To all the people telling me to do more software videos: well, here's what you asked for. RIP Support me on Patreon: / cathoderaydude Tip me: ko-fi.com/cath...
Hey folks, it seems like the "voice" I picked with for this didn't entirely come through. That's on me - I think in the future I just need to say explicitly what I'm doing. Basically, for most of this video, I am _deliberately not telling you things I already know,_ because the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product. For instance, I recorded the intro after everything else, when I already knew the answers to all the questions I was raising - I knew at that point that this was not "just GRUB or LILO," but I wanted to start out with _the reaction that I think most people would have,_ then start dismantling those assumptions. The problem, I guess, is that that isn't evident unless you watch the whole thing, at which point you might be too irritated with me to hear what I'm driving at. I get it. I'll frame it better in the future. I don't want to begin every sentence with "_I_ know better, but I think that John Q User would have thought..." so I went for brevity, but I don't really blame anyone for not seeing the whole thing from 10,000 feet. If you didn't finish the video, the tl;dr is that I think this is a brilliant idea, and a product with a lot of really interesting features that _might_ have been unique in its day, but you can only use those features if you have a degree of patience that is unusual even among most computer experts. On top of that, there are features that appear to just not work, even following instructions in the manual explicitly, and features that are extremely hard to discover even if you do read the entire manual. A lot of people would never have run into any of those defects, but those who did would have been very frustrated.
I'm a modern PC tech enthusiast so I would definitely fall into the category of Joe Schmoe who isn't that deep into peculiarities of the turn of the millennium software. To me this approach made the video very compelling and it's extremely informative. It was absolutely effortless to watch this feature length documentary. To me the approach you took was extremely evident "I already did this and are familiar with this stuff, but I'm walking through this step-by-step for those less informed" which I feel is the very reason this video is so good. You did a great job in my opinion. I've watched many of the videos on hardware items and I think you really have talent in writing to a technically minded audience. BR, software engineer from half way across the world
"the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product." I liked this approach. I am sorry others disagree. It was the most enjoyable part of the video if you ask me.
@@JacenLP Honestly, I think it's on me. If I had just said upfront, "I am going to be playing a character, wait for the end to get my real opinion," it'd have gone over better. heck, maybe I should do a thing where i sort of switch modes - "in character, out of character" - explicitly throughout the video. I might try that next time around if I can figure it out. Glad you enjoyed either way!
stop apologising for these things, I absolutely loved the way you explained everything and never once thought it was annoying, this just gives extra fuel for the haters. Be more confident in yourself, you're doing great :) ❤❤
Wiping out the partition table on the family PC when you wanted to experiment with Linux was basically a rite of passage for 90s geek kids. Hopefully it encouraged your parents to get you your own PC.
My parents used to think that playing a game on a PC would destroy the PC. I wasn't allowed to burn CD's (this would permanently slow down the PC) etc etc. The reason I got "good with computers" is because whenever I fucked up the PC I had to fix it immediately because I didn't want to get into trouble :P
@@psyched91 1994, My boss took a holiday... 2 days in I killed a whole network (50 users, 25,000GBP server). I quickly learned Novell 3, then 3 days in I remembered the 'grandfather, father, son backup tapes, which I had suggested. His boss was getting frantic, so I told him "gimme a couple of hours". Restore from last known good backup took 5 hours. 'We learn best by breaking things' is my mantra ; )
I once tried to install LiteStep on the family computer and flubbed it. A work friend of my mom's said he could fix it without losing anything. Dude completely nuked the system and installed Windows 98. If I really wanted that done, I could have done it myself. Also the system originally had 98SE. So...yeah. Thanks for your time, I guess. One thing I did learn from that, though, is the importance of partitioning.
There's a joke article about such phenomenon called "Is your son a computer hacker?" that was originally published in the now defunct "Adequacy" website, you can still find it reposted on the internet.
I know this was time consuming to create and felt meandering to you, but this was comfy in the same way as the Norton Desktop video and it was a real nice way to spend an hour
I actually used this for a very long time ... I didn't pay $60 for it ... but it did work very well. I've been a Debian package maintainer since 1998, so it's not like I didn't know how grub works, but this made booting into different windows versions so much easier! Once you get it setup, it's actually quite elegant. I still have my System Commander rescue floppy for emergencies, though I haven't used it in a very long time.
We used it back in the day to setup a system on which we would test the software we developed. On a single drive we would have all of the versions of Windows we supported. Then switch between each OS to test. Eventually replaced in with VMWare but it worked for us.
@@michaelmccarrick5513 The guy that did this video was probably not even around in 1998 or was toddler. I'm from Pre Atari cpm days. 1998 yea I used that program also worked for Acronis and True Image which was a great imaging program at the time. It did become a bloated mess not long after that.
I used it for many years and found it extremely convenient, but perhaps technology left it behind. It was better than LILO or GRUB because it was easy to configure right at boot time: order of preference at boot time, countdown time before it boots the default, whether you want a noise played to alert you, and so on. GRUB requires you to edit a configuration file, in a funny place, in sudo, and I have never done it successfully.
@@CathodeRayDudeI could be wrong but this *_really_* feels like it was made for nerds, by nerds. Even down to them (seemingly?) writing a completely unnecessary DOS implementation. Thats absolutely insane if you're thinking in terms of business sense, but *_any_* programmer can go on for hours about the hordes of extremely hard to make, incredibly involved and thoroughly interesting side-tangent projects they started that, in hindsight, were completely unnecessary. It would also explain why all of their warnings are very documentation-ey and don't ever seem to come out and just say "this is not compatible". That sort of nuance-first context dump before saying the bit *_most_* people will actually care about just screams "we made this for ourselves and only realized afterwards that we're all massive nerds"
This isn't like engineers wrote the manual. This is like the engineers got a 10 person test group together then wrote the manual (and related bits of the software) entirely based on their FAQs.
@@JoyMertenskill means the kind of marketing manager that got the job because they were friends with the CEO or got promoted from sales because they made a nice looking PowerPoint one time. Not the kind that have training and actually know what they are doing lol.
@@JoyMerten Yes, and that was probably the right thing to say, although in reality when the product needs 'a wall of text' you're kinda fubar already, as the only real solution is either back to the drawing board or spend some significant extra dev-time, which is usually not/hardly an option at that point either. I.e. the damage is already done.
A LOT of BIOS did not allow you to boot from a CD-ROM so allowing for boot disks was important. Also, Linux was still unstandardized between distros using LiLo for booting, and different file systems. I used this product a lot 24 years ago, and again just recently trying to get a multi-boot OS/2 of HPFS along with FAT32 Win98 and FAT16 DOS / Win3.x on an old ThinkPad 380e. Working with real hardware made you appreciate this product more.
@@lasskinn474I first encountered it on Socket 7 motherboards. The earliest bootable CD I remember possessing was either Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows NT 4.0. It wasn't until the end of the decade - the P3 era - when drives and bus controllers started to be reliably supported by the generic drivers included in the CDs' boot loaders. On the other hand, NT's boot loader at least didn't actually require a bootable _diskette._ The diskette just had to contain the 32-bit drivers necessary for the boot loader to initialize the controller and drive for hand-off to the OS. Hardware initialization is weird.
@@Azlehria early '00s sata motherboards were annoying yeah in that you had to have the sata drivers on a floppy to install windows, even when the windows install itself was from cd.
Yeah I don't recall CD boots becoming easy until... 2005? Personally. And then USB didn't get similarly easy until 2009-2012. It's funny how we went from boot floppies for CD installs, to (occasionally) boot CDs for a >700MB USB install (if you didn't want to just burn a pricier DVD).
Thank you so much. I've been worrying for the last couple years that I would never be able to go back to the stuff I used to do, which was simpler, if not less time-consuming, but it turns out people will watch this kind of thing, so I am definitely going to try to get back to it more.
@@CathodeRayDude yeah im sure it's just as time consuming on the research end but hopefully it makes shooting a little easier while you're recovering. happy to hear you're doing better!
Due to this thing's woeful lack of support for Linux, it really seems like one engineer's personal/internal project that probably solved one very specific problem for them and them only was seen by an executive and then cleaned up and re-packaged into a commercial product due to how quickly Linux was emerging as the "Next Big Thing"(TM). I'll bet this product could've been marketed towards enthusiasts who wanted to try Linux, but that didn't know much about it and didn't want to risk their Windows/DOS install. The insane number of warnings really seems like a "Please don't sue us if you get something wrong, thanks!" message and also further convince me that this was exactly what the marketing team envisioned, only for this to be the result.
I used System Commander to triple boot Win95\Win31\DOS on my work 486 before I was aware Linux existed. As a kid I needed different operating systems to correctly load different games. Yes, it was in 1999-2000. No, we did not have Internet until like 2003.
At the time of its release, LILO/GRUB (and Linux in general) were VERY user-unfriendly. At work we only had maybe 2 people that COULD do it that way, but they also couldn't comprehend why others couldn't (Hard-core Linux nerds with the "If you can't do it, you're too stupid to use a computer" type). We got it so we could multi-boot. Had DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS-9000 bootable on on my machine, others had different configurations, but this program let us do that.
Wouldn’t you make fun of users who called me during a power outage wondering why their computers were all broken? It wasn’t directed at you at all, I used to work at a helpdesk. I actually had one user whose computer didn’t work because he had plugged his computer into the power strip, and then plugged the power strip into itself.
I remember the TechTV show “The Screen Savers” once brought on a guy that had installed “Every pc operating system” on a computer and he did it using this software or something like it. It stuck out in my head because at the time having struggled with GRUB this looked amazing. I never did end up buying it though.
To be fair I don't think any major distro was distributing GRUB in 1999 (Red Hat 6.0 certainly didn't). The standard boot loader was LILO and it was finicky as all heck, I always kept ending up in situations where my MBR was all screwed. I definitely see people using this.
Well, fun fact... I checked and GRUB only became a GNU project in 1999, prior to that it seems to be a closed project for Hurd specifically. Dev transitioned to GRUB2 around 2002/2003 and distros started defaulting to GRUB in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It's actually detailed out in the manual history section. ^_^ And LILO was... uuuurgh. At least it wasn't MILO...
