Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 30, 2021

There’s no need to dadsplain, Mike.

And Alex isn’t a millennial .

So she managed to reverse engineer the entire Windows 95 operating system back into some semblance of source code and then rewrote it in one afternoon? Bill Gates needs to be afraid, very afraid.

Can she take a look at Cyberpunk 2077 next?

Wave goodbye, Mike. That’s your little girl leaving you in the dust.

And invalidated the guarantee..

“Plug and Pray” was to follow shortly after.

That’s how I perceived my children on computers. (The oldest started when he was 3.) They seemed to magically know how to do everything.

To me, most commentators this week might as well have been speaking in tongues. That reflects poorly on me, I know that. There’ll be brand-new stuff tomorrow, though. ;-)

And this is when you know you need to start saving for the really good college.

This is where Mike discovers that his daughter is not like either of her parents. She is a genius and a millennial!

Apparently, it is so easy a child can do it. I suspect she is well positioned for success as long as she can graduate college within the 5 years or so.

That’s basically hacking a completely alien operating system. I saw it done in “Independence Day”, so how hard could it be? :)

Also, multi-tasking does not generally speed up separate programs. It just enables several programs to run more slowly together. It wasn’t until processors got much, much faster that multi-tasking came into its own. I remember continually having to kill background processes to give computationally intensive programs more CPU time.

If MS had found out, they would have bought her out killed the discovery.

Win95 crashed. Often. Cycled the power. Screen came up telling me to shut it down gracefully. That screen was more irritating than Clippy.

True story:

In the HP3000 world, there was a wiz kid who was hired as a programmer at age 12. He was the feature of one of those human interest / light news segments at the end of a national network news story. It included of clip of the start of a department meeting. His boss asked him to not make changes to the operating system before checking with him.

He and his father started a software company that specialized in security and productivity tools for the HP 3000. The company I worked for was a subscriber. The father made regular visits to clients. After one visit, our general manager asked what the son was up to. “He’s clerking for Sandra Day O’Connor” was the answer. We didn’t know he had jumped from technology to law.

The next I heard of him was on a news story about a U.S. Supreme Court decision. He was giving his opinion, as a Professor of Law at UCLA.

If you want to learn more, Google Eugene Volokh.

Windows really was a great step forward for PCs in that it provided a platform with device drivers already built in. Before that, every time you wrote a program you also had to write a device driver for, say, every single type of printer that you would want to use or monitor or modem, also all the user interface code. For the first time, that was “somebody else’s problem” and you could concentrate on code.

Actually, computers still do only one thing at a time. They just do it very quickly.

Yes, that’s our girl! A future PhD and twins simultaneously.

Some of the best computer fun I had in the 1980s was “hacking” LS-DOS (a/k/a TRS-DOS). Aside from coding in Z80 assembler (the extra software was cheap and easy and the source code was publicly available for the price of the books!), the OS had a built in job control language that blew MS-DOS batch files, at least back then, totally away.

now it’s a virus

One of my (admittedly pretty few) computer coups happened when the shop I was in had just started using the new cutting-edge IBM OS/2 (version 2.0 Extended Edition, I think). OS/2’s printer support had been extremely limited, but this version claimed to support Hewlett Packard laser printers. Yes, but whenever we tried to print anything, the top two lines didn’t appear. I was able to use a hex editor to examine the printer driver, discover the snippet of HP Printer Command Language (PCL) that defined the page and its margins, identify the part that defined the print area outside the margins, and change it so that the print area was within the margins. Worked fine after that. As I recall, I called IBM Support and told them about the problem, and received an unenthusiastic “Thanks.”

Was this the first strip that suggested Alex was a genius? It’s the first one I can recall.

I had a long list of reasons but suffice it to say that what she claims was impossible.

She should have become a GNU/Linux hacker.

I miss Windows 98.

Throw out the back doors, watcher-software, and a ton of “Cargo Cult Programming” and it will Run like lightning!