I usually use modern VB .Net, but took a trip down memory lane.

So I started VB with version 3 on Windows 3.1, back in 1993/94. I've gone through every version since, as well as branching out into C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, etc.

Anyway, I installed Win3.1 on VirtualBox, and then installed VB3 in that. It was quite the trip down memory lane. ha ha!

Youtube video of the experience is here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejpYHez1JgE

I tried installing Win3.1 in a VM a long time ago, and didn't make it very far. I got the feeling I'd need to muck about with config.sys or something, but couldn't find any quick references that helped demystify it, haha.

Some where I still have my Turbo Pascal disks somewhere... given that they're on 5.25" floppies, I doubt I'm going to find a way to install it any time soon.
(10 minutes and a google search later)

Huh.... looks like there is a starter edition for Delphi... I may have to check that out...

-tg

If I only had an easier way to transfer files to a VM of DOS 6.22

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Originally Posted by DEXWERX

If I only had an easier way to transfer files to a VM of DOS 6.22

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You can download a DOS 6.22 VM for virtual box here:
https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems

Then, you can simply share a folder from your Mac/Windows box to the VM.

Jase

You know what I got interested in lately and I wish I'd been born a little sooner to experience? Hypercard.

It sounds really fun. I guess the reason there's not a good modern equivalent is before you get halfway through the features any dev could say, "That's just HTML/JS?"

But Hypercard was kind of like, "What if the HTML/JS development process came with a visual designer, too?" In a lot of ways it sounds like it was "VB for Mac", only with a bigger focus on "let's be accessible to non-programmers". It's hard to describe exactly what that means, but on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is "non-technical users can do non-trivial things with help" and 10 is "only experienced users are successful at non-trivial things", I'd say .NET development is about a 7, VB6 is a 4, and Hypercard sounds like it was trying to be a 2 or 3. (The problem with things at a low level of complexity is the hold-your-hand features tend to cause problems at scale. Even .NET has its share of those features, mostly as baggage from VB6.)

Anyway I'm rambling but it seems like such a neat program!

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Originally Posted by Sitten Spynne

You know what I got interested in lately and I wish I'd been born a little sooner to experience? Hypercard.

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I remember it well. I used to work on a support desk when I was younger, and people were always deleting stuff or corrupting stuff when it came to Hypercard. ha ha!

Can you set up a DOS VM such that it replicates the performance of an 8086?

I had a Joust game that was built for the 4 MHz 8086. I then got a 286 that normally ran at 12MHz, but could be throttled back...somewhat. Unfortunately, the way you flew in the Joust game was by hitting one key. You were always sinking down, and the faster you hit the key, the higher you flew. On the 286, even with the speed throttled back I could barely hit the key fast enough to get off the ground, and then only in short hops.

I don't have a copy of the game anymore, so I guess it is purely academic curiosity (I got the game while in academia).

I know you can't do this with VirtualBox. The closest you can get is limit the number of cores to 1, then slow the machine to a percentage of the host processor speed... So let's imagine 1% of a 2Ghz processor will still give you 200 Mhz, not the 4Mhz you're after.

I would use DOSbox to run an old DOS game, rather than VirtualBox running DOS.
In fact I have done that, but I'm not sure if I have a DOSbox running on my current laptop. It was probably on my previous laptop.

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Originally Posted by JasonCoulls

So I started VB with version 3 on Windows 3.1, back in 1993/94. I've gone through every version since, as well as branching out into C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, etc.

Anyway, I installed Win3.1 on VirtualBox, and then installed VB3 in that. It was quite the trip down memory lane. ha ha!

Youtube video of the experience is here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejpYHez1JgE

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Wow. Thanks for that. So many memories for me from that time. Enjoyed the nostalgia. MSCDEX in particular brings back so many memories. I remember fighting tooth and nail with it to get the CD-ROM to work on countless occasions. I eventually learned how to configure it with all its bizarre parameters in Autoexec.bat by heart. I remember a lot of fights with EMM386 as well. Those days were harsh. And of course, lots of memories with VB. My first foray into Windows programming started there as well.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Can you set up a DOS VM such that it replicates the performance of an 8086?

