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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 25.03.2023, 05:34

> > Can you give me a theoretical use case where someone would be using a
> 1.44
> > MB floppy?
>
> 10 MB hard disk image? 20? 50? 2 GB? When is it enough to do "something"
> useful?
Useful historically or useful today?

Either way, I could do something useful today with a
1.44 MB floppy. I could have written this message,
and then taken it to a different machine to post
on this board.

And something recently cropped up (since my previous
message), that gave me a new interest.

Starting from a blank floppy disk, but with a genuine
IBM PC with ROM BASIC, I could develop an OS from
scratch (by writing a disk editor in BASIC).

And on a modern machine I could do the same with
Tianocore potentially. ie flash a disk editor
and then start using it.

There is a practical use - I don't trust courts.
I am used to them completely making stuff up.
The High Court of Australia decided that there
was an "implied" right to freedom of speech in
the Australian constitution (I've read it - that's
bullshit), to strike down legislation they
personally didn't like. Rather than doing the hard
work required to actually get the constituion
changed to what they personally want.

A similar thing happened in the 2000 US election.

And a similar thing happens with Roe vs Wade -
the only reason that is even up for discussion
again is because a person died while the "other
side" was in power, instead of carefully resigning
while "their side" was in power, to provide
continuity, when they got too old.

So I developed (not single-handedly) PDOS/386,
a rival OS to Windows, using Windows.

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.

So I'm looking to develop an OS without an OS.

It is unclear whether they will say that I also
can't use the IBM PC ROM BIOS because one of my
OSes (z/PDOS) will be/is a competitor to IBM z/OS.

Tianocore may be considered an OS because it can
load a program, so I might instead need to
replace Tianocore with a mere disk editor.

After building a bootx64.efi using a disk editor I
could then take it to another machine to boot.

I can't possibly know what every judge in the world
will say (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), but I at least want
to have the maximum possible distance between me
and judges.

But first - I know that a FAT12 MBR disk image (with
a bootx64.efi) on a USB stick will boot fine on all
my modern UEFI computers. I haven't tried a FAT12
floppy image.

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

If I start zapping a bootx64.efi into existence,
it will take a long time before I exceed the limits
of a 1.44 MB floppy.

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

Note that the "final" design of PDOS-generic was only
done a few weeks ago or something, and only exists as
proof of concept - it hasn't been fleshed out.

So I don't have a problem with rewriting it, and I
am semi-willing to write in machine code.

The thing is - Linux was written with existing tools
available (GNU toolchain). So it may be legitimate
to have my tools (built on Windows) sitting on a
floppy/hard disk, with no OS to boot them.

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

> > Would this be on a real computer after a nuclear holocaust and
> civilization
> > is being rebuilt? Or perhaps if you lock someone in a basement with that
> > real or emulated hardware and told them that was the only thing available
> -
> > it was either that or watch ants?
>
> I was thinking more like: "Let's tell news://comp.lang.misc or
> news://comp.lang.asm.x86 and see what they come up with (in a year)." You
> know, give them a limited environment to develop something useful (that
> doesn't require ten bazillion gigs).
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.

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

BFN. Paul.

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