I feel like I righted a wrong in some small way recently. It also gives me an excuse to write another of my shaggy dog posts about old computers, which I’ll never pass up the opportunity to do. Behold, our boxed copy of Digital Research DOS 6.0 from 1992: The first OS I ever used was MS-DOS 5.x on the family 486, upgraded shortly after to MS-DOS 6.2 [sic], then Windows 95. DOS was “what came with computers” to me at the time, so the idea there were alternatives didn’t even cross my mind. MS-DOS’s origins lay with QDOS, itself a broad clone of Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. CP/M-86 was compiled and offered for the original PC, but IBM famously went with Microsoft instead. The circumstances surrounding this decision remain… contentious. Either way, I’ve had a soft spot for Gary Kildall since I first saw him on those archived episodes of the Computer Chronicles. People like exploring an alternative universe where IBM went with CP/M over DOS, and Gary had become the billionaire tyrant instead of Gates. We can only speculate, but Gary always struck me as more of a self aware, Woz-type character than Bill. I’ve mentioned how Digital Research’s GEM desktop was a big part of the reason why I got into the Atari ST, but I haven’t talked much about DR DOS, the OS Digital Research released to compete with Microsoft and IBM. I never used it as a kid, but I wondered what Gary and his team had been able to deliver. Last year I acquired disk images for every major release, in part for a blog post series about DOS that I never ended up publishing. Version 6.0 quickly supplanted IBM PC DOS 7 as my preferred DOS; everything from the installer to the included utilities are vastly superior, and it even came with ViewMAX, a file manager based on GEM/3. Awesomesause! Pair this with Turbo Pascal, Commander Keen, Sim City 2000, The Games: Winter Challenge, the Brief editor, and the DOS port of Lemmings, and I’ve got all the bases covered! DR DOS 6 was released in 1992, around the time Digital Research was acquired by Novell. For context, Lynne and William Jolitz released 386BSD at the same time, and Microsoft was selling MS-DOS 5.0 to my dad for our first family PC. He could have ended up with DR DOS 6.0 instead, which makes this all the more interesting. This boxed set of DR DOS 6 includes the instruction manuals for DOS and ViewMAX, along with a handy reference card. The “Value Pack” sleeve contained the install disks, but I’m not sure if it previously had something else. The OS itself is contained on two 5.25-inch high density disks, along with the original voucher for 360 KiB disk versions. So many of the disk labels from the time seem to have developed this blotchy appearance, but fortunately it’s only cosmetic. Funnily enough, my PC DOS 2.1 disk is about the only one from the early 1980s that hasn’t developed this odd label issue. In the next post, I’ll get a basic install of DR DOS 6 going, to demonstrate why I like it so much. Only took me (checks calendar) two and half decades. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-02.

Snow Leopard was a version of Mac OS X released in 2010. It was billed by Apple as having “0 new features”, with a focus on refining the system, improving efficiency, and fixing bugs. Those of us using Macs at the time welcomed the news after living with updates that seemingly broke as many things as they introduced with each release. This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped. The reality at the time was a bit different. As I wrote at the time: This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS. As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now. This was putting it mildly. When I tried it again a few months later, I still had so many problems that I downgraded again, then leapfrogged it for Lion when it was released in 2011. Jeff Johnson has a great post discussing all the problems Snow Leopard introduced and had to have patched. It was a mess. Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification. Apple’s marketing team hit on something so popular that it has staying power sixteen years later. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-02.

I worked briefly in process control when I was younger, and saw Things.™ One of those Things™ was a wall of LEDs to indicate statuses of various valves and sensors across the entire plant. It was old school, but it worked. It also made you feel like you were on a 1960s-era sci-fi set. What does this have to do with databases? That’s an extremely excellent, and dare I say handsome, question. While we’re on the topic of things I used to do, I used to work against a large database that had a schema with a specific quirk that used to drive me up the wall. Take this contrived example of a table for an account: username | active | paid ---------------+--------+------ nagato_yuki | true | true takarada_rikka | true | false And another for some basic infrastructure: hostname | running | error ------------------+---------+------- retro.rubenerd.au | true | false www.sasara.moe | true | true Do you spot the subtle difference between the two? Why is the first table well designed, and the second one horrible? The first table has uniform positive attributes. Having an active account is good, and being paid is good. This means one can tell at a glance whether an account is in good standing or not. You can also do trivial boolean algebra to derive a status. The second table has a mix of positive and negative attributes. Having a running state of true is good, but having an error state of true is bad. This means you can’t as easily tell at a glance the status of an instance. You can’t also as easily derive an overall status. The value of consistent booleans was something that was immediately obvious when looking at that status wall. It mostly had white lights. When one of these changed colour, you knew there was something actionable. If that status wall instead was designed with some lights being positive, and some being negative, it would be almost (but perhaps not entirely) useless. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ Why am I thinking about this today? I’ll admit it’s for an incredibly embarrassing reason: I had a dream about databases last night. I know, some people have fun dreams involving flight, reliving something they enjoyed, or exploring a new side of themselves. I dreamed I was back at uni with my DB professor who insisted that all booleans should have positive assertions. Anyway, I was shy at the time when I went to that class in the real world, and said nothing. But what I wanted to say was that uniformity is more important. Most of the time there’s an unambiguous, convenient term to describe something positive, but I also acknowledge there are some circumstances where forcing this naming can get clumsy, such as having a schema full of not_$foo attributes. It’s not a data science to me, but I’m reminded of the sixth rule from The Economist Style Guide: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. The same applies for software variables, but that would be a whole other post, can of worms, and kettle of fish. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-01.

I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to deal with the onslaught of gen-“AI” DDoS attacks. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ I was browsing an online store, like a gentleman, when I saw a message that sent me back to the Web 1.0 days: Due to an above average number of visitors, the maximum number of connections have been reached. Please try again later. I wonder how many other sites still have a codified ceiling on the number of visitors? It reminds me of the old days of CGI. This used to be much more common in my experience, but thesedays sites are expected to scale indefinitely. Or in the case of one of our banks, let their servers grind to a near halt when too many account holders try to log in at once. If I were more cynical, I’d claim they do it because they have plausible deniability among a client base who may not be tech savvy. “Not sure what you’re talking about, it loads fine for us! Have you tried turning your modem off and on again?” Calculating these limits when you’re talking about database transactions, processes, threads, or memory is somewhat easier, because you’re dealing with finite, measurable metrics. But my favourite are those (almost always rude) client calls that begin by asking how many clients can access a remote desktop, without any context about what applications the clients will run, or what their connections are. Sure thing, and how long is a piece of string, good sir? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-05.