why reactos is necessary even though presently useless as a daily driver.

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Kythra the suntamer
Kythra the suntamer
0 seconds ago
oopsies. meant to say wine has come a long way since 2006.

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DeWayfarer · 61-69, M

As a once long time ago programer I remember very well the problems I had with both the documentation of the interupt vector table as well as the lack of documentation of certain bios routines.

The arguments at the time sound to be very similar with the current lack of documentation of windows API.

Yet there were reference books not put out by MS that I actually used more frequently then anything put out, or approved, by MS.

I'm not into programming anymore, yet it seems this reacto thing is very similar to those ancient reference books that MS refused to even acknowledge.

I would fully approve of anything similar to those old reference books on the software end. There are many reasons for such software. One being faster and smaller code. Which was why I often used those books back then instead of any approved by MS.

In addition to better documentation of reference books as well, it gave unrelated information to the underlying areas of MS DOS.
I mentioned BIOS as well which is a whole different world. Yet these reference books as well gave timings for actual 80x86 instructions and such.

All this was highly applicable to programers of every sort. From device drivers to TSRs to actual full blown programs and utilities.

My problem with some of this new development has little to do with MS or Linux. Yet little is done with what is under anything of Apple's OS stuff.

It seems not even unapproved sources will touch anything from Apple. Where long before the was stuff like "Beneath Apple DOS".

That certainly was not approved by Apple BTW. Yet I fully used it frequently even back in the 1980s.

There's simply no one willing to confront Apple in any way, shape or form any more.

BetweenKittensandRiots · 36-40, MVIP

@DeWayfarer I had to look up TSRS and now i'm wondering what projects you actually programmed because that's some old old old hat stuff did you work in assembler?

But my own thinking is no ones touching Apple these days because the motivation level to reverse engineer MacOS at this point is extremely low. What benefit would we really get from doing so? I mean i'd like to see them finish APFS but it's just apple's clone of BTRFS.

but APFS being clean room reverse engineered fully would at least mean being able to really work with the phone without itunes and without having to use macos.

it's just there isnt a lot of worthwhile software worthy of reverse engineering the rest of MacOS that doesn't have an open source alternative or even a paid one over on windows.
apple stole it.

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DeWayfarer · 61-69, M

@BetweenKittensandRiots Yes, on both Merlin assembler (Apple IIe) and Borlands Turbo Assembler (TASM) in MS machines. Yet the list of computer languages I knew could fill a book.

When it came to both device drivers and Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programming there really was no option but to use assembly language. Both absolutely had to be small and little to no waste of code. Any other language requires libraries. Huge waste of space. Because libraries often used other unknown code. MS code all-over again.

Yet I was also into video code at the time and why I went to comdex for the MPEG Avi showings.

Yet that was just a small portion of what type of programming I worked on.

I done just about every type programming in those days.

From data base (HP MPE, Apple dbase II, MS Access, Oracle and FreeBSD MYSQL) to both front end and back end programming to windowing code (units) in Borland pascal to reports in RPG II and COBAL (Common Business Oriented Language).

You name it from back then, I did it!

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