We ❤️ Open Source

A community education resource

Jim Hall

Jim Hall is an open source software developer and advocate, including projects such as open source usability and the FreeDOS Project. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company. | Check out Jim’s new book From Markup to Markdown (available now) about important milestones in writing with computers, including nroff, LaTeX, HTML, and DITA.

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We ❤️ Open Source

Jim Hall

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Articles by Jim Hall

The copyright problem with AI-generated code

4 practical pandoc techniques for everyday document conversion

California’s age verification law applies to Linux, FreeBSD, and FreeDOS too

Tiny programming with FreeDOS: Just a kernel, shell, editor, and compiler

Edlin on FreeDOS: When a simple line editor is all you need

26 commands to get started with FreeDOS

Turn off acceleration for an authentic retrocomputing experience

Why FreeDOS is a modern DOS

Build a dc-style calculator in C using a simple stack

Getting started with dc: The command-line calculator hiding in your terminal

Download the free starter guide to command-line stacks today

How I run virtual machines with QEMU

Optimizing for the edge: Lessons from DOS, Turbo Pascal, and hardware constraints

Inside the shareware era: Features, bugs, and programming in DOS

Building As-Easy-As: A spreadsheet born out of scientific need

The nuclear engineer who became a software founder

The AWK trick I use to count real words in Markdown

Intro to DOS graphics: A simple way to draw with pixels

Command line magic: Extracting links with awk, grep, and tr

Clean up your code with Indent

How I built a Markdown-to-HTML tool on a 5MB FreeDOS system

Why developers keep choosing LibreOffice after 40 years

FreeDOS 1.4 is the retrocomputing system you’ve been waiting for

4 open source documentation tools for developers

From TurboC to Open Watcom: A tale of two C compilers and their interfaces

Getting started with FreeDOS 1.4 Release Candidate 1

How to use the findfirst-findnext functions to expand wildcards into filenames

How to write your first FreeDOS program

5 FreeDOS editors I love

From HTML to AI: What the modern technical writer’s toolkit looks like

How slow was the Teletype?

A Linux and Unix experiment – Part 3: Writing several C programs

A Linux and Unix experiment – Part 2: Preparing a document using nroff

A Linux and Unix experiment – Part 1: Writing a FORTRAN 66 program

A throwback experiment with Linux and Unix: Introduction and set-up

Unix user commands reference guide

Technology history: Where Unix came from

Unix 4th edition commands reference guide

Getting started with the ‘ed’ editor

How to navigate the command line

Explore the five steps of the FreeDOS boot sequence

Learning to program: 2 ways to copy files in C

Looking ahead to 30 years of FreeDOS

Explore regular expressions by playing a word game

Celebrating 60 years of BASIC and why it’s still relevant for new programmers

5 elements to explore in ODT files

Learn about machine language with this retro computer simulator

Another open source DOS: A new reference for how MS-DOS worked under the hood

How to make a web color palette with Bash tutorial

Automation tips for using ‘if’ statements in Bash scripts

4 lessons from my first open source contribution

Automating jobs with ‘cron’

Learn programming by exploring these tech history milestones