Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.

this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware).

#retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains to the slop farm.

@mdhughes ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!!

@eniko not sure if this is DOS-y enough, but DOSBox runs Windows 3.11 quite well, which is a good platform for the classic Microsoft Entertainment Packs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack).

I should post about the latest #retrocomputing project I started.

Problem: I'd like an open-source, self-hosting C compiler on 8086, that supports the large memory model, overlays, and enough C89 to build Lua.

This seems to not exist! K&R is much more common in this size category. Around the time of C89, many compilers bloated to the point of requiring a 386 or better host, though they could still target 8086. The 8086 holdouts were, in general, commercial products that never got a source release.

One notable exception was DeSmet C http://www.desmet-c.com. It seems to have started life as a commercial PC fork of Bell Labs PCC, a small and sturdy K&R compiler. DeSmet 3.1 added "draft ANSI C" support, but this is incomplete, and riddled with code-gen bugs. This version later found itself on Github as OpenDC https://github.com/the-grue/OpenDC.

Aside from all the bugs, this is a pretty cool package: its dis/assembler, debugger, text editor, and some other utilities were also open sourced, and it runs on an 8088 with 256K RAM and two 360K floppies.

The OpenDC person did a good job packaging things up into an easily buildable form, and fixing syntax errors that probably came from running the sources through a different compiler version than expected, so... yes, it does indeed build and self-host... and I've done this on my Book 8088.

So now I will try to fix the bugs and add the missing C89 features. There are many, many of both... gulp.