The biggest hurdle for me was figuring out "how do I open a file?" I could cd around and ls, but what if I wanted to open a .doc in openoffice? There was no "double-click" for the command line.
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[0]: https://scriptingosx.com/2017/02/the-macos-open-command/
I tried to convey some of that magic, or at least logically reason why those 8-bits were awesome, in a blog post once - https://retrofun.pl/2021/05/18/hobbyarding/ :)
It still feels like this sometimes. Finding poorly documented system calls, changing screen properties in ways beyond BASIC, getting into how CP/M works internally... (more comprehensible than today's 1000x larger systems)... Or even doing Advent of Code in BASIC is cool!
I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree representing every possible sequence of a password of length N. Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the directory that had the non-kid-safe media files.
The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time. (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had, though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the appliance from working after an initial delay.
Never tried this again. And I don't remember availability of USB drives back then.
If you had only the dumb appliance UI, however, finding the files would be a bigger chore than even energetic kids could accomplish in mere hours, and only if they knew it was there (the "password UI" was also hidden a little).
https://github.com/wheybags/DungeonsAndDirectories/blob/mast...
Be warned if you're not using an SSD!
It also left ".poop" files in the folder you had to clean up in order for it to stay healthy. Also added mating and offsprings which would fork the process so each would "live" their own life
I remember having it on some demo disk as a kid
I didn't notice the shift to macOS and iOS until it was well underway, and I was part of the target demo.
Btw, that was 20 years ago.
Been looking around for awhile so figured this would be a good place to ask.
It works great with Windows' backwards compatibility, but modern filesystems have so many thousands of directories the game is now impossible to complete.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlin...
Either this is because it's not at all well known, or because they think some users will be on XP. (Which would be strange)
You have 3 types junction points, file links and directory links. Each one acting in its very weird odd way. Junction points are for local only directories. Files for files and directories can be either local dirs or remote SMB points. Junctions vs dir can be an interesting trade off on what you want it to do. With junciton being faster for many operations but local only. Also if the file is less than ~500 bytes there is no real gain as you will probably just consume MFT anyway either way.
Then you could have a portable game to bring into any enterprise office environment
on the other hand, nobody would read a manual these days anymore...
also, i didn't read manuals back then. i didn't know where they were. closest to a manual i had were Byte magazines
The thing is, there are far more trade-offs today than there were in the days of the C64. It is a worthwhile goal however, ideally computers should turn on instantly.
You mean xdg-open? I'm not aware of a commonly available "open" tool under Linux.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
This has many uses, as you said. E.g. sometimes even just downloading a video stream to disc creates a temporary file in the destination folder for every fragment. I just d/l those into /var/tmp first and then mv the finished video to where it's supposed to live. I'm sure both my SSD and HDD are grateful! =)