System Commander: Paying $60 For GRUB (But Not Really)

[@CathodeRayDude]

Hey folks, it seems like the "voice" I picked with for this didn't entirely come through. That's on me - I think in the future I just need to say explicitly what I'm doing. Basically, for most of this video, I am _deliberately not telling you things I already know,_ because the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product. For instance, I recorded the intro after everything else, when I already knew the answers to all the questions I was raising - I knew at that point that this was not "just GRUB or LILO," but I wanted to start out with _the reaction that I think most people would have,_ then start dismantling those assumptions. The problem, I guess, is that that isn't evident unless you watch the whole thing, at which point you might be too irritated with me to hear what I'm driving at. I get it. I'll frame it better in the future. I don't want to begin every sentence with "_I_ know better, but I think that John Q User would have thought..." so I went for brevity, but I don't really blame anyone for not seeing the whole thing from 10,000 feet. If you didn't finish the video, the tl;dr is that I think this is a brilliant idea, and a product with a lot of really interesting features that _might_ have been unique in its day, but you can only use those features if you have a degree of patience that is unusual even among most computer experts. On top of that, there are features that appear to just not work, even following instructions in the manual explicitly, and features that are extremely hard to discover even if you do read the entire manual. A lot of people would never have run into any of those defects, but those who did would have been very frustrated.

[@mrwalter1049]

I'm a modern PC tech enthusiast so I would definitely fall into the category of Joe Schmoe who isn't that deep into peculiarities of the turn of the millennium software. To me this approach made the video very compelling and it's extremely informative. It was absolutely effortless to watch this feature length documentary. To me the approach you took was extremely evident "I already did this and are familiar with this stuff, but I'm walking through this step-by-step for those less informed" which I feel is the very reason this video is so good. You did a great job in my opinion. I've watched many of the videos on hardware items and I think you really have talent in writing to a technically minded audience. BR, software engineer from half way across the world

[@JacenLP]

"the goal is to illustrate how I believe an average-to-slightly-above user would have experienced the product." I liked this approach. I am sorry others disagree. It was the most enjoyable part of the video if you ask me.

[@joshm7769]

Thanks for the video crd, it was very interesting to me.

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@JacenLP Honestly, I think it's on me. If I had just said upfront, "I am going to be playing a character, wait for the end to get my real opinion," it'd have gone over better. heck, maybe I should do a thing where i sort of switch modes - "in character, out of character" - explicitly throughout the video. I might try that next time around if I can figure it out. Glad you enjoyed either way!

[@lelluc]

stop apologising for these things, I absolutely loved the way you explained everything and never once thought it was annoying, this just gives extra fuel for the haters. Be more confident in yourself, you're doing great :) ❤❤

[@lemagreengreen]

Wiping out the partition table on the family PC when you wanted to experiment with Linux was basically a rite of passage for 90s geek kids. Hopefully it encouraged your parents to get you your own PC.

[@psyched91]

My parents used to think that playing a game on a PC would destroy the PC. I wasn't allowed to burn CD's (this would permanently slow down the PC) etc etc. The reason I got "good with computers" is because whenever I fucked up the PC I had to fix it immediately because I didn't want to get into trouble :P

[@algizmo7079]

@@psyched91 1994, My boss took a holiday... 2 days in I killed a whole network (50 users, 25,000GBP server). I quickly learned Novell 3, then 3 days in I remembered the 'grandfather, father, son backup tapes, which I had suggested. His boss was getting frantic, so I told him "gimme a couple of hours". Restore from last known good backup took 5 hours. 'We learn best by breaking things' is my mantra ; )

[@zoeyaaahmed203]

me who did this in 2020 :3

[@MajorOutage]

I once tried to install LiteStep on the family computer and flubbed it. A work friend of my mom's said he could fix it without losing anything. Dude completely nuked the system and installed Windows 98. If I really wanted that done, I could have done it myself. Also the system originally had 98SE. So...yeah. Thanks for your time, I guess. One thing I did learn from that, though, is the importance of partitioning.

[@JORGETECHJorge]

There's a joke article about such phenomenon called "Is your son a computer hacker?" that was originally published in the now defunct "Adequacy" website, you can still find it reposted on the internet.

[@swagar]

I know this was time consuming to create and felt meandering to you, but this was comfy in the same way as the Norton Desktop video and it was a real nice way to spend an hour

[@Sir_Maximus_Hardwood]

Omg a Ruby Gloom pfp? Have a gold star!

[@heroinmom153]

Comfy? Are you like five years old?

