Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

IDK about MacOS, but on Windows 9x/XP, sending bytes via serial was incredibly trivial in C#, Visual C++ or even ols school Visual Basic.[1]

Even if you didn't have one of the dozens of already written serial terminal apps, you could write your own pretty easily in one of those languages to push bytes out the serial port, with just a few standard API calls.

I doubt MacOS didn't have something similar. Unless of course, MacOS back then was somehow shittier than Windows, which I doubt.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.visua...

View on HN

No need for any programming language in Windows 9X, just open a DOS prompt and use 'copy file.txt COM1: /B'. We used that trick back in the DOS days to print raw ASCII files on parallel (LPT1:) or serial (COM1:) devices. I'm willing to bet it still works on Win11.

> I'm willing to bet it still works on Win11.

It might not. A lab I was at in uni still had Windows XP PCs because according to them, that's the last Windows OS that allowed direct serial/paralel port access needed to control the external robotics/CNCs via those old APIs the SW used, since subsequent versions of Windows abstracted away those direct HW API calls that DOS used in the name of security and stability.

What OS-level APIs would something communicating over serial be using? Sure, Windows abstracts the hardware, but that's been true since well before Windows XP, and modern versions of Windows still expose virtual COM ports for serial adapters connected through USB or PCIE, just as XP did.

In fact, even DOS abstracts away serial communications: your hardware would be set to a specific I/O port and IRQ, but DOS exposes those as I/O devices, so you would just read and write to COM1, COM2, etc.

My guess is that there's some other issue running that old Windows program on modern versions of Windows -- maybe some components are 16-bit, and since current 64-bit Windows doesn't include the VDM, they can't run. Or maybe it's an issue with current versions of certain DLLs.

Didn’t know how to program at the time I was using classic macos but my current understanding (having done some retro programming for fun) is that unless you specifically installed a programming environment there’s no real ability to script or even run commands.

Windows 9x/XP did not come with C#, Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Likewise, classic macOS did not come with any programming or scripting languages. In this respect, they were equally “shitty”, and your solution would have been unavailable for both.

windows xp sp1 and later bundled .net framework, which included compilers for c# and vb.net.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework_version_history...

AFAIK MacOS was just another UNIX, and in UXIX writing to a serial port was just writing to a file. Are you telling me MacOS had no shell scripting capabilities to write to a file via the command line? Even MS-DOS could do that.

Mac OS X is a UNIX (of sorts). Mac OS classic (as in the article) is most definitely not.

So that version of MAcOS had no possibility of some command line shell scripting?

There was no command line at all.

Brings back memories, but you'd have to install a programming environment, e.g.:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

- http://www.think-pascal.org/#SetUp

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C

Everything from DOS 5.x onwards (including Windows 9x and NT) came with QBasic, previous versions of DOS had GW-BASIC.

Not the greatest tools out of the box, but still better than nothing.

MS/PC-DOS shipped with debug.com since pretty much the first versions. It is a perfectly usable assembler where you can type a short loop that receives characters from the serial port and outputs them to a file. Similar things have been done many times to salvage hosed systems where a little more than copy file COM1: was required.

With the Internet today, you probably don't even need to remember the instruction names, you can probably find a printout of a program that does this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com