Conway in C89Another year, another version of my Polyglot Conway project, this time for C89, also known as “ANSI C”, targeting quite a few compilers of the early 1990s, and some others from our more recent times.
FreeDOS on QEMUFollowing with my recent explorations around running vintage operating systems on various virtualization platforms, I’ve recently tried to run FreeDOS on QEMU, and these are the steps I followed. Sources: Wikibooks and QEMU QED.
WordStar 7 for DOSI’m a Fedora Linux user, a very happy one at that, and there’s no shortage of decent text editors for Fedora; yet, I have to say that for the past few months I’ve been happily writing my text on the most awkward and backward editor you could think of… and it turned out to be one of the most pleasant writing experiences I’ve had in the past few years.
Word 5.5 on DOSBoxContinuing with my exploration of old versions of Word in various platforms, I wanted to experience one of the last versions of Microsoft Word for DOS, Word 5.5. Here are the instructions to run it on any platform that supports DOSBox Staging.
32 Years of PC ConfigurationsI’ve been keeping track of the various characteristics of personal computers I’ve owned during the past 32 years, and here’s a table comparing those data points.
Conway in Minimal BASICLast Monday I released the 59th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, my dear monthly magazine about code, developers, and society, and this month I talked about BASIC in all of its flavors. As part of the preparation of this issue, I dived into the world of Minimal BASIC code, the one with source code line numbers, the one that would start immediately after powering up your computer, and the one that brings endless nostalgia.
My First PCI got my first personal computer 30 years ago this month. It was during the summer of 1992; I had just finished my first year of studies at the Collège Sismondi, and it was the first summer after we arrived from Argentina that looked like a real holiday.
Programmable CalculatorsAs far as I can remember, I have always been fascinated by computers. But in the crisis-ridden Argentina of the 1980s, buying one was beyond the reach of my mother. Actually, we did not even have a telephone back then.