This is my Vlog of PDOS development. Now in reverse chronological order. Note that the latest entry may have broken links because of the enormous difficulty I have trying to upload large files (the sad stories are worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy - Aleco's electricity going up and down like a yoyo, typhoons, fiber connected to a coconut tree, wifi dropping out due to incomplete installation, webhost not doing file resume, numerous bugs in the "free" (no-one gives a shit about it) software the webhost uses, and all underpinned by a bloodyminded pig-headed user who refuses to use Youtube like normal people because he believes it is all of the above clowns (other than the typhoons) who should be changing their ways, not him, and that all problems can be solved with a B52s carrying JDAMs). It could take days for the complete set to get up, so I don't want to update this page every time one of them finally makes it. Note that when I switched to using a Unix system I decided for some reason to try sftp and found the reput command which seems to have solved the issue.
My daughter Soolin is turning THREE (3) years old tomorrow, ie currently TWO (2) years old, and I wanted to record her progress with "keyboard skills". I was planning on doing that tomorrow, ie on her birthday, or maybe the day after, but it will probably be a bit chaotic tomorrow. But I decided to "capture the moment". The sequence of events was that she wanted me to open a Peppa DVD. I bought 19 DVDs second-hand. And she normally just wants to play with the DVD itself, which I didn't want her to do, so I offered to play the DVD for her using my USB DVD drive. But she wasn't able to see the DVD drive, and I said it was just over here, and I'll get it, don't worry. When I brought the computer and DVD player over, she said she wanted to do "keyboard skills". So I put the DVD player back and started PDOS/386. She used it for about 30 seconds before I realized that I could use the opportunity to record her progress now.
Highlights are:
Before the video starts, she asked to see either Daddy's artwork or Mama's artwork - can't remember - but when I went to do "cd baby" and then "showpic family.txt" (Daddy) or "showpic artwork.txt" (Mama), she took control of the keyboard back before I had typed anything or much (can't remember - but didn't even get the cd done).
At 00:10 she moves the mouse cursor off the screen and then wants ME to say "I want the arrow back".
At 00:53 she asks me "where is a small 'a'?". I point to the first "a" in "aka" but the camera didn't catch that.
At 01:03 she points to a small 'e' and asks "There's a small 'a' here?". Either I misheard her, or she was testing me, or she was mistaken, but I point out that she is pointing to an 'e', not an 'a'. She does know the different letters as far as I know, so I'm not sure why that happened.
At 01:14 she again asks me "where is a small 'a'?" and this time I get her to find one instead of me doing it, and she correctly points to the 'a' in the word "batch".
At 01:38 I try to get her to type the command "cls" to clear the screen. Only once before has she followed my instructions to type those 3 letters to clear the screen. I thought seeing the command actually work would inspire her to try it again and maybe learn more commands, but that didn't happen. She seems to have the attention span of a budgie.
At 02:18 she asks "You can do like this?". She means "I", not "You", but despite much effort she hasn't accepted that she is "I/Me", since we keep calling her "You". Anyway, she is on the second line, and wants to backspace back to the first line. When I first started teaching her "keyboard skills" there was a bug in PDOS/386 preventing it from going back to a previous line. Since this wasn't a critical integrity bug, it was never priority to fix it. But when Dat from Vietnam became available again, I asked him to fix that, which he did. Before it was fixed, she would say quite a number of times that she couldn't delete the characters in the previous line.
At 02:40 I ask her if she remembers the two different ways of getting capital letters. I repeat this multiple times but it takes a while before she eventually does it. And luckily she ends up doing both methods (Caps Lock and Shift).
At 03:00 she has finished her activity of deleting characters one by one, so is willing to put on Caps Lock to get a capital 'A'.
At 03:16 she types a big 'D' and for some reason is impressed by that particular letter and points it out.
At 03:42 she seems to remember that the shift key can be used to get a capital letter, but she still has Caps Lock on, so she will get confusing results if she doesn't rectify that.
At 03:57 she insists on keeping Caps Lock on. I was thinking of whacking her in the head for disobedience, but at the last minute I changed my mind and granted her leniency, as this was only her 53,763rd offense. Combined with the fact that she wasn't technically violating anyone's human rights, so it likely wouldn't (or rather, shouldn't) stand up in court.