Even around 2010 when I got into the Linux scene and wanted to try out everything from arch to gentoo, to puppy across a wide variety of devices. This software in a modern form aka the CURRENT DAY boot loaders would've made things all that much more usable.
the visual design you have here with a vertical pane with your video on the left and the software in a much larger box taking up most of the rest of the screen looks great - it's a lot more visually appealing than either a picture in picture or green screen would've looked.
What a coincidence, I’ve learned of System Commander few hours before you posted your video! I was thinking of Acronis OS Selector, which was a different paid boot loader my family used in the 2000s, and was surprised to see it was a whole class of commercial software.
This product is like an inflection point that weirdly straddles the software in a box on the shelf era and the Internet era: The back of the box claims are something else -- like utility software in a box was an idea whose time had come and gone already by 1998 and had become something purely for the rubes by that point, while a thousand long-abandoned scene websites have that other serial number from winworld on a big list. If you had an existing multiboot setup and just needed to make whatever annoying nested boot menus you got from your stock 9x, NT, OS/2, Linux bootloaders into a single menu with decent names and icons, this did what it said on the tin -- and by the tin I mean the one line summary in whatever 00index file
The System Command he showed was no where near their first version. I used System Commander in the early 90's when OS's didn't want to consider you'd ever want to use another OS.
It reminds me of 'going to the computer store' just to browse. Like one would go to the music store to try out some records. You'd pick up software boxes and read the back. I remember the smell of the plastic wrapping. But yeah, that's how people bought things. Most did not even read magazines. You just looked at some weird boxes at the storew
@@KunjaBihariKrishna and even after I was savvy to magazines and tried to get my folks to use those reviews, I still would find a new "master your PC" software disc (which was really just a slideshow or a bunch of low-res videos) in the house a few times a year up until... 2007? 2008? The back of the box of course promised results unlike any other tutorial software. But they were all the same, and usually didn't cover the edge-cases that they'd actually ran-inti.
@@kaitlyn__L haha, that reminds me of "download managers", which to be fair were actually necessary because browsers were unable to resume downloads back then. If you lost connection you had to start from scratch. So you had to install an entire software just for that
@@KunjaBihariKrishna gosh, yes, I only actually found out about download managers right as they were becoming useless. Got about 12-18 months using one with Megaupload (mainly to bypass the one download at a time limit) before they stopped being useful altogether. (If I knew sooner it certainly could’ve saved us a lot of headaches, as we still had dialup until 06.)
I personally think it'd be cool to see a video documenting those weird operating systems that the software said it supported but that you had never heard of.
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to do so, and several of them appear to be either lost, or never got released, but if I can manage, I will see what I can do.
I've just started a channel where I review weird/obscure OSes (as well as restoring various OSes to run in emulation) and will very likely make videos on the ones that I've been able to find. I've already made a couple on QNX.
I’d love to see something along those lines. In the early 90’s I remember exploring options and installing a bunch. Sadly I don’t remember most of them now. Lots of DOS variants and some DOS shell-like interfaces.
Well i didnt pay 60$ for it, but i did use it back then and still use it on almost every retro PC i have. Its quite convenient to use and certainly worth 2 floppy disks it cost..
Pick (and its variations like Reality) was an old database OS based on a BASIC compiler. It originally ran on a proprietary CPU but was eventually ported to pretty much every CPU since it's very simple and has extremely low hardware requirements for a multiuser system. There were thousands of businesses running versions of Pick in the 1970s.
@@JeremyMitts Pthth! There are thousands of car dealerships who are still running most of their software on a version of Pick ported to Linux right now. It can support thousands of simultaneous users on modern hardware.
The little "pop" sound that you use when post-production text appears on screen is the same one I use for incoming IMs (or whatever we're supposed to call the various forms of internet-based messages these days). Thanks for that!
There is a similar product which is still updated "BootIt Bare Metal". I have a license and still use it today. It lets you mix any number of operating systems on the same drive. For example I have a laptop with four copies of XP and several copies of Windows 7. Any OS can be tricked to think it's the only operating system on the drive and that it is booting from it's own primary partition. It works great for example when you use different diagnostic software for PLC programming, automotive or construction machines. It includes partitioning,resizing, cloning and backup etc.
It's midnight. I have to wake up early tomorrow. Why am I watching an hour long video essay about a bad piece of decades-old software? Gravis you've done it again. Your narrative capabilities swindled me yet again, and I have no regrets.
I didn't even realize it's an hour long until I finished it and read this comment. I love the type of content, about stuff that's not supposed to be as interesting as it turns out to be (in no small part thanks to the presenter, to be fair, but still).
This is a product I used back in the day, that I really liked. It might be kind of hard to understand what the purpose of this was from a modern standpoint, but back in the day most people only had one hard drive, and experimenting with multiple operating systems was tricky, especially with Windows 95 as your main system, because it was really intended to be a sole OS, and didn't recognize any other system. I actually preferred the version 1 of SC, it had a much simpler look to it, but less options. I was successfully able to juggle Windows 95, NT, 3.1, BeOS, and Linux on a single hard drive, mainly as a proof-of-concept, because most of those systems weren't very useful to me, as I didn't work in software development or anything, I just liked to tinker. I'll agree that this program has some pretty obtuse documentation that I found confusing at the time. Boot managers were a thing for a few years, but I can't remember any other one being sold as a standalone boxed program. There might have been one, but I can't think of it at the moment.
I can say that we used this to remove a proprietary partition from a hard drive back then. It was the only thing that worked to actually remove it. None of the other partitioning programs out there would remove it. They would go through the motions and act like they would, but ultimately wouldn’t. I think it was a drive from an AT&T 1/0 narrowband DACS or something, it ran its own proprietary software IIRC.
BTRON was the consumer OS offering as part of the TRON initiative which you can think of as being kinda like Japan's take on POSIX just without the Unix. The idea was to have a single operating system standard to ensure compatibility. The successful part was ITRON for industrial control systems but there was also an attempt to target home and business computers with BTRON. The problem was that NEC was the largest PC maker in Japan by marketshare and their consumer PCs already used a modified version of MS-DOS so adoption died pretty quickly due to BTRON not supporting MS-DOS software. Microsoft also lobbied against it as part of the general US-Japan trade spats of the late 80s/early 90s. By the time this product came out, BTRON was basically dead although a few workstations still shipped with it. It was popular as a development platform for companies targeting ITRON systems.
i watched this entire video while working on a windows server 2016 file sharting error as part of a trial by fire for an interview. heres hoping i get the job and can help to support more videos like this and more
I was a computer repair technician when that software was out and I had a scenario where this actually helped one of my clients. He was able to get Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to boot up on the same HDD but he worked at a place that used OS/2 and the software you reviewed allowed me to help him out. To be safe, I disconnected his main HDD installed OS/2 on a separate HDD, and reconnected the main one. I installed this package on the Windows installation and it recognized OS/2 without any problems.
It was certainly a different era. If you watch old shows of the Computer Chronicles, they talked about software packages that were $89 back in the 80s that most people wouldn't spend 99 cents to buy in the app store today.
I used this software back in the day. I had a laptop with every Microsoft Operating System avaliable, OS2, and some Linux distros on it. It was handy for testing before virtual machines. In those days many companies had their own DOS. Microsoft's version just happen to be the one that became dominant. While outdated now, it was good back in the day.
I remember seeing JexeOS from Toshiba at a CeBIT show some time in the late 90s. It was running on a Toshiba laptop and the point was that it did some kind of just-in-time compilation of Java programs so they ran faster. The demo was a really useful real-world application: drawing lots of larger and smaller rectangles. The standard laptop (maybe under Windows, I'm not sure) drew the rectangles quite slowly. The one running JexeOS did it more quickly. I wasn't all that interested in drawing rectangles so didn't investigate further, and I never saw any trace of the product after that.
Before even watching the video after the intro : I had to use a third-party bootloader like that a few years back when I had a Pentium 3 laptop and wanted to put every supported Windows versions on it (Windows 98 SE, 2000, Me and XP). All of those don't really want to live together, I had to use BootMagic to make it work, it essentially works in tandem with PartitionMagic to hide the partitions that are not needed when you select an OS, so in my case, Windows XP could only see Windows 98 and Windows 2000 could only see Me. I would guess that product was made for a similar task and judging by the box, for even more OSes. I don't think LiLo or GRUB supported that at the time (and it probably still doesn't since it's really an obsolete way of doing multi-boot). Edit : So, I guess there's a little bit of hiding the partitions, but it seems simultaneously much more complicated and much more simple, that's weird.
Just a quick side note: you absolutely could have more than 4 OSes on the same HDD even in the 90s. The Windows NT family only required the bootloader to be on a primary partition (which could coexist with DOS/Win9x) and could otherwise boot from a logical volume on the extended partition. Or you could even try installing NT and 9x on the same partition in a pinch, that was discouraged but supported. LILO could boot Linux from a logical volume too, and there were various chainloaders, like loadlin that booted Linux from DOS. You could go crazy trying to configure it all, but it was possible even without any third-party boot manager or multiple HDDs. Not that anybody had disk space for that many OSes though...
When I saw the thumbnail with the physical switch on the box, I thought "I'd pay for that." I've got an old socket A board with a kt133 chipset. It has agp, pci and more important ISA. I use it to boot pretty much everything from dos up to windows xp. I ended up putting a swappable drive bay in it and since ssd's are so cheap, I treat them like giant floppy disks. Just pop the drive out, stick in another one and now I'm booting another OS with the same hardware. I could use grub and put everything on one disk, but I often reimage these disks so I can get a clean install in order to test older hardware. Thats about all I use the system for really - just testing old hardware.
Fascinating video! I remember getting something like System Commander some years back, didn't do too much with it, but I did use it for a couple of DOS versions and Win 3.1 and 3.11. Kind of makes me want to try installing those other OSes just to play around with them.. thank you for this!
I'm almost 40, and using this was like a dream that hasn't existed since. With a diskette, I could move, copy, and resize partitions without restrictions in a windows UI that was easier to use than Windows. I looked for betting options years later but never found any, and I kept my old disk drive with the old disk in it, just to temporarily connect it to newer computers to keep using it. I haven't used it for 10 years though.
Love these really niche software stuff. A lot of this stuff no one cared about when it was actively sold, it's always nice to do a deep dive on stuff like this and learning more about it.
