PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available, along with an archive of historical software and documentation.
This is my brief take on the story of a web standard (XSLT) that was created around 25 years ago and has existed in all modern web browsers ever since, but has now been deemed too hard and too costly to maintain, too much of a security risk, and is used by a sufficiently small number of active websites that XSLT can simply be removed from web browsers – effectively killing all those pages…
A couple of years ago, while sifting through lots of ZIP archives from old Shareware CD-ROMs , I found quite a few that couldn’t be unzipped, either because they were corrupted, encrypted, or used compression methods that were no longer supported by modern ZIP utilities. That took me on a journey of ZIP (and ARC) decompression, and I created some new PCjs decompression tools in the process,…
Over 30 years ago, in March 1993, Microsoft released MS-DOS 6.00 , the next major release of MS-DOS after 5.00 shipped in June 1991. In addition to several new full-screen utilities, like DEFRAG to defragment your hard disk (licensed from Symantec), MSBACKUP to efficiently backup your hard disk (also licensed from Symantec), and MSAV to check for viruses (licensed from Central Point Software),…
This will probably be the final post in my “ trilogy ” of posts about the PC.js command-line utility, now that I’ve (hopefully) finished ironing out most of the wrinkles. I’ve improved FAT12 and FAT16 support, so when pc.js builds either a standard or custom FAT disk image, it should be compatible with whatever version of PC DOS, MS-DOS, or COMPAQ DOS you select. BTW, there’s no FAT32 support.…
Last month, I wrote about a new tool I’ve been working on. pc.js is a stripped-down version of the web-based PCjs emulator that runs console-based DOS programs from the command-line. Since then, I’ve added a few more features and improved its ability to construct and load hard disk images. Before I get into the changes, I want to re-emphasize something I mentioned last time: “Only text-based…
Recently, I’ve been working on a command-line utility that uses PCjs machines to run DOS software on modern operating systems, and it’s called, aptly enough, pc.js . Let’s run through a few examples. All you need to get started is: Install Node and NPM Clone the pcjs repository (eg, git clone https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs.git ) CD into pcjs and run npm install For the examples below, I’m using…
BASIC shipped with every IBM PC, both in the machine’s ROM and on DOS diskettes, making it the easiest (and cheapest) way to create programs that could run on every other IBM PC in the world. So it’s no surprise that a lot of BASIC software was created and distributed throughout the 1980s. I recently wrote some new libraries to help create an online version of the PC-SIG Diskette Library , a large…
The PC Software Interest Group, aka PC-SIG, began advertising a directory of public domain software for the IBM PC in early 1983. A year later, their collection featured over 135 diskettes, which you could purchase for $6 per diskette, plus $4 per order for shipping. Each diskette was numbered, to make it easy to specify which diskettes you wanted. By 1986, PC-SIG was one of the most prominent…
File compression became quite popular in the 1980s. People who used dial-up “BBS” bulletin board systems could transfer compressed data in less time, and people like me could squeeze more data onto 360K diskettes. For IBM PC users, a popular compression solution was a “shareware” program named ARC written by Thom Henderson in 1985 and sold by his company, System Enhancement Associates (“SEA”). ARC…
I first visited Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum in October 2013. It offered a unique museum experience, combining traditional displays and plaques with interactive exhibits and vintage computers that allowed you to run a variety of old software–and even write your own. In 2012, when the museum first opened to the public, here’s what Paul Allen wrote on the LCM website: Note one sentence in…