The MS-DOS Showcase | Hacker News Reader

The MS-DOS Showcase

ascii.textfiles.com

109 pointsfcambus46 comments

If you don't know him already, textfiles has one of my favorite people on the internet (Jason Scott) running a lot of things, and hoarding interesting material for our future. As far as I can tell the dude just loves MS-DOS games and hence we have this great project. (I imagine there are a lot of contributors, but he is clearly pushing it forward)

He gave a great talk at DEFCON 17 called "That one time I was sued for two billion dollars." in which he gives a few more details about textfiles if you are interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY

Is this showcase his or Internet Archive's project?

It's the Internet Archive's project. (Jason Scott works for the Archive, but also has his own projects. This one happens to be an IA project.)

How am I the first person to mention Leisure suit Larry?

On one end of the scale, is this Internet-playable version of all of these games.

On the other end of the scale, is a complete archive of such games installed, and playable, in your portable DOS machine: http://openpandora.org/

And somewhere, on a different scale, is the myriad number of other system emulators you can run today .. and gain access to decades of computing history. If you are new to computers and are learning of this world, one thing you can do to enjoy the experience is dig into the emulation-of-older-systems culture that is out there. Old software still works, and is still quite productive in many cases!

(Personal example: Cakewalk DOS is still a wicked little music-making machine!)

Don't forget the [GCW Zero](http://www.gcw-zero.com/), pretty much the more modern sibling of the Pandora! It doesn't have a full physical keyboard, though.

EDIT: Right, no Markdown. Oh well.

Looks like cool material, and the Internet Archive has a lot of interesting data besides games worth checking out.

On an unrelated note, that notebook picture in the article is very nice! Anybody know of where to get such a unique book?

EDIT: Found it, from http://www.geekware.ca/floppy-notebook-c-61/floppy-disk-note... Which apparently specializes in recycling electronic waste into products. Good to see the reuse of old software and hardware in this article. :)

Nifty. Whenever i wonder where to find something with only a image on hand is to do a reverse image search via Google.

I'm not sure if I understand, is this abandonware?

From Wikipedia: "Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no product support is available. Although such software is usually still under copyright, the owner may not be tracking or enforcing copyright violations."

So the software will be there until (or because) the copyright holder won't enforce his rights.

The Internet Archive styles itself as an internet facing library (which is a way to claim more latitude re copyright: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108 ).

The argument that they are providing access to the material, rather than distributing it, is probably a reasonable one to make (I guess it probably isn't technically legal).

The Internet Archive is an internet facing library. That's not (just) a "legal fiction" to get around some laws.

My phrasing is such because "internet facing library" is not a well established concept, in any sense.

Well, probably few people here are lawyers specializing in copyright law. But at least at first glance, the rationale for the IA's position is that they are a nonprofit, and their motivations are clearly just to archive and preserve this stuff for the future. And, without them, this stuff might well end up not being preserved.

It is piratism, plain and simple. Calling it "abadonware" is just disingenuous whitewashing.

I'm sure they're going to be very fast at removing things once the relevant copyright owners actually notice and send takedown demands. However, for all of the copyrighted material for which they never receive a notice, how is it immoral for them to host it? If nobody cares, nobody's receiving any money from their ownership of the copyright, so the hosting obviously can't be reducing their profits.

> If nobody cares, nobody's receiving any money from their ownership of the copyright, so the hosting obviously can't be reducing their profits.

Well, realistically, that wasn't really the point of copyright to begin with anyway (increase/guarantee of profits). The point was a distribution/derivative monopoly for limited duration to allow a creator/inventor to recoup their investment. The whole profit thing is just a means to an end.

If you look at copyright the way it was actually intended to work, it becomes very hard to argue that distributing abandonware should be prosecuted, no matter the circumstances.

It is called preservation.

Nice kneejerk response.

Seriously though, no, it is not "whitewashing". It is a very specific term to describe a type of software that is considered obsoleted and 'abandoned' to the point that the rightsholder (if it is known at all) is virtually guaranteed not to make claims on it, simply because it's too old to be relevant.

In the broader sense of the term, it is also used for software that has attained an unclear legal status because of some weird historical oddity that isn't handled by copyright law; many undocumented IP acquisitions, death of the entire family tree of the rightsholder, and so on.

What you are describing, "piratism" (which, by the way, is the first time I see that particular spelling of "piracy") is what somebody supposedly does with it, not what it is. They describe two entirely different things. Not to mention that in some cases, distribution of abandonware can legitimately not fall under the banner of "piracy" due to one of the aforementioned edge cases.

First I support the Internet Archive and I wish them the best. I really like that DOS Video Games are being saved.

I have to question the legality of it because they didn't ask publishers permission first. They just downloaded the DOS video games, hosted them, run EM-DOSBOX to play them in the web browser, and then have a link to a DMCA page to email them to remove the game from the publisher.

This is sort of what many Bittorrent sites did, and they too claimed to be saving the games, and making an archive, and hosting a library and they still got shut down and people got arrested. One famous one is The Pirate Bay that has a ton of DOS based games from Razor 911 and other groups. They got raided recently and their site taken down and they haven't made a functional one yet.