I used to use this because it was the only way I knew to have multiple versions of Dos, os/2 and Linux. I remember trying to fight LILO and grub and I just found System Commander and it did exactly what I needed
I tried to resize a partition once in the late 90s with (most likely) Partition Magic. It locked up halfway through and I nearly lost my 10GB MP3 collection. Don't remember how, but I was able to recover it. I still have that collection. There are over 4,000 songs and to this day, I'm not 100% sure there is no corruption, since I doubt I've listened to even a fraction of them.
VirtualBox is great for quick and dirty dev work. Shrinking a partition after a new OS install was pretty easy compared to a system that had been running for a while. The OS installer would install everything at the front of the drive so you could just truncate the tail end of the partition to shrink it. It's very likely this is what he was doing to shrink a partition.
Whew this was a lotta carrying on and hoping to not smell smoke. This was a really great video, I'd love to see more software related stuff in the future. Maybe even a live stream? You're really good at summing up all your thoughts and the weird things you've encountered. This software is surely made by engineering wizards. "So we wanna make a grub like thing for all these OSes but we need some kind of terminal to fall to if needed" "I know like make our own DOS from scratch!" "Also let's make 10 years of advancement in ease of partition management" "Then we can slap our meh OS manager on top" "Let's fucking go!" And since you mentioned Android jailbreak guides I'm gonna go on a little rant that's just for me. It's so fucking annoying that documentation has not gotten a lick better. It's so often a wall of text guide shoved in a forum post, instead of a place where it can be made readable. Tons of inferring knowledge and short hand leaving wondering what BBQv32 means. Download this zip and throw the files in the folder, why and do I even need all the files? "fuck you do it." And all the times I don't know if I need to have the device in normal or recovery mode and then run some program.
Actually there were two techniques how to get a mouse course in such a text-mode-UI (whatever you want to call it). The simple method that everyone has seen before is to just have a block character traveling around and whenever it would be painted over a field that contains a border symbol or text, instead of painting the block character, inverse the foreground and background color of that field. This looks quite okay, despite the motion being very clunky: ruclips.net/video/hE-Voij5k5Q/видео.html The better looking method modifies the characters on the fly to paint a mouse cursor into the character itself. That means at any given time, you need to modify up to 4 characters as the mouse course can, depending on how it is placed, affect 1 to 4 characters. This gives you a smooth mouse cursor but the programming overhead is quite significant: ruclips.net/video/7nlNQcKsj74/видео.html
There was also at some point stuff that let you use FAT as a root filesystem in Linux. It stashed extra info somewhere, I don't remember where, for the owner and permissions. I think it might even still be in the kernel.
Wow, that was an hour that just flew by lol. Amazing video, it genuinely terrifies me how much stuff this just does with your disk with little or no notice.
I've been a Linux developer since 1994, and almost 30 years later in 2023 Fedora's kernel update process broke on my laptop (bog standard, common Dell model from 2017) twice, and I had to manually fix grub to boot the last two kernels Fedora tried to install. Luckily I still had one kernel that worked. The Linux boot process still has problems, of the self-inflicted variety because they've added absurd amounts of complexity. Over the years I've complained about it to no avail. Thus a commercial boot manager would still have an audience even in 2024.
What do you think of SystemD-Boot? Personally, it works for my use case, but I'm also occasionally feeling a nagging in the back of my mind for the occasional breakage. However, even if I were to send GRUB packing, I do (still) have Refind, after all. As an inactive backup, currently.
The Pick system is wild. As far as I'm aware, my dad was writing Pick BASIC well into the 2010's. I saw some snippets where he was extracting data from and serializing data to XML with it as part of a credit card processing system, and it was HORRIFYING
I have a similar product called "bootit next generation" which can boot multiple operating systems from a single fat partition and can fit more then four primary partitions on a mbr disk. I use it all the time, all my retro PCs have it installed. It also has a partition manager and disk cloning tool from the boot menu. It was sold as shareware. It seems to have been sold more as a power users tool, not a convenience thing
I loved this SW. It required some knowledge and understanding to set up but did what I needed and more. Today we use virtualization and other "magic" but having only a single PC and wanting to try eveything this was a neat and practical tool.
CTOS was a Unisys system that was used by the military or at least the Coast Guard in the late 80s and early 90s. The machines were not like the typical computer. It was different sections known as slices. You had the CPU slice or unit. The hard drives, floppy drive, tape drives, etc, were different slices. Each slice had a power rating, which meant that after so many units, one had to plug in another power brick. For example, if a power brick (I forget if it was a number rating or amps) was labeled 15 and you had a CPU with regular green font as it was all text based rated at say 5, a floppy slice rated at 4 and two tape slices both rated at 6 you would have a power brick plugged into the CPU slice and another brick plugged into the first tape slice (unit). They would all snap together in a row. If your unit had a guy like me, you might have got a colo graghicr slice and maybe the rarer modem slice to get onto a BBS, aka internet. The color slice was 8 or 16 bit color, It was pretty much like DOS with a simple shell. Your choices were limited to tabing up and down (or arrow keys) to an email program, text editor, and a few other software as deemed by the administrator. Oh, and logout was the other option. The user login was a simple page that linked the program name to an exe file for the most part. I would have a fake user interface startup file in which every program ran the logout command. When a certain person was being a jerk, I would point his user to log in to that file. Wait for a call, swap back to the nor normal profile, and then go see him and have him show me the error. Of course, it would work fine. Or I would have mail open the text editor, etc. It was not a very difficult program. Basically, if you knew Dos, you could use CTOS. I thought BTOS was the precursor to CTOS by unisys.
Haven't had a chance to watch this, but my recollection is that GRUB was a future twinkle when this was in the wild...I remember vividly screwing up my LILO configs...good times.
While absolutely adore your newer extremely in depth and polished videos, think there's something to be said about more relaxed videos like this, they are still compelling and really fun ,and about something one would be completely unaware of. Do think it's a good idea to have them at least ocassionally
I'm impressed with your vintage DOS & Windows knowledge. I suspect that it is still of value in some situations that are more than just historical curiosity. I learned DOS basics and switched to Linux in the mid 1990's. I have rarely had a need to do anything with Windows since then. The school where I worked did use System Commander to dual boot Windows and Linux without any issues on about 60 machines. Others did the SC and Windows installs first and then I did the Linux installs (Redhat and later Fedora). Initially each machine was set up separately. In time a single machine was set up and the hard drive cloned to all of the user machines.
"This is the DOS setup program. Bet you've never seen this before!" [Flashes back to disk 3, when the floppy drive starts sounding like it's chewing on pennies until 'File Corrupt. Try Again (y/n)?' pops up...over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and then copies the file fine] You are correct, I do not recall that particular program. By choice.
I would very much love a follow-up on System Commander 2000. the interface may be silly, but i have a soft spot for that. thank you for the great coverage!
I once used this to get a bunch installed. Backing up your mbr, knowing what order to install the os, and what not to do when installing was peak drive management education.
a little weird but I think you should have sounds like the furnace in the background more often the white noise was nice and helped me to focus on what you were saying
this would be possible if it was a low level VM, but a VM that early, back in 1999 would have been absolutely super impressive on a 32bit architecture even on the early 64bit architecture before the 32-64x hybrid it would be impressive... but it would be possible if it took over the system and flushed the system on restart so that it can swap the OS... in fact it would be quite cool if it were able to do transfers between OS' and have the system on a pause state, not just hybernation, a pause where it saves it to disk. But then it would be doing some serious flex of "yea, it's a boot manager... and something more..."
Love this episode and yes, having done all the multiple OS stuff (and even writing my own fdisk and bootloaders) back in the 90s, spending days on it just to kill your OS in the end, was definitely business as usual 😂 Cannot imagine trying this on real iron in 2024, and seeing the OSes boot in seconds (including Linux dirty shutdowns every time!) is just epic ! And your skills to turn a half-baken forgotten product into a fascinating 1h video (and grinding its ins & outs properly) is amazing to watch and very enjoyable 🙏
@@the_kombinator Having a HPFS partition isn't necessarily keeping it simple from the tools perspective (if I understood the video correctly), but awesome it worked reliable for you ! And tbh, it's usually at least partially PEBKAC too when things break😜
That was a deep dive into a software dumpster fire that was oddly enjoyable. Your channel makes me wish I could afford to support people on patreon. Love everything you do!
@@the_kombinator Are you saying that if I haven't used this software I must therefore be regurgitating, whatever the hell that means? No, I've never used this software. But I've been multi-booting to different OS's since the early 90's. I would have never paid for this software. Yeah, it does a few neat things beyond what I could do with LILO back in the day, but mostly with Microsoft OS's which I avoided like the plague back then. Add to that the "walls of text" you had to sift through to find any of that out, and I'd have tossed this aside pretty quickly. Yet , as usual, CRD's deep dive into something I'd have never used was interesting and kept my attention for an entire hour. The dude has magic powers with that. Is that enough regurgitating for you?
@@captainsunshine918 It means you don't know what the F you're talking about. CRD's was also wrongly ranting about nothing he knows about. You had to be needing to multiboot all these OS's in 1993+ to understand. I would have thought someone into retro-computing would try harder to put themselves into the context of the time.
@@lastfm4477 I *was* multi-booting in 1993. What that looked like for ME in 1993 was a combination of manually running fdisk to change the boot partition and/or booting from different floppies to achieve the desired outcome. That changed in 1994 when I discovered OS/2 Boot Manager which served me well until Linux became my primary OS and I switched to LILO. By 1999 when the software CRD reviewed was released the "problem" of multi-booting was no longer a problem. It was a walk in the park. Anyone capable of getting the full use out of it was already capable of doing so without it, if you ask me.
Those agonizing noises are noises we remember today or bring us nostalgia. Many of us, 40+ in age, found those noises as entertainment long before console gaming. The noises carried over as it used the midi standard and sound wasn't prioritized yet for QOL improvements... yet.
I think the "refer to chapter 3" was intended as a place to put any corrections to any errors or unclear things in the video. A placeholder of sorts. Seen this way, I think it makes it harder to be critical of it. This says nothing of the rest of the video. Great work!