[@wirebrushofenlightenment1545]

Gravis talks about janky software - I love this stuff. The home design software vids from a few years back are still stone cold classics.

[@bigstupidgrin]

Norton desktop is one of my favorite videos from CRD

[@seanephram]

exactly! i think we come here for the company haha - protip, try it with a vapor(and or retro)wave playlist @ 50%

[@jonmarler]

I actually used this for a very long time ... I didn't pay $60 for it ... but it did work very well. I've been a Debian package maintainer since 1998, so it's not like I didn't know how grub works, but this made booting into different windows versions so much easier! Once you get it setup, it's actually quite elegant. I still have my System Commander rescue floppy for emergencies, though I haven't used it in a very long time.

[@CathodeRayDude]

This is pretty much what I figured, that a person with preexisting domain knowledge would actually find it quite useful. Thanks for the perspective!

[@michaelmccarrick5513]

We used it back in the day to setup a system on which we would test the software we developed. On a single drive we would have all of the versions of Windows we supported. Then switch between each OS to test. Eventually replaced in with VMWare but it worked for us.

[@Physics072]

@@michaelmccarrick5513 The guy that did this video was probably not even around in 1998 or was toddler. I'm from Pre Atari cpm days. 1998 yea I used that program also worked for Acronis and True Image which was a great imaging program at the time. It did become a bloated mess not long after that.

[@zh84]

I used it for many years and found it extremely convenient, but perhaps technology left it behind. It was better than LILO or GRUB because it was easy to configure right at boot time: order of preference at boot time, countdown time before it boots the default, whether you want a noise played to alert you, and so on. GRUB requires you to edit a configuration file, in a funny place, in sudo, and I have never done it successfully.

[@felixjohnson3874]

​@@CathodeRayDudeI could be wrong but this *_really_* feels like it was made for nerds, by nerds. Even down to them (seemingly?) writing a completely unnecessary DOS implementation. Thats absolutely insane if you're thinking in terms of business sense, but *_any_* programmer can go on for hours about the hordes of extremely hard to make, incredibly involved and thoroughly interesting side-tangent projects they started that, in hindsight, were completely unnecessary. It would also explain why all of their warnings are very documentation-ey and don't ever seem to come out and just say "this is not compatible". That sort of nuance-first context dump before saying the bit *_most_* people will actually care about just screams "we made this for ourselves and only realized afterwards that we're all massive nerds"

[@ougonce]

I love the "sleepover at a friend's house where he tells you about this weird CD his dad brought home the other day" energy this video has. Please keep it up

[@ParametricAvocado]

I get it now, Syscommander is a visual novel, complete with fictional terms and a ton of text, and you beat it by save-scumming your HDD image.

[@Algoinde]

Holy hell, this is the most accurate summary one could give

[@ougonce]

It can't possibly be a visual novel, nobody dies in it and there are no anime girls. They should fix that in the sequel

[@ParametricAvocado]

@@ougonce Yeah many of those complaints were addressed in SysCommand 2000 Yellow edition. Please don't look up BackStep-tan, the fanart is egregious.

[@Algoinde]

@@ougonce data and mbr dies. Also OSes have anime girl mascots.

[@HalianTheProtogen]

@@Algoinde [happy OS-tan noises]

[@henryokeeffe5835]

This isn't like engineers wrote the manual. This is like the engineers got a 10 person test group together then wrote the manual (and related bits of the software) entirely based on their FAQs.

[@skillaxxx]

And then have a marketing manager rephrase half of it afterwards ....

[@trecorite]

I have actually witnessed this happening.

[@JoyMerten]

​@@skillaxxx I dunno, a lot of my marketing career has involved begging people not to release incomprehensible walls of text to the public

[@barcodenosebleed5485]

​@@JoyMertenskill means the kind of marketing manager that got the job because they were friends with the CEO or got promoted from sales because they made a nice looking PowerPoint one time. Not the kind that have training and actually know what they are doing lol.

[@skillaxxx]

@@JoyMerten Yes, and that was probably the right thing to say, although in reality when the product needs 'a wall of text' you're kinda fubar already, as the only real solution is either back to the drawing board or spend some significant extra dev-time, which is usually not/hardly an option at that point either. I.e. the damage is already done.

[@davebauchan6718]

A LOT of BIOS did not allow you to boot from a CD-ROM so allowing for boot disks was important. Also, Linux was still unstandardized between distros using LiLo for booting, and different file systems. I used this product a lot 24 years ago, and again just recently trying to get a multi-boot OS/2 of HPFS along with FAT32 Win98 and FAT16 DOS / Win3.x on an old ThinkPad 380e. Working with real hardware made you appreciate this product more.

