If I were to write an OS for a system of that era, I think I would target a game console. Compatibility is a rabbit hole (as I discovered when writing a JIT for Ruby). If you don't have to worry about whether other software runs, there is a lot of room for creativity.
Risk was minimized with the use of segmented memory. A bad pointer would generally only clobber something in the same (data) segment of memory. But there were no segfaults; a program crash means a reboot, which is why so many people optimized config.sys abs autoexec.bat for fast boot.
Come to think of it, maybe things aren't so different today -- if something goes wrong in your container/vm, many teams just wipe it and start from a clean snapshot
I remember that book! I wanted to get a copy but made do with the DOS Programmer's Reference, 3rd ed., which was also very good since beej's interrupt list wasn't available yet or I didn't know about it.
I found a copy of the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia (PCGPE) back then but couldn't really wrap my head around most of the articles (especially the 3D stuff and Mode X).
KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.
I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded).
I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).
"You are granted permission to read, copy, modify, redistribute this software or derivatives of this software."
While Jim's more popular projects were usually MIT-licensed, Jim was once on a quest to find the world's shortest open source license. As far as I can tell, this is the final form of that license, dating to 2009.
This is the main reason I keep my PS/2 around with WordPerfect 5.1. Sure I can go browse the web with Minuet, or I used to before https everywhere, but that means saving and exiting WP. And 30+ years later I'm still waiting for a word processor with a decent Reveal Codes.
Personally I like Latex as it reveals all the codes and lets you type them, change them, find-and-replace them, define new ones, etc. But then, I'm a mathematician, so it's designed for my stuff.
AFAIK, the current version of Nota Bene -- a direct descendent of XyWrite -- still has this; the current feature list explicitly mentions "Editable Show Codes view so you can see exactly where commands take effect, and edit them as desired". Nota Bene has survived into the present day by moving pretty firmly into a niche academia market, though, and carries a pretty stiff price ($349).
Meanwhile my mind first jumped to the old, pre-USB connector used for things like keyboards and mice, and was wondering what wizardry they had built to turn a PS2 keyboard into a complete text processor!
I'm also in the quaint demographic that believes WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was the apex of distraction-free writing. Switching disks to change the application was just the right amount of intentional friction to stay in the zone.
I keep a Mac IIci that I purchased at a thrift store for $12 to remind me that we haven't progressed that far. It's not fast, but it runs Photoshop, Illustrator, and Vim. Not bad for a 35+ year old machine that will do 80% of what you need. No GPU, but I think that's losing the plot when people can't afford to pay their electricity bills while billion dollar companies continue to scale out the data centers that jack up prices for AI slop nobody wants.
It’s been 30ish years, so I can’t be 100% sure, but Ami Pro 3.1 for Windows had an easy-to-use equation editor that gave great results. And I think its Reveal Codes equivalent was pretty good.
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