Since a few days, and between two revision sessions, I had
fun to install FreeDOS and configure it with Qemu. Today I
(finally!) managed to get the network working and was able
to browse gopher thanks to gophernicus. How pleasing it is!
There's two cons though.
First, Qemu sometimes takes a lot from the host CPU, causing
the temperature to rise and the fan to be activated. I
wonder if it's from the emulation itself or if it's me who
needs to tweak Qemu's configuration more properly. Because
I'm emulating a very basic system with little RAM to run a
very light system, it shouldn't take that much on my so
modern quadcore CPU, or did I missed something?
The second concern is that I have problems with the sound.
I managed to configure the emulator but having sound results
in serious slowdowns of the virtual machine (only when
sounds are played). This make video games relatively unusa-
ble (unless I cut the sound) and playing mp3's is quite
messy. Something to dig in the next days...
But for everything else, and for now, it's great! It's not
my first time with FreeDOS. Years ago I had it on bare me-
tal, a proud 486DX I unfortunately don't have anymore. It
brings back good memories though. Maybe I could find an old
machine at a local broker's, just to make it more real?
And for the record, I'm actually writing today's entry from
WordStar 4.0, which is quite the fun. I've downloaded from
ZLIB the Easily into WordStar manual by Christine Simons and
already learned how to manage the margins, the (manual) hy-
phenation (with help from the word processor), &c.
Reading this manual is a leap in time. It was clearly made
for "regular" people back in the 80's (the version I have
was published in 1988). Meaning the author takes the time
in the introduction to explain what is a computer and how to
casually use it. Furthermore, knowing that many people may
never had the chance to put there hands on a computer, she
constantly needs to explain what is happening on screen.
For instance, here is an example page 12 where Christine
Simons clearly thinks of the typists of the time who used
only mechanical typewriters (I use '*' to show words in bold
in the book):
"(...) it is important to remember that the computer has an
automatic *WRAPAROUND* function which takes the text from
one line to another at the right-hand margin. This means
that when keying-in your work *YOU DO NOT PRESS 'RETURN' AT
THE END OF LINES WITHIN A PARAGRAPH*."
Yes, this last sentence is in bold AND uppercase! To empha-
size enough this small revolution, I guess? Certainly it
was necessary to conteract years of habit of hitting the
enter key to do a carriage return!
On page 17, something else made me smile:
"Because the screen can show only a certain number of lines
of type under the menu, the text *scrolls* (it appears to
move up under the menu) and you may think your work has
disappeared. But it hasn't (...)."
Yes, it was definitely a different time, wasn't it? One
would not imagine today having to explain in computer class
that text has not really disappeared from the word processor
as you type and reach the bottom of the screen!
Digging into FreeDOS is a lot of fun, I'm telling you. And
frankly, I'm having so much pleasure rediscovering the way
things were that I plan to keep using FreeDOS and WordStar
to write for the phlog. That will be the start of many more
plain text adventures I hope.
