and made the interface to connect to the Amiga as a second keyboard. I made the software in assembler to use the same computer with a single monitor in two windows using two keyboards. A bizarre but funny project. ii) In 1992 I wanted to make my own graphical operating system. Not in the real sense but in the Windows 3.0 sense. I started doing this in Turbo Pascal and at some point I stopped because my multitasking was cooperative just realizing a few years later that Windows (and Apple!) used this basic strategy too. I felt ashamed of them.

stuff4ben 12y ago
you were spoilt by the Amiga's pre-emptive multitasking. It's funny I recall "pre-emptive multitasking" being a big selling point of the Amiga's OS, but I never understood it at the time, I just knew it was better.
- wslh 12y ago
  In which project (i) or (ii) ? On (i) I took advantage of the preemptive multitasking being able to use the computer by two people in the same computer monitor. On (ii) I knew that the Amiga was superior than a PC but I had access to more documentation and better programming languages (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++) on the PC. In the Amiga you ended up doing multimedia stuff with a lot of hardware information about the coprocessors and DMA while in the PC was more straightforward.

andsmi2 12y ago

This quote hurt my head "Windows 2000..., which was basically like 98, but crappier." But provided context for the entire thing.

tbrock 12y ago
Agreed, basically the most incorrect thing I've ever read on the Internet. Windows 2000 was amazing.
- ArcticCelt 12y ago
  Windows 2000 is one of my favorite OS. I barely used XP because I liked it so much I almost went straight from 2000 to windows 7.
  - stevekemp 12y ago
    Mine too - All the stability of Windows NT 4, but with the addition of USB so I could use "modern stuff". Of all the versions of Windows I've ever used 2000 was my favourite.
- pmarin 12y ago
  All depend on which hardware it runned.
chambo622 12y ago
That quote definitely doesn't make sense. Maybe he's thinking of Windows ME, widely regarded as being worse than 98? It's an odd thing to mix up for anyone familiar with the two.
- tripa 12y ago
  It's quite possible he was not familiar with 2000 at the time (consumer vs enterprise), and conflated the both afterwards, because no one really talks about ME anymore.
guessbest 12y ago

FrankenPC 12y ago

Where did he get the books? When I was a kid, the DOS interrupt bible was something I turned into a dog-eared nightmare. I wonder if he had access to technical books through his school maybe?

orangecomputer 12y ago
I had access to two programming books; Basic BASIC and Advanced BASIC by James S Coan which I loaned out (and frequently over-loaned) from my high school library. I searched intensely during lunch periods at the library for other books on anything related to computers and programming, but I don't recall any other notable computer books. The books I had loaned out however were dated 1977 - 1978 according to a recent google search. Very obsolete for the time. I'm tempted to call the high school library and see if I can buy them, since they'd be even more so useless for any student who wants to get into programming now. Better yet, it's just given me an idea, if they still haven't updated their books on programming, I might even see if I can buy a few good modern books on C / Python etc and donate them to the library, along with software. Who knows, it might stop someone else from ending up the same way I did.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

wtbob 12y ago

> I took another shot at coding this year to see if I could build anything interesting in C++, but the difference between something like QBASIC and a full blown C++ IDE just ended up baffling me more than anything else, and I struggled for a bit. That's a really damning statement about our modern software ecosystem. You see what this guy was able to put together as a kid, and it's impressive. Sure, it was close to 20 years out of date, but it was good-looking and (appears) usable. Why isn't it as easy for him, with the knowledge he's accumulated, to build software with modern languages, modern tools and and modern libraries as it was for him to build software with BASIC?

