Absolutely the same here.
And sometimes i wake up pretty early, feeling totally awake. I find that in that case, I have to get up. If i force myself to sleep 2 more hours, the day is basically ruined.
I have an irrational attachment to V2.11. For whatever reason, I thought that represented the first mature, finished DOS V2. V2 was massively improved over V1 (V1 didn't have subdirectories), and V3,4,5 etc were much more marginal improvements. For years I kept a version of debug.com from V2.11, patched (with debug.com) so that the initial version check didn't abort for something other than 2.11. It had all the features I expected in debug, yet was positively tiny compared to bloated later versions with no (important) extra features. To me that was V2.11 versus later versions in a nutshell.
3.3 seemed to be a common base for a long time, and a lot of people skipped 4.0. The big feature it brought to market was support for >32Mb disc partitions, but at the cost of using enough conventional memory that you needed bootdiscs to turn off "superfluous" stuff like mouse drivers to play some games.
5.0 brought the ability to load a bunch of stuff high, so you could finally have your cake and eat it too.
I'm with you there -- IIRC, the 3.x series was all about hard disks. I'd lean toward 3.31, though, personally as the "Everything(TM)" item since (I think) that was the version that shipped with FAT16 (had to hit up Wikipedia and this was the version that supported partitions over 32MB). I remember, as a kid, that we had to have 2 partitions on our drive because of the version of DOS not supporting partitions greater than that size and that this was a problem for us for a while (how long, not sure, I was young, could have been years but was probably months), so it seemed like it was a pain point that was overdue for where software was heading, even then[0].
It was also when I started to feel the age of the 8088 I was running it on and was the first version of an OS that I wrote something 'difficult' that I thought was 'really cool' using assembler. I was very young, so cool had a wildly different definition than it has today. What I wrote was a TSR (terminate and stay ready -- something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a background app) that made a ball-like character bounce around the screen after a random number of minutes, really fast* for a second (just long enough for you to maybe question what you saw)[1].
It was a horrible pain of C, some assembler, and -- of course the mess of pirated software that claimed to be something of a compiler and a development environment but I found most of them were designed to simply return indecipherable errors (or -- error codes -- sometimes literally just exit codes), it took me weeks, but it's the reason I stopped begging for a C64, Mac, Amiga or any of the other platforms that had far more fun things to do with them at the time.
[0] Some never forget being told '640K is more than you'll ever need' (yes, partial or misquote, but it's exactly what the guy who sold us that first 8088 told us) -- I'll never forget the incredible controversy that happened when OS/2 2.1 came out and it was something like ~30MB installed! We had a FULL height 350MB SCSI drive at the time (a cool $1,600 controller, cable, terminators, drive and all), so I was a little spoiled. I was still always almost full all the time but, hey, what can you do.
[1] I got the idea from a rumor I had heard about a software virus of the time that did something similar. Mine didn't spread -- it had to be edlin'ed into the AUTOEXEC.BAT. I named it something non-obvious since my dad was proficient enough to go snooping around (it may have even been something in the more l33t CONFIG.SYS).
Honestly, I think I've always referred to it as Terminate and Stay Ready; probably something I read in one of those old books that used to adorn the bookshelf of my parent's office.
Writing it brought back a lot of memories, as well - glad someone enjoyed it! It's amazing to think that we used to write programs in ways other than "I don't know how to do this" (performs google search) "I know how to do this now", but rather had to pour through books, forums (on dial-up BBSes and what qualified as equivalents in the early Internet days) and acquiring that little nugget of knowledge felt like it had so much more value, even though the reality is that the value was the same, it just took a lot more effort.
I wrote a couple of TSR programs too, nothing too advanced, but it was a fun time to be learning and experimenting.
I suspect the most useful thing I wrote was a simple "undeleter" program, for recovering deleted files from floppies and drives. Unmarking the FAT-entry as deleted, then chasing blocks to reassemble the file.
I wasn't a fan of the 6.x series of DOS but I can't remember exactly why. I have fond memories of DOS 5.0, but that's also the first version I ran on my 486 that we built in the 90s (I came from an 8088, so this was an unfathomable upgrade). It was the first version of DOS that I could finally run some interesting games on.
