Raymond Chen’s blog posts are one of the best things coming out of Microsoft.
As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.
This supports a GUI, which I think is based on X/GEM, as well as TCP/IP networking, app development in Java, and more. It was sold until about 10 years ago.
I don't think I've ever seen a screenshot.
There have also been interesting later FOSS developments.
On the ST platform, TOS + GEM evolved in multiple directions. Some were proprietary, such as MagiC.
EmuTOS went from a stub ROM that just reproduced something analagous to the kernel of MS-DOS to a full graphical OS, using the PC GEM source code that Caldera made GPL.
So there is a lovely full circle here, where the ST version continued for years after Windows killed off the PC version, but then the PC version got open-sourced and was used to revive and modernise the ST version in the 21st century.
There's been a lot more GEM-related development in the last decade or two than you'd expect. This makes me happy.
Ha! I came to say exactly the same! I (my dad) had a PC1512, CGA with B/W screen. It came with a serial mouse that we only took out of the box when we used GDE. I have to say we didn't use it much, as we were used to DOS and the "I boot the computer and directly run the application/game I want to use".
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 a lot (I guess that it was v2.2 or so in the Amstrad).
If you use it rarely, I can high recommend the excellent QuickEMU [0]
Any VM is just a `quickget ubuntu 24.04` and `quickemu --vm ubuntu-24.04.conf` away. The conf file is just a yaml that is very readable and can give you more cores/ram/disk easily. Just run `quickget` to get a list of OS's to download.
Thought this was the perfect place to share a project I've been working on for a few years: https://asm-editor.specy.app
It's an interactive online IDE for many assembly languages, currently M68K, MIPS, RISC-V and X86 (I need to improve X86). It has a ton of features that are made to teach assembly programming, and it can be embedded in other websites.
It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly.
Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.
The funding model is an integral part of the story.
Jasmin is something like this. It is essentially a high-level assembler, will handle register allocation (but not spills) for you, has some basic control flow primitives that map 1-to-1 to assembly instructions. There is also an optional formal verification component to prove some function is equivalent to its reference , is side-channel free, etc.
Windows 2 can be run on modern hardware using DosBox[0]. If like me your old install media is deep in an attic somewhere, you can still get them from lovely archive.org[1].
Well if OS2 had succeeded we would have PC's controlled by the OG evil tech monopoly which have had their business dealings in far worse things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust) than microsoft ever did.
As a Unix person for decades, for me it’s great to see his incredibly experienced and insightful view on software development in general and specifically OS development at Microsoft and to read about his experience with all these nice processor architectures no longer supported by NT.