PCjs Machines

This is my brief take on the story of a web standard (XSLT) that was created around 25 years ago and has existed in all modern web browsers ever since, but has now been deemed too hard and too costly to maintain, too much of a security risk, and is used by

A couple of years ago, while sifting through lots of ZIP archives from old Shareware CD-ROMs, I found quite a few that couldn’t be unzipped, either because they were corrupted, encrypted, or used compression methods that were no longer supported by modern…

Over 30 years ago, in March 1993, Microsoft released MS-DOS 6.00, the next major release of MS-DOS after 5.00 shipped in June 1991.

This will probably be the final post in my “trilogy” of posts about the PC.js command-line utility, now that I’ve (hopefully) finished ironing out most of the wrinkles.

Last month, I wrote about a new tool I’ve been working on. pc.js is a stripped-down version of the web-based PCjs emulator that runs console-based DOS programs from the command-line.

Recently, I’ve been working on a command-line utility that uses PCjs machines to run DOS software on modern operating systems, and it’s called, aptly enough, pc.js.

BASIC shipped with every IBM PC, both in the machine’s ROM and on DOS diskettes, making it the easiest (and cheapest) way to create programs that could run on every other IBM PC in the world.

The PC Software Interest Group, aka PC-SIG, began advertising a directory of public domain software for the IBM PC in early 1983.

File compression became quite popular in the 1980s.

I first visited Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum in October 2013.