pjbrunet 12y ago
I think that's a great question and I could list some contributing factors but I think a thorough answer could upset a lot of people. I lost 100+ karma just for some criticism of Apple ;-) Yeah, let's critique all the modern languages, tools and libraries--that will go over real well here.
icebraining 12y ago
Who says it isn't? Maybe C++ just wasn't a good choice for someone coming from BASIC.
Lrigikithumer 12y ago
I would definitely put that down to experience, C++ is a much different beast to QBasic. Qbasic being geared towards beginners, C++ being geared towards professionals. I mean it's the difference between a tool box 70 years ago (Software lives by dog years) and a tool box today, the tools you will find are vastly different, and even though you can build a house with the tools from 70 years ago, that does not necessarily mean you will be able to travel forward in time and build a house with todays tools because you have zero experience with it.
Rygu 12y ago
The truth. Take web development. If you're willing to look objectively at the state of HTML5 and the lack of feature support for browsers (that stick around), then yes we've established many good specs and communities, however for the enduser comparing it to Flash back in the days, nothing different. At least Flash development was easy. goes back to building JS and CSS files with his frontend build system, and testing in IE8

codezero 12y ago

I had a 486 in 1991. If this person had one from 1999 to 2006 I'm amazed it didn't suffer repeated hardware failures. Hard drives die often. I want to believe this isn't true because it's too depressing. I want to believe it's true because people deserve the benefit of the doubt.

inDigiNeous 12y ago
Why wouldn't it be true? The terms used in the article are misleading though, like many people have already pointed out. Not an OS, a shell, I don't even know if you can build an OS with QBASIC alone, maybe with some assembler support, but I don't recall qbasic supporting assembler, at least without any binary tricks ?
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  I've amended the original imgur post to reflect this. You're 100% correct, it's not an actual OS. but rather a primitive GUI of sorts that is an imitation/representation of what I perceive to be an 80s OS.
  - unexistance 12y ago
    heyya OP, I love CLI, so I really dig what you did here :D for now it runs under QBasic only?
    - orangecomputer 12y ago
      Yep, so far it's just for QBASIC. I can't see much point in resurrecting it or attempting to port it, but if I ever get into C#/C++/another modern language, I will likely focus on writing new and more interesting apps.
orangecomputer 12y ago
Today I still have a working Pentium 1 with hard disks in full operating order. As for the 486, I brought it down to my dads when I moved, and switched to using his much more modern system. It did eventually "die" in 2007-2008. My dad threw it out after the clock chip failed on the motherboard. I was pretty bummed because it sounds like a fairly straightforward fix / such a minor issue, but he's as sentimental as I and referred to it as "an old clunker".

iamcreasy 12y ago

Astonishing story. I'd like to meed this guy and have a coffee with him. I have a similar story but not as harsh as his. I started programming basic(not sure which variant) on a small hand held system CASIO PB700. One this system I've created a Paranoid clone and a 4 frame ascii animation. My father saw my aptitude on programming he introduced me to his more advanced systems. He was a computer engineer and had an habit of buying new systems in 1980s. On the newer systems(I don't recall the name) I learned Turbo Pascel. Back then those systems didn't have any storage. MSDOS had to be booted from one 5 inch floppy drive and a new disk had to be inserted to get the different programs. Every time you compile and run a program, it would take a couple of minutes to read the compiler from the 5inch floppy disk. Those floppy disks were fragile and they had a tendency to developed bad sectors after a frequent read-write session. To circumvent this, my father deployed a ramdrive on the system. A drive would be created inside the ram every time the system boots up, and it would copy the Turbo Pascel compilers and all relevant libraries to that ram drive. So next time you hit 'run', it would take seconds instead of minutes. This solutions still blows away my mind. Another thing about these old machines, they all came with monochrome monitors. It was all green and had a very low refresh rate. Every time there was a large change on the display, you could still see the previous characters being faded away. Like matrix. Later I had access to better machines(Pentium 1 133Mhz), but haven't forgot those days. I wish I had more information about those systems to post here, but I am long way from home. Back at home those systems are still all packed up and stacked on top on one another. The funny thing - all them work as if they are 'brand new'.

anopheles 12y ago
My first programming platform was basic on the Casio FX-702P, I remember reading the manual and realising what programming was all about... oh the sense of wonder and possibility on a 9 year-old. The peak of my achievement was a version of E.T. for it (my cousin had an Atari 2600 and to my little brain that was a pretty cool game). I saved my programs by writing them down on a notebook, as my dad never got any peripherals for it...
- iamcreasy 12y ago
  Going through the wiki page of Casio FX-702P reminds me how far we've come. Fascinating.

