marttt

Yeah, wifi on DOS is doable, but very limited in speed and not exactly straightforward to set up (so much that I haven't seriously considered trying myself). Here's an overview and a writeup:

https://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/network/wifi.htm

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/wireless-networking-in-dos/

Re: distraction free writing machine -- another option would be a FreeDOS/SvarDOS-based system: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/04/26/build-your-o...

No kidding. Lots of fun to see a system actually boot in about 1 second.

That aside, I've installed all kinds of systems on my trusty 2009 Dell Mini 9, a fanless netbook. For years, this was a CLI-only Tiny Core Linux system, currently running SvarDOS. While on Linux, I even used it to live record 1,5-hour long radio shows via an old Mbox2 audio interface and some CLI recording software. Created a huge ramdisk just in case, but everything went well. Netbooks are weird and interesting machines.

Similar guy (though a more mysterious persona), and another noteworthy low-key web page: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Thanks! I wasn't sure about this one, and guessed wrong. Considering pronunciation, it does feel that there should be a soft sign as well.

Sasha may also refer to Alexandra, which is a feminine first name. What's more, there's like a ton of diminutive short names for these -- my first ever instagram link on HN, but: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTUeNn7iAit/

(FWIW, it lists: Sasha, Sashka, Sashulya, Sashenka, Sanya, Sanechka, Sancho, San, Shurik, Sashunya, Sanyusha, Sanyok. I myself have heard native Russians use Sash - should be written as Сашь -, and e.g. Mish - Мишь -, which is a similar "lazy" conversational short form for Misha/Mikhail.

I've learned some Russian, and once you start sensing the endless magic they can do with verb prefixes and sufixes, you realize what a versatile language this is. Somewhat the same counts for first names, I guess.)

This whole story somehow reminds me of the Fosbury flop technique in high jump -- amazingly, Dick Fosbury started to develop it at the age of 16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury#High_school_and_t...

From the Wikipedia article on Fosbury:

"The technique gained the name the "Fosbury Flop" when in 1964 the Medford Mail-Tribune ran a photo captioned "Fosbury Flops Over Bar," while in an accompanying article a reporter wrote that he looked like "a fish flopping in a boat." Others were even less kind, with one newspaper captioning Fosbury's photograph, "World's Laziest High Jumper""

Is there a current and pre-compiled Windows port for Dillo somewhere?

+1, same here, I've used line editors a fair bit (and enjoying line-oriented interface in general), so rlwrap has been an essential tool for me. Many thanks for your work!

See also -- The Screenless Office: http://screenl.es/

(On HN 2017, 138 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15960056)

Nils M. Holm's essays about highly intelligent people and IQ are worth a read here -- "Where Do The Failed 0.1% Go?" [1] and others [2].

1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)

2: https://t3x.org/#essays

DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode internet is there (should you want online in the first place), and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a huge leap [1].

I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently.

Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul!

0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-relea... | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php

1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA

2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS

+1. I would add RJ The Bike Guy's youtube channel -- straightforward, down-to-earth, no-nonsense videos, may prove immensely useful if you have simple, traditional, cheaper-end bicycles at home, and only a basic set of tools. Excellent explainer; has similar "vibe" to Sheldon Brown's site IMO: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaAK2FaxQ2xiBbAUVZsvDYQ

Here's another, ultimate bike derailleur geekery -- Disraeli Gears: https://www.disraeligears.co.uk/site/home.html

Yeah. There's probably tens of thousands of internet users worldwide with that same story. Myself included: when I was fixing my Bianchi retro road bike's derailleur etc some 20 years ago as a univesity freshman, this site was a definite gold mine, immensely helpful, and taught me a ton. One of my favorite procrastination rabbit holes as well back then. :) And -- a prime example of 1990s era internet and information freedom and layman-level enthusiasm -- selfless sharing of knowledge (and, I wonder if he also used Notepad to write the HTML :). Thanks, Mr Brown, for everything, all the way from Estonia!

PS, interesting to note that Mr Brown seemed to be quite a fan of sci-fi books: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/books.html

Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.

Another distro worth noting here is EasyOS, a current project by Puppy Linux creator Barry Kauler: https://easyos.org/

I remember having tested it, but can't remember what it was like :) -- at least it didn't make me switch from Tiny Core Linux, which I've used extensively. From a superficial, distro-hopper view, DSL, Puppy, EasyOS and Tiny Core all feel quite similar, I guess.

As a side note, it is interesting to see DSL and TC on the HN front page in two consecutive days of 2025. Both are very old projects; I wonder what's the impulse behind this current interest.

This appears to be new to me. Very interesting, many thanks for sharing!

What's the size of your "diskless" NetBSD installation, and how fast does it boot?

As compared to TC, the "out of the box" NetBSD images contain many things I wouldn't need, so customizing it has been a recurring thought, but oh well. The documentation and careful modularity is, obviously, a huge bonus of NetBSD in that regard (even an end-user like me could do some interesting modifications of the kernel solely by reading the manual). TC seems much more ad-hoc, but I assume this, too, is intentional, by design.

I like using old hardware, and Tiny Core was my daily driver for 5+ years on a Thinkpad T42 (died recently) and Dell Mini 9 (still working). I tried other distros on those machines, but eventually always came back to TC. RAM-booting makes the system fast and quiet on that 15+ years old iron, and I loved how easy it was to hand-tailor the OS - e.g. the packages loaded during boot are simply listed in a single flat file (onboot.lst).

I used both the FLTK desktop (including my all-time favorite web browser, Dillo, which was fine for most sites up to about 2018 or so) and the text-only mode. TC repos are not bad at all, but building your own TC/squashfs packages will probably become second nature over time.