One thing I do recall about the 6.x series that drove me nuts was that the installer progress bar was ... peculiar[0]. It seemed like you could benchmark the 5.0 and 6.22 install from the time the progress bar started and both would go from 0% to 99% in the same time, but where 5.0 would finish with a non-unusual delay after 99%, each version of 6.x spent a while there, with each minor version longer than the prior. By a while, it was something like 3 or 4 times more time spent on that 1% than the entirety of 0-99 (no politics intended). We joked that the entire MS-DOS 5.0 installer must have been copied over and they appended all of the files for 6.x to some post-install script that ran at 99%. No evidence or attempts to gather evidence were ever done, but it was something to talk about while waiting for that last semi-solid 8-bit ASCII block to get filled in.
The 6.x series ended up being one that I ran for the least amount of time -- I ended up on DR-DOS and PC-DOS. But software of that time was really painful to work with. Eventually, I ended up on OS/2 (2.0 through Warp, which I used until just prior to Windows 95) because it felt like the software I depended on ran the same on the platform it was designed for -- Windows 3.x -- as it did on on OS/2's compatibility layer[1].
And the worst part is this is not a compliment of OS/2. Back then, starting an application wasn't as simple as tapping an icon on a touch-screen. Some programs required commitment and following a careful launch sequence if your level of commitment was detected as insufficient. To appease these demonic applications, you followed a careful set of ritualistic actions. Double-click the program icon, wait until the mouse stops moving entirely (or if it starts hopelessly stuttering, that's fine, too). At this point, turn the computer off, wait until it's quiet, turn it back on, tidy your desk, refill the coffee, double-click the application icon (rinse, repeat until you land three 7s). And in the days of co-operative Multitasking or OS/2's 'hold my beer' with a single application's bug taking out the entire system (OS/2 one-upped Microsoft by occasionally causing dumpster fires in the shape of large, metal, PC enclosures). /s
This really wasn't meant to be so ranty, so my apologies. I think fondly of those days. I also tend to think about them a lot more when people say silly things like 'quality of software isn't what it used to be'. It really depends on what 'used to be' means. (-:
[0] Sure, complaining about an installer you run once is weak, but while I mentioned that big computer upgrade, I didn't mention was that it was funded by my father selling PCs which I assembled and configured DOS/Windows/Networking on (we had some corporate clients). It was a side business he set up as a way for me to make enough money to buy a top-of-the-line upgrade. I was 13, or so, and we were ... successful ... just my take in it paid for a car and a 486 that cost as much as a car. I installed ... a lot ... of DOS ... and Windows.
[1] If memory serves, it was actual Win32 API code that they had a license to from past contractual agreements (they still had to pay for the license for each version but they were legally allowed to include it on install media), so it wasn't so much a compatibility layer as it was ... Windows, running on OS/2 with stability as a future feature ... of Windows, and nearly every Windows app of the era. Later they removed the compatibility layer, and released a version where you could provide your Windows installation disks to get the compatibility layer. The two were meant to feel tightly glued together, but someone mixed up glue and lube.
Windows 95 was really annoying in that regard, the progress bar would race to 95%, and then stay there for a long time. We used to joke that the installation routine would only start doing any actual work upon reaching that 95% mark.
You can keep politics out of your own github account. But maybe people who will bring their politics to you, regardless. Maybe you didn't even realize that you did something "wrong". Maybe you said something that wasn't "wrong" at that point, but a few years later, it is.
> Or your opinions are spicy in general.
So if not anybody likes your opinion, it's your fault for having the wrong opinions...?
I'm hedging as much as I can here. That is certainly not the case, but I would consider that question right there to be critical to good introspection and growth as a person.
"If everyone hates my opinion, is that the wrong opinion to hold so dearly?"
It's certainly worth honestly considering if most people think your opinion is terrible.
Yes, I'm sure folks hiding jews in their attic in Nazi Germany would have been better off had they just decided to go with the flow.
It is worth being introspective, but you should keep in mind the fact that an opinion being popular has very little to do with whether it's right.
Reality is also that the vast majority of people don't care about the politics that get people ousted from OSS projects. It's more along the lines of "if a very loud minority thinks your opinion is terrible".