[@lasskinn474]

I don't remember any 90s bios letting you boot from cd- IDE or otherwise.

[@Azlehria]

​@@lasskinn474I first encountered it on Socket 7 motherboards. The earliest bootable CD I remember possessing was either Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows NT 4.0. It wasn't until the end of the decade - the P3 era - when drives and bus controllers started to be reliably supported by the generic drivers included in the CDs' boot loaders. On the other hand, NT's boot loader at least didn't actually require a bootable _diskette._ The diskette just had to contain the 32-bit drivers necessary for the boot loader to initialize the controller and drive for hand-off to the OS. Hardware initialization is weird.

[@the_kombinator]

That's actually very close to how I am using it present day on a Nixdorf Siemens 486.

[@lasskinn474]

@@Azlehria early '00s sata motherboards were annoying yeah in that you had to have the sata drivers on a floppy to install windows, even when the windows install itself was from cd.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Yeah I don't recall CD boots becoming easy until... 2005? Personally. And then USB didn't get similarly easy until 2009-2012. It's funny how we went from boot floppies for CD installs, to (occasionally) boot CDs for a >700MB USB install (if you didn't want to just burn a pricier DVD).

[@apricotghost3939]

I really liked this one, it’s been fun watching you revisit the older style of video you used to put out.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Thank you so much. I've been worrying for the last couple years that I would never be able to go back to the stuff I used to do, which was simpler, if not less time-consuming, but it turns out people will watch this kind of thing, so I am definitely going to try to get back to it more.

[@apricotghost3939]

@@CathodeRayDude yeah im sure it's just as time consuming on the research end but hopefully it makes shooting a little easier while you're recovering. happy to hear you're doing better!

[@xXRedTheDragonXx]

Due to this thing's woeful lack of support for Linux, it really seems like one engineer's personal/internal project that probably solved one very specific problem for them and them only was seen by an executive and then cleaned up and re-packaged into a commercial product due to how quickly Linux was emerging as the "Next Big Thing"(TM). I'll bet this product could've been marketed towards enthusiasts who wanted to try Linux, but that didn't know much about it and didn't want to risk their Windows/DOS install. The insane number of warnings really seems like a "Please don't sue us if you get something wrong, thanks!" message and also further convince me that this was exactly what the marketing team envisioned, only for this to be the result.

[@SockyNoob]

Cute icon

[@krzbrew]

I used System Commander to triple boot Win95\Win31\DOS on my work 486 before I was aware Linux existed. As a kid I needed different operating systems to correctly load different games. Yes, it was in 1999-2000. No, we did not have Internet until like 2003.

[@arcallcaps]

​@@SockyNoobI've seen you in the comments before hi there

[@jakeyyyyyyyy]

It also explains why it's running under some bizarre DOS variant

[@atlasnetwork7855]

Having used SC a lot, it's support for linux was just fine, i've never had any issues with SC except when i've deleted an operating system.

[@michaelelandon]

At the time of its release, LILO/GRUB (and Linux in general) were VERY user-unfriendly. At work we only had maybe 2 people that COULD do it that way, but they also couldn't comprehend why others couldn't (Hard-core Linux nerds with the "If you can't do it, you're too stupid to use a computer" type). We got it so we could multi-boot. Had DOS, Windows, Linux, and OS-9000 bootable on on my machine, others had different configurations, but this program let us do that.

[@LeslieLanagan]

That's actually been a true help in my career- being the patient and kind Linux person who only made fun of users behind their backs.

[@michaelelandon]

@@LeslieLanagan IDK if you make fun of me, just be willing to explain it in terms a Windows user can understand! 😁

[@LeslieLanagan]

Wouldn’t you make fun of users who called me during a power outage wondering why their computers were all broken? It wasn’t directed at you at all, I used to work at a helpdesk. I actually had one user whose computer didn’t work because he had plugged his computer into the power strip, and then plugged the power strip into itself.

[@xephael3485]

Besides being unfriendly they were also quite buggy

[@millenniumtree]

The amount of nostalgia in this video is stunning. Ancient linux, several flavors of DOS, 3 different Winblows versions, some OS/2 spice, and even a shout-out to BeOS. Thanks for all that. You were right at the outset - nobody got time to film all that on period hardware. xD The fact that VirtualBox got it all done is pretty impressive! Thanks for the feels!

[@CathodeRayDude]

Thanks for watching! You know, virtual box is remarkably flexible. I actually have a folder containing an unbelievable variety of VMs, from Windows 1.0 up, every version of OS / 2, a bunch of early Linux variants, and many other things. I've been able to get virtually everything working in it with a bit of tinkering, and it's truly amazing looking at the VM library window and just seeing everything there at once. Computing has gotten very strange.