curiously 12y ago

did a similar thing in the late 90s. I didn't have a computer besides an old 286 with monochrome monitor because my parents would not let me use a brand new computer because it would affect my school studies as I would play games (they weren't wrong). I discovered a program called qbasic and started fooling around with it. I did whatever I could on it. It was so interesting. Then after about a year I got a fast computer because my dad felt sorry for me and I just started using the internet to download emulators and roms. I lost the same level of patience back when I used to have a 286. Anyways I still remember those times. Magical moments like figuring out how to program. I wonder what would've happened if I had kept going. Sadly, the internet and video games completely took over.

orangecomputer 12y ago
Exactly what happened to me in 2006 when I left the country. I wanted to catch up on everything; I had Deus Ex, the Quake series, DOOM etc to get through. Now if I try and code something, there are too many distractions, yet when you're sitting in a silent basement, your ideas tend to fill your head pretty quick (+ many a hot dull afternoon at school).

pjbrunet 12y ago

Looks like typical apps we all created during the early 90s. I taught my little brother Pascal in what seemed like a few minutes (I think he was in 5th grade) and within a weekend he created a file manager that would blow this one away. My brother is very smart but my point is, coding some DOS games or a file manager is not anything remarkable, even if you only had the manual to work from. Most developers during that time period worked from a manual. We did not have StackExchange, haha. Where do you think RTFM comes from? I'm surprised this is trending. If you want to see what was typical of the early 90s, take a look at the Graphics Gems books http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/0122861663 http://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Gems-Andrew-S-Glassner/dp/012... every bookstore in the US had Graphics Gems.

brandonmenc 12y ago

This isn't an OS - it's closer to a DOS shell, like Central Point's PC Tools.

orangecomputer 12y ago
Yep, it's more or less a shell. I probably should've clarified it a bit better in the imgur description. It's basically a dos shell representitive of my rendition of a "late 1980s OS".
- marvin 12y ago
  Would just like to say thanks for your really fascinating story :) This is the intellectual highlight of my day. Don't let the naysayers get to you. Not sure what you're doing at the moment, but I'm sure you've directed your technical skills towards something that pays well and acquired new ones in the meantime :) The projects you describe here are obviously works of love that show great technical talent. Too bad you didn't have access to better learning resources at an earlier point in time, but learning is thankfully a multi-decade project. (I also hope your P.O.S. stepfather got what was coming to him in the end).
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    > Don't let the naysayers get to you. Clarification of facts is not naysaying. I think what they did was impressive and interesting.
    - marvin 12y ago
      I wasn't referring to you; I just found a plausible place to reply to OP. There were plenty of real naysayers in the thread, though. And even more that were just very insensitive. (Again, I'm not referring to you).
  - orangecomputer 12y ago
    Thanks for your comments. Technically, the naysayers haven't bothered me too much, but a lot of people seem irked (and rightfully) that it was initially mistermed as an Operating System when in fact a simple shell of sorts. I have amended the imgur description since however. As for what I'm doing at the moment, I'm a Lead Quality Assurance Analyst for a video games company. I love what I do, but as for pay, it's less than half the minimum wage. Goes to show that I REALLY love what I do I suppose, but I would really like to do something more technical someday. Perhaps special effects or something of the like. I'd say the works were definitely a very important part of my life, although they were not necessarily a technical triumph by any means. I still claim that they're nothing more than a series of cheap hackery and tricks, but hey, even a Magicians work will entertain and amaze, even if it's not "really" happening you know? My stepfather is still out there, but both time and emphysema will catch him in the end, so I try not to concern myself too much with it. Nature and tobacco will do its work.

