On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 7:46 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Roger wrote: > > I finished reading the "Why We Love FreeDOS" book a few nights > > ago. A really good read, and led myself to a similar conclusion, > > DOS/FreeDOS is a really good platform for learning and implementing > > initial experimental engineering for experimental or working hardware > > due to simplicity and bare metal access. I was inspired by this thread to also read the "Why We Love FreeDOS" book, and finished it this morning. What a fun read! Thanks for putting it together, Jim! For me, coming back to Freedos after ~22 years has been a lot of fun. I'm quite technical, and a professional software engineer now (I was a student when I last participated), so diving deep into the intricacies of old Undocumented DOS and the FreeDOS kernel code has been both refreshingly straight forward (I keep having to remind myself that DOS is not multithreaded) and complex (how does COMMAND.COM and friends split itself into a resident and transient parts?). It's been a month of re-discovery and learning. :D On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 7:46 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-user < freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > DOS was created for a different purpose. When IBM created the IBM PC > 5150 in 1981, they needed an operating system to run on it, so the > computer could run programs. I'll save the backstory, but Microsoft > licensed a "DOS" from Seattle Computing, and that became the PC's DOS. > But DOS was not intended to be a set of tools like Unix. Instead, the > DOS command line was something you might use to do a few things like > format a floppy or edit a file, or do basic file management, but > mostly you just ran an application (such as the BASIC interpreter). > DOS has always been very application-based. > This explanation has so much truth to it, and clicked with me. I grew up on DOS, but graduated on Linux, and so have tended to lean towards the unix tool philosophy, but this really explains a lot of DOS applications. A lot of them were really complete Applications and you would often have that one application which you would use to solve a problem, rather than I'll combine these tools to solve my problem. It might even make me change the way I build some of my commands for DOG :) -Wolf -- |\_ | .\---. / ,__/ / /Wolf <wolf+...@bergenheim.net>_ > -- > > I'm very off-topic with this, but here's an example: 'cat' will print > the contents of a file (or files) to the terminal. 'tr' will translate > one character set to another character set, or delete characters from > a set. 'uniq' will remove duplicate lines from a file. 'sort' will > sort the lines in a file. And 'comm' will compare two files and print > the lines that are unique to file1, file2, or both. > > Individually, these are interesting commands that you can use to do a > lot of different things. And by combining them in a specific way, you > can do something like find misspelled words in a text file: > > (The first command just makes sure you have a correctly sorted list) > > > $ sort /usr/share/dict/words > words > > > $ cat hello.txt > Hi there! This is a demnstration of how to find misspelled words. > > > $ cat hello.txt | tr A-Z a-z | tr -d '.,:;()?!' | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | > uniq | comm -2 -3 - words > demnstration > > > In other words: convert uppercase to lowercase, remove punctuation, > turn spaces into new-lines (each word will be on a separate line), > sort the list, remove duplicates, compare to the dictionary (the > 'words' file') and only show the lines (words) that do NOT appear in > the dictionary. > > So that just shows how to combine tools to do different things, rather > than relying on a single application to do it all for you. There's > tradeoffs either way for "tools" v "applications," I'm just showing an > example of "tools." > > > *The sort command was an original program from Unix 1st Edition > (November 1971), uniq arrived in Unix 3rd Edition (February 1973), and > tr and comm were both introduced in Unix 4th Edition (November 1973). > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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