[@millenniumtree]

Would love to see a few of your weirder VMs. I actually installed BeOS from CD back in the day. It was fun, but a lack of any 3rd-party software meant it was essentially a tech demo.

[@Cmdad]

Be great if a zip file of that folder ended up somewhere

[@martinhow121]

@@CathodeRayDude Don't be too hard on PICK. I never used it but MAPLIN ( a sort of UK Radio Shack on steroids) ran a whole dial up ordering system on it in the early 90s pre internet pre Linux days.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

18:40 - The wonky thing about disk compression back in the day is that it didn’t actually “compress the files on the disk at the file-system level” the way modern disk compression does. It created a disk container file. Like a drive image. It compressed _that_ file. Then it mounted that image as another hard drive. And it did so by changing drive letters. So your *actual* “on the hard drive” partition would be bumped up to a different letter, and the mounted drive image would become “C”. Often times, these utilities would then _hide_ the raw partition. If you booted to another OS and looked at the actual partition, all you’d see were minimal boot loader files and the compressed disk image file. But in the “booted” OS, you’d often only see the “C” drive, with all your files. Note: With tools like System Commander, it would have been possible to still have the multi-OS thing, but you’d have to make sure that they were loaded in the actual uncompressed raw disk partition, not in the in-Windows compressed “fake C”. By default, Windows would use up all available space on the physical partition though. Third party disk compression utilities like Stacker worked similarly, but you could choose how much disk space was available on the “bare metal” partition vs. the compressed. So you could have left enough space in the “bare metal” partition for other files.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

Dear God, why do I still remember all this……

[@CathodeRayDude]

Oh, that's terrifying. Wow.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

@@CathodeRayDude What’s terrifying, how old disk compression worked, or that I still remember it? 🤣

[@dustojnikhummer]

Yes. Very much yes. ​@@AnonymousFreakYT

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

What's fun is that I just tested using disk compression on an encrypted disk that uses the same method. So now I have *THREE* drive letters for one drive. It's an LS-120 drive that with a normal disk mounts as Drive A. The raw drive "E" contains a text file saying "the contents of this disk are encrypted, use decryption utility to mount this disk." The disk is full, and the only other file is the hidden encrypted image file. Then there's that encrypted image decrypted as drive "S", which contains a text file saying "the contents of this disk are compressed, use compression utility to mount this disk." (Yes, I'm paraphrasing both.) This disk is also full, the only other file is the hidden compressed image file. Finally, there's now-doubly-virtualized drive A, which is the mounted compressed image. This shows up as a "double size" of the original disk - 240 MB. Of course, that's only when it's empty. If I load it with incompressible data (.zip files, .JPG, etc,) it fills up faster than it thinks it should.

[@avrilsegoli]

the visual design you have here with a vertical pane with your video on the left and the software in a much larger box taking up most of the rest of the screen looks great - it's a lot more visually appealing than either a picture in picture or green screen would've looked.

[@DaivG]

Your research and information about Pick OS and it's late founder just made my day. Thank you for being you!

[@nurbs2322]

I remember the TechTV show “The Screen Savers” once brought on a guy that had installed “Every pc operating system” on a computer and he did it using this software or something like it. It stuck out in my head because at the time having struggled with GRUB this looked amazing. I never did end up buying it though.

[@bootmii98]

That would have been early, early GRUB. Like '03-'04.

[@StarryCactus]

Hey I remember that episode! Man I miss that show.

[@ylitvinenko]

What a coincidence, I’ve learned of System Commander few hours before you posted your video! I was thinking of Acronis OS Selector, which was a different paid boot loader my family used in the 2000s, and was surprised to see it was a whole class of commercial software.

[@adamsfusion]

The walls of text make me think of a company that is deeply uncomfortable and unsure of their product. The more they said, the more uneasy I felt of whether this thing could pull it off, and I'm sure that feeling was tripled in '99.

[@joeofloath]

I have visions of 2-3 young , inexperienced engineers furiously writing code as the deadline looms, forever terrified of the "slap slap slap" of the pointy shoes from the marketing department coming down the stairs ready to demand impossible features. No, I'm not speaking from experience, why do you ask...

[@WafflePlaneRC]

Right? I was getting *huge* flashbacks to my time in a startup. All of the systems are hacked together, minimum viable product solutions, that *do* work when used in a very specific way. However, there's no chance to do the last 10% (which takes 90% of the time) to make it all seamless. The end result of this is that the only way is to "fix it in procedure," ie turning the manual into a meandering wizard's spellbook and the training sessions into two-week hands on boot camp on all the ways not to use the product.

