From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,6192a34d0c9ffe5b X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!feeder.news-service.com!94.75.214.39.MISMATCH!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: tmoran@acm.org Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 18:44:57 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: Lf0Nl3CcQzx+ocHx9cmuGg.user.speranza.aioe.org X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 X-Newsreader: Tom's custom newsreader Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:20210 Date: 2011-05-12T18:44:57+00:00 List-Id: A few years ago an NTFS disk became corrupted and Windows stuck its nose in the air and pretended it didn't exist. So I got out my old Janus DOS compiler and, accessing disk sectors via the BIOS, was able to copy almost everything. More generally, hardware is simple - a few pages would tell you everything you needed to know about, say, DMA. Today you need to learn a massive library even to do a simple thing, and then spend a lot of time discovering what the docs left out or lied about. I suspect programmers today spend much more time gathering information and much less time creating programs.