I had a Joust game that was built for the 4 MHz 8086. I then got a 286 that normally ran at 12MHz, but could be throttled back...somewhat. Unfortunately, the way you flew in the Joust game was by hitting one key. You were always sinking down, and the faster you hit the key, the higher you flew. On the 286, even with the speed throttled back I could barely hit the key fast enough to get off the ground, and then only in short hops.

I don't have a copy of the game anymore, so I guess it is purely academic curiosity (I got the game while in academia).

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I remember the arcade game, used to be a favorite! :thumb:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JasonCoulls

You can download a DOS 6.22 VM for virtual box here:
https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems

Then, you can simply share a folder from your Mac/Windows box to the VM.

Jase

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last I checked there are no host features for dos 6.22 - which means you can't share files through virtual box.
It should be possible with the right drivers to access a SAMBA file share or FTP though.

edit: definitely not easy :/

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I usually use modern VB .Net...

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"I don't always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis."

;)

****** Beer Tuesday #7: Dos Equis XX Special Lager

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Nothing says ****** beer like Dos Equis.

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Yeah, if you want something nice you have to look to Swift or TypeScript these days. That's more like the Quadrupel I like from a local brewery.

Weird but I read that Google is looking at a move that would ditch both Java and Kotlin for Swift on Android. No idea whether they are just tinkering or whether something else may be going on.

One reason might be to get away from the performance hit taken by any sort of "damaged code." Another may be alarm that Android programming in the U.S. has dropped off as domestic programmers move to iOS instead. The main reason given is that so much Android programming has moved to BRICS nations and undercut compensation rates so drastically that everyone is saying to Hell with it and bailing out. As the quality of Android apps flushes down the toilet Google risks losing major markets leaving just the bathless masses that aren't very profitable.

I'd guess that something else is going on, and that something else has to do with Java more than Swift, but that may be all ancient history.

Well, Apple did open-source the Swift language in much the same way MS made the BCL and C# open specifications. I'm not sure what Apple's intent there is, I don't think they have the same goals of owning the developer space that MS does.

Adopting Swift would still pose challenges for porting iOS apps to Android as an iOS app is going to want to bind to Cocoa and the Foundation libraries whereas Android has a Java SDK implementation and a ton of Android-specific libraries. So they'd need some kind of Xamarin-like middleware layer to handle that... but it seems like they've poached Tim Sneath away from MS for exactly that so maybe we'll see some interesting fireworks.

I wouldn't rule out "spite" or "self defense". Java is the only "open" language where the maintainer has consistently sued people who try to implement it. I'm not even sure C# would exist if Sun hadn't sued Microsoft, it seems it would've been easier to make J# the de facto .NET language without that baggage. It took Google years to dismiss the suit Oracle filed. I think the message is clear no one is really safe if they try to implement their own Java SDK. Demonstrably MS has not sued people who implement their stuff. Apple doesn't have that record, but perhaps Google figures "Since we sat on the Apple board while they designed iOS and cribbed their best ideas for Android and they let us get away with it, they're not going to sue us for this."

All of your points are interesting here too, dilettante, I just felt like these were some other angles.

Google definitely has some problems in the Android software market, and they aren't easy to solve when the platform is as open as Android.

Kotlin and Swift are such similar languages, it seems odd that Google would drop Kotlin for Swift.

It would be nice if they consolidated the languages and made 2 seperate runtimes, one for native compilation and one for the JVM.

The bad blood around Java was what I was referring to. There were some sharpened lawyers being tossed around for several years in the late 90s, which may well have made people wary of sticking too close to Java.

For all we know Google Fuchsia may be part of the picture.

Perhaps Google is is toying around, perhaps they will finally move away from the problematic Linux kernel. Or maybe it is meant for IOT and unrelated to future plans for Chrome OS and Android or replacements for them.

Yeah I feel like "Swift over Kotlin" makes sense if you're looking at the "Which company has sued the most people for using their open-source language" scoreboard.