[@_ata_3]

Thats how we learned how to read 😂

[@SBBurzmali]

Very little of that manual was unusual for business software of the time, which is exactly what this was likely designed for.

[@amogusenjoyer]

I'd agree in 2024 but back then (and I was very very young, but still this was true even in the early 2000s) every software "box" had that. It gives as seen on tv vibes but even major software was sold like that

[@ocno]

To be fair I don't think any major distro was distributing GRUB in 1999 (Red Hat 6.0 certainly didn't). The standard boot loader was LILO and it was finicky as all heck, I always kept ending up in situations where my MBR was all screwed. I definitely see people using this.

[@glenncaughey5044]

LILO, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long tine.

[@nathanferch5375]

LILILILILILILILILI

[@KaitharVideo]

Well, fun fact... I checked and GRUB only became a GNU project in 1999, prior to that it seems to be a closed project for Hurd specifically. Dev transitioned to GRUB2 around 2002/2003 and distros started defaulting to GRUB in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It's actually detailed out in the manual history section. ^_^ And LILO was... uuuurgh. At least it wasn't MILO...

[@WhatWillYouFind]

Even around 2010 when I got into the Linux scene and wanted to try out everything from arch to gentoo, to puppy across a wide variety of devices. This software in a modern form aka the CURRENT DAY boot loaders would've made things all that much more usable.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

The first time I tried Red Hat, I couldn't figure out how to make RPM download dependencies or even tell me which ones to download. At which point, I lost interest because that should be something that's easy to do without having to go around looking for instructions.

[@ronichoudhury]

Fascinating video. Please don't drop these software safari videos from your repertory, at least not because of your self-perception that your audience doesn't want to watch them - we do!

[@vjcodec]

This is peak CRD content again. At least that is what I felt. I hope you had a great time making this vid again. And that you are recovering well? Also thanks again for the thrift store video, really enjoyed it. I went shopping and listened to you describing all the stuff. ❤ keep it going mate! And everyone share this one to get the algorithm grinding for our dude!

[@joearnold6881]

It has at least three separate instances of incorrectly using “these days” when they mean “those days”, so you know it’s a good one!

[@rakslice]

This product is like an inflection point that weirdly straddles the software in a box on the shelf era and the Internet era: The back of the box claims are something else -- like utility software in a box was an idea whose time had come and gone already by 1998 and had become something purely for the rubes by that point, while a thousand long-abandoned scene websites have that other serial number from winworld on a big list. If you had an existing multiboot setup and just needed to make whatever annoying nested boot menus you got from your stock 9x, NT, OS/2, Linux bootloaders into a single menu with decent names and icons, this did what it said on the tin -- and by the tin I mean the one line summary in whatever 00index file

[@lastfm4477]

The System Command he showed was no where near their first version. I used System Commander in the early 90's when OS's didn't want to consider you'd ever want to use another OS.

[@KunjaBihariKrishna]

It reminds me of 'going to the computer store' just to browse. Like one would go to the music store to try out some records. You'd pick up software boxes and read the back. I remember the smell of the plastic wrapping. But yeah, that's how people bought things. Most did not even read magazines. You just looked at some weird boxes at the storew

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@KunjaBihariKrishna and even after I was savvy to magazines and tried to get my folks to use those reviews, I still would find a new "master your PC" software disc (which was really just a slideshow or a bunch of low-res videos) in the house a few times a year up until... 2007? 2008? The back of the box of course promised results unlike any other tutorial software. But they were all the same, and usually didn't cover the edge-cases that they'd actually ran-inti.

[@KunjaBihariKrishna]

@@kaitlyn__L haha, that reminds me of "download managers", which to be fair were actually necessary because browsers were unable to resume downloads back then. If you lost connection you had to start from scratch. So you had to install an entire software just for that

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@KunjaBihariKrishna gosh, yes, I only actually found out about download managers right as they were becoming useless. Got about 12-18 months using one with Megaupload (mainly to bypass the one download at a time limit) before they stopped being useful altogether. (If I knew sooner it certainly could’ve saved us a lot of headaches, as we still had dialup until 06.)

[@djsmeguk]

As someone who did the crazy stuff in the 90s. Remember when you didn't have a supercomputer in your pocket connected to the entire world, that you can browse on the toilet? My shared flat toilet of the 90s was replete with dozens of software and development books. Those chonky manuals were perfect toilet reading. This would have been a good one for a particularly strained session the day after the night before..

