// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Os8088.com: IBM XT OS now has a Browser, CP/M 2.2 with Z80 core and MS Word 1.1a
One page per addition that a line on the releases page does not carry:
what it is, screenshots of it running, and the video if there is one.
Written for someone who has not read the source. The running list of every
change is releases; every video is the
video log.
os8088 now fetches real web pages and lays them out as text and tables, over an
Ethernet card or a parallel cable to a DOS machine standing next to it. The network is not
the slow part: drawing a window full of text takes longer than fetching the page.
CP/M was the operating system small computers ran before the IBM PC existed, on a processor
the PC does not have. os8088 now emulates that processor, so CP/M software runs here: the 1979
command processor at the prompt, Microsoft BASIC, an assembler and an editor, in a window you
can drag around like any other.
Everything in os8088 up to now was written in assembly language, one processor instruction
at a time. There is now a C compiler for it, which is a far quicker way to write a program. To
find out whether it could carry something real, I wrote a second word processor with it -- and
it turned out too big for the memory a program gets, so it comes in two pieces.
I have added something I have wanted to see for a while: my own os8088 version of
Microsoft Word 1.1a. It has the familiar 1990 menus, uses the same clever tricks to show
bold and italics on a plain old PC screen, and saves Word .DOC files. The whole program fits
in 47KB.
A PC of this era could hold a monochrome card and a colour card at once, because their
picture memory sat at different addresses. Almost nothing used both together. os8088 now
spans one desktop across the pair -- 1,360 pixels wide, on a 4.77 MHz machine -- and a
window that lands over the join is drawn on both screens.
A Z-machine interpreter in 23,722 bytes of 8086 assembly. The Z-machine is the pretend
computer Infocom invented in 1979 so one game could be sold for every machine at once --
which is why a story file from 1982 is still a plain file that still runs. Mini-Zork,
Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground and Photopia all play, off a
floppy of their own.