NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 23:43 UTC (Mon) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992)
In reply to: NetBSD 10.0 released by proski
Parent article: NetBSD 10.0 released

Nah, period MSDOS would load fine off a floppy. Whether or not you could do anything with programs written towards the late 80s and later is a different question. But then, part of the retro experience is that quite a few useful programs at the time were written by the end users. MSDOS came with a limited form of Quick BASIC, remember. There were alternatives for other languages, all of which were just TUIs back then.

I distinctly remember I only started running into memory issues when it became necessary to load CDROM drivers, which were relatively huge for the time and took a special load sequence or you ended up with too little memory to load some programs. This was when optical drives were finally becoming commodity products in the 90s but before the release of Win 95.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 2, 2024 5:38 UTC (Tue) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

You're speaking about the latest versions shipping with QBASIC. I started with 1.25 which did not support directories, and later upgraded it to 2.11. By then 64k was quite sufficient and allowed me to start tons of programs, even the BASIC interpreter and the debugger. I had a game that couldn't start, and one day a neighbor offered me an extension to 256kB that allowed me to even run that game :-) So now when I see a server with 64GB of RAM, I know it is sufficient in itself to educate one million future developers to the basics of computing.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 2, 2024 16:23 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Qbasic — you youngster. I remember MS-DOS running off a floppy with a BASIC interpreter (one of IBM BASICA or MS GW-BASIC) and very little useful stuff, other than letting you program in BASIC. (Bill Gates' first claim to fame was writing the Altair BASIC interpreter, so maybe not surprising. His second claim to fame was writing that open letter to hobbyists...)

Our first home computer, when I was in high school, had a princely 1MB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. It could run the BASIC interpreter. And also the MS-DOS version of Rogue. And some edition of WordStar, as I recall. We upgraded the RAM to 2MB at some point, and later 4MB, and installed a hard drive, and were able to run Windows 3.1, and the MS-DOS version of Turbo Pascal, and even Aldus PageMaker.