<story><title>Open Sourcing DOS 4</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/open-sourcing-dos-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.&lt;p&gt;I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS&amp;#x2F;COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).&lt;p&gt;It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src&amp;#x2F;MESSAGES.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.&lt;p&gt;They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andsoitis</author><text>&amp;gt; At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify.&lt;p&gt;Kids with a hacker mentality (let&amp;#x27;s face it, even in the 80s those of us who hacked around with DOS etc. were the teeny tiny minority) have more options than ever before, including but not limited to FreeDOS, Linux, or a bunch of others &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Comparison_of_open-source_operating_systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Comparison_of_open-source_oper...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finding it is also super easy if you have the curiosity (and of course a PC and an internet connection).</text></comment>
<story><title>Open Sourcing DOS 4</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/open-sourcing-dos-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.&lt;p&gt;I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS&amp;#x2F;COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).&lt;p&gt;It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src&amp;#x2F;MESSAGES.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.&lt;p&gt;They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zooq_ai</author><text>My favorite Hex Editor hack was when I cracked a Windows software simply by changing the instruction &amp;quot;Equal to&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Not Equal to&amp;quot; where it matches for Software Key with user entered key.</text></comment>