At 05:33 Soolin backspaces to the previous line again, and this time I thank Dat for fixing the bug in PDOS that was previously preventing that from working.
At 05:45 I ask her how to do a slash and backslash. I have named those characters when she has typed them before, but I am not sure if she can remember those. In the video she does type one backslash, but that could have been coincidence.
At 06:08 she asks "This is 'enter'?". Note that correct English would normally be "Is this 'enter'?". But the first way is correct if she is pretty sure that it is indeed "enter", and just wants confirmation. I'm not sure if she realizes the difference and is just coincidentally using the appropriate form. But she is correctly using it, because she does indeed know that that is the "enter" key. I've asked her to press "enter" many many times. There should be little doubt.
At 06:13 she asks "And this is (the?) 'shift' key?" as she presses the right-shift. I confirm that and use the opportunity to ask her what she can do with that. She then proceeds to press the right-shift, but I didn't notice that and I was very confused as she was pressing 'a' and getting a capital 'A' and I thought there was some bug in PDOS/386 that caps lock had been reversed (missed interrupt or whatever) so that it was producing confusing results. I was trying to find a way of resetting Caps Lock to work properly, when I finally realized that it was already working properly. So she had successfully pressed it.
At 06:47 she starts singing "big and small, big and small, big big big big, small small small". I didn't catch it at the time, but on reviewing the video, she seems to have correctly sung that song correctly in combination with producing big and small letters.
At 07:33 she asks for Mama. This is not typical. She would normally just switch to another activity with me, and when she's sick of playing with me she just leaves, rather than calling for Mama as if I had been cheating her all this time by distracting her from a chance to be with Mama and had just realized it. I confirm that that's what she wants to do. Off-camera she put her foot on the computer and I tell her to not do that.
Note that I also took a video when she turned 2 years old, and my focus at that time was to go into c:\baby\hex and get her to press just one "a" and then hit "enter" to get a big picture of an "A" on the screen (hand-drawn). She had done that before turning 2, but I think on the day she couldn't control herself - we should probably stop leaving the crack pipe lying around.
Received Microsoft C 6.0. The last version that can run on an 8086. Not shown on the video is that it was later shown to be sufficiently ANSI X3.159-1989 compliant to handle the PDOS/86 source code.
386SX alive but didn't last enough minutes to do any work. Owner rambled on for much longer than the computer was of any potential use. Something about Mary?! WTF?
386SX alive and incredibly managed to boot PDOS/386 from floppy, with caveats!
386SX alive again. Reported that the floppy disk was bad, so I disabled that, specified a Type 24 hard disk (40 MB), and for the first time saw MSDOS attempt to boot, but apparently hung on HIMEM.SYS.
386SX came alive again, so I could do limited testing, briefly. Also received another copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Windows 2000 Professional.
Received another Visual C++ 4.0 (with bundled 1.52C), IBM VisualAge C++ for Windows 3.5, and Visual Studio .NET 2002.
80386SX alive but dead, like Leonard Cohen.
80386SX still dead. Waffled on at length about the price of rice in China.
Received 32-bit Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 standard edition full box which includes the 16-bit Visual C++ 1.52C disk. 80386SX dead.
80386SX alive - speculation continues.
80386SX dead - speculation abounds.
80386SX came back to life after 24 hours of rest. But - even though it presumably doesn't run Doom, can it run PDOS/386? Note that a couple of minutes of free speech (thanks Philippines!) were lost because it turns out you can't multitask the calculator at the same time as recording video after all, and I didn't immediately notice the problem.
Received my 80386SX laptop. Attempted to use it to prove that PDOS/386 does CHS addressing properly for hard disks. And the result is ...
Got UCX64 running on real hardware. Also received some old PC hardware (floppy drives, controllers and serial ports). Demonstrated the Chinese computer (with Zhaoxin processor) and Chinese UEFI/BIOS being switched between "UEFI" and "legacy" to boot PDOS/386 also.
UCX64 now self-hosting, received Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Edition, ISA expansion for Book 8088, Borland C 5.0 and a new laptop with a Chinese-made processor (Zhaoxin/Kaitian?) and semi-Chinese-made OS (Kyrin/Kylin?-Linux) which has Chinese and English as options for the OS, but the BIOS (F1 for Lenovo) is Chinese-only.
Received Hand 386 plus Microsoft C 6.0 and 7.0 and IBM PC DOS 7 and tried out PDOS/386 on the Hand 386.
