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Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
> Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
Yep, it was a thing, and for /some/ programs that were originally CP/M programs (i.e., WordStar 7.0 for DOS) it continued for a long time. The WordStar 7 documentation included patch locations to use (this time, IIRC, for DOS debug.exe) to change various behaviors of the program.
But I thought specifically patching something to configure it is such a weird concept that I never would have thought of.
What was very common on those devices was using the "poke" command in BASIC to change a handful of values, but while it was possible to change code in this way it was much more common to be changing the value of variables - things corresponding to "number of lives left" and the like. Not all that different.
Fairly quickly, though, the games were entirely in machine code and used fancy loaders (still from tape mostly) so you didn't get access to BASIC. This created a market for devices that let you get at a monitor program - the "Multiface" series of addons². They had at least three generations of that device, but the company slightly weirdly evolved into a music production company³ after that, which is kind of cool.
Er, ok, I'll stop now while I still can...
Edit: PS - you should ask him about it. Tell him another former ZX81 owner says "Hi" and that my fingers still ache from that keyboard. Although I sneer a bit at its capabilities, it kicked off an interest in computing that's still paying the bills 40 something years later...
----
¹ https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000265/Book/Not_Only_...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Robot
One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?
OK. I love Raymond’s blog but this is crazy. Microcomputers existed only as a prototype in 1973 (things like Intel’s Intellec dev systems) and there were no operating systems for them. Strictly speaking, Kildall did start developing CP/M in 1973, but at that point it ran only on a simulator on a PDP-10 mainframe.
1979, sure. 1973? Way too early…
So I guess the moral of the story is: Ensure they always point to the same path, or else...
Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )
I assume that they first tried /dev/null which failed, so then moved onto just plain null?
Otherwise it would not make sense that a unix programmer did this. More likely ula dos programmer misspelled NUL as null.
That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").
The whole story is that Microsoft just never bothered to standardize, despite using it themselves.
"Over time, programs were written with MS-DOS as their primary target, and they started to realize that they could use environment variables as a way to store configuration data. In the ensuing chaos of the marketplace, two environment variables emerged as the front-runners for specifying where temporary files should go: TEMP and TMP."
And before that there are a few paragraphs describing the migration of applications from i8080/Z80 based CP/M towards x86 based DOS via mechanical translation.
I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts!
Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated!
https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch
I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config?
I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts.
I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
I almost want to set up a VM that sets up XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/.foobar and see how many apps actually respect it, and how many still write to ~/.config.
Interfacing with people is never easy.
[1]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
[0]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
I noticed this first when I assigned TZ to .tar.xz (or .tar.gz) as I was lazy. Then things suddenly no longer worked. Turns out TZ is ... timezone. So you should not define all variables, right? Well ... how to know that? People can perhaps read tons of documentation, but I want to ... minimize time investment here. So I learn mostly by learn-and-doing. And as far as I know there is no trivial way to know about "this can be dangerous". Those shells are fairly simple at all times - and not that sophisticated.
TMP versus TEMP may also be trivial but ... who can remember the differences? And why is it important?
I have come to think that environment variables are useful; I use them all the time. But they are a bit hackish and not super-elegant and may have side effects. This is not a very important side effect per se, as most people will not run into issues such as TZ or having to think which variable to use and which not, but in the moment when you DO get surprising results, and you don't know why, this may become a problem suddenly. I kind of semi-work around by prefixing via:
This is even less elegant, to then have e. g.: or something like that. But with the prefix "MY_" I rarely run into problems. So this then becomes my main pointer, e. g. MY_TEMP_DIRECTORY, and then TEMP and TMP may just be aliases to that. It's a bit stupid but it is also simple and kind of works. Beauty is not to be found here, but it is practical and that is not a bad thing.In my own ruby code I also have to use ENV[] sometimes, which is a wrapper over environment variables, but I also try to be as independent as possible from that. For instance, all my settings are stored in simple .yml files, and these are then used to autogenerate environment variables or handle things in environments where there are no environment variables available (this is sometimes the case; I had that issue with .cgi files many years ago, where I wanted to access all environment variables but for a reason I don't fully remember, this was not available. Then I transitioned into those .yml files and that problem went away; now of course I need to load those .yml files, if necessary, but this is trivial in ruby, YAML.load_file() works very well for the most part, and I find this is more reliable than depending on reading environment variables output. On some restricted environments this may be unavailable though; I had that on university campus running ancient linux systems, so I have to be flexible in this regard).