adrusi 12y ago

While I don't have a story quite like OP's, I wanted to share my experiences with old-school programming in more recent history. In middle and high school (2008-2014), I had access to modern hardware, the internet and all those lovely things at home. At school, though, I didn't have access to a computer most of the time, and yet I wanted to program. What I did have though, was a TI-84+SE graphing calculator, with a z80 cpu clocked at 15MHz and 24/128K accessible/total RAM, and 1.5/2.0MB of ROM. Most teachers didn't really care if I just stuck my nose into that thing for the entire class, so often I did just that. For those not familiar with the calculator, it ships with an OS that provides a shell where the user can input mathematical expressions, as well as a graphing interface. It also provides a program editor where the user can write what are essentially shell scripts for the main interface in TI-BASIC, or run machine code written in hex if the program starts with the AsmPrgm token. It also lets you transfer files from a PC using a usb port on the calculator. You could download and install "Apps" for the calculator. When I was 12-14 I mostly wrote small programs, like Pong and a quadratic factorization utility, in TI-BASIC, and played games that I downloaded in class. After a while I tired of TI-BASIC because it was slow, and that limited the possibilities. I downloaded Axe, an App that modifies the code in RAM of Kernel's TI-BASIC editor to allow for programs written in a different language, which was basically assembly + a lot of macros and a standard library useful for writing games, or like C without a type system. This code was compiled to machine code on the calculator, and therefore the code ran at a reasonable speed (keep in mind it's still just a 15MHz cpu from the 70s). With Axe I made some more interesting programs. Unlike with TI-BASIC, where learning the language was easy since the calculators main interface was basically a REPL for the programming language, Axe was hard to learn. I needed to look at external documentation to know what I was dong in Axe, but even though I had a smartphone at this point, I couldn't use it in class, so I printed out the manual to reference it in class. I wrote a bunch of programs in Axe, like a cellular automata simulator, a game of life program, a 4-level grayscale sprite editor (which worked by flickering the pixels of the 1-bit display which had a slow enough response time to create a static gray color if alternated quickly enough). I also learned z80 assembly and used an on-calc assembler and editor called mimas, but editing assembly on-calc was too bothersome with a 64x96 display, so I mostly stuck with Axe. Eventually I stopped being the nerdy kid who played with his calculator all day, but I had fallen in love with the platform, so even though I wasn't writing code in class, I wrote code for the calculator at home, sometimes on my PC and sometimes on the calculator just because I liked that experience more. I'll be sad to see these ancient calculators finally phased out of the math curriculum in the US, so that kids no longer get access to that last stronghold of 80s computing. Raspberry Pi is cool, but it's still so much more modern than the calculators, which hurts its coolness factor for me, but more importantly, kids won't have access to it unless their parents want them to get into computing. Soon I see kids only having hardware that seems impenetrably locked down, which is a real shame.

mariuolo 12y ago

Nice to see how necessity is (still) the mother of invention. BTW, is the guy in jail now?

orangecomputer 12y ago
Sadly not as far as I know. As proven with the recent attack in Sydney (the guy had been walking free with 40 charges against him), my stepfather was in the precise same position. Multiple charges but walking free because the justice system had catastrophically failed.

robotkilla 12y ago

Throwing my story in the mix: I owned a 386 and a 486 when I was around 9. Hand me down computers. My family was poor and we didn't have the internet and I'm not sure it would have mattered if we did back then. I learned QBASIC and Dos from library books and help files. Made lots of text adventure games and later games with minor graphics. I'm a professional developer now (have been for 12 years). I know multiple languages including python and I still make games on the side as a hobby. I keep seeing stories similar to mine. I really think we (humans) have lost something with new tech. Simple UI breeds users whereas hard seems to breed developers. Edit: typed that out on my phone - made some typo fixes. Also forgot to mention - I never went to school for CS and I dropped out of community college which I attended for graphic design.

ghinda 12y ago

I also have a similar, but definitely not tragic, story. In the late '90s my dad got us a ZX Spectrum, so me and my brother learned BASIC and played Deathchase. Around ~2000 we got a Pentium "75", that is - 75mhz, 16mb ram, 500mb hdd with no cdrom or sound card. I think it had a 2mb S3 video card, and came with Windows 95. At some point, after some tweaks, you could play Mortal Kombat 4 in a very small window, installed from multi-rar archives on around ~20 floppys. We had a lot CDs with games from gaming magazines, with "cool" (or so I thought at the time) HTML/JavaScript autoruns, that ran with Internet Explorer 4. Since most of these games (eg. NFS 3) wouldn't run on my PC, I found out how to "View Source", and I basically learned HTML/CSS/JS from them. In 2003 I sold my first "DHTML" menu widget.

leke 12y ago

When I started reading this, I imagined the author was going to say, isolated from 1999 to 2006 with a 486 on an island living with a group of scientists called The Dharma Initiative, with no connection to the outside world.

