5 ms·

Keep reading... ;-) and—instead of being fired—I was just about to be offered a new job!

by donut 11y ago

fit2rule 11y ago
Ah, he was going to be fired because he was a poor data-entry operator, but then re-hired because he was an awesome sysadmin. Got it. Makes more sense to me now .. and I'm pretty sure a lot of us who cut our teeth on that metal in the 70's and 80's experienced similar things. For my part, I was hired as a junior developer at a new company once, in my late teens, and told to "figure out how to programmatically reboot the workstations from a distance" .. took me 10 seconds with DEBUG.COM and I'd done a job nobody there already could figure out for weeks. An advantage of having nothing but DEBUG.COM to play with on my new PC for a while, I suppose .. ;)
- pjc50 11y ago
  How did you do the "from a distance" part of the reboot? (I once had to rebuild a partition table by hand using nothing but DEBUG.COM and Peter Norton's book..)
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Partition rebuilding .. heh, yup, been there too. I created "REBOOT.COM" and then had our master control application call it on command. The hardest part was working out how to programmatically reboot the PC - for some reason the mainframe guys couldn't work out that a simple "JMP FFFF" was all we needed. Scored points that day. :)
    - batou 11y ago
      Great stuff. I miss the days when solutions could be that tight. You could have written that .com file with a hex editor back then. Now an ELF header and symbol table is bigger than edit.com
      - fit2rule 11y ago
        Well, this was in the very early days of DOS, where it was being used as a front-end for other bigger systems, so it was considered not much better than a dumb terminal, albeit re-programmable so .. on these "workstations" that needed REBOOT.COM installed, we didn't even have DEBUG.COM - only the master control program (quite literally, a .BAT file), which didn't have a facility to put new apps on all the little DOS machines - admins had to do it manually. So we all got used to using COPY CON: C:\REBOOT.COM and some sort of Alt-key combo for "JMP FFFF", which defeats me since I haven't thought about it in 30 years or so .. but yeah. It was the last manual-install we did as an admin/dev team, as the reboot was needed so that we could finally add "Remotely administer Workstation Base Image" to the master control program/.BAT file and save ourselves endless late nights. ;)
    - donut 11y ago
      Nice. I recall writing REBOOT.COM myself by using EDIT.COM and writing two bytes (0xCD 0x18 by typing Alt-205 Alt-24, if I recall right) and saving it. That executes interrupt 0x18 which should start the BASIC interpreter in the ROM. But most PCs didn't have one, so instead it rebooted. I discovered this by experimentation :-) http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/50/22.html http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/50/22.html

Keep reading... ;-) and—instead of being fired—I was just about to be offered a new job!

by donut 11y ago

Keep reading... ;-) and—instead of being fired—I was just about to be offered a new job!

Ah, he was going to be fired because he was a poor data-entry operator, but then re-hired because he was an awesome sysadmin. Got it. Makes more sense to me now .. and I'm pretty sure a lot of us who cut our teeth on that metal in the 70's and 80's experienced similar things. For my part, I was hired as a junior developer at a new company once, in my late teens, and told to "figure out how to programmatically reboot the workstations from a distance" .. took me 10 seconds with DEBUG.COM and I'd done a job nobody there already could figure out for weeks. An advantage of having nothing but DEBUG.COM to play with on my new PC for a while, I suppose .. ;)

pjc50 11y ago
How did you do the "from a distance" part of the reboot? (I once had to rebuild a partition table by hand using nothing but DEBUG.COM and Peter Norton's book..)
- fit2rule 11y ago
  Partition rebuilding .. heh, yup, been there too. I created "REBOOT.COM" and then had our master control application call it on command. The hardest part was working out how to programmatically reboot the PC - for some reason the mainframe guys couldn't work out that a simple "JMP FFFF" was all we needed. Scored points that day. :)
  - batou 11y ago
    Great stuff. I miss the days when solutions could be that tight. You could have written that .com file with a hex editor back then. Now an ELF header and symbol table is bigger than edit.com
    - fit2rule 11y ago
      Well, this was in the very early days of DOS, where it was being used as a front-end for other bigger systems, so it was considered not much better than a dumb terminal, albeit re-programmable so .. on these "workstations" that needed REBOOT.COM installed, we didn't even have DEBUG.COM - only the master control program (quite literally, a .BAT file), which didn't have a facility to put new apps on all the little DOS machines - admins had to do it manually. So we all got used to using COPY CON: C:\REBOOT.COM and some sort of Alt-key combo for "JMP FFFF", which defeats me since I haven't thought about it in 30 years or so .. but yeah. It was the last manual-install we did as an admin/dev team, as the reboot was needed so that we could finally add "Remotely administer Workstation Base Image" to the master control program/.BAT file and save ourselves endless late nights. ;)
  - donut 11y ago
    Nice. I recall writing REBOOT.COM myself by using EDIT.COM and writing two bytes (0xCD 0x18 by typing Alt-205 Alt-24, if I recall right) and saving it. That executes interrupt 0x18 which should start the BASIC interpreter in the ROM. But most PCs didn't have one, so instead it rebooted. I discovered this by experimentation :-) http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/50/22.html http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/50/22.html