I knew a guy who did a lot of flipping of the OSes in earlier 90's with something similar and it finally messed up the HD (MBR, FAT etc). That MBR "scraping" was not a wise stuff on just spun HDD's. If you ever had to restore MBR on heavily used classical HD that just out of the blue decided to fail, that is MBR just "crept out" of being readable because of mechanical and magnetic decay.
Seeing that MS-DOS 5 Shell has let me finally find out what the OS we were using in Design & Technology class was (circa 2005 - tiny (for the time) black and white TN panel laptops. When booted it'd bring up a file browser just like that shell - it looks so familiar, so I'm fairly sure that's it! We used it for manually editing g-code files for a CNC mill - only doing the most basic things. It was basically a practical demo to us of CNC machining - just a "hey look kids, this thing's cool" type of project. The laptops were awful, but I think the reason was that they had the drivers and such for the mill. I kind of wish I continued on with D&T to GCSE but I don't know if GCSE students got to use the mill or not.
I mean, people paid a lot of money for Partition Magic. I think I used that software twice a month to partion between OS/2, Linux, Windows. The portable framed hard disks I took to the computer lab needed constant changing, os reinstalls, etc.
At 52:00 , that particular feature that crashed the virtual machine in which you have to state your using such and such at the TimeMaker above. My question is was that feature in the program always there or did it have to be added later on? Apologies if this question is confusing but I'm really interested and I may have worded it weird. I'm wondering though like is that telling the virtual machine aspect something added later or something that it was originally there.
This product reminds me of my recent mishaps with Windows (10) boot process. For some reason, it didn't want to boot after removing Linux from a dual-boot machine (a situation I've only seen once in years of using dual booting setups). Automatic boot repair of course didn't work, and I wasn't able to fix it even after reading official Microsoft support documentation (one of the commands gave out a bogus error message). In the end, the solution was to use an external piece of software called "EasyUEFI" that was able to fix the boot partition so Windows could boot again, so I guess there's still a place for boot management software outside of built-in OS software. Thankfully, I rarely boot into Windows and don't change it too often so I don't have to frequently deal with that crap.
I can't believe it but I HAVE seen DOS Shell before. When I was 10 my uncle asked me to help him with his PC and it had this on the screen. I couldn't help because I had never used a PC before (i just looked nerdy). I always wondered what it was.
Every time I see a video about some PC product trying to do something batshit insane like this, I just get annoyed at the fact I wasn't around in the 90s to see the insanity myself
36:50 I can confirm those files need to be in specific sectors, based on the university papers I had to read, in order to implement the FAT12 filesystem in a kernel I'm writing.
I should probably add some explanation. While I'm not 100% certain of this, it would seem this was done to make the bootloader simple. On MBR, your bootloader effectively has to be within 512 bytes. But not even all that space is usable in a well formatted boot sector, because 64 bytes are used for the 4 partitions' information, and like 22 bytes or something goofy are used for the volume information (disk type, label, sector information). Anyway, the point being, to write code that properly looks through the FAT table for the correct OS file to load, really makes the space tight. It's technically doable (I was able to do it), but there's probably several drawbacks. If instead, your file is always at a known location, you can effectively skip the FAT, or at least, only use it to verify the file is there (since it should also be in the first 2 FAT entries), and load it quite easily.
RE the OS/2 boot into DOS thing: even better is that OS/2 came with it's own fully featured boot manager included which is compatible with DOS, Win9x, NT, Linux, etc rendering this software even more redundant for any OS/2 user (so long as you don't mind, per usual, with doing everything the *OS/2 way™*).
I was doing lots of multiboot stuff in the 90s, and I'd just have to say that although System Commander has lots of rough edges, the delta between syscom and doing it manually (especially when you have obscure-for-the-time stuff like Linux and OS/2) was quite huge. Many OSes would only recognize partition tables created by their own FDISK or FDISK equivalent. So, in its day, syscom was kind of magical. Otherwise, you had to do things in a very specific order with very specific tools and loads of trial-and-error. Though, none of the serious IT folks I worked with at the time would bother with its partition editor. Standard practice was to pair System Commander with Partition Magic. Of course, now I'd just use a gparted live CD.
Drivespace works by creating a file containing the compressed filesystem on the actual fat32 filesystem. There will be two drives. Windows helpfully hides these but if you were like me and played arround with drivespace on floppy disks to eke out a bit more storage you know that it actually leaves the original volume in tact.
Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk, before any file system is created.
This was great back in the day, being able to configure this stuff from a menu, and booting into DOS 6 / Windows 95, DrDOS and Linux. Also props to it customising the characters in text mode. I seem to recall having all the DOS ones on the same partition somehow :) Have to admit I never read the docs.
The software seems like a real pain, but as other people have mentioned so was everything else. By 1999 I'd be multi booting OS/2, NT, possibly 9x, and maybe Unixes too using OS/2's partition manager. Multi boot can be made to be completely reliable but it typically requires a lot of fiddling and knowledge of each OS' limitations. Something like this which works on some level and documents most of the caveats is valuable. I wouldn't recommend dual booting OS/2 on a FAT partition with DOS though, it leads to extended attribute corruption and filesystem issues when inevitably DOS crashes. Nowadays I'd probably look at Air-Boot, used by ArcaOS - it's free, full featured, and natively supports OS/2, NT, and others.
I was always able to install several OS's including windows In Windows! There has always been a way to do this. As long as you went up from the earlier version of windows, you can install multiple and Windows has its own GRUB already in the package.
CTOS ran on 80186 and one application I know it was used for was batching operations of ready mix concrete plants in Finland. Application was called Betas. There was one complete machine including batching panel in storage of old HQ of Oy Lohja Ab as recently as 2018, but it has since been sent to shredder. CTOS was probably mostly used for industrial automation. I might have old photos of machine and application running on it somewhere, but no real knowledge of system.
"Tamperelainen Soraseula kehitti 1980-luvulla yhteistyössä Tampereen teknillisen korkeakoulun kanssa betonitehtaan ohjausjärjestelmän. Professori Pauli Karttunen kantoi päävastuun tämän Betas-Cam-BS1:n betonin suhteutusjärjestelmän kehittämisestä. Järjestelmä edusti aikanaan alansa huippua ja esimerkiksi Suomen markkinajohtaja Lohja osti järjestelmän käyttöoikeuden." AFAIK this ran on CTOS.
Your videos are Great I remember it all when it was new. There are a couple of things I'd love to see you review. Microdrives and Diablo 63 printers.. Microdrives were CF memory cards that had 1-inch hard drives in them. For a long time, any CF card larger than 50M had a hard drive in it. Remove a couple of screws and the side cover comes off revealing a drive the size of a quarter. I worked for Xerox in the early 80s. Xerox bought Diablo, and one of the products was the Diablo 630 printer. It was a daisy wheel printer. But not many people knew it could print vector graphics. using just the "." Kinda like a dot matrix with only one dot. it could print a perfect 8-inch circle, with a print quality better than most laser printers. One more printer that's worth checking out is the first Xerox Phaser desktop printers they used solid blocks of colored wax for ink. And sold for $80,000.00 in the early 90's now you can pick one up for under $10.
I remember when Microsoft released a patch for the fast CPU problem in Windows 95 but put it in a Windows-based installer, when being unable to boot Windows was the problem!. It was a matter of continually trying to boot into safe mode until eventually it would boot to install the patch.
At 7:27, I noticed that they list CP/M as an operating system you can use with this product. I find this interesting because, at least according to Wikipedia, CP/M hadn't had a new version since 1983.
Correction: The MS-DOS Shell still came with MS-DOS 6 & 6.22, albeit only on the supplemental disk :) (I'm not sure whether it was packaged with the base OS or just ordered from Microsoft afterwards)
![A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R [Ricoh Encryptease]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5ucImqdKbY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Headstart's PC With The Weird GUI "OS" [Explorer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/d1jpIiST6ec/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey folks, it seems like the "voice" I picked with for this didn't entirely come through. That's on me - I think in the future I just need to say explicitly what I'm doing. Basically, for most of this video, I am _deliberately not telling you things I already know,_ because the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product. For instance, I recorded the intro after everything else, when I already knew the answers to all the questions I was raising - I knew at that point that this was not "just GRUB or LILO," but I wanted to start out with _the reaction that I think most people would have,_ then start dismantling those assumptions.
The problem, I guess, is that that isn't evident unless you watch the whole thing, at which point you might be too irritated with me to hear what I'm driving at. I get it. I'll frame it better in the future. I don't want to begin every sentence with "_I_ know better, but I think that John Q User would have thought..." so I went for brevity, but I don't really blame anyone for not seeing the whole thing from 10,000 feet.
If you didn't finish the video, the tl;dr is that I think this is a brilliant idea, and a product with a lot of really interesting features that _might_ have been unique in its day, but you can only use those features if you have a degree of patience that is unusual even among most computer experts. On top of that, there are features that appear to just not work, even following instructions in the manual explicitly, and features that are extremely hard to discover even if you do read the entire manual. A lot of people would never have run into any of those defects, but those who did would have been very frustrated.
I'm a modern PC tech enthusiast so I would definitely fall into the category of Joe Schmoe who isn't that deep into peculiarities of the turn of the millennium software. To me this approach made the video very compelling and it's extremely informative. It was absolutely effortless to watch this feature length documentary. To me the approach you took was extremely evident "I already did this and are familiar with this stuff, but I'm walking through this step-by-step for those less informed" which I feel is the very reason this video is so good. You did a great job in my opinion. I've watched many of the videos on hardware items and I think you really have talent in writing to a technically minded audience.
BR,
software engineer from half way across the world
"the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product."
I liked this approach. I am sorry others disagree. It was the most enjoyable part of the video if you ask me.
Thanks for the video crd, it was very interesting to me.
@@JacenLP Honestly, I think it's on me. If I had just said upfront, "I am going to be playing a character, wait for the end to get my real opinion," it'd have gone over better. heck, maybe I should do a thing where i sort of switch modes - "in character, out of character" - explicitly throughout the video. I might try that next time around if I can figure it out. Glad you enjoyed either way!
stop apologising for these things, I absolutely loved the way you explained everything and never once thought it was annoying, this just gives extra fuel for the haters. Be more confident in yourself, you're doing great :) ❤❤
Wiping out the partition table on the family PC when you wanted to experiment with Linux was basically a rite of passage for 90s geek kids. Hopefully it encouraged your parents to get you your own PC.