stuaxo 12y ago

He should learn python, after wbasic it was the first language I used that was as easy or fun(after years of java).

kokey 12y ago

I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.

kokey 12y ago

reitanqild 12y ago

Totally impressed. Yes, not an os but a shell but still impressive. Boredoom can easily lead to creativity it seems. And this guy is smart.

orangecomputer 12y ago
Indeed, I've re-worked the title to include quotes around the "OS" parts as everyone who states that it is a shell is actually correct. I should've termed it better. Indeed having no inspiration or having a lot of boredom leaves the mind to create its own entertainment and innovation, however I'd disagree that I'm smart. My code is merely a series of hackery and visual tricks. It technically -does- do what it is supposed to, but it is nowhere near as maintainable, optimized and well written as the code of that of a talented or seasoned programmer. Thanks for your kind words!

byEngineer 12y ago

And of course the court granted custody to mother wanting to live with a psychopath. So much about sex discrimination in real life. Very different from liberal media portrayed world now, isn't it?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
boomlinde 12y ago
Yes, those details of the divorce proceedings that you just made up are very different indeed.
- byEngineer 12y ago
  Oh, details, details, we never look for them when deciding to give three young children to a psychopath ran family
  - boomlinde 12y ago
    The point isn't that they are details. It's that you made them up. You seem to be imagining a scenario where there was a dispute over custody where a court was involved, and that the court, knowing that the mother would move in with a psychopathic criminal, handed custody over to her. I'm not sure what article you read, but the one linked mentions none of that, so I'll assume that this is a figment of a very bitter mind.
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      So you can't draw conclusions? This is basic reading comprehension skill we are talking about here dude.
      - boomlinde 12y ago
        I am able to draw conclusions, but when there is no basis for drawing conclusions I won't. What you call conclusion in this case is a pretty elaborate and unreasonable fantasy.

pwr22 12y ago

This guy's mother made a terrible and selfish choice :(, I feel terrible for him

agumonkey 12y ago

Reminded me of the classic 'stuck in a room' reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room http://www.reddit.com/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_exp...

orangecomputer 12y ago
I guess I've answered the threads question in a sense. Though I wish I'd at least had a basic copy of Windows XP, and a good C++ compiler + some reference books.

sauere 12y ago

QBasic... those were the days. I actually started programming around 2002/2003. At that time QBasic was of course already horribly outdated. But that was what my school teacher was using. We used it to have direct PEAK/POKE access to the LPT-Port (the big, bulky printer port!). So we connected LEDs and other Stuff to the LPT Pins and made them blink with QBasic (and Windows 2000). I still sticked to QBasic a while because i refused to learn anything else and C-Style languages just looked scary to me. By the way, if you are looking for a cool, modern, cross-platform BASIC Compiler take a look at FreeBasic. It started out as a QBasic-kompatible Interpreter but now is a Project on it's own.

orangecomputer 12y ago
Now that would've been more interesting. I never got to experiment with printing or connecting anything to my own system, but it would've been fun to make something like what you've described. Indeed C was a bit intimidating to me at first. I took up a TAFE games programming course in 2008 to learn it, but our teacher was an ex-banker and didn't seem to really have any enthusiasm for games, and there wasn't really any "games programming" in the course. I left after getting mugged in broad daylight on a busy road (Mount Druitt is absolutely atrocious, never going back there again!)

drinchev 12y ago

I only imagine what would've happened if OP was stuck with a UNIX or even better Linux with source code files included. It would be a really different story I guess...

orangecomputer 12y ago
I really wish that I had Linux around that time. It's always piqued my curiosity but I fear I wouldn't be able to think of a practical purpose for it (however that probably also stems from a lack of knowledge about Linux itself and what it can do). I have as much knowledge of Linux and its capabilities as a 3 year old would in driving a car.

