> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. At least that’s how I configured them. I remember my WordStar manual coming with details about which bytes to patch to do what. There was also a few dozen bytes of patch space set aside for you to write your own subroutines, in case you needed to add custom support for your printer.
Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this
It was necessary because both RAM and disk space were so severely limited, and because almost every computer came with an assembler.
Many CP/M programs were expected to run in as little as 32K RAM, and 130K of slow-ass floppy disk. Or worse – From a cassette tape. If you had 64K of RAM and a 360K disk, you were something special.
Unlike today, most programs were optimized for the bottom of the market, not the top. You wanted your program to run on as many system as possible so you could sell more copies. You didn't just shrug your shoulders and tell people to upgrade their hardware. The failure was yours, not your customers'.
There simply wasn't room for any kind of external configuration file, or a program to generate that configuration file. Common functions could be accessed via a command-line parameter, but even that logic eats valuable bytes.
Today people complain about the MacBook Neo having just 8,000,000,000 bytes of RAM, saying you can't do anything in such a limited space.
Meanwhile, in 1978, people could write an entire rudimentary IDE in 2,048 bytes.
Yes, it was definitely a thing. The patching code had to be in Z80/8080 machine code. I wrote higher performance keyboard and display routines for my copy of Wordstar using this feature.
Stuff like that is also cool (reminds me a bit of modding some games), patching machine code to improve performance of a compiled app? Very cool! (My dad might have done that, he has an old ZX81)
But I thought specifically patching something to configure it is such a weird concept that I never would have thought of.
The line between "configuration" and "modding" is pretty thin.
One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?
At the time (early to mid 1980s) I think we would say "patching". The Wordstar devs certainly did mean you to do this - the memory locations available were fully documented, and I seem to remember they supplied a small patch utility to incorporate your code into the Wordstar executable.
Some time before that it would have been "painting", when you used conductive paint to patch the microcode on your CCROS (Card Capacitor Read-Only Store) machine.
Yes, most Basics had peek and poke commands with which you could read and write specific memory locations. For example - parentheses may or may net be needed, depending on the Basic implementation:
X = PEEK( 123 )
would read the byte at memory location 123 and store its value in X. Then
POKE( 123, 42 )
would change the byte at 123 to be 42.
But these didn't normally have so much to do with patching executables to add/change functionality.
That unlocked a memory of me seeing my computer lab teacher after class in 5th or 6th grade to ask her about the applications of PEEK and POKE. I’d picked up a copy of the GW-BASIC manual from a used bookstore. She’d never heard of those commands. Ended up promptly locking up one of the school computers by poking random numbers to random addresses.
I remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)
The ZX81 didn't have so much software around for it - what there was mostly came on tape, or was typed in¹ on the ghastly membrane keyboard, and what there was was very limited in capability (the default RAM size was one kilobyte (yes, just 1024 bytes, though typically you'd buy a "ram pack" upgrade to 16k). Then it was very rapidly superseded by the more capable ZX Spectrum machine. So odds are your Dad didn't patch software on the ZX81 because it was usually already highly optimised to squeeze it into the tiny space available.
What was very common on those devices was using the "poke" command in BASIC to change a handful of values, but while it was possible to change code in this way it was much more common to be changing the value of variables - things corresponding to "number of lives left" and the like. Not all that different.
Fairly quickly, though, the games were entirely in machine code and used fancy loaders (still from tape mostly) so you didn't get access to BASIC. This created a market for devices that let you get at a monitor program - the "Multiface" series of addons². They had at least three generations of that device, but the company slightly weirdly evolved into a music production company³ after that, which is kind of cool.
Er, ok, I'll stop now while I still can...
Edit: PS - you should ask him about it. Tell him another former ZX81 owner says "Hi" and that my fingers still ache from that keyboard. Although I sneer a bit at its capabilities, it kicked off an interest in computing that's still paying the bills 40 something years later...
Cool, yeah, he had the 16 kb extension and his own software written on a cassette/tape.
He says hi back, for him it was purely a work machine (PhD in Chemistry, never did anything with computers as in CompSci), he doesn’t remember too much from back then but he said he loved the architecture of it.
He's likely a good bit older than me then - I was about 9 when we got ours. I think "fancy calculator" was probably one of the best ways to use them given their limitations.
Their success was largely down to their very low price point (clever cost-shaving engineering) at a time when there was a huge untapped public interest in computers.
> > My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching.
> Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
Yep, it was a thing, and for /some/ programs that were originally CP/M programs (i.e., WordStar 7.0 for DOS) it continued for a long time. The WordStar 7 documentation included patch locations to use (this time, IIRC, for DOS debug.exe) to change various behaviors of the program.
Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.
At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.
Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.
On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.
< Rewind to 1973. The operating system common on microcomputers was CP/M
OK. I love Raymond’s blog but this is crazy. Microcomputers existed only as a prototype in 1973 (things like Intel’s Intellec dev systems) and there were no operating systems for them. Strictly speaking, Kildall did start developing CP/M in 1973, but at that point it ran only on a simulator on a PDP-10 mainframe.
Intel 8080 was launched in April 1974 and the development system for it, "Intellec 8 Mod 80", was available soon after that.
CP/M could be developed only after the launch of the 8080 and the delivery of the development system.
In UNIX, the environment variables were added in the Seventh Edition (1979-01), together with the Bourne shell.
I do not remember whether any other command interpreters used something equivalent with environment variables before the UNIX shell (excluding the interpreters for general-purpose programming languages, like LISP and APL, where you can run a function in REPL and that function can access global variables).