My parents used to think that playing a game on a PC would destroy the PC. I wasn't allowed to burn CD's (this would permanently slow down the PC) etc etc.
The reason I got "good with computers" is because whenever I fucked up the PC I had to fix it immediately because I didn't want to get into trouble :P
@@psyched91 1994, My boss took a holiday... 2 days in I killed a whole network (50 users, 25,000GBP server). I quickly learned Novell 3, then 3 days in I remembered the 'grandfather, father, son backup tapes, which I had suggested. His boss was getting frantic, so I told him "gimme a couple of hours". Restore from last known good backup took 5 hours. 'We learn best by breaking things' is my mantra ; )
me who did this in 2020
:3
I once tried to install LiteStep on the family computer and flubbed it. A work friend of my mom's said he could fix it without losing anything. Dude completely nuked the system and installed Windows 98. If I really wanted that done, I could have done it myself. Also the system originally had 98SE. So...yeah. Thanks for your time, I guess.
One thing I did learn from that, though, is the importance of partitioning.
There's a joke article about such phenomenon called "Is your son a computer hacker?" that was originally published in the now defunct "Adequacy" website, you can still find it reposted on the internet.
I know this was time consuming to create and felt meandering to you, but this was comfy in the same way as the Norton Desktop video and it was a real nice way to spend an hour
Omg a Ruby Gloom pfp? Have a gold star!
Comfy? Are you like five years old?
Gravis talks about janky software - I love this stuff.
The home design software vids from a few years back are still stone cold classics.
Norton desktop is one of my favorite videos from CRD
exactly! i think we come here for the company haha - protip, try it with a vapor(and or retro)wave playlist @ 50%
I actually used this for a very long time ... I didn't pay $60 for it ... but it did work very well. I've been a Debian package maintainer since 1998, so it's not like I didn't know how grub works, but this made booting into different windows versions so much easier! Once you get it setup, it's actually quite elegant. I still have my System Commander rescue floppy for emergencies, though I haven't used it in a very long time.
This is pretty much what I figured, that a person with preexisting domain knowledge would actually find it quite useful. Thanks for the perspective!
We used it back in the day to setup a system on which we would test the software we developed. On a single drive we would have all of the versions of Windows we supported. Then switch between each OS to test. Eventually replaced in with VMWare but it worked for us.
@@michaelmccarrick5513 The guy that did this video was probably not even around in 1998 or was toddler. I'm from Pre Atari cpm days. 1998 yea I used that program also worked for Acronis and True Image which was a great imaging program at the time. It did become a bloated mess not long after that.
I used it for many years and found it extremely convenient, but perhaps technology left it behind. It was better than LILO or GRUB because it was easy to configure right at boot time: order of preference at boot time, countdown time before it boots the default, whether you want a noise played to alert you, and so on. GRUB requires you to edit a configuration file, in a funny place, in sudo, and I have never done it successfully.
@@CathodeRayDudeI could be wrong but this *_really_* feels like it was made for nerds, by nerds. Even down to them (seemingly?) writing a completely unnecessary DOS implementation. Thats absolutely insane if you're thinking in terms of business sense, but *_any_* programmer can go on for hours about the hordes of extremely hard to make, incredibly involved and thoroughly interesting side-tangent projects they started that, in hindsight, were completely unnecessary.
It would also explain why all of their warnings are very documentation-ey and don't ever seem to come out and just say "this is not compatible". That sort of nuance-first context dump before saying the bit *_most_* people will actually care about just screams "we made this for ourselves and only realized afterwards that we're all massive nerds"
This isn't like engineers wrote the manual. This is like the engineers got a 10 person test group together then wrote the manual (and related bits of the software) entirely based on their FAQs.
And then have a marketing manager rephrase half of it afterwards ....
I have actually witnessed this happening.
@@skillaxxx I dunno, a lot of my marketing career has involved begging people not to release incomprehensible walls of text to the public
@@JoyMertenskill means the kind of marketing manager that got the job because they were friends with the CEO or got promoted from sales because they made a nice looking PowerPoint one time. Not the kind that have training and actually know what they are doing lol.
@@JoyMerten Yes, and that was probably the right thing to say, although in reality when the product needs 'a wall of text' you're kinda fubar already, as the only real solution is either back to the drawing board or spend some significant extra dev-time, which is usually not/hardly an option at that point either. I.e. the damage is already done.
A LOT of BIOS did not allow you to boot from a CD-ROM so allowing for boot disks was important. Also, Linux was still unstandardized between distros using LiLo for booting, and different file systems. I used this product a lot 24 years ago, and again just recently trying to get a multi-boot OS/2 of HPFS along with FAT32 Win98 and FAT16 DOS / Win3.x on an old ThinkPad 380e. Working with real hardware made you appreciate this product more.
I don't remember any 90s bios letting you boot from cd- IDE or otherwise.
@@lasskinn474I first encountered it on Socket 7 motherboards. The earliest bootable CD I remember possessing was either Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows NT 4.0.
It wasn't until the end of the decade - the P3 era - when drives and bus controllers started to be reliably supported by the generic drivers included in the CDs' boot loaders.
On the other hand, NT's boot loader at least didn't actually require a bootable _diskette._ The diskette just had to contain the 32-bit drivers necessary for the boot loader to initialize the controller and drive for hand-off to the OS. Hardware initialization is weird.
That's actually very close to how I am using it present day on a Nixdorf Siemens 486.
@@Azlehria early '00s sata motherboards were annoying yeah in that you had to have the sata drivers on a floppy to install windows, even when the windows install itself was from cd.
Yeah I don't recall CD boots becoming easy until... 2005? Personally. And then USB didn't get similarly easy until 2009-2012.
It's funny how we went from boot floppies for CD installs, to (occasionally) boot CDs for a >700MB USB install (if you didn't want to just burn a pricier DVD).
I really liked this one, it’s been fun watching you revisit the older style of video you used to put out.
Thank you so much. I've been worrying for the last couple years that I would never be able to go back to the stuff I used to do, which was simpler, if not less time-consuming, but it turns out people will watch this kind of thing, so I am definitely going to try to get back to it more.
@@CathodeRayDude yeah im sure it's just as time consuming on the research end but hopefully it makes shooting a little easier while you're recovering. happy to hear you're doing better!
Due to this thing's woeful lack of support for Linux, it really seems like one engineer's personal/internal project that probably solved one very specific problem for them and them only was seen by an executive and then cleaned up and re-packaged into a commercial product due to how quickly Linux was emerging as the "Next Big Thing"(TM). I'll bet this product could've been marketed towards enthusiasts who wanted to try Linux, but that didn't know much about it and didn't want to risk their Windows/DOS install. The insane number of warnings really seems like a "Please don't sue us if you get something wrong, thanks!" message and also further convince me that this was exactly what the marketing team envisioned, only for this to be the result.
Cute icon
I used System Commander to triple boot Win95\Win31\DOS on my work 486 before I was aware Linux existed. As a kid I needed different operating systems to correctly load different games. Yes, it was in 1999-2000. No, we did not have Internet until like 2003.
@@SonicBoone56I've seen you in the comments before hi there
It also explains why it's running under some bizarre DOS variant
Having used SC a lot, it's support for linux was just fine, i've never had any issues with SC except when i've deleted an operating system.
At the time of its release, LILO/GRUB (and Linux in general) were VERY user-unfriendly. At work we only had maybe 2 people that COULD do it that way, but they also couldn't comprehend why others couldn't (Hard-core Linux nerds with the "If you can't do it, you're too stupid to use a computer" type). We got it so we could multi-boot. Had DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS-9000 bootable on on my machine, others had different configurations, but this program let us do that.
That's actually been a true help in my career- being the patient and kind Linux person who only made fun of users behind their backs.
@@LeslieLanagan IDK if you make fun of me, just be willing to explain it in terms a Windows user can understand! 😁
Wouldn’t you make fun of users who called me during a power outage wondering why their computers were all broken? It wasn’t directed at you at all, I used to work at a helpdesk. I actually had one user whose computer didn’t work because he had plugged his computer into the power strip, and then plugged the power strip into itself.
I remember the TechTV show “The Screen Savers” once brought on a guy that had installed “Every pc operating system” on a computer and he did it using this software or something like it. It stuck out in my head because at the time having struggled with GRUB this looked amazing. I never did end up buying it though.
That would have been early, early GRUB. Like '03-'04.
Hey I remember that episode! Man I miss that show.
To be fair I don't think any major distro was distributing GRUB in 1999 (Red Hat 6.0 certainly didn't). The standard boot loader was LILO and it was finicky as all heck, I always kept ending up in situations where my MBR was all screwed. I definitely see people using this.
LILO, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long tine.
LILILILILILILILILI
Well, fun fact... I checked and GRUB only became a GNU project in 1999, prior to that it seems to be a closed project for Hurd specifically. Dev transitioned to GRUB2 around 2002/2003 and distros started defaulting to GRUB in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It's actually detailed out in the manual history section. ^_^
And LILO was... uuuurgh. At least it wasn't MILO...
Even around 2010 when I got into the Linux scene and wanted to try out everything from arch to gentoo, to puppy across a wide variety of devices. This software in a modern form aka the CURRENT DAY boot loaders would've made things all that much more usable.
the visual design you have here with a vertical pane with your video on the left and the software in a much larger box taking up most of the rest of the screen looks great - it's a lot more visually appealing than either a picture in picture or green screen would've looked.
What a coincidence, I’ve learned of System Commander few hours before you posted your video! I was thinking of Acronis OS Selector, which was a different paid boot loader my family used in the 2000s, and was surprised to see it was a whole class of commercial software.
This product is like an inflection point that weirdly straddles the software in a box on the shelf era and the Internet era: The back of the box claims are something else -- like utility software in a box was an idea whose time had come and gone already by 1998 and had become something purely for the rubes by that point, while a thousand long-abandoned scene websites have that other serial number from winworld on a big list. If you had an existing multiboot setup and just needed to make whatever annoying nested boot menus you got from your stock 9x, NT, OS/2, Linux bootloaders into a single menu with decent names and icons, this did what it said on the tin -- and by the tin I mean the one line summary in whatever 00index file
The System Command he showed was no where near their first version. I used System Commander in the early 90's when OS's didn't want to consider you'd ever want to use another OS.
