Two Stop Bits | xc8's comments

xc8 61 days ago | parent | on: I fixed a beat-up Atari 2600 "Jr" with glue, a sin...
> original protective film is still stuck to it
This is true on most retro systems, check the (metal) labels eg on C64/C128 even Amiga, previous owners did not realize there was a protective film over them
- barbeque 60 days ago
  I had some stuck on a Famicom and it just crumbled. I'm impressed the Atari one came off cleanly.
xc8 92 days ago | parent | on: Windows 2: Final Fantasy of operating systems
I would not classify win2 as OS, still relied on MSDOS.
- BirAdam 92 days ago
  Many people feel that way, but it had multitasking, its own APIs, its own memory management, and so on. Disk access was still handled by MS-DOS, but that was it. I’d say that it’s an OS as it is far more than a shell, but we can also use Microsoft’s terminology from the time, “operating environment.”
  - qingcharles 86 days ago
    I agree. As soon as you booted Windows it almost entirely sidelined DOS. DOS was more of a bootloader for Windows OS.
- bmonkey325 92 days ago
  Respectfully, Is the distinction important?
  macOS and Next Step rely on BSD and the Mach kernel. Android relies on Linux and the dalvik jvm.
  - KODust 92 days ago
    Not sure if it's important, but Windows 2 is still fundamentally a graphical shell on top of DOS. I think the Unix parallel would be: is the X Window System an OS?
    - bmonkey325 92 days ago
      Ok. I will play. Is it because you invoke the shell vs having the shell started automatically. Leading to this query:
      Is Windows 95 an operating system ? If not why not. After all it relied on MS-DOS also.
xc8 108 days ago | parent | on: Debug: G=C800:5
ok lol I once screwed a HDD because I mistyped some numbers at debug for lowlevel format :)