Therefore the quoted year may be a typo for 1979, when environment variables appeared in the UNIX shell, but were not available in the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP, the predecessor of COMMAND.COM).
CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it.
iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.
Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.
Also, chances are programs chose “TMP” because file extensions in MS-DOS were 3 characters, max, and programs used to use “.TMP” for names of temporary files.
If CP/M had used environment variables for configuration, presumably there would have been an established standard for TMP vs. TEMP that DOS would have adopted. The real catch, however, is that CP/M didn’t have directories. Nor did DOS 1.0.
"Rewind to 1973. The operating system common on microcomputers was CP/M. The CP/M operating system had no environment variables. That sounds like a strange place to start a discussion of environment variables, but it’s actually important."
"Over time, programs were written with MS-DOS as their primary target, and they started to realize that they could use environment variables as a way to store configuration data. In the ensuing chaos of the marketplace, two environment variables emerged as the front-runners for specifying where temporary files should go: TEMP and TMP."
And before that there are a few paragraphs describing the migration of applications from i8080/Z80 based CP/M towards x86 based DOS via mechanical translation.
Sounds like the short answer is "because there was no standard for the variable set by MS-DOS from the get go".
The background is that the issue hadn't existed in CP/M because there hadn't been environment variables. Perhaps if the issue had already been seen in CP/M, the developers of MS-DOS might have defined a standard variable to avoid it. Maybe. Other than that it doesn't seem to have much to do with CP/M specifically.
I was curious seeing this thread, and I just looked and don't get it either. AFAICT the CP/M references could have been entirely omitted and nothing in the narrative about TMP and TEMP would change.
Except that DOS was made to have its first programs ported from CP/M, so it’s relevant to explain that there were no environment variables to inherit from CP/M and no developer habits or program standards to inherit from CP/M programs.
Multics had envars in the 1960s and Unix in the 1970s, why were they ‘added’ to DOS when it was so close to an older OS, why didn’t it inherit them from CP/M? Did it get TMP from CP/M and introduce TEMP because computers were bigger but then?
1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file.
Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )
Fun fact: "/dev/nul" (with only one L) would have worked, even if there is no directory with that name.
That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").
Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
I've already created a 'NULL' file, but it was not a Unix thing... It was just because I got confused if it was NULL as in the programming languages I usually use.
Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.
It’s similar to how Unix programs weren’t consistent on whether they look for http_proxy or for HTTP_PROXY, and nowadays many(?) are looking for both, but maybe not in the same order.
Part of the philosophy of the slightly odd suckless people is their projects are mostly configured by changing the source code and recompiling. This is I suppose a similar approach in a modern open source vein. Although their general asceticism makes their projects a bit of an acquired taste I suspect.
Ohh acquired taste it is.. I had two stints with suckless software. First, when i was in early twenties when I had a lot of time in the world, and thought the manliest way to talk to a machine is all through low level C code. Had a whole flow to patch it and heck the code is so well written and commented, i was able to understand it. Then, i guess life happened and i discovered more interesting stuff to spend time on.
And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts!
Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated!
> I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts
I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config?
I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts.
I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
Not frequently, however in experimental phase where you need to debug if any specific combination of patch is causing issues, it helps a lot. For instance, I had issues with my delete key not working even with delkey patch and then after trying to enable patches incrementally I zeroed in on the fixkeyboardinput patch. Sure I can do this in a VCS flow but, it feels magical what a bunch of ifdef’s simplify the process to. And I feel it is still suckless philosophy since the code still compiles to exactly what you need.
Additionally, it helps lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people, who would have shied away from the manual patching flow. You’d be surprised how often i have seen people squint with default xterm on our servers, not knowing how to configure it and messing around with xrdb. (Which takes a while to propagate across LSF clusters).
With flexipatch it feels easier to introduce it to them since I just say run make after any config changes to apply the setting and restart the terminal emulator.
Ohh i tried wezterm and ghostty. Couldn’t get them working using just software rendering. And once st worked, I realized I don’t need it tbh.
the general asceticism, frign (on the board of suckless.org e.v.) setting his mailserver hostname to a nazi bunker, them picking a torch march through the german countryside as a bonding activity instead of literally anything else... yeah. at that point why would one want to bother trying to acquire the taste?
If people just followed the XDG Base Directory Specification, config file littering would be a non-issue. More and more projects adopt it, even holdouts like Firefox.
I wonder how many apps actually read the correct XDG environment variables and obey them, versus just hardcoding paths that match their machine’s config paths (typically ~/.config/*)
I almost want to set up a VM that sets up XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/.foobar and see how many apps actually respect it, and how many still write to ~/.config.
A few years ago I had a Windows box where I pointed XDG_CONFIG_HOME et al to the corresponding-ish Windows paths (AppData subdirectories, mostly) so that the many Linux-derived CLI programs I was using wouldn't clutter up my userdir, and it worked pretty well, though there were a few programs that didn't get the memo. Unfortunately I don't remember which ones they were. Most programs get it right, though!
I don’t mind ~/.* for config, especially when the config is just one or two files. What I don’t like is programs like go and cargo treating my $HOME as a dumping ground for every file they want to download and/or cache.
At least cargo places everything in a .cargo directory, so it doesn’t display by default. Go will instead write to $HOME/go, without even the decency to use a hidden directory, unless you first define the GOPATH environment variable.
And if you install more than one version of go, they get placed in $HOME/sdk [0]. Last I checked, this path is hard-coded with no override, despite this being a known issue for 8 years.