It reminds me of 'going to the computer store' just to browse. Like one would go to the music store to try out some records. You'd pick up software boxes and read the back. I remember the smell of the plastic wrapping.
But yeah, that's how people bought things. Most did not even read magazines. You just looked at some weird boxes at the storew
@@KunjaBihariKrishna and even after I was savvy to magazines and tried to get my folks to use those reviews, I still would find a new "master your PC" software disc (which was really just a slideshow or a bunch of low-res videos) in the house a few times a year up until... 2007? 2008?
The back of the box of course promised results unlike any other tutorial software. But they were all the same, and usually didn't cover the edge-cases that they'd actually ran-inti.
@@kaitlyn__L haha, that reminds me of "download managers", which to be fair were actually necessary because browsers were unable to resume downloads back then. If you lost connection you had to start from scratch. So you had to install an entire software just for that
@@KunjaBihariKrishna gosh, yes, I only actually found out about download managers right as they were becoming useless. Got about 12-18 months using one with Megaupload (mainly to bypass the one download at a time limit) before they stopped being useful altogether. (If I knew sooner it certainly could’ve saved us a lot of headaches, as we still had dialup until 06.)
I personally think it'd be cool to see a video documenting those weird operating systems that the software said it supported but that you had never heard of.
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to do so, and several of them appear to be either lost, or never got released, but if I can manage, I will see what I can do.
I've just started a channel where I review weird/obscure OSes (as well as restoring various OSes to run in emulation) and will very likely make videos on the ones that I've been able to find. I've already made a couple on QNX.
I’d love to see something along those lines. In the early 90’s I remember exploring options and installing a bunch. Sadly I don’t remember most of them now. Lots of DOS variants and some DOS shell-like interfaces.
Well i didnt pay 60$ for it, but i did use it back then and still use it on almost every retro PC i have. Its quite convenient to use and certainly worth 2 floppy disks it cost..
Yeah totally, this was a FANTASTIC utility.
Same - I use it in a 486 with a 4.3 gig drive to load all kinds of OSes up.
I bet you know more about how to use more then he does
Had this on dad’s pc. Don’t remember it costing too much though. Dad didn’t trust Linux and didn’t want lilo on his computer.
Pick (and its variations like Reality) was an old database OS based on a BASIC compiler. It originally ran on a proprietary CPU but was eventually ported to pretty much every CPU since it's very simple and has extremely low hardware requirements for a multiuser system. There were thousands of businesses running versions of Pick in the 1970s.
There was a security company in Tulsa running their entire business on Pick in the *nineties*.
@@JeremyMitts Pthth! There are thousands of car dealerships who are still running most of their software on a version of Pick ported to Linux right now. It can support thousands of simultaneous users on modern hardware.
The little "pop" sound that you use when post-production text appears on screen is the same one I use for incoming IMs (or whatever we're supposed to call the various forms of internet-based messages these days). Thanks for that!
There is a similar product which is still updated "BootIt Bare Metal". I have a license and still use it today. It lets you mix any number of operating systems on the same drive. For example I have a laptop with four copies of XP and several copies of Windows 7. Any OS can be tricked to think it's the only operating system on the drive and that it is booting from it's own primary partition.
It works great for example when you use different diagnostic software for PLC programming, automotive or construction machines. It includes partitioning,resizing, cloning and backup etc.
It's midnight. I have to wake up early tomorrow. Why am I watching an hour long video essay about a bad piece of decades-old software?
Gravis you've done it again. Your narrative capabilities swindled me yet again, and I have no regrets.
I didn't even realize it's an hour long until I finished it and read this comment. I love the type of content, about stuff that's not supposed to be as interesting as it turns out to be (in no small part thanks to the presenter, to be fair, but still).
This is a product I used back in the day, that I really liked. It might be kind of hard to understand what the purpose of this was from a modern standpoint, but back in the day most people only had one hard drive, and experimenting with multiple operating systems was tricky, especially with Windows 95 as your main system, because it was really intended to be a sole OS, and didn't recognize any other system. I actually preferred the version 1 of SC, it had a much simpler look to it, but less options. I was successfully able to juggle Windows 95, NT, 3.1, BeOS, and Linux on a single hard drive, mainly as a proof-of-concept, because most of those systems weren't very useful to me, as I didn't work in software development or anything, I just liked to tinker. I'll agree that this program has some pretty obtuse documentation that I found confusing at the time. Boot managers were a thing for a few years, but I can't remember any other one being sold as a standalone boxed program. There might have been one, but I can't think of it at the moment.
I can say that we used this to remove a proprietary partition from a hard drive back then. It was the only thing that worked to actually remove it. None of the other partitioning programs out there would remove it. They would go through the motions and act like they would, but ultimately wouldn’t. I think it was a drive from an AT&T 1/0 narrowband DACS or something, it ran its own proprietary software IIRC.
I remember having a partition I couldn't delete and had to use a red hat install CD to do it.
BTRON was the consumer OS offering as part of the TRON initiative which you can think of as being kinda like Japan's take on POSIX just without the Unix. The idea was to have a single operating system standard to ensure compatibility. The successful part was ITRON for industrial control systems but there was also an attempt to target home and business computers with BTRON.
The problem was that NEC was the largest PC maker in Japan by marketshare and their consumer PCs already used a modified version of MS-DOS so adoption died pretty quickly due to BTRON not supporting MS-DOS software. Microsoft also lobbied against it as part of the general US-Japan trade spats of the late 80s/early 90s.
By the time this product came out, BTRON was basically dead although a few workstations still shipped with it. It was popular as a development platform for companies targeting ITRON systems.
i watched this entire video while working on a windows server 2016 file sharting error as part of a trial by fire for an interview. heres hoping i get the job and can help to support more videos like this and more
Good luck, hope your employers ain't bastards
best of luck! hope you get it!
I don't know if that's a typo of sharing or if Windows is sharting on files, either one works.
I was a computer repair technician when that software was out and I had a scenario where this actually helped one of my clients. He was able to get Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to boot up on the same HDD but he worked at a place that used OS/2 and the software you reviewed allowed me to help him out. To be safe, I disconnected his main HDD installed OS/2 on a separate HDD, and reconnected the main one. I installed this package on the Windows installation and it recognized OS/2 without any problems.
It was certainly a different era. If you watch old shows of the Computer Chronicles, they talked about software packages that were $89 back in the 80s that most people wouldn't spend 99 cents to buy in the app store today.
I used this software back in the day. I had a laptop with every Microsoft Operating System avaliable, OS2, and some Linux distros on it.
It was handy for testing before virtual machines.
In those days many companies had their own DOS. Microsoft's version just happen to be the one that became dominant.
While outdated now, it was good back in the day.
This was a super cool video Gravis, hope you're feeling better.
As an Australian once said, Can you believe nobody brought this.
It’s a bargain and so easy to use!
I remember seeing JexeOS from Toshiba at a CeBIT show some time in the late 90s. It was running on a Toshiba laptop and the point was that it did some kind of just-in-time compilation of Java programs so they ran faster. The demo was a really useful real-world application: drawing lots of larger and smaller rectangles. The standard laptop (maybe under Windows, I'm not sure) drew the rectangles quite slowly. The one running JexeOS did it more quickly. I wasn't all that interested in drawing rectangles so didn't investigate further, and I never saw any trace of the product after that.
Before even watching the video after the intro : I had to use a third-party bootloader like that a few years back when I had a Pentium 3 laptop and wanted to put every supported Windows versions on it (Windows 98 SE, 2000, Me and XP). All of those don't really want to live together, I had to use BootMagic to make it work, it essentially works in tandem with PartitionMagic to hide the partitions that are not needed when you select an OS, so in my case, Windows XP could only see Windows 98 and Windows 2000 could only see Me. I would guess that product was made for a similar task and judging by the box, for even more OSes. I don't think LiLo or GRUB supported that at the time (and it probably still doesn't since it's really an obsolete way of doing multi-boot).
Edit : So, I guess there's a little bit of hiding the partitions, but it seems simultaneously much more complicated and much more simple, that's weird.
Just a quick side note: you absolutely could have more than 4 OSes on the same HDD even in the 90s. The Windows NT family only required the bootloader to be on a primary partition (which could coexist with DOS/Win9x) and could otherwise boot from a logical volume on the extended partition. Or you could even try installing NT and 9x on the same partition in a pinch, that was discouraged but supported. LILO could boot Linux from a logical volume too, and there were various chainloaders, like loadlin that booted Linux from DOS. You could go crazy trying to configure it all, but it was possible even without any third-party boot manager or multiple HDDs.
Not that anybody had disk space for that many OSes though...
When I saw the thumbnail with the physical switch on the box, I thought "I'd pay for that." I've got an old socket A board with a kt133 chipset. It has agp, pci and more important ISA. I use it to boot pretty much everything from dos up to windows xp. I ended up putting a swappable drive bay in it and since ssd's are so cheap, I treat them like giant floppy disks. Just pop the drive out, stick in another one and now I'm booting another OS with the same hardware. I could use grub and put everything on one disk, but I often reimage these disks so I can get a clean install in order to test older hardware. Thats about all I use the system for really - just testing old hardware.
Fascinating video! I remember getting something like System Commander some years back, didn't do too much with it, but I did use it for a couple of DOS versions and Win 3.1 and 3.11. Kind of makes me want to try installing those other OSes just to play around with them.. thank you for this!
I'm almost 40, and using this was like a dream that hasn't existed since. With a diskette, I could move, copy, and resize partitions without restrictions in a windows UI that was easier to use than Windows. I looked for betting options years later but never found any, and I kept my old disk drive with the old disk in it, just to temporarily connect it to newer computers to keep using it.
I haven't used it for 10 years though.
Love these really niche software stuff. A lot of this stuff no one cared about when it was actively sold, it's always nice to do a deep dive on stuff like this and learning more about it.