VLM 12y ago

Two oddities, there's a technical difference between a GUI desktop environment and an operating system, even if the commercial vendors insist they're conjoined twins and alternatives to that worldview are a thoughtcrime. So this is an OS of the Gnome variety, not a OS of the retroBSD variety. The other oddity having lived thru a slightly earlier era in high school, we did TONS of sneakernet peer 2 peer filesharing using floppies. The stuff he needed would be getting would be kinda obsolete, on the other hand the school had stuff laying around so if you wanted a "turbo C" it was literally sitting in the library waiting for you to copy it. Anyway I'm surprised he never found anyone to trade "warez" with. In '99 when the story started I already had 5 or 6 years of experience with a linux desktop at home, first with SLS floppy based installs off a BBS, but by 99 I had a couple years experience with Debian, makes you wonder what would have happened if the guy had been on an abandoned isle with a linux distro instead of quickbasic...

abhididdigi 12y ago

If there is one story that changed me today, it's this. Kudos to you sir. With no internet/help you still pursued your passion and built this from Ground UP. Thank you for the inspiration, and have a great career ahead.

doctorstupid 12y ago

I'm saddened that most of the comments here are of the "me too, time for my story" variety. The amount of self references is disheartening.

kragen 12y ago
By contrast, I'm delighted every time I come across another "me too, time for my story" comment in this thread, because those are the interesting ones.
pekk 12y ago
I'm saddened that you're saddened by nerds relating to each other, talking about things they actually liked and feeling nostalgia. Everyone, let's be sure we stick to the real business of HN: gossip about companies which were started for no reason other than to get sold, fighting over the brands of fetishized personal electronics, hagiographies of people like Steve Jobs and Edward Snowden, flamewars about women in tech, and preening about how we personally are the top 1% of software engineers and only hire people like ourselves. Otherwise, someone might feel saddened.
- doctorstupid 12y ago
  My point is that they are not relating to each other. Modern conversation seems to be morphing into the art of using others' comments as triggers for one's own monologue. Instead of having the discipline of quieting ourselves in order to comprehend what others are saying, we isolate ourselves into narcissism by placing mirrors onto their heads. An awareness of this trend may surprise you about how little we actually relate to each other. Rather, we use others to relate to ourselves.
  - kowdermeister 12y ago
    > Modern conversation seems to be morphing into the art of using others' comments as triggers for one's own monologue I'm pretty sure in real life it happens that in a coming together somebody has a spark and tells a story in 5 minutes. This is in no way different.

nashashmi 12y ago

I find it painful to know that there are people like this who live like this painfully everyday: * people with old computers because they cannot get new ones, * people with old crappy android phones because they cannot get the new kind of phones, * people who are poor and are working on some rundown computer that does not work very nicely because it is worn down, and other people who are just stuck with whatever they have and how we will never hear their story because ... well. And when I say people, I really mean kids. Heartbreak!

lupinglade 12y ago

486s typically had 4-16MB RAM. To access this memory in DOS a special driver needed to be loaded, EXTMEM386.SYS or something like that from what I remember. This article really is somewhat misleading, as that is not an OS, rather it is an application running on DOS. Did the same sort of thing as a kid on an Atari 130 XE. Was a lot more graphical though. It's something you do when your computer is essentially useless :)

swatow 12y ago

In the late 1990s, my parents divorced, and my mother took my brother and myself and had us go live in a very rural area of Australia with a psychopath who was wanted in 3 states. This was our new stepfather, so we were to remain in isolation so that he wouldn't be found. This being said, we were not allowed to leave the house after school hours, nor use the internet, nor own mobile phones. Truly shocking that this could happen in Australia. Where were the child support services? Why didn't the teachers notice anything? The rest they say, is history. Mum finally ditched the guy who made our life hell. I was allowed to move back to civilization and had my mind absolutely BLOWN away by Crisis screenshots. I wonder how old the author was when this happened? Was he still being kept captive as an adult? This story raises serious questions about the adequacy of child protection and law enforcement in Australia.