In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.
> In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.
/tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is this blog post about TMP and TEMP, and ending with "I don't know why" (in different words).
The reason is simple: different programmers thought the other name was bad. They were under no obligation to come to a consensus.
Don't forget about TEMPDIR and TMPDIR! Also Windows has its own environment variables for this. But generally, Linux software ported to Windows still use TMP or TEMP.
> /tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
It makes sense when it's a user option. If /tmp isn't an option due to security concerns, then use $CWD by default. I can always alter the config to some other location if I do not like it. With the amount of programs that litter $HOME, especially with caches, you have to whitelist directories when backing it up. With a naive rsync, you'll find half your transfer is junk.
I don't see much difference between a program littering in ~/.app versus littering in ~/.config/app, ~/.local/share/app , ~/.local/state/app and ~/.cache/app
I don't have strong feelings one way or the other, the files are hidden so out of sight out of mind for me.
I don't disagree that it would be cleaner if things were more organized, but I definitely prefer something more like that the person you replied to said, ie "~/.xdg/foo/{config,share,state,cache}"
The only XDG folders that seem reasonable to me are .local/share/fonts and .local/share/applications, and I think both of those are still just conventions, not actually described in any spec.
It all sounds so easy, until you learn about the XDG Base Directory Specification[1]. You're actually supposed to do a whole song and dance around a hierarchical set of environment variables, associated defaults, and resolution orders.
Most modern software uses .config, and I suspect the holdouts are due to cross-platform support issues. Windows may have it's own equivalents, but they are radically different from Unix. Developers may not want to deal with those differences, or don't want to deal with the support issues related to those differences.
The remaining holdouts tend to be very old applications. (The XDG standards are less than 25 years old, then you have to give time for them to be adopted.) For some of those applications, it would create support issues even if it would be trivial to implement. For others, it would create issues since other software would have to be modified to reflect the changes. For others, the software did not have a distinct configuration directory so untangling it would be a major effort.
In the case of the latter, just look at Firefox. Yes, it recently moved the .mozilla directory to .config. It is in no way reflective of the XDG standards. Among other things, there are log files, cache files, and add-ons in there. In my mind, that is worse than having ~/.mozilla. Instead of having a directory that can be cleanly backed up, with the exceptions being elsewhere, I am left having to sort through everything. I don't blame Firefox for taking that approach though: users were demanding a clean home directory and the developers had legacy code to deal with. They simply took the path of least resistance. (That said, Firefox isn't the only culprit here.)
I don't know if anyone is actually using roaming profiles, but config should go into the %APPDATA% folder to support that. %LOCALAPPDATA% is for things that shouldn't be synced to different machines, such as caches.
I'll take dotfiles I can grep and mange with a text editor over settings littered all over a central binary registry. But maybe that's just what I'm used to.
Every single program has to write logic to parse/store/query/validate those values. A common API with a single store can be type-enforced, backed up, and likely easier to work with from an internationalization perspective.
I do like dotfiles for portable apps where everything the program needs is in one folder. Personally, my need for portable apps has gone down year on year.
Yea this is something I'd love to see standardised, a distro that was able to enforce a .config folder somehow would be a winner for me. Think weve probably missed the boat though.
As these things go, there obviously is a standard for this called the XDG Base Directory Specification[0], which elegantly solves almost all configuration path needs—and has been ignored, violated, or only partially implemented, since forever.
One of the first things I do (after using O&O ShutUp10++ of course) when setting a new installation is to create "C:\Temp\" folder and go to them variables to point there. Mind you, you have global TMP and TEMP, and you have user defined (which points to \Windows\Temp instead of %LOCALAPPDATA%/Temp) ones. All 4 will point to my folder and makes my life a lot easier in the long run
I have been pointing out these annoying things for decades with Microsoft. It’s funny because the “senior dev” know it all there person always used to have an answer. “Heh you see temp stands for temporary. Tmp stands for troubleshoot my pc. For debug logs. That’s why I’m a senior and you’re not.”
As I’ve gotten more senior turns out I was right to question it and we can actually talk to the original Microsoft devs now and they explain the whoopsie and how they had to keep it for backwards compatibility.
So then I ask why that excuse is valid, backwards compatibility, when many changes are frequently breaking core compatibility and active business flow (like New Outlook) and they go full hands off. Whoah I’m not the bad dev you’ll have to ask the new guys.
You can’t ask the new guys. And they’re hiding behind leetcode screens. It’s no wonder why these real problems don’t get fixed and we have new outlook. It’s the senior dev from earlier who now works there. All the real devs are retired.
Even when I do get a real answer from Microsoft on annoying things like the user home documents folder being used inappropriately by random programs or straight up forcefully deleted by onedrive in an oopsie, their answer they senior dev invented to give me or go on length about in a technical document or angry interview online is invalidated within 6 months when Microsoft just vibe pushes a random change that randomly alters how these things work in both not a good way and it invalidates their entire core argument.
Just like notepad updates as another example off the top of my head. There are dev interviews talking about how this is a very simple program because it needs to be 0 risk. Then it gets a Microsoft auth login with copilot.
The whole leetcode dev attitude and Microsoft culture really ruins the entire industry. We can’t have civil discussions. Everything turns into Nuh uh your argument is invalid because you don’t work at Microsoft.
Google Chrome famously having chrome install into appdata to exploit and bypass admin rights is a core memory. That’s clearly not the actual intention of that feature for 3rd parties to use in order to bypass having administrator authority. But now this is retconned by the devs as an intended feature because chrome ended up being good at the time at having to sort out the mess of deploying a 3rd party exception program on millions of locked down business computers would’ve been a nightmare.
