Philip Storry's Website

Since moving to my own hosting arrangements, I've seen a lot more spam - both via email and in comments left on this website.

The email spam doesn't surprise me - it's almost all attempts to sell me dodgy pharmaceuticals, with a smattering of very dodgy programs sent to me masquerading as {tax|hotel|car rental} refunds or claim forms for lottery wins.

Nothing there that's really unexpected...

The website comment spam is a bit more interesting though.
I use various techniques to trap spam, but a tiny amount still leaks through. (At the time of writing 3,211 comments have been submitted, of which 3,054 were deflected automatically.)

Some of it is for undoubtedly fake designer dresses by Karen Millen.
(Your guess is as good as mine, quite frankly. My audience here is probably not their core market...)

A good chunk of it is advertising - can you guess? Yes! Dodgy pharmaceuticals!

Linux is 20 today, give or take.

Actually, it's the 20th anniversary of the announcement of Linux. It was, by then, about three to four months old - but existed only on Linus Torvald's hard disk.

What if that hard disk had died?

Personally, if Linux didn't exist, I'd still be struggling with the mess that is Windows. Or I'd have switched to the Mac already.

But away from my desktop and netbook, the Linux kernel is also running on my MP3 player. My phone. My ebook reader. My NAS box. And those are just the current devices that I know about.

A decade ago, people were predicting "the year of Linux on the desktop". Now, the desktop is closer than back then.

But Linux didn't limit itself to the desktop. Like it or not, you probably depend on Linux somewhere in your life.

Like? Actually, liking it is irrelevant.

It's now ubiquitous. Know it or not, you probably depend on Linux somewhere in your life.

I am the first to set foot on it in all humanity.
Well, I say set foot on it.
In it would be more accurate.

If the earth is a blue marble, then EM4 is just a blue ball. A giant, blue ball.
Gravity is slightly higher than earth, and the surface is about half a foot deep. And the surface practically gaurantees death. But I feel we have to do this as a race - we have to walk on this planet, after all we've done.

We? Who am I kidding. I.

It isn't a solid blue now. Great swathes of the planet have long grey scars, thin lines that look like someone has scratched it with a comb. Despite no human ever coming here, we've still had our impact.

My foot sinks into the blue mat. I'd thought about some first words, but decided in the end that this should be done in silence. It seemed fitting.

I've chosen a clean area, consistently blue in every direction to the horizon.

Happy Birthday, IBM PC! 30 today!

And haven't you done well? A lot better than MS-DOS did, anyway...

I measure that by your legacy. This netbook I'm typing on - and my desktop machine - are still shaped by decisions in your design. From the CPU's ISA to the I/O systems to the fact that the keyboard has a Scroll Lock key on it...
Oh, wait, my netbook doesn't have a Scroll Lock key on it. But it does have Sys Rq, which I think I used once many years ago on a 286 machine.

If anyone knows of a modern use for Sys Rq, I'd like to hear it.

Anyway, the point is that the only real "design point" from MS-DOS that survives 30 years on is that Windows still assumes, as DOS did, that the first hard disk is C: and that A: and B: are floppy disks.
That's about it.

"Oooh, you are awful - but I like you!"

That was one of Dick Emery's gags - it's a British thing and I'm not going to explain it any further than that.

MS-DOS is 30 today. It's also awful. (That's the link with Dick Emery's punchline.)

I learned computing on MS-DOS.

Sure, I had a Spectrum before that. And that taught me BASIC programming, and how to swear like a retired sailor when a game stopped loading 2:04 into its 2:06 load time. I liked the Spectrum, but it merely whet my appetite and showed me what might be possible.

MS-DOS taught me more about computers than anything else ever could. Or did, for that matter.

MS-DOS is awful because it has no multi-tasking - what's running right now is what you get. It had no process protection - any program could happily overwrite any bit of memory, even if it belonged to MS-DOS itself. It didn't protect hardware - you could do anything you wanted to any bit of hardware. It didn't set up hardware or protect hardware items from each other - if both your floppy drive and your tape drive wanted the same memory, they both got it, with hilarious results!

No, wait. Not hilarious results. Data loss. That's the one. Yes, data loss, and much crashing. That was what I meant.

Yes, MS-DOS was awful. It provided an abstraction from the disk hardware, a basic video and keyboard input/output layer, and a filesystem. If a modern Windows installation is a basic hotel room, then MS-DOS was a bivouac under a bees' nest dripping with honey just as the bears are waking up from hibernation.

But I liked MS-DOS.

It did what it did, and that was that. It couldn't nanny you, or stop you from doing anything. As a learning environment for a computer geek, MS-DOS is fantastic.

You have total access to the hardware, to memory, to everything. It's a hacker's paradise. No, wait, we lost that linguistic battle - a hacker is now a bad guy, not a curious tinkerer. OK, so MS-DOS is a tinkerer's paradise.

As it's an anniversary, I'll give you an idea of how much fun MS-DOS could be with an anecdote.

At school, we had some "multimedia machines" in the Library. Not networked, and often abused by students to play games on with bootdisks. They frequently needed a rebuild.
Myself and a friend were asked to secure them, and we did pretty well. But we had one last hole - kids using CTRL+BREAK to break out of the boot sequence.
And then my friend had an idea.

When you hit CTRL+BREAK in MS-DOS, it interrupts the current operation and jumps to a bit of code to handle the interruption. I'm simplifying there a bit, but it's pretty much what happens.

Basically, he wrote a small program which over-wrote the bit of memory that handled that kind of interruption. Instead of pointing at the correct MS-DOS handler, it pointed at the very start of the code the machine runs when first booting.

So if you tried to CTRL+BREAK out of the boot process, the machine rebooted.

It was perfect.

And I must admit, it amused us and the Librarians for a week or so, watching kids walk up to the machine and try to play games on it, only to find it continually rebooting as they did so. Anyone who reported such behaviour got a wide-eyed Librarian saying "So you mean you broke it?", which usually forced the miscreants to make their excuses and leave...

You can't do that on a modern computer.

And if I'm honest, it wasn't MS-DOS that made that possible. CP/M would probably have allowed the same trickery, for example.

But it wasn't CP/M that I learned on. It isn't CP/M that I'm looking back on with rose-tinted glasses.

MS-DOS was extremely limited. Tools like XTree Gold, Norton Utilities, PC Tools, QEMM, 4DOS and more were necessary to work around its utter lack of useful commands. MS-DOS didn't get an undelete command or unformat until after everyone else had one, for example.

And I'll even admit that at the time, I often didn't run MS-DOS. I ran DR-DOS/Novell DOS, which was compatible but had more features and used less precious RAM...

But DOS, be it MS or DR/Novell or IBM PC, was what taught me the most about the fundamentals of computers. The fact that it mostly taught me by the unusual method of not being good enough and therefore making me go out and learn to find or make my own fix - well, that fact is irrelevant.

I don't miss MS-DOS in my everyday computing. I don't think it could have continued to be useful to many outside of specialised areas. But I am, now that I have hindsight's benefits, grateful to MS-DOS for giving me a grounding for a career with computers.

MS-DOS, you are awful.

But I like you.