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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 27.03.2023, 09:25

> What I'm wondering is whether there is an "implied
> right" in any copyrighted OS that their OS shouldn't
> be used to develop a competitor, thus invalidating
> my work.

I'm not a lawyer, but people are VERY litigious.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#After_Novell
* https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

Do your best to avoid any obvious problems, but don't worry beyond that.

> I can't possibly know what every judge in the world
> will say

It's impossible to please everyone. Some people don't even want to play fair.

> (perhaps they will say the fact that I used
> Windows ever in my life means that I can't ever
> create an OS of any sort ever)

That would be a stretch too far.

> So the first constraint - can it be a FAT12 1.44
> MB floppy image on USB stick instead of a real
> physical floppy?

A bootable USB is more realistic, but I'm trying not to go too far where everything is AMD64 or ARM64 with gigs of RAM and terabytes of disk space.

> I was thinking of having a Youtube channel or similar
> showing the construction of the OS from scratch.

Good idea.

> I could have a single app
> that does editing, compiling and linking, and name
> it bootx64.efi, and it's technically not an OS

Sounds like Turbo Pascal.

> but it would allow me to develop an OS in C from day 1,
> instead of machine code. And developing tools in
> machine code too, at least potentially. It depends
> what is "allowed" by random judges worldwide.

There have been various Forth OSes over the years. Take a look at Nils (nmh)'s Sol-86. "Forth" is an OS, a compiler, an interpreter, an editor, a debugger, a calculator, etc.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

> There are probably not many people interested in doing
> challenges, and it is probably best to ask them "anyone
> here interested in a challenge - if so, let's thrash
> out the details".
>
> Aren't those strange places for a challenge? I have
> heard of people entering coding challenges, but they
> don't get them from those newsgroups.

There's something very limiting about the modern Linux mindset. Everything has to use GNU Make, Bash, Python, GCC, etc. I'd like it if we weren't so tied to our specific architectures or OSes or even tools.

> > Maybe I just want to reinvent Minix (aka "mini-UNIX").
>
> Why not mini-DOS, given that you're here?

Dumb question from me, but isn't UEFI just a modern DOS? Or should a modern DOS just be a UEFI app? Realistically, QEMU (or even DOSBox) is considered "good enough" by most people.

I'm not sure I believe the future is x64 or even ARM64. It's probably going to be something else entirely.

 

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