I noticed this first when I assigned TZ to .tar.xz (or .tar.gz)
as I was lazy. Then things suddenly no longer worked. Turns out
TZ is ... timezone. So you should not define all variables, right?
Well ... how to know that? People can perhaps read tons of documentation,
but I want to ... minimize time investment here. So I learn mostly
by learn-and-doing. And as far as I know there is no trivial way to
know about "this can be dangerous". Those shells are fairly simple
at all times - and not that sophisticated.
TMP versus TEMP may also be trivial but ... who can remember the
differences? And why is it important?
I have come to think that environment variables are useful; I use
them all the time. But they are a bit hackish and not super-elegant
and may have side effects. This is not a very important side effect
per se, as most people will not run into issues such as TZ or having
to think which variable to use and which not, but in the moment when
you DO get surprising results, and you don't know why, this may become
a problem suddenly. I kind of semi-work around by prefixing via:
MY_
This is even less elegant, to then have e. g.:
MY_TEMP = /home/x/temp/
or something like that. But with the prefix "MY_" I rarely
run into problems. So this then becomes my main pointer,
e. g. MY_TEMP_DIRECTORY, and then TEMP and TMP may just
be aliases to that. It's a bit stupid but it is also simple
and kind of works. Beauty is not to be found here, but it is
practical and that is not a bad thing.
In my own ruby code I also have to use ENV[] sometimes, which
is a wrapper over environment variables, but I also try to
be as independent as possible from that. For instance, all
my settings are stored in simple .yml files, and these are
then used to autogenerate environment variables or handle
things in environments where there are no environment
variables available (this is sometimes the case; I had
that issue with .cgi files many years ago, where I wanted
to access all environment variables but for a reason I
don't fully remember, this was not available. Then I
transitioned into those .yml files and that problem went
away; now of course I need to load those .yml files, if
necessary, but this is trivial in ruby, YAML.load_file()
works very well for the most part, and I find this is
more reliable than depending on reading environment
variables output. On some restricted environments this
may be unavailable though; I had that on university campus
running ancient linux systems, so I have to be flexible
in this regard).
I use lowercase for my personal environment variables. It works well since most programs only depend on variables in all caps. Hadn't thought of using MY_
> These surface vibrations are so minute that they are not critical from a mechanical point of view (unlike e.g. vibrations due to imbalance), but they can cause serious acoustic problems. The reason for this is that when the fan is running, there is a pressure difference between the intake and the outlet side of the fan (lower pressure on the upside of the blades, higher pressure on the downside of the blades). From an aero-acoustic point of view, this situation is similar to a stereo speaker where there is higher pressure inside the chassis and lower pressure outside the chassis. In both cases, the pressure difference leads to an efficient acoustic coupling, so the surface vibration of either the blades of the fan or the membrane of the speaker is transferred to the air.
I love rotary woofers :) I hope to get one some day.
> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. At least that’s how I configured them. I remember my WordStar manual coming with details about which bytes to patch to do what. There was also a few dozen bytes of patch space set aside for you to write your own subroutines, in case you needed to add custom support for your printer.
Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this
It was necessary because both RAM and disk space were so severely limited, and because almost every computer came with an assembler.
Many CP/M programs were expected to run in as little as 32K RAM, and 130K of slow-ass floppy disk. Or worse – From a cassette tape. If you had 64K of RAM and a 360K disk, you were something special.
Unlike today, most programs were optimized for the bottom of the market, not the top. You wanted your program to run on as many system as possible so you could sell more copies. You didn't just shrug your shoulders and tell people to upgrade their hardware. The failure was yours, not your customers'.
There simply wasn't room for any kind of external configuration file, or a program to generate that configuration file. Common functions could be accessed via a command-line parameter, but even that logic eats valuable bytes.
Today people complain about the MacBook Neo having just 8,000,000,000 bytes of RAM, saying you can't do anything in such a limited space.
Meanwhile, in 1978, people could write an entire rudimentary IDE in 2,048 bytes.
Yes, it was definitely a thing. The patching code had to be in Z80/8080 machine code. I wrote higher performance keyboard and display routines for my copy of Wordstar using this feature.
Stuff like that is also cool (reminds me a bit of modding some games), patching machine code to improve performance of a compiled app? Very cool! (My dad might have done that, he has an old ZX81)
But I thought specifically patching something to configure it is such a weird concept that I never would have thought of.
The line between "configuration" and "modding" is pretty thin.
One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?
At the time (early to mid 1980s) I think we would say "patching". The Wordstar devs certainly did mean you to do this - the memory locations available were fully documented, and I seem to remember they supplied a small patch utility to incorporate your code into the Wordstar executable.
Some time before that it would have been "painting", when you used conductive paint to patch the microcode on your CCROS (Card Capacitor Read-Only Store) machine.
I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.
Yes, most Basics had peek and poke commands with which you could read and write specific memory locations. For example - parentheses may or may net be needed, depending on the Basic implementation:
would read the byte at memory location 123 and store its value in X. Then would change the byte at 123 to be 42.But these didn't normally have so much to do with patching executables to add/change functionality.
That unlocked a memory of me seeing my computer lab teacher after class in 5th or 6th grade to ask her about the applications of PEEK and POKE. I’d picked up a copy of the GW-BASIC manual from a used bookstore. She’d never heard of those commands. Ended up promptly locking up one of the school computers by poking random numbers to random addresses.
I remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)
The ZX81 didn't have so much software around for it - what there was mostly came on tape, or was typed in¹ on the ghastly membrane keyboard, and what there was was very limited in capability (the default RAM size was one kilobyte (yes, just 1024 bytes, though typically you'd buy a "ram pack" upgrade to 16k). Then it was very rapidly superseded by the more capable ZX Spectrum machine. So odds are your Dad didn't patch software on the ZX81 because it was usually already highly optimised to squeeze it into the tiny space available.
What was very common on those devices was using the "poke" command in BASIC to change a handful of values, but while it was possible to change code in this way it was much more common to be changing the value of variables - things corresponding to "number of lives left" and the like. Not all that different.
Fairly quickly, though, the games were entirely in machine code and used fancy loaders (still from tape mostly) so you didn't get access to BASIC. This created a market for devices that let you get at a monitor program - the "Multiface" series of addons². They had at least three generations of that device, but the company slightly weirdly evolved into a music production company³ after that, which is kind of cool.
Er, ok, I'll stop now while I still can...
Edit: PS - you should ask him about it. Tell him another former ZX81 owner says "Hi" and that my fingers still ache from that keyboard. Although I sneer a bit at its capabilities, it kicked off an interest in computing that's still paying the bills 40 something years later...
----
¹ https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000265/Book/Not_Only_...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Robot
Cool, yeah, he had the 16 kb extension and his own software written on a cassette/tape.
He says hi back, for him it was purely a work machine (PhD in Chemistry, never did anything with computers as in CompSci), he doesn’t remember too much from back then but he said he loved the architecture of it.
He's likely a good bit older than me then - I was about 9 when we got ours. I think "fancy calculator" was probably one of the best ways to use them given their limitations.
Their success was largely down to their very low price point (clever cost-shaving engineering) at a time when there was a huge untapped public interest in computers.
> > My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching.
> Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
Yep, it was a thing, and for /some/ programs that were originally CP/M programs (i.e., WordStar 7.0 for DOS) it continued for a long time. The WordStar 7 documentation included patch locations to use (this time, IIRC, for DOS debug.exe) to change various behaviors of the program.
Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.
At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.
Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.
On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.
Some sort of still do. The stuff that suckless writes is generally configured by changing config.h and recompiling.
https://suckless.org/
Edit: oops just saw that this was already mentioned in another subthread on this page.
< Rewind to 1973. The operating system common on microcomputers was CP/M
OK. I love Raymond’s blog but this is crazy. Microcomputers existed only as a prototype in 1973 (things like Intel’s Intellec dev systems) and there were no operating systems for them. Strictly speaking, Kildall did start developing CP/M in 1973, but at that point it ran only on a simulator on a PDP-10 mainframe.
1979, sure. 1973? Way too early…
Wikipedia says it was created in 1974, so something's definitely off with the time line here.
Intel 8080 was launched in April 1974 and the development system for it, "Intellec 8 Mod 80", was available soon after that.
CP/M could be developed only after the launch of the 8080 and the delivery of the development system.
In UNIX, the environment variables were added in the Seventh Edition (1979-01), together with the Bourne shell.
I do not remember whether any other command interpreters used something equivalent with environment variables before the UNIX shell (excluding the interpreters for general-purpose programming languages, like LISP and APL, where you can run a function in REPL and that function can access global variables).
Therefore the quoted year may be a typo for 1979, when environment variables appeared in the UNIX shell, but were not available in the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP, the predecessor of COMMAND.COM).
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY
CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it. iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.
Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.
> 1979, sure. 1973? Way too early…
Which is fun, because this is the same time difference between 2020 and now
And then we think we didn't have ChatGPT in 2020
A great example of a decision that likely received little to no thought from an early developer but that has long legs and will stick around forever.
There's nothing more permanent than a TMPorary decision.
I love that!
One table at the core of an S&P500 product I briefly worked on will always be named "attornies" because somehow nobody caught it early on.
REFERER is forever in the http spec.
Also, chances are programs chose “TMP” because file extensions in MS-DOS were 3 characters, max, and programs used to use “.TMP” for names of temporary files.
I'm confused by the CP/M reference. Author says it'll be important later then proceeds to explain how it had nothing to do with CP/M or the 8080 CPU.
Agree, CP/M has nothing to do with the story, nor does the 8080/8086 sidetrack.
The whole story is that Microsoft just never bothered to standardize, despite using it themselves.
If CP/M had used environment variables for configuration, presumably there would have been an established standard for TMP vs. TEMP that DOS would have adopted. The real catch, however, is that CP/M didn’t have directories. Nor did DOS 1.0.
could you quote the text you are referring to?
"Rewind to 1973. The operating system common on microcomputers was CP/M. The CP/M operating system had no environment variables. That sounds like a strange place to start a discussion of environment variables, but it’s actually important."
Just a few lines below:
"Over time, programs were written with MS-DOS as their primary target, and they started to realize that they could use environment variables as a way to store configuration data. In the ensuing chaos of the marketplace, two environment variables emerged as the front-runners for specifying where temporary files should go: TEMP and TMP."
And before that there are a few paragraphs describing the migration of applications from i8080/Z80 based CP/M towards x86 based DOS via mechanical translation.
Sounds like the short answer is "because there was no standard for the variable set by MS-DOS from the get go".
The background is that the issue hadn't existed in CP/M because there hadn't been environment variables. Perhaps if the issue had already been seen in CP/M, the developers of MS-DOS might have defined a standard variable to avoid it. Maybe. Other than that it doesn't seem to have much to do with CP/M specifically.