Unveiled a new bunch of goodies, including Windows 3.0 (boxed), so was able to start Windows on the Book 8088.
Tested UC8086 on the Book 8088. Also checked the license agreement of a boxed Visual C++ 2.0.
Mostly use of the Book 8088 computer in conjunction with Microsoft C 5.1. Last video stopped a couple of minutes short without my knowledge I think due to limited space on my smartphone.
Received Book 8088 computer (with NEC V20 - ie 8080 capable - not just 8080), Visual Studio 2013, Visual C++ 2.0, Visual C++ 1.52C and MSDOS 6.22 Upgrade.
Received Windows 95 on floppy disk and MASM 6.11 (Microsoft Assembler) on floppy disk.
Received AS3955-1991 aka ISO/IEC 9899:1990 aka ANSI X3.159-1989 and Visual C++ 2003.
Received MSDOS 6.22 (again), Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (again) and OS/2 1.2 (for the first time in my life).
Made another attempt to modify PDOS/386 to ignore bad sectors on floppy disks.
Received full versions of OS/2 2.0 and Windows 98 Second Edition.
Received Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
Attempted to install Windows 95.
Attempted to install Windows 98.
Showcased a treasure trove of old software (mainly C compilers) recently purchased from Ebay (mainly US).
Attempted to read Microsoft C 5.1 720k 3.5" floppies. A couple of segways into religion/politics, and apologies if any Carabao were unduly alarmed. I'm from Queensland.
Attempted to install new version of PDOS/386 onto hard disk, in preparation for reading Microsoft C 5.1 (from 1988) from 3.5" floppies, and after (off-camera) preparatory work had shown that the old version of PDOS was not correctly reading the (believed to be) 720k floppies (in a 1.44 MB drive).
Proved that booting from a floppy image on CD now worked, followed by an attempt to show the effect of rudimentary caching. 203 seconds boot time was reduced to 136.
2023-05-14 video 1. (youtube). Attempted to get a real floppy disk to read and write, with limited success. File exceeded 2 GB so the link is to youtube. The original data that can be reconstructed with copy /b x+y z is 2023-05-14 video 1 part 1 and 2023-05-14 video 1 part 2
2023-05-13 video 1. Attempted to get a floppy image on CD to boot. Got a divide by zero at least.
2023-05-03 video 1. Mentioned absence due to change of plans due to breakthroughs, including proof that PDOS/86 ran on a real IBM PC AT (80286) clone (Compaq), from a 360k floppy. Video abandoned after a couple of minutes because my daughter was brought in, sleeping.
2023-04-20 video 1. I think here I explained about the DB9 serial port and writing a driver for it.
2023-04-18 video 1. I think here I had a problem with a corrupt USB stick when trying to reproduce a problem with the Magellan.
Introduction to setup.
Below is some historical information that can be ignored.
Ok, now I found out that my server has a 2 GB limit on uploads. So much for everything being 64-bit. And I also found out that an hour of video on my smartphone is about 4 GB. I don't know how to split an MP4, but I do know how to use xychop, and I just updated it to use unsigned long instead of signed long. So depending on msvcrt.dll I may at least be able to split this file in two, and in future I will watch the time. However, that means that the second file will not be in proper MP4 format. Hopefully one day forensic scientists will be able to make the second half of the video viewable. Or you could just do a copy /b file1+file2 file3.mp4 yourself. Whatever. Or maybe wait for it to come out on TV. Oh yeah, and before you ask - hey moron, don't you know that 2 GiB is different from 2 GB - well, yes, I do, but I don't know if the programmers who produced that error message do. And before you then have a followup - hey moron, why is it 1,999,999,999 instead of 2,000,000,0000 if that's the limit in the error message? Well, I don't know whether the programmer typed < or <=.
Update! Note that even the first file wouldn't play for some people because it was detected as corrupt, but fortunately someone else (Dimaguy) has split the video properly, so now there are two usable parts.
Update 2! It has now been uploaded as a single file to Youtube, so that is now the main link.
2023-04-17 video 2 part 1 (split properly).
2023-04-17 video 2 part 2 (split properly).
2023-04-17 video 2 part 1 - original, bad - see sad story above.
2023-04-17 video 2 part 2 - original, bad - even sadder story.