vidarh 12y ago
Consider that in the late 90's cellphone penetration was still low enough that not being allowed cellphones was fairly common, and certainly not something anyone would react to. Not being allowed to leave the house after school hours, or use the internet is still a fairly common situation for kids in many sects that are not considered problematic enough to interfere with. What you describe as "being kept captive", others would consider protecting their children from corrupting outside influences (I'd like to emphasise that I absolutely don't think that is right). That the stepfather in this case seems to have been motivated by hiding from the authorities doesn't make much difference - the point is most schools have students that are in similar situations, so it's not something most schools would see as exceptional and something they can interfere with. It's a difficult tradeoff in terms of child protection, because the traumatic experiences of being taken into care or disrupted by lots of interference can easily become worse than what the interference is meant to fix, and because the moment you start passing moral judgement over peoples parenting, you're in for a crazy struggle over how it is acceptable for people to raise their kids.
- orangecomputer 12y ago
  That's a very very logical perspective of it, considering it from both sides. A lot of times, my parents (mother and stepfather) played it off as "he needs to be disciplined etc", although they omitted certain truths when it came time to talk to the police. A punch to the side of the head was a "clip over the ear" etc. The police however seemed not to care, I will never forget hearing their "Ah yeah." reactions to it, but again they face the same thing as mentioned above. Even if you're not legally allowed to hit a child now, it's still seen in some places here as an unwritten omission of law to discipline your child if it is "Reasonable", such as a smack on the bum etc. Indeed being kept inside the home wasn't really the bad part of it all. I have always been much of a loner, and it was very likely I wouldn't have done much outside of the home. I did sometimes "Run away" for nights, and I would walk through the city or walk out into the country for a very very very long time at night wondering where to go or what to do. Now that I look back on it, I'm actually very surprised albeit greatful that I never was abducted or robbed. But at that point, I didn't really care where I went or what happened because anything seemed better than what was going on at home.

scoot 12y ago

orangecomputer 12y ago
That's a very good question. I can't actually remember any particular inspiration for using 1995 as a start date, but it was probably just a random year to give it an "Authentic" look as if it had been some old shell system for the TAFE that had been in use for ages (ie much like how most software will have "copyright 1996-2014" to certify the date on which the copyright was filed and what the current year was. It was however, never meant to be an authentic piece of software or have any significant numbers, merely written as a brief demonstration that used a few simple commands to list file and directory structures. 2006 was the year that code would've been made though.

DaveSapien 12y ago

Yes, write a book. It would sell like hot cakes to us. You've inspired the shit out of me today!!

orangecomputer 12y ago
I'd love to write a larger and more in depth recount of it, and release it alongside the codes someday. I would more than likely release it for free, or if it ever got published, donate a lot of the proceeds to a domestic violence charity.

foo-licious 12y ago

Pretty sure everyone that started programming on an x86 and pre windows 95 already did this exact same thing. I did this when I was 8 and did it in a few days. No story here except OP is a slow learner. Sorry but this is true.

mironathetin 12y ago

Great story. Is it fair to say, if he had had internet, television, cinemas and tons of friends around, he would never have achieved that? I see our kids every day staring at various screens, being miles away from any creative impulse and getting really mad, if we discuss (or execute) internet access limits.

orangecomputer 12y ago
It's very hard to say. Right before leaving for the country, circa 1997-1998, my best friend was trying to get me into C++, as he was a games dev / games fanatic like I was. I had always wanted to get my hands into C++ and start working with it. It never really transpired sadly as I had no idea where to start.

gedrap 12y ago

I have a little bit similar, just not so sad story. I was ~12 years old (around 2004), I really wanted to learn programming but all I had was a cell phone (one of the first budget class phones with GPRS, Nokia 3510i). I had very little access to internet / pc (about 30min/week) and couldn't speak English, Russian, or any other major language. So I tried to get my hands on any PHP code examples, type it in using my phone, and upload to FTP using some online forms. Eh, funny times. I wrote a bit more about it http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-cellphone-back-in-2005/ http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2013/07/30/writing-code-with-a-ce...

jdbiggs 12y ago

Hey, OP, I'd love to talk to you. Email me at john @ biggs.cc. Everyone else can email me too!

vivin 12y ago

This is amazing. This took me back to the 90's when I was learning BASIC by scrounging for books in our school library. I grew up in Oman and there weren't too many programming resources. So I had to make do with random BASIC books that were often in different dialects (Apple BASIC for example). I also reinvented the wheel many times and wrote a bunch of silly little programs. It was a great and fun experience and this story really took me back.

Zen101 12y ago

Amazing story!