I was curious seeing this thread, and I just looked and don't get it either. AFAICT the CP/M references could have been entirely omitted and nothing in the narrative about TMP and TEMP would change.
Except that DOS was made to have its first programs ported from CP/M, so it’s relevant to explain that there were no environment variables to inherit from CP/M and no developer habits or program standards to inherit from CP/M programs.
Which is irrelevant to TMP or TEMP.
It could simply be: When envars were added to MSDOS…
Multics had envars in the 1960s and Unix in the 1970s, why were they ‘added’ to DOS when it was so close to an older OS, why didn’t it inherit them from CP/M? Did it get TMP from CP/M and introduce TEMP because computers were bigger but then?
Did Multics actually have something really similar to the much later envars introduced in Unix?
Those questions appear awfully overfit to the current blog post.
That comment feels awfully cherry-picked to the perfect untestable rebuttal based on what you want to be true.
How did you measure the fitness and decide it was 'over'?
1995-ish. Telstra (Australia Telecom). Probably about 50k desktop computers across the organisation. One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file.
Why do we need to adopt extant standards? (I was going to ask, why standardise? But realised that might confound the North Americans. : )
>One day a small file turned up in everyone's network home directory called null. A *nix person had evidently had a go at writing a .bat file
I assume that they first tried /dev/null which failed, so then moved onto just plain null?
Otherwise it would not make sense that a unix programmer did this. More likely ula dos programmer misspelled NUL as null.
Fun fact: "/dev/nul" (with only one L) would have worked, even if there is no directory with that name.
That's been a feature since DOS 2.0, there was even an undocumented option AVAILDEV to make the prefix mandatory, instead of having device names present everywhere. But it broke the common trick used to detect if a directory exists ("if exist c:\some\path\nul").
Unix programmer remembered that in there's no /dev/null in DOS and that it's something shorter, and tried null which worked. Didn't check the directory contents afterwards. So basically your first sentence - doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. (I mean, I think it happened to me at least once too)
I've already created a 'NULL' file, but it was not a Unix thing... It was just because I got confused if it was NULL as in the programming languages I usually use.
What text was in there that he tried to discard?
Asking the real questions!
Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.
It’s similar to how Unix programs weren’t consistent on whether they look for http_proxy or for HTTP_PROXY, and nowadays many(?) are looking for both, but maybe not in the same order.
> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching.
I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
Part of the philosophy of the slightly odd suckless people is their projects are mostly configured by changing the source code and recompiling. This is I suppose a similar approach in a modern open source vein. Although their general asceticism makes their projects a bit of an acquired taste I suspect.
Ohh acquired taste it is.. I had two stints with suckless software. First, when i was in early twenties when I had a lot of time in the world, and thought the manliest way to talk to a machine is all through low level C code. Had a whole flow to patch it and heck the code is so well written and commented, i was able to understand it. Then, i guess life happened and i discovered more interesting stuff to spend time on.
And now in my late twenties, suckless terminal is the only one that would work reliably on a shitty old enterprise linux system at work. Yeah, we got xterm and konsole (the older one). I am seeing them in a whole different light now. I did not read the source code now and it is effectively a foreign language to me, but just being able to have modern features in it without too many dependencies is a different level of bliss. This time, I am glad I have the flexi patch to the rescue since, i passed on suckless terminal as a real alternative since I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts!
Even though I don’t like the elitist attitude of the project, can’t deny they got a point. Why does a terminal emulator need to be so complicated!
https://github.com/bakkeby/st-flexipatch
> I don’t want to patch it manually or solve merge conflicts
I wonder, is this really such a big problem? How often do people add patches or change their config?
I've configured my st once and haven't touched that build for years. I use only few patches like scrollback, custom colortheme and a "plumb" for few scripts.
I've also had an opportunity recently, to try a "modern" and trendy terminal and I can't see myself switching to something slower (in terms of lag) and using 10x more memory and cpu even when idle for literally zero gain.
Not frequently, however in experimental phase where you need to debug if any specific combination of patch is causing issues, it helps a lot. For instance, I had issues with my delete key not working even with delkey patch and then after trying to enable patches incrementally I zeroed in on the fixkeyboardinput patch. Sure I can do this in a VCS flow but, it feels magical what a bunch of ifdef’s simplify the process to. And I feel it is still suckless philosophy since the code still compiles to exactly what you need.
Additionally, it helps lower the barrier to entry for a lot of people, who would have shied away from the manual patching flow. You’d be surprised how often i have seen people squint with default xterm on our servers, not knowing how to configure it and messing around with xrdb. (Which takes a while to propagate across LSF clusters). With flexipatch it feels easier to introduce it to them since I just say run make after any config changes to apply the setting and restart the terminal emulator.
Ohh i tried wezterm and ghostty. Couldn’t get them working using just software rendering. And once st worked, I realized I don’t need it tbh.
the general asceticism, frign (on the board of suckless.org e.v.) setting his mailserver hostname to a nazi bunker, them picking a torch march through the german countryside as a bonding activity instead of literally anything else... yeah. at that point why would one want to bother trying to acquire the taste?
If people just followed the XDG Base Directory Specification, config file littering would be a non-issue. More and more projects adopt it, even holdouts like Firefox.
I wonder how many apps actually read the correct XDG environment variables and obey them, versus just hardcoding paths that match their machine’s config paths (typically ~/.config/*)
I almost want to set up a VM that sets up XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/.foobar and see how many apps actually respect it, and how many still write to ~/.config.