I used to use this because it was the only way I knew to have multiple versions of Dos, os/2 and Linux. I remember trying to fight LILO and grub and I just found System Commander and it did exactly what I needed
I tried to resize a partition once in the late 90s with (most likely) Partition Magic. It locked up halfway through and I nearly lost my 10GB MP3 collection. Don't remember how, but I was able to recover it. I still have that collection. There are over 4,000 songs and to this day, I'm not 100% sure there is no corruption, since I doubt I've listened to even a fraction of them.
VirtualBox is great for quick and dirty dev work. Shrinking a partition after a new OS install was pretty easy compared to a system that had been running for a while. The OS installer would install everything at the front of the drive so you could just truncate the tail end of the partition to shrink it. It's very likely this is what he was doing to shrink a partition.
Whew this was a lotta carrying on and hoping to not smell smoke.
This was a really great video, I'd love to see more software related stuff in the future. Maybe even a live stream?
You're really good at summing up all your thoughts and the weird things you've encountered.
This software is surely made by engineering wizards.
"So we wanna make a grub like thing for all these OSes but we need some kind of terminal to fall to if needed"
"I know like make our own DOS from scratch!"
"Also let's make 10 years of advancement in ease of partition management"
"Then we can slap our meh OS manager on top"
"Let's fucking go!"
And since you mentioned Android jailbreak guides I'm gonna go on a little rant that's just for me.
It's so fucking annoying that documentation has not gotten a lick better.
It's so often a wall of text guide shoved in a forum post, instead of a place where it can be made readable.
Tons of inferring knowledge and short hand leaving wondering what BBQv32 means.
Download this zip and throw the files in the folder, why and do I even need all the files? "fuck you do it."
And all the times I don't know if I need to have the device in normal or recovery mode and then run some program.
Actually there were two techniques how to get a mouse course in such a text-mode-UI (whatever you want to call it).
The simple method that everyone has seen before is to just have a block character traveling around and whenever it would be painted over a field that contains a border symbol or text, instead of painting the block character, inverse the foreground and background color of that field. This looks quite okay, despite the motion being very clunky: ruclips.net/video/hE-Voij5k5Q/видео.html
The better looking method modifies the characters on the fly to paint a mouse cursor into the character itself. That means at any given time, you need to modify up to 4 characters as the mouse course can, depending on how it is placed, affect 1 to 4 characters. This gives you a smooth mouse cursor but the programming overhead is quite significant: ruclips.net/video/7nlNQcKsj74/видео.html
There was also at some point stuff that let you use FAT as a root filesystem in Linux. It stashed extra info somewhere, I don't remember where, for the owner and permissions. I think it might even still be in the kernel.
System Commander is the best. It goes on every retro machine of mine that dual boots.
Wow, that was an hour that just flew by lol. Amazing video, it genuinely terrifies me how much stuff this just does with your disk with little or no notice.
Thanks for the video! Intresting as always
I've been a Linux developer since 1994, and almost 30 years later in 2023 Fedora's kernel update process broke on my laptop (bog standard, common Dell model from 2017) twice, and I had to manually fix grub to boot the last two kernels Fedora tried to install. Luckily I still had one kernel that worked. The Linux boot process still has problems, of the self-inflicted variety because they've added absurd amounts of complexity. Over the years I've complained about it to no avail. Thus a commercial boot manager would still have an audience even in 2024.
What do you think of SystemD-Boot? Personally, it works for my use case, but I'm also occasionally feeling a nagging in the back of my mind for the occasional breakage.
However, even if I were to send GRUB packing, I do (still) have Refind, after all. As an inactive backup, currently.
The Pick system is wild. As far as I'm aware, my dad was writing Pick BASIC well into the 2010's.
I saw some snippets where he was extracting data from and serializing data to XML with it as part of a credit card processing system, and it was HORRIFYING
I have a similar product called "bootit next generation" which can boot multiple operating systems from a single fat partition and can fit more then four primary partitions on a mbr disk. I use it all the time, all my retro PCs have it installed. It also has a partition manager and disk cloning tool from the boot menu. It was sold as shareware. It seems to have been sold more as a power users tool, not a convenience thing
I loved this SW. It required some knowledge and understanding to set up but did what I needed and more. Today we use virtualization and other "magic" but having only a single PC and wanting to try eveything this was a neat and practical tool.
CTOS was a Unisys system that was used by the military or at least the Coast Guard in the late 80s and early 90s. The machines were not like the typical computer. It was different sections known as slices. You had the CPU slice or unit. The hard drives, floppy drive, tape drives, etc, were different slices. Each slice had a power rating, which meant that after so many units, one had to plug in another power brick. For example, if a power brick (I forget if it was a number rating or amps) was labeled 15 and you had a CPU with regular green font as it was all text based rated at say 5, a floppy slice rated at 4 and two tape slices both rated at 6 you would have a power brick plugged into the CPU slice and another brick plugged into the first tape slice (unit). They would all snap together in a row. If your unit had a guy like me, you might have got a colo graghicr slice and maybe the rarer modem slice to get onto a BBS, aka internet. The color slice was 8 or 16 bit color,
It was pretty much like DOS with a simple shell. Your choices were limited to tabing up and down (or arrow keys) to an email program, text editor, and a few other software as deemed by the administrator. Oh, and logout was the other option. The user login was a simple page that linked the program name to an exe file for the most part. I would have a fake user interface startup file in which every program ran the logout command. When a certain person was being a jerk, I would point his user to log in to that file. Wait for a call, swap back to the nor normal profile, and then go see him and have him show me the error. Of course, it would work fine. Or I would have mail open the text editor, etc. It was not a very difficult program. Basically, if you knew Dos, you could use CTOS. I thought BTOS was the precursor to CTOS by unisys.
Of course, the military would yuck it up with their own operating system with their own command structure. :B
Haven't had a chance to watch this, but my recollection is that GRUB was a future twinkle when this was in the wild...I remember vividly screwing up my LILO configs...good times.
While absolutely adore your newer extremely in depth and polished videos, think there's something to be said about more relaxed videos like this, they are still compelling and really fun ,and about something one would be completely unaware of.
Do think it's a good idea to have them at least ocassionally
we are making it into the OS/2 from installed in 4 nested MSDOS directories with this one 🔥🔥🔥🗣🗣🗣‼‼‼‼
what a fun watch! I had no idea this was something people did back then
I'm impressed with your vintage DOS & Windows knowledge. I suspect that it is still of value in some situations that are more than just historical curiosity. I learned DOS basics and switched to Linux in the mid 1990's. I have rarely had a need to do anything with Windows since then. The school where I worked did use System Commander to dual boot Windows and Linux without any issues on about 60 machines. Others did the SC and Windows installs first and then I did the Linux installs (Redhat and later Fedora). Initially each machine was set up separately. In time a single machine was set up and the hard drive cloned to all of the user machines.
"This is the DOS setup program. Bet you've never seen this before!"
[Flashes back to disk 3, when the floppy drive starts sounding like it's chewing on pennies until 'File Corrupt. Try Again (y/n)?' pops up...over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and over...and then copies the file fine]
You are correct, I do not recall that particular program. By choice.
I would very much love a follow-up on System Commander 2000. the interface may be silly, but i have a soft spot for that. thank you for the great coverage!
Thanks for including the Warp start screen. That was a big wave of nostalgia! I remember thinking that was pretty cool the first time I saw it. 🤣
I misread that and thought it was DEREK SMART’S DESKTOP COMMANDER.
I once used this to get a bunch installed. Backing up your mbr, knowing what order to install the os, and what not to do when installing was peak drive management education.
a little weird
but I think you should have sounds like the furnace in the background more often
the white noise was nice and helped me to focus on what you were saying
this would be possible if it was a low level VM, but a VM that early, back in 1999 would have been absolutely super impressive on a 32bit architecture even on the early 64bit architecture before the 32-64x hybrid it would be impressive... but it would be possible if it took over the system and flushed the system on restart so that it can swap the OS... in fact it would be quite cool if it were able to do transfers between OS' and have the system on a pause state, not just hybernation, a pause where it saves it to disk.
But then it would be doing some serious flex of "yea, it's a boot manager... and something more..."
oh man, I remember "resizing" my windows ME partition while installing Mandrake 8.0, my mum was not happy the next day
in 1999, many of the ATMs in the UK used O/S2, also it was the year that VMWare Workstation was released
It wasn't uncommon for ATMs in the US either.
My IT teacher does the same "wall of text" method, we once had like 22 F's out of 30
Love this episode and yes, having done all the multiple OS stuff (and even writing my own fdisk and bootloaders) back in the 90s, spending days on it just to kill your OS in the end, was definitely business as usual 😂
Cannot imagine trying this on real iron in 2024, and seeing the OSes boot in seconds (including Linux dirty shutdowns every time!) is just epic !
And your skills to turn a half-baken forgotten product into a fascinating 1h video (and grinding its ins & outs properly) is amazing to watch and very enjoyable 🙏
I must be using the non broken half of this utility.
@@the_kombinator you probably keep it KISS ? Which imho is always the best approach 😇
@@skillaxxx LMAO I keep it simple keep it simple :D - Three different versions of DOS, an HPFS partition, and one for OS/2. No Linux though.
@@the_kombinator Having a HPFS partition isn't necessarily keeping it simple from the tools perspective (if I understood the video correctly), but awesome it worked reliable for you !
And tbh, it's usually at least partially PEBKAC too when things break😜
That was a deep dive into a software dumpster fire that was oddly enjoyable. Your channel makes me wish I could afford to support people on patreon. Love everything you do!
Have you actually used this software though? Or are you just regurgitating?
@@the_kombinator Are you saying that if I haven't used this software I must therefore be regurgitating, whatever the hell that means? No, I've never used this software. But I've been multi-booting to different OS's since the early 90's. I would have never paid for this software. Yeah, it does a few neat things beyond what I could do with LILO back in the day, but mostly with Microsoft OS's which I avoided like the plague back then. Add to that the "walls of text" you had to sift through to find any of that out, and I'd have tossed this aside pretty quickly. Yet , as usual, CRD's deep dive into something I'd have never used was interesting and kept my attention for an entire hour. The dude has magic powers with that. Is that enough regurgitating for you?
@@captainsunshine918 I understood you did not use the software and are projecting CRD's viewpoint.
