Getting MS-DOS on the web
I love thinking back on my childhood and the PCs we had then. The new tech that got released then into our lives that made it feel like we were an instant part of the sci-fi movies and series we were watching. Something about that moment where there was made a distinction between analogue past and digital future felt definitive, surreal and invigorating. I love that in that period of time everyone had their own custom PC with all slightly different parts and personalities. I think it must have been the same for when the automobile arrived for personal use the first time. Everyone probably could feel the difference between horse and carriage and other types of transportation and the new car they got. The feeling of the world becoming smaller.
Uniqueness
I love the uniqueness of those eras pertaining to the products. Also the freedom and knowledge of understanding the product, making it easy to tinker with it and naturally making it a status symbol. If you know and understand more you are smarter, better, stronger and overall a much more interesting of a human being than those others that do not even know what a motherboard is. I thoroughly enjoyed the weekends pouring over catalogues with my father and just hand picking the best items for our custom built PC. Waiting for the parts to arrive, installing them, and finally after weeks and months of this process flicking the switch and hoping you did not screw up. It lights up, it shows a boot prompt and the BIOS screen. There was a moment of pure joy there.
Networking
The day we spend an entire afternoon installing Novell Netware and running a special cross data cable, which was a bright pinkish/orange, from one PC in my bedroom to the computer on the same floor in my father's office to finally copy a file over and seeing it being transferred was amazing. What was even more amazing was that my mother and sister had no clue what we were doing, let alone sharing in our joy.
There was also another way of networking and that was not just through the newly arriving Internet but just locally with people. Knowing where to go to get the good games and items. Secrets on floppy disks that you could loan from the public library and also people that put viruses on them.
First virus
My first virus I do not know exactly how I got it, but I suspect the floppy disk that held Doom I got from the public library. I had a 486DX2/66MHz, 4Mb RAM, 20Mb hard disk and, the best feature, a SoundBlaster Pro sound card. I cannot remember the graphics, but I believe it was a standard VGA setup. Video cards were not a thing back then, as it was unaffordable and only ever used for businesses that worked in an industry that needed such a thing.
I could not play a lot of games, but I could always shuffle around some games. That is what I did most of the time. I would have a lot of files on there. Most of them pictures I created, or some game or another. Of course Windows 3.11 took a lot of space too. A whopping 8Mb. So as I was in the process of swapping out I think Jill of the Jungle for Doom, suddenly my PC would not boot anymore normally.
I rebooted, and it loaded up my prompt and all the letters starting falling down. I could not input any commands anymore. What ended up happening was that I had to loan another HDD to install MS-DOS there and “fix” my HDD by copying over all the unspoiled MS-DOS files.
I installed a anti virus program for the first time ever and I ran it. It found some more things on my hard drive and I was wondering how long I had been infected for and where it came from.
Bringing the past with me
I wondered if it was possible to revisit that time in the present. I bought a 486DX2/50MHz this time and it got a bit better specs except of course a SoundBlaster sound card. It does have networking now though and I tested it with my local LAN network. I could copy a file over FTP from my Dell XPS super charged laptop from 2021 to a PC running MS-DOS 6.22 from 1993. I will tell you, the moment I got it all working I was jumping up and down again with joy. It instantly took me back to those olden days.
Now my project for this particular machine is to get a small screen to hook up to the VGA port and use the Molex cable to DC to power said monitor. Then it is a self contained system. Like a giant Raspberry Pi. After that I want to get a HTTP server on there to serve some files and make it the actual server for a website for a company called Studio Vlegel. Then make a game and have my friends at Studio Vlegel make a piece on the casing of the PC. After that sell this artwork as a statement piece.
Artwork
Something about getting the maximum with minimal resources, forgotten tech and also not discarding old tech. At the same time it is a bit of a jab at modern hardware with all their specs (especially servers) and the thing they do can be solved with a desktop computer from the 90s.
It is also an homage to the demo scene of yore. It still exists to some degree luckily and I want to sell the PC with the only copy of the game and source code of the website with server on there. Maybe we will sell floppy disks with the game on there as well in a limited fashion.
Coding for DOS
This gets me to coding for DOS. I never did that way back when. Now though I have a nice setup using Open Watcom C/C++ Version 2.0, picotcp4dos and just an editor. You can use VSCode, vim or emacs or anything else. I can now easily compile for DOS and successfully done so already. To be fair I think most would program direct in Assembly back then and I could still do that, but I am not that far advanced....yet.
The first time I compiled and shipped the binary to my actual hardware machine and seeing it work was amazing.
So stay tuned and in the future there will be a server added to the statistics that has an OS tag MS-DOS 6.22.