After writing in the past about TCP/IP for MS-DOS, I kept feeling like there was something left unsaid. Of course, we all know that there never was any TCP/IP stack in MS-DOS originally, at least nothing packaged with the operating system. The first appearance of TCP commands for MS-DOS was…

I remember buying a computer magazine one day, it had to be around the year 2000, 2002 maybe. I was an avid computer magazine reader back then. I had a vast collection spanning at least four or five years of publications. In those years they were already sold with a…

Knowing the precise hardware configuration details was always something I was fond of. And I remember the Device Manager application that was launched with Windows 95. It was so good! It had complete information on every aspect of the hardware detected and installed in the system, neatly categorized so you…

I just found out something cool today about file thumbnails in Linux. They of course follow a standard! It is defined by freedesktop and it bears the self-descriptive name Thumbnail Managing Standard. It establishes paths for thumbnails, thumbnail creation definitions and so on. …

Last time we talked about Borland Pascal 7 and the way we used to write code for MS-DOS, and while trying different things I remembered about a modern open-source Pascal compiler. It’s called Free Pascal Compiler and I kid you not, it’s actively developed. Since we have a modern compiler…

Since we explored quite a few older MS-DOS applications so far, including text-mode file managers, editors, archiving tools and even design tools that went from clunky beginnings to indispensable award-winning category defining software, I thought we should do something different today. Yes, it will involve writing code, but don’t shy…

Feeling that I am getting all theoretical and idealistic lately, I thought to bring you something different today: another fine MS-DOS era application. I don’t know how knowledgeable you are about AutoCAD. It is indeed a reference name in the design industry, but if you have never heard about it…

While considering the last article about NFS, my mind wandered back to past thoughts on file sharing. There is so much going on: files, protocols, permissions. It’s a lot to think about in a home network scenario. And these days we don’t even use home network scenarios anymore. …

There is a long-standing unchallenged axiom in the open-source world: the best applications are small and have a single purpose. If you want a tool to remove the background from a photo, you should have a small terminal program that receives a photo and outputs the photo without background. If…