@@captainsunshine918 It means you don't know what the F you're talking about. CRD's was also wrongly ranting about nothing he knows about. You had to be needing to multiboot all these OS's in 1993+ to understand. I would have thought someone into retro-computing would try harder to put themselves into the context of the time.
@@lastfm4477 I *was* multi-booting in 1993. What that looked like for ME in 1993 was a combination of manually running fdisk to change the boot partition and/or booting from different floppies to achieve the desired outcome. That changed in 1994 when I discovered OS/2 Boot Manager which served me well until Linux became my primary OS and I switched to LILO. By 1999 when the software CRD reviewed was released the "problem" of multi-booting was no longer a problem. It was a walk in the park. Anyone capable of getting the full use out of it was already capable of doing so without it, if you ask me.
Those agonizing noises are noises we remember today or bring us nostalgia. Many of us, 40+ in age, found those noises as entertainment long before console gaming. The noises carried over as it used the midi standard and sound wasn't prioritized yet for QOL improvements... yet.
I really like the way you did the screens during the demo station. I think it's one of the best you've done for demonstrating software.
I remember this exact software being sold in Ames prior to their bankruptcy in 2002.
I think the "refer to chapter 3" was intended as a place to put any corrections to any errors or unclear things in the video. A placeholder of sorts.
Seen this way, I think it makes it harder to be critical of it. This says nothing of the rest of the video.
Great work!
Now this is og Gravis. I didn’t realize I needed one of these videos but I did. Thank you.
I knew a guy who did a lot of flipping of the OSes in earlier 90's with something similar and it finally messed up the HD (MBR, FAT etc). That MBR "scraping" was not a wise stuff on just spun HDD's. If you ever had to restore MBR on heavily used classical HD that just out of the blue decided to fail, that is MBR just "crept out" of being readable because of mechanical and magnetic decay.
I remember using this to triple boot a 98SE/NT 4.0 Workstation/RH5. Yes it was something to use, but once you get the hang of it, it was solid.
I am an immediate fan of BTRON 1B
Seeing that MS-DOS 5 Shell has let me finally find out what the OS we were using in Design & Technology class was (circa 2005 - tiny (for the time) black and white TN panel laptops. When booted it'd bring up a file browser just like that shell - it looks so familiar, so I'm fairly sure that's it! We used it for manually editing g-code files for a CNC mill - only doing the most basic things. It was basically a practical demo to us of CNC machining - just a "hey look kids, this thing's cool" type of project. The laptops were awful, but I think the reason was that they had the drivers and such for the mill. I kind of wish I continued on with D&T to GCSE but I don't know if GCSE students got to use the mill or not.
I mean, people paid a lot of money for Partition Magic. I think I used that software twice a month to partion between OS/2, Linux, Windows. The portable framed hard disks I took to the computer lab needed constant changing, os reinstalls, etc.
Ah, PartitionMagic and System Commander. Or, as we referred to them back in the day "PartitionTragic" and "System Commandeer" :)
At 52:00 , that particular feature that crashed the virtual machine in which you have to state your using such and such at the TimeMaker above.
My question is was that feature in the program always there or did it have to be added later on?
Apologies if this question is confusing but I'm really interested and I may have worded it weird. I'm wondering though like is that telling the virtual machine aspect something added later or something that it was originally there.
Loved this one. The Norton Desktop episode has always been one of my favorites and this had a lot of the same vibes.
This product reminds me of my recent mishaps with Windows (10) boot process. For some reason, it didn't want to boot after removing Linux from a dual-boot machine (a situation I've only seen once in years of using dual booting setups). Automatic boot repair of course didn't work, and I wasn't able to fix it even after reading official Microsoft support documentation (one of the commands gave out a bogus error message). In the end, the solution was to use an external piece of software called "EasyUEFI" that was able to fix the boot partition so Windows could boot again, so I guess there's still a place for boot management software outside of built-in OS software. Thankfully, I rarely boot into Windows and don't change it too often so I don't have to frequently deal with that crap.
I can't believe it but I HAVE seen DOS Shell before. When I was 10 my uncle asked me to help him with his PC and it had this on the screen. I couldn't help because I had never used a PC before (i just looked nerdy). I always wondered what it was.
Every time I see a video about some PC product trying to do something batshit insane like this, I just get annoyed at the fact I wasn't around in the 90s to see the insanity myself
thanks for the trip down memory lane, without the stress of doing it myself, or having to swap out 30+ diskettes.
36:50 I can confirm those files need to be in specific sectors, based on the university papers I had to read, in order to implement the FAT12 filesystem in a kernel I'm writing.
That sounds like a lovely barrel over a waterfall, why Fat12?
I should probably add some explanation. While I'm not 100% certain of this, it would seem this was done to make the bootloader simple.
On MBR, your bootloader effectively has to be within 512 bytes. But not even all that space is usable in a well formatted boot sector, because 64 bytes are used for the 4 partitions' information, and like 22 bytes or something goofy are used for the volume information (disk type, label, sector information).
Anyway, the point being, to write code that properly looks through the FAT table for the correct OS file to load, really makes the space tight. It's technically doable (I was able to do it), but there's probably several drawbacks.
If instead, your file is always at a known location, you can effectively skip the FAT, or at least, only use it to verify the file is there (since it should also be in the first 2 FAT entries), and load it quite easily.
RE the OS/2 boot into DOS thing: even better is that OS/2 came with it's own fully featured boot manager included which is compatible with DOS, Win9x, NT, Linux, etc rendering this software even more redundant for any OS/2 user (so long as you don't mind, per usual, with doing everything the *OS/2 way™*).
In 95 we would bypass the school Mac computer security by safe booting. Just had to hold a couple keys during boot.
Yeah I did the same, they had a novell network at my school, and it was so easy to get around the login
I was doing lots of multiboot stuff in the 90s, and I'd just have to say that although System Commander has lots of rough edges, the delta between syscom and doing it manually (especially when you have obscure-for-the-time stuff like Linux and OS/2) was quite huge. Many OSes would only recognize partition tables created by their own FDISK or FDISK equivalent. So, in its day, syscom was kind of magical. Otherwise, you had to do things in a very specific order with very specific tools and loads of trial-and-error.
Though, none of the serious IT folks I worked with at the time would bother with its partition editor. Standard practice was to pair System Commander with Partition Magic.
Of course, now I'd just use a gparted live CD.
Drivespace works by creating a file containing the compressed filesystem on the actual fat32 filesystem. There will be two drives. Windows helpfully hides these but if you were like me and played arround with drivespace on floppy disks to eke out a bit more storage you know that it actually leaves the original volume in tact.
Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk, before any file system is created.
This was great back in the day, being able to configure this stuff from a menu, and booting into DOS 6 / Windows 95, DrDOS and Linux. Also props to it customising the characters in text mode. I seem to recall having all the DOS ones on the same partition somehow :) Have to admit I never read the docs.
In all this, I am left curious how well does DOS86 work as a MS-DOS alternative?
The software seems like a real pain, but as other people have mentioned so was everything else. By 1999 I'd be multi booting OS/2, NT, possibly 9x, and maybe Unixes too using OS/2's partition manager. Multi boot can be made to be completely reliable but it typically requires a lot of fiddling and knowledge of each OS' limitations. Something like this which works on some level and documents most of the caveats is valuable. I wouldn't recommend dual booting OS/2 on a FAT partition with DOS though, it leads to extended attribute corruption and filesystem issues when inevitably DOS crashes. Nowadays I'd probably look at Air-Boot, used by ArcaOS - it's free, full featured, and natively supports OS/2, NT, and others.
I was always able to install several OS's including windows In Windows! There has always been a way to do this. As long as you went up from the earlier version of windows, you can install multiple and Windows has its own GRUB already in the package.
Would you mind trying 超漢字V with BTRON options? Just wondering whether it would work...
CTOS ran on 80186 and one application I know it was used for was batching operations of ready mix concrete plants in Finland. Application was called Betas. There was one complete machine including batching panel in storage of old HQ of Oy Lohja Ab as recently as 2018, but it has since been sent to shredder. CTOS was probably mostly used for industrial automation. I might have old photos of machine and application running on it somewhere, but no real knowledge of system.
"Tamperelainen Soraseula kehitti 1980-luvulla yhteistyössä Tampereen teknillisen korkeakoulun kanssa betonitehtaan ohjausjärjestelmän. Professori Pauli Karttunen kantoi päävastuun tämän Betas-Cam-BS1:n betonin suhteutusjärjestelmän kehittämisestä. Järjestelmä edusti aikanaan alansa huippua ja esimerkiksi Suomen markkinajohtaja Lohja osti järjestelmän käyttöoikeuden."
AFAIK this ran on CTOS.
Your videos are Great I remember it all when it was new. There are a couple of things I'd love to see you review. Microdrives and Diablo 63 printers.. Microdrives were CF memory cards that had 1-inch hard drives in them. For a long time, any CF card larger than 50M had a hard drive in it. Remove a couple of screws and the side cover comes off revealing a drive the size of a quarter. I worked for Xerox in the early 80s. Xerox bought Diablo, and one of the products was the Diablo 630 printer. It was a daisy wheel printer. But not many people knew it could print vector graphics. using just the "." Kinda like a dot matrix with only one dot. it could print a perfect 8-inch circle, with a print quality better than most laser printers. One more printer that's worth checking out is the first Xerox Phaser desktop printers they used solid blocks of colored wax for ink. And sold for $80,000.00 in the early 90's now you can pick one up for under $10.
I remember when Microsoft released a patch for the fast CPU problem in Windows 95 but put it in a Windows-based installer, when being unable to boot Windows was the problem!. It was a matter of continually trying to boot into safe mode until eventually it would boot to install the patch.
At 7:27, I noticed that they list CP/M as an operating system you can use with this product. I find this interesting because, at least according to Wikipedia, CP/M hadn't had a new version since 1983.
CP/M was the thing back in the day, so probably still in use in some niche commercial settings.
Correction: The MS-DOS Shell still came with MS-DOS 6 & 6.22, albeit only on the supplemental disk :)
(I'm not sure whether it was packaged with the base OS or just ordered from Microsoft afterwards)
I thought this was the case! I definitely remember using DOS shell on MS-DOS 6 on my 486.