A few years ago I had a Windows box where I pointed XDG_CONFIG_HOME et al to the corresponding-ish Windows paths (AppData subdirectories, mostly) so that the many Linux-derived CLI programs I was using wouldn't clutter up my userdir, and it worked pretty well, though there were a few programs that didn't get the memo. Unfortunately I don't remember which ones they were. Most programs get it right, though!
I don’t mind ~/.* for config, especially when the config is just one or two files. What I don’t like is programs like go and cargo treating my $HOME as a dumping ground for every file they want to download and/or cache.
At least cargo places everything in a .cargo directory, so it doesn’t display by default. Go will instead write to $HOME/go, without even the decency to use a hidden directory, unless you first define the GOPATH environment variable.
And if you install more than one version of go, they get placed in $HOME/sdk [0]. Last I checked, this path is hard-coded with no override, despite this being a known issue for 8 years.
[0] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26520
In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.
> In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.
/tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is this blog post about TMP and TEMP, and ending with "I don't know why" (in different words).
The reason is simple: different programmers thought the other name was bad. They were under no obligation to come to a consensus.
Don't forget about TEMPDIR and TMPDIR! Also Windows has its own environment variables for this. But generally, Linux software ported to Windows still use TMP or TEMP.
> /tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
It makes sense when it's a user option. If /tmp isn't an option due to security concerns, then use $CWD by default. I can always alter the config to some other location if I do not like it. With the amount of programs that litter $HOME, especially with caches, you have to whitelist directories when backing it up. With a naive rsync, you'll find half your transfer is junk.
I contemplated for years and eventually saw someone implement a transparent kernel redirect for programs reaching for ~/.*
I don't see much difference between a program littering in ~/.app versus littering in ~/.config/app, ~/.local/share/app , ~/.local/state/app and ~/.cache/app
The difference is big. I want my home directory to be clean, whereas .config is meant to be littered.
I don't have strong feelings one way or the other, the files are hidden so out of sight out of mind for me.
I don't disagree that it would be cleaner if things were more organized, but I definitely prefer something more like that the person you replied to said, ie "~/.xdg/foo/{config,share,state,cache}"
The only XDG folders that seem reasonable to me are .local/share/fonts and .local/share/applications, and I think both of those are still just conventions, not actually described in any spec.
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
It all sounds so easy, until you learn about the XDG Base Directory Specification[1]. You're actually supposed to do a whole song and dance around a hierarchical set of environment variables, associated defaults, and resolution orders.
Interfacing with people is never easy.
[1]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
No. Actually, it's easy. Just check for directory env or use a fallback. For example here's how you'd do this in bash:
XDG_*_DIRS are a bit more complicated, but nothing that can't be solved with a simple for-loop in any modern programming language.Most modern software uses .config, and I suspect the holdouts are due to cross-platform support issues. Windows may have it's own equivalents, but they are radically different from Unix. Developers may not want to deal with those differences, or don't want to deal with the support issues related to those differences.
The remaining holdouts tend to be very old applications. (The XDG standards are less than 25 years old, then you have to give time for them to be adopted.) For some of those applications, it would create support issues even if it would be trivial to implement. For others, it would create issues since other software would have to be modified to reflect the changes. For others, the software did not have a distinct configuration directory so untangling it would be a major effort.
In the case of the latter, just look at Firefox. Yes, it recently moved the .mozilla directory to .config. It is in no way reflective of the XDG standards. Among other things, there are log files, cache files, and add-ons in there. In my mind, that is worse than having ~/.mozilla. Instead of having a directory that can be cleanly backed up, with the exceptions being elsewhere, I am left having to sort through everything. I don't blame Firefox for taking that approach though: users were demanding a clean home directory and the developers had legacy code to deal with. They simply took the path of least resistance. (That said, Firefox isn't the only culprit here.)
%LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows. Or better still, use GetAppContainerFolderPath or SHGetKnownFolderPath with FOLDERID_LocalAppData.
I don't know if anyone is actually using roaming profiles, but config should go into the %APPDATA% folder to support that. %LOCALAPPDATA% is for things that shouldn't be synced to different machines, such as caches.
I know we used to use them in our corporate environment. Not sure if we still do, or if they gave up and called OneDrive “good enough”.
I'll take dotfiles I can grep and mange with a text editor over settings littered all over a central binary registry. But maybe that's just what I'm used to.
Every single program has to write logic to parse/store/query/validate those values. A common API with a single store can be type-enforced, backed up, and likely easier to work with from an internationalization perspective.
I do like dotfiles for portable apps where everything the program needs is in one folder. Personally, my need for portable apps has gone down year on year.
I'm the opposite: I'll take a centralized, strongly-typed registry over 'stringly' typed dotfiles scattered across the entire filesystem.
Yea this is something I'd love to see standardised, a distro that was able to enforce a .config folder somehow would be a winner for me. Think weve probably missed the boat though.
As these things go, there obviously is a standard for this called the XDG Base Directory Specification[0], which elegantly solves almost all configuration path needs—and has been ignored, violated, or only partially implemented, since forever.
[0]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
Say what you want about AI but one nice aspect of it is that it is more likely to follow these kinds of standards than humans.
You would've preferred binary patching of the executable? Really?
I didn't know it was such a chaos.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Ensure they always point to the same path, or else...
