Category: Uncategorized

Not the PDC

Rory Blyth is going on an adventure. Lucky git 😉 #

Robert Scoble describes the PDC keynote hall. #

As Silicon Valley Reboots, the Geeks Take Charge  “…most of the young companies that survived the crash – and the start-ups that have risen since – are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.” #

Opportunity ahoy: “A million UK households will switch from dial-up to broadband in the next year, says the telecoms watchdog.”

Dead Bits Run Again

Set the controls of the time machine back to the Spring of 1990…

I don’t know what you were doing back then, but I was about to start the final year of a computer science degree. Realizing that I was going to need some kind of computer if I was to have any chance of completing my final-year project (something to do with image processing, I think), I bought an almost new Amstrad PC 2086 through an advert in the local paper. It was basically an IBM XT-clone, and reasonably well spec’d for its time: speedy 8MHz 8086 CPU, enormous 640K RAM,  mind-blowing EGA graphics, and a proper keyboard and mouse. here was no hard disk, of course, but it had two 3.5″ 720Kb floppy drives; which was plenty.

With the PC 2086 I got a then-current version of DOS (probably 2.11) and a set of floppies containing something called Microsoft Windows 2.03 – some kind of graphics thingie. I vaguely remember installing this strange “Windows” software but being fairly un-impressed. It had a neat calculator, but there was no software (at least none that I could afford) that used this Windows stuff, so put the disks in a box and forgot about them.

That old PC got me through my final year, and through a further one-year master’s degree, using DOS, John Friend’s PC Outline, and a “borrowed” copy of Microsoft C 7.0. A high point was when I bought a 40Mb hard-disc (bizarrely, it was mounted on an IDE expansion card because the mother board had no disc controller, and you had to remember to park the disc heads manually). The low point was probably the day I spent six hours printing my master’s thesis on a Star dot-matrix printer. Ahh… I can hear it now… the screech of the print-head… the crumple of the paper as it jammed under the platter… Those were the days…

Now fast forward to early 2003. The Amstrad went into the skip years ago but, while unpacking after moving house, I found those old Windows 2.03 discs together with a lot of other discs from the same era (Wordstar, anyone?). After twelve-plus years sitting in a box they were mostly unreadable and ready for the bin. Probably because of their historical value, though, I kept the Windows discs with the intention of doing something with them.

And now its now. I fired-up VMware and tried installing this strange old windows on top of DOS 6.22. Much to my surprise, it worked. And this is what I saw:

Windows 2.03 desktop    Windows 2.03 desktop   

Pretty cool, huh? These old bits were released by Microsoft in 1987 – sixteen years ago – and sat in a box for years, and they still work. Okay, so I’m running them in an emulation environment, but I could install them on a brand-new modern PC and they would run just as well on the bare metal.

The impressive aspect to this just how well the compatibility works. Windows 2.03 runs happily under DOS 6.22, which didn’t hit the streets until seven years later – at the end of May 1994. VMware 3.2 was released in 2002, but runs them both. Its hard to think of any other technology with such impressive backward compatibility. Okay, so an audio cassette tape recorded in 1963 (assuming it physically survived) would probably still play on a modern cassette player, but only because the associated technology has seen essentially no changes since it was first introduced. With computers, on the other hand, the hardware and software have seen immense changes. While it is slightly depressing to think of the human effort that has been expended over the years in making each new device and release compatible with those that preceeded them, it does make innovation possible while keeping the installed-base happy. Without it, I doubt we’d have an IT industry, and I wouldn’t be writing this.

I do wonder how long this can go on. Will there be a day in 2020 when I’ll find a Longhorn DVD in the back of a cupboard, and try to run it up on whatever screaming hardware we’ll have by then? That would be fun.

pointers: Religion, Voting

NY Times: Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong. Some welcome news one the decline of religious belief in Europe. Quote: “The parishes tell me that there are children who don’t know how to make the sign of the cross.” Well gosh… I’m shocked. #

Not-so-welcome NY Times article on the rise of religion in third-world counties. #

The same edition of the NY times has a report of a tragic, multiple-fatality accident involving a bus full of religious believers. God was obviously looking the other way. #

Two articles (here and here) about the computerised voting machines now being used in the US, and the potential for their misuse. Its spelt c-o-u-p.