There was a wiseman from the far east who had numeral followers. They were all eager to obtain the knowledge of their master, who promised to leave all his accumulated knowledge compiled in a book. This writing however, would not be available until after his death.
Much later, a thick book was revealed with nothing but blank pages except for a few lines on the first page containing the following statement...
The work of art consists of a personal computer placed on a tabletop. It is running through an endless loop with coldstarts. During the delay (between each reboot) it shows a textmode window:
When you know the difference between the content
and the container, then you have knowledge...
To make the impression of an empty computer (without even the signs of an operative system), I had to remove the 'loading statement' from one of the hidden system files residing on the boot floppy I used for the job. I simply replaced all bytes within the 'Loading MS-DOS...' string with the byte 0x20h, using the dos debug utility. The string (in my case) was found starting at 1A8E:9E15 of the io.sys file.
Please note that you have to use the attrib dos utility before you can make changes to hidden system files, such as io.sys and msdos.sys. Just write the following at your dos prompt:
attrib io.sys -s -r -h
then press ENTER... and voila! The file would be accessible for whatever patching job you have in mind. Just remember to reset the attributes of the file when you are done with it:
attrib io.sys +s +r +h
The autoexec.bat used on the boot floppy:
echo OFF cls uks_oslo coldboot
The machine instructions (assembler code) needed to reboot the computer:
cseg segment assume cs:cseg,ds:cseg org 100h start: xor ax,ax mov es,ax mov bx,472h mov word ptr es:[bx],0 pushf mov ax,0f000h push ax mov ax,0fff0h push ax iret cseg ends end start
Click to download executable version and above source listing.
The program (uks_oslo.exe) displaying the blue textmode window message, is programmed using Turbo Pascal:
PROGRAM uks_oslo;
USES
crt,
scrnunit;
BEGIN
CreatePopWin(5,3,55,3,$1F,$17,'','');
writeln(' When you know the difference between the content and');
write(' the container, then you have knowledge...');
delay(65000);
END.
To modify and recompile the above listing, you need all of the following files: uks_oslo.pas, scrnbios.tpu, scrnunit.tpu, and stacks.tpu.