[@dustojnikhummer]

Compared to 90s even a basic smartfridge is a supercomputer

[@Roxor128]

I hate it when people call a smartphone a supercomputer. It's not. It has about a millionth of the compute power of an actual supercomputer (gigaflops vs petaflops for the early 2020s).

[@djsmeguk]

@@Roxor128 the cray 2, a supercomputer of the 80s, and the standard benchmark for the term "supercomputer" in my 50+ year old head, has about 1/5000th the compute power of an iPhone. Perhaps my context clues (pre mobile computing, ubiquitous internet, paper manuals) were insufficient. Sorry.

[@aimwell8813]

@Roxor128 Most people who call a smartphone a "supercomputer" are referring to it in a historical (maybe a bit exaggeratory) context. It isn't one by modern standards, but it is by 80s standards.

[@ErrorTH]

> Remember when you didn't have a supercomputer in your pocket connected to the entire world And when you eventually mess up your only computer, you have no way to google for help. Or create any bootable media...

[@magfal]

If this was a product with a physical widget kinda like the image on the front I would pay for this today.

[@TheAechBomb]

I can imagine a front-panel SSD housing that switches which physical drive is connected, with 2-4 options, maybe with a simple firmware lock that prevents swaps while it's powered

[@bennyfactor]

Was gonna say the same thing!

[@noahhaskell7695]

I would as well

[@BillAnt]

You could make a USB dongle with a 4 way switch along with a bit of electronics interfaced with the MBR. However it's essentially the same thing as simply selecting it from the boot menu.

[@magfal]

@@BillAnt I would pay for someone to integrate reading such a physical switch into clover and/or grub and to make schematics for the required hardware open source.

[@yurab1834]

An interesting thing I noticed in the pseudo-Windows UI for the wizard and partitioning software is that it actually uses those fields at the bottom of the window and always displays "Message 0-XX" in the bottom left corner. When you go through the wizard, that number changes, meaning that it's likely some debugging info, showing that that the dialog data for the program is stored sequentially and the wizard just flips to the right page depending on the choices you make. Which makes sense, I guess, but I've never seen a program be so upfront about how it works to the end user.

[@ErrorTH]

It can probably improve support, because now you are not forced to explain what you see over the phone, just name the dialog ID.

[@GP1138]

“Choose Your Own Adventure” for hyper-nerds.

[@JoeHamelin]

Good to see you back in fine form.

[@corwin881]

This. Good, old form of rambling along vor an hour. For the Life of me, I cannot tell, why, but I like it 😍

[@CraigAB69]

This software saved my sanity back in 1998/99. I was learning Novell Netware and Windows NT Domains as well as programming on Solaris at University. I had 2 machines and was multi-booting both. I can't remember the exact configuration, it's a long time ago now, but I think I had Dos 6.2 / Win3.11 / WinNT 3.51 /4.0 and Netware 3.11 on both machines. That enabled me to learn client to client (peer to peer), client to server and Server to Server setup. Somewhere in there I think there was Solaris. The way I got around problems was to ensure that I backed up the partition information. System Commander had a backup to floppy and if things did go bad, the floppy saved the day. The biggest headache was getting the hardware that all OS's were happy with.

[@KOTYAR0]

It's fascinating story, Craig, nj, thanks for sharing it

[@elijahpass1539]

Thanks!

[@menhirmike]

TIL that the first version of Pick OS was implemented in what Richard A. Pick called the "Generalized Information Retrieval Language System". Yep, Dick Pick invented GIRLS. And yes, Dick dying of Stroke is perfectly on-brand.

[@the_beefy1986]

The little "pop" sound that you use when post-production text appears on screen is the same one I use for incoming IMs (or whatever we're supposed to call the various forms of internet-based messages these days). Thanks for that!

[@scottlarson1548]

Pick (and its variations like Reality) was an old database OS based on a BASIC compiler. It originally ran on a proprietary CPU but was eventually ported to pretty much every CPU since it's very simple and has extremely low hardware requirements for a multiuser system. There were thousands of businesses running versions of Pick in the 1970s.

[@JeremyMitts]

There was a security company in Tulsa running their entire business on Pick in the *nineties*.

[@scottlarson1548]

@@JeremyMitts Pthth! There are thousands of car dealerships who are still running most of their software on a version of Pick ported to Linux right now. It can support thousands of simultaneous users on modern hardware.

[@pepinw]

This product was revolutionary for testing secondary operating systems. We are super lucky to have FOSS like GRUB to handle these and more

[@FooneTuring]

ooh! Pick! That's what Dynix ran on, the library thing with the Wyse dumb terminals. It's a weird OS that's a sort of database-oriented BASIC-based system.