This is sort of a grey area that The Underdogs once did, and they had to take down a lot of DOS Video Games in their abandonware archive.

As it turns out a lot of DOS based video games get put for sale on Steam or GOG.COM and they usually run on some DOS Emulator like DOSBOX. With the Internet Archive hosting the same DOS video games for free, I ask will this cut into their sales?

I used to work for lawyers who did IP and they would issue DMCA takedowns of copyrighted materials. Sometimes suing the owners of the website even if they were a non-profit, etc.

If IA asked for permission first, it would have been a different story. Some publishers might agree that allowing a free version of their game might stir interest in a remake of the same game for modern platforms. This was once done with Daggerfall when Skyrim came out. It would have been good PR for the IA and the publishers. But by not asking permission first, doesn't it sort of open up a hole that might allow them to be sued?

Actually, TPB completely ignored DMCA requests, so that's not really a good comparison at all. The same goes for other torrent sites, really - their abuse handling policies really aren't anything like that of IA, and they attract a distinctly different audience.

As for the legal point of view, I doubt anybody in this thread will be more qualified to discuss that than the legal team of the Internet Archive. They've been at it for a long time, and have had a number of legal cases about this already, including https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

As for the moral point of view, I see absolutely no problem with IA doing what they do.

This is awesome. If I have a a bunch of DOS programs I want to have auto-startup in browser, what is the easiest way of doing this?

Have a read at "Packaging DOS programs" here: https://github.com/dreamlayers/em-dosbox/

Before you go too crazy on the packing, we very, very specifically wrote a loader that would use .zip files (and you have to declare which file in the .zip is the first-executed one). That way you're not translating everything to that crazy intermediate.

It would be cool if you could make it easy for others to use the zip loader architecture. :)

What's funny is that MS-DOS is only 4 years older than Windows, initial MS-DOS release being 33 years old whereas Windows is 29 years old.

I'm pretty sure that in 2018, there won't be a “Windows Showcase” giving such a rush of sweet nostalgia; I wonder how come Win has so much more longevity than MS-DOS had?

There's almost such a thing right now. In the node Socket.IO package there is a 'computer' example where you and random internet strangers can control an XP machine: http://socket.io/demos/computer/

=) Nice link, didn't know about it!

It is possible the reason is because Windows was not really adopted until 3.11 which was around 1992. But even then people still used DOS to load some applications and games.

Good point!

True. I used win 3.11 when I had to use Word. Other than that, it was DOS.

Yep. Windows 1.0 to 3.11 came as an "add-on" to DOS.

Heck, even as late as Windows ME you had some kind of DOS sitting at the bottom. Only with Windows XP did consumer Windows fully evict the DOS underpinnings.

I think my first PC came with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.11. Barely touched Windows back then.

IIRC Win2k was already DOS-less, wasn't it?

Yep, being of the NT lineage. But it was not really sold to the consumer market (tough it had better gaming support via directx than any previous NT version). XP was the first consumer NT based Windows release.

Windows NT 3.1 (1993) and its successors (NT 4.0, Windows 2000, XP and the server equivalents) was independent of DOS, but was separate to the other OSes (Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME) that ran with a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit monolithic kernel on top of some sort of MS-DOS.

The most popular Windows games are still available: Solitaire and Minesweeper!

Forget about that, there's Pinball.

Your saying Pinball, combined with the topic of this post - i.e. older computers and operating systems - reminded me of the book The Soul of a New Machine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

which I read some years ago. A fantastic story. Pinball is mentioned in it. Anyone interested, don't go by the description in the Wikipedia article; it may be only partially accurate, and anyway cannot do justice to the book. Try to get hold of an online or offline copy and read it. I'm not endorsing (or otherwise) any of the practices or principles described in the book - just found it a fascinating story. According to Wikipedia:

"The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[1] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction."

Current and former startupistas may be reminded by the book, of some aspects of their life/work-styles, whether good or bad.

DOS and Windows are not the same age -- you are not comparing apples-to-apples. MS-DOS is a modification of x86-DOS, and x86-DOS is a near copy of CP/M (which has the same API and a many other low level similarities) which is from 1972/1974.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

The current version of Windows is based on the NT kernel which was written from scratch starting in 1989.

… starting in 1986, at DEC, when it was called MICA.

Nonsense. There is zero lines of code from Mica in NT.

However the same people did design both Mica and NT. Namely Dave Cutler and his team of ex DEC engineers who got fired when the DEC PRISM project was closed (of which Mica was a core part).

By the logic of your argument Linux wasn't started in 1991, it was started in 1969 and called Unix originally... Even if both where independently developed.

DEC sued MS for a hefty sum and settled out of court for the IP that Cutler took and passed on to MS so at some level there is Mica stuff in NT or else MS would have probably won that suit.

Part of the arrangement was that MS would issue NT for the Alpha architecture, which in fact they did.

Irrelevant. The above comment claimed:

> … starting in 1986, at DEC, when it was called MICA.

Which isn't accurate. NT definitely contains ideas and maybe protected trade secrets from DEC, that's just inevitable when you hire all of DEC's former team to build your new OS. But it is a massive leap to then go on to claim that NT was in fact Mica or that NT was started years earlier because that is when Mica was.