One of the first things I do (after using O&O ShutUp10++ of course) when setting a new installation is to create "C:\Temp\" folder and go to them variables to point there. Mind you, you have global TMP and TEMP, and you have user defined (which points to \Windows\Temp instead of %LOCALAPPDATA%/Temp) ones. All 4 will point to my folder and makes my life a lot easier in the long run
I have been pointing out these annoying things for decades with Microsoft. It’s funny because the “senior dev” know it all there person always used to have an answer. “Heh you see temp stands for temporary. Tmp stands for troubleshoot my pc. For debug logs. That’s why I’m a senior and you’re not.”
As I’ve gotten more senior turns out I was right to question it and we can actually talk to the original Microsoft devs now and they explain the whoopsie and how they had to keep it for backwards compatibility.
So then I ask why that excuse is valid, backwards compatibility, when many changes are frequently breaking core compatibility and active business flow (like New Outlook) and they go full hands off. Whoah I’m not the bad dev you’ll have to ask the new guys.
You can’t ask the new guys. And they’re hiding behind leetcode screens. It’s no wonder why these real problems don’t get fixed and we have new outlook. It’s the senior dev from earlier who now works there. All the real devs are retired.
Even when I do get a real answer from Microsoft on annoying things like the user home documents folder being used inappropriately by random programs or straight up forcefully deleted by onedrive in an oopsie, their answer they senior dev invented to give me or go on length about in a technical document or angry interview online is invalidated within 6 months when Microsoft just vibe pushes a random change that randomly alters how these things work in both not a good way and it invalidates their entire core argument.
Just like notepad updates as another example off the top of my head. There are dev interviews talking about how this is a very simple program because it needs to be 0 risk. Then it gets a Microsoft auth login with copilot.
The whole leetcode dev attitude and Microsoft culture really ruins the entire industry. We can’t have civil discussions. Everything turns into Nuh uh your argument is invalid because you don’t work at Microsoft.
Google Chrome famously having chrome install into appdata to exploit and bypass admin rights is a core memory. That’s clearly not the actual intention of that feature for 3rd parties to use in order to bypass having administrator authority. But now this is retconned by the devs as an intended feature because chrome ended up being good at the time at having to sort out the mess of deploying a 3rd party exception program on millions of locked down business computers would’ve been a nightmare.
[dead]
always shove it to `%LOCALAPPDATA%/Temp`, or `~/AppData/Local/Temp`, and don't think otherwise
No, don't. There are many reasons why a user may want to move the temp dir somewhere.
Environment variables on *nix are ... strange.
I noticed this first when I assigned TZ to .tar.xz (or .tar.gz) as I was lazy. Then things suddenly no longer worked. Turns out TZ is ... timezone. So you should not define all variables, right? Well ... how to know that? People can perhaps read tons of documentation, but I want to ... minimize time investment here. So I learn mostly by learn-and-doing. And as far as I know there is no trivial way to know about "this can be dangerous". Those shells are fairly simple at all times - and not that sophisticated.
TMP versus TEMP may also be trivial but ... who can remember the differences? And why is it important?
I have come to think that environment variables are useful; I use them all the time. But they are a bit hackish and not super-elegant and may have side effects. This is not a very important side effect per se, as most people will not run into issues such as TZ or having to think which variable to use and which not, but in the moment when you DO get surprising results, and you don't know why, this may become a problem suddenly. I kind of semi-work around by prefixing via:
This is even less elegant, to then have e. g.: or something like that. But with the prefix "MY_" I rarely run into problems. So this then becomes my main pointer, e. g. MY_TEMP_DIRECTORY, and then TEMP and TMP may just be aliases to that. It's a bit stupid but it is also simple and kind of works. Beauty is not to be found here, but it is practical and that is not a bad thing.In my own ruby code I also have to use ENV[] sometimes, which is a wrapper over environment variables, but I also try to be as independent as possible from that. For instance, all my settings are stored in simple .yml files, and these are then used to autogenerate environment variables or handle things in environments where there are no environment variables available (this is sometimes the case; I had that issue with .cgi files many years ago, where I wanted to access all environment variables but for a reason I don't fully remember, this was not available. Then I transitioned into those .yml files and that problem went away; now of course I need to load those .yml files, if necessary, but this is trivial in ruby, YAML.load_file() works very well for the most part, and I find this is more reliable than depending on reading environment variables output. On some restricted environments this may be unavailable though; I had that on university campus running ancient linux systems, so I have to be flexible in this regard).
I use lowercase for my personal environment variables. It works well since most programs only depend on variables in all caps. Hadn't thought of using MY_
Case-sensitivity reduces portability. "Different strokes", I guess. (literally and figuratively!)
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...
> Uppercase and lowercase letters shall retain their unique identities and shall not be folded together.
> The name space of environment variable names containing lowercase letters is reserved for applications.
I prefer aboard_varname, because my_ is sometimes used by people like you ;-).
> These surface vibrations are so minute that they are not critical from a mechanical point of view (unlike e.g. vibrations due to imbalance), but they can cause serious acoustic problems. The reason for this is that when the fan is running, there is a pressure difference between the intake and the outlet side of the fan (lower pressure on the upside of the blades, higher pressure on the downside of the blades). From an aero-acoustic point of view, this situation is similar to a stereo speaker where there is higher pressure inside the chassis and lower pressure outside the chassis. In both cases, the pressure difference leads to an efficient acoustic coupling, so the surface vibration of either the blades of the fan or the membrane of the speaker is transferred to the air.
I love rotary woofers :) I hope to get one some day.
You appear to have commented on the wrong post.
Oh, I apparently did. Oops. Too late to delete.