I can also confirm that a handful of lenghty, long-form radio programs (a somewhat "landmark" show) for my Tiny Country's public broadcasting are produced -- and, in some cases, even recorded -- on either a Dell Mini 9 or a Thinkpad T42 and Tiny Core Linux, using the (now obsolete?) Non DAW or Reaper via Wine. It was always fun to think about this: here I am, producing/recording audio for Public Broadcasting on a 13+ year old T42 or a 10 year old Dell Mini netbook bought for 20€ and 5€ (!) respectively, whereas other folks accomplish the exact same thing with a 2000€ MacBook Pro.

It's a nice distro for weirdos and fringe "because I can" people, I guess. Well thought out. Not very far from "a Linux that fits inside a single person's head". Full respect to the devs for their quiet consistency - no "revolutionary" updates or paradigm shifts, just keeping the system working, year after year. (FLTK in 2025? Why not? It does have its charm!) This looks to be quite similar to the maintenance philosophy of the BSDs. And, next to TC, even NetBSD feels "bloated" :) -- even though it would obviously be nice to have BSD Handbook level documentation for TC; then again, the scope/goal of the two projects is maybe too different, so no big deal. The Corebook [1] is still a good overview of the system -- no idea how up-to-date it is, though.

All in all, an interesting distro that may "grow on you".

1: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html

See also: PDOS (Public Domain Operating System) https://www.pdos.org/ -- a single-person project with a remarkably stream-of-concsiousness-style webpage. Not sure how well 'geniuine' DOS software works on this system, though.

+1. I set up Fedora, openSUSE and later Arch for our son (then 10-11yo). He became instantly curious about typing those strange words in terminal (unix heritage all the way :), started to check internet availability with 'ping' by himself, etc.

Unfortunately, the laptop has a Nvidia GPU, which conflicted with some of his games, and the gaming experience was all in all not very smooth. Eventually I gave up and went with Windows 10 LTSC -- surprisingly usable and bullshit-free (!), but, well, I don't think he has ever touched the terminal in this Windows system. I'd say after switching to Windows, his progress in Actually Learning Stuff About Computers has more or less stalled. It's mostly mindless gaming and Youtube these days (luckily, he's interested in sports exercises, athletes etc - so there's at least some "real-world related" information included).

Contemporary Linux can be quite confusing, but it is still miles ahead of Windows in encouraging the child's hands-on experience and exploration of the system. The GUI inconsistencies of current Windows are simply horrible IMO; back in the Win2k/XP days, it was actually quite a usable -- and, hackable! -- system; these days it's just an insanely huge, impossible-to-grasp mess. Also, I have yet to find a simple, easily understandable and modifiable solution for setting daily computer time restrictions for our son on Windows -- surprisingly, while there are a gazillion of small single-purpose apps in the Windows world, there doesn't appear to be too many options for parental control if you wish to avoid a Windows account altogether.

Ha, I just recently had uBlock Origin remove all HTML elements on news sites that 1) link to comments (in my country this is usually in the form of comment count right after the headline - and typically the comments are printed in red, ugh), and 2) allow me to comment (usually a button at the end of the article).

News comments in my country have really become almost completely pointless. It's ridiculous or even incredible - honestly, you have something like 1 sensible comment out of 30 or 40. Things started to go noticeably downhill during Covid, and it got worse with the war in Ukraine (we are battling Russian trolls over here). In this light, the uBock Origin solution has really worked wonders for me. Having also removed some other "cruft" like content marketing stories etc, I can read news in a calm, peaceful atmosphere again. Not thinking about commenters (dubbed "commentariat" by a witty local intellectual - scornfully hinting to "proletariat", obviously) or commenting at all.

Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had) about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it mentioned.

I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)

1: https://aatranslator.com.au/

The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable, though, esp with notable operators like inurl:this-or-that. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely a tool (I worked in investigative journalism at the time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well. </rant>

I literally remember one of my elderly relatives pulling out a tooth at home with a thread tied around a door handle as if this was nothing special. DIY all the way! Early 1990s, former Soviet Union rural-or-so area.

As of today, we have moved to a different situation where dental care in that same country is ample, but the price lists are rarely transparent, making many not-so-well-off people avoid going to dentists altogether.

The health insurance system gives something like 60€ yearly to an adult for fixing teeth. Dental care for children up to 19yo is for free, though, which is great.

BTW, its FreeDOS version is still being updated fairly frequently. :) Current version 2.24 is from May 2024.

+1, structural regular expressions are a joy to use.

https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pd...

Also interesting, with other derivates of ed -- LineEditorFamily in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?LineEditorFamily

This seems related to "ventilated prose", as invented by Buckminster Fuller: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/

I can confirm that while this technique feels odd at first, it does prove very useful when you need to edit or shorten a "wall of text", or express something very concisely. Somehow, the relevant/irrelevant parts of a sentence or thought stand out better this way.

IIRC, I even wrote a simple Vimscript function back in the day to join a "ventilated" secton back into a traditional, coherent sentence.

Tangential, but at least for the minimalism-inclined, Rebol's inventor Carl Sassenrath might be an interesting guy: https://sassenrath.com/computing.html

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

+1, long time follower of nmh's work. His books are brief and concise, but carry a peculiar "something", a precision of expression etc that is hard to put into words - but can often be noticed in long-time practicioners of some mental teaching. :)

It is always interesting to spot a person on the interwebs who seems to actually have managed to turn buddhist or some other teachings into real world deeds. Living really modestly (IIRC, he/you also uses modest, underclocked laptops?), publishing for the benefit of many, and doing all this for years and years. Like, there seems to be no "overhead" in this way of living. Hugely inspirational.

I would also point out the "Essays" section on nmh's webpage, especially the ones discussing sensitivity and high IQ: https://t3x.org/#essays

Having purchased several of your books, thanks for your work, nmh!