[@CathodeRayDude]

that's the one thing i discovered when i looked it up. what an absolutely fascinating little moment in computing history

[@nuka-flix]

I work for a furniture company that STILL uses a Pick based system to handle all their sales data, warranty issues etc. They all connect using a terminal emulator on their Windows PCs.

[@joew1865]

​@@nuka-flixℂ𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕔!

[@semifavorableuncircle6952]

Well i didnt pay 60$ for it, but i did use it back then and still use it on almost every retro PC i have. Its quite convenient to use and certainly worth 2 floppy disks it cost..

[@atlasnetwork7855]

Yeah totally, this was a FANTASTIC utility.

[@the_kombinator]

Same - I use it in a 486 with a 4.3 gig drive to load all kinds of OSes up.

[@waterup380]

I bet you know more about how to use more then he does

[@cmfrancis1]

Had this on dad’s pc. Don’t remember it costing too much though. Dad didn’t trust Linux and didn’t want lilo on his computer.

[@cheeseparis1]

Thanks so much, this was so interesting to see how you showed us this product. I had this feeling too: either you know how to install multiple OSes and you write a batch file, or you are an executive that needs two OSes to run two business softwares and won't read more than three lines of warnings. But finally the product can help system gurus, yet I would prefer not to have a power failure while I'm booting... Please accept this small dono for the pleasure I get while watching your work. Cheers from France.

[@GoTeamScotch]

It's midnight. I have to wake up early tomorrow. Why am I watching an hour long video essay about a bad piece of decades-old software? Gravis you've done it again. Your narrative capabilities swindled me yet again, and I have no regrets.

[@TommyAgramonSeth]

I didn't even realize it's an hour long until I finished it and read this comment. I love the type of content, about stuff that's not supposed to be as interesting as it turns out to be (in no small part thanks to the presenter, to be fair, but still).

[@dphoenix1]

Fun fact: PatientFirst (a mid-Atlantic urgent care provider) still heavily uses Pick on their back-end systems.

[@tngaskell]

System Commander apparently existed for a number of years and versions. I have a 1997 version with a box very similar to yours. I was going to put it on my 486 and take it to VCFSW. It's ability to swap between DOS configurations was very nice, but I gave up on it because its support for the Mark Williams Company's Coherent operating system did not work as advertised. Coherent' partition boot record would expect things to have been left in a different state by the MBR than System Commander did and bomb out instead of loading the third stage. I can only assume they tested it against an earlier version of Coherent that had a slightly different MBR/PBR combination. I'll probably try it again when I set up my Computer Reset machine with NT 3.5X.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I'm absolutely astonished that someone actually tried to run CTOS with this. May I ask what CTOS was, you know, for? All I could find when i looked it up was a lot of architectural stuff; what ran on it?

[@CathodeRayDude]

Oh I'm sorry, I mixed up Coherent and Convergent. Whoops

[@tngaskell]

If I had a copy of CTOS, I wouldn't need an excuse. You're talking to someone who regularly uses the *page down* key to navigate GRUB installs.

[@JimLeonard]

Former Mark Williams Company employee here -- hope your memories of Coherent are nice ones! 🙂

[@tngaskell]

@@JimLeonard I've had great experiences with Coherent! It's a darling little operating system that deserves more love. None of those are memories of its glory days, though, since I am a youngster who never got to use it until the free VM was posted online. I currently have it installed in a 66Mhz 486 with about 16 MB RAM and a Tseng ET4000AX video card, so I have the full X experience. I periodically dream of writing or porting software for it, but I'm not sure that will ever happen. I tried to build the modern, open-source version of Motif for it but got tired of wading through incompatibilities in its behemoth configure script. I've also considered using it as a development environment for writing a pure Xt application that would then hopefully build easily on all xwin-using operating systems.

[@leemarshall9946]

Great video as always! I was really hoping MultiFAT was actually some multiple-file-allocation-table magic, that would allow multiple logical filesystems to occupy the same partition - all that "enabling fs compression will break everything" verbiage got me really excited.

[@b2gills]

I immediately realized it was where all of the different DOS "partitions" were all installed together. (Along with Win3.x) I did not however realize that it was where the System Commander was located. (I would have probably guessed as much if I spent any thought on it.) To be fair System Commander does do some fancy things to make it so that the different versions of DOS will actually boot. Specifically moving those sys files.

[@jaytee7773]

Blockbuster Video's in-store video rental system ran on the Pick operating system. Never knew it was named after its founder Dick Pick though!

[@blackravenX]

I personally think it'd be cool to see a video documenting those weird operating systems that the software said it supported but that you had never heard of.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to do so, and several of them appear to be either lost, or never got released, but if I can manage, I will see what I can do.

[@andreww195]

I've just started a channel where I review weird/obscure OSes (as well as restoring various OSes to run in emulation) and will very likely make videos on the ones that I've been able to find. I've already made a couple on QNX.

[@roskelld]

I’d love to see something along those lines. In the early 90’s I remember exploring options and installing a bunch. Sadly I don’t remember most of them now. Lots of DOS variants and some DOS shell-like interfaces.

[@danteblankenship6213]

System commander was initially released in 1993. Grub came out in 1995. Also, many computer users were not very savvy, any sort of graphical interface helped things, a lot. I used system commander to multiboot a few OSes, until I discovered grub.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I agree, in 1993 this would have been a *much* bigger product with far fewer drawbacks.

[@JeremyLevi]

This really would make a heck of a lot more sense as a product in 1993 when there weren't other commonly available (and free!) tools to do similar things. By 1999 you had other much better options available.

[@UntouchedWagons]

This was a super cool video Gravis, hope you're feeling better.

[@anthonyprime]

I have never, *ever* , enjoyed a video as much as I enjoyed the angst of this one. Congratulations Sir, magnificent!

[@Inadvisablescience]

Fascinating video! I remember getting something like System Commander some years back, didn't do too much with it, but I did use it for a couple of DOS versions and Win 3.1 and 3.11. Kind of makes me want to try installing those other OSes just to play around with them.. thank you for this!

[@jfbeam]

Even linux used that "boot an MBR" trick. Early versions of GRUB would save the existing MBR before installing itself, and added a chainloader entry to get back to the previous environment. I recall that being the way to load NT from GRUB. And it's how NT loaded DOS.

[@doltharbad5625]

Fascinating to see how interesting it is to just follow CRD in his quest to understand and use System Commander. :) I agree that you should have pointed out in the beginning what your intentions in this video are, nonetheless I enjoyed it and hope there will be more stuff like this in the future. I also found System Commander itself quite fascinating: The programme itself is really smart in some ways and does quite a bit more than GRUB. I love that ability to switch between DOS Versions by switching the IO.SYS files. It even tried to handle Windows and OS/2, unfortunately not every step has been thought through. On the other hand the tool is plagued by the marketing department, which had to sell something by simple language on the box, producing an overly complex printed manual and hiding features in the programme behind a huge wall of text. Didn't match together so good in the end. Long story short: clever programme, not quite finished and overtexted. :D

[@spudd86]

I have written the code to make a cursor work in VGA text mode. Most of the complexity is just getting mouse input. Drawing the cursor is just changing the colour of one character to inverted.

[@XanthinZarda]

Yeah, this is something EDIT could do, a simple inverted block cursor. It may not look nice, but it's functional.

[@sryx]

I bought this program back in the day (from an EggHead software store in San Francisco near where I worked). Back then I used to have a complex boot menu setup to start Win95 directly into DOS mode with and without things like CD-ROM support (I had a laptop with a CD-ROM that used a PCMCIA adapter which I didn't always have plugged in). The idea of keeping a pure DOS environment and a win95 environment for when I needed it seemed worth it. I actually learned a lot about installing operating systems back then which I ended up using in my next job with a startup, but yes it was kind of disappointing. Still this was setting up a computer was exciting :)

[@GigAHerZ64]

MS DOS 6+ had dos shell on fourth disk called "supplemental disk". I love your software review videos!

[@ronwilgenbusch1961]

I can say that we used this to remove a proprietary partition from a hard drive back then. It was the only thing that worked to actually remove it. None of the other partitioning programs out there would remove it. They would go through the motions and act like they would, but ultimately wouldn’t. I think it was a drive from an AT&T 1/0 narrowband DACS or something, it ran its own proprietary software IIRC.

[@volvo09]

I remember having a partition I couldn't delete and had to use a red hat install CD to do it.

[@phuturephunk]

As an old head who was around and using computers back then : The current age of every BIOS or UEFI allowing for multiple boot options by detection was essentially alien back then. BIOS's were much simpler. Doing multiple booting machines really didn't become de rigeur until Win2K/XP.

[@classicnosh]

I was a computer repair technician when that software was out and I had a scenario where this actually helped one of my clients. He was able to get Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to boot up on the same HDD but he worked at a place that used OS/2 and the software you reviewed allowed me to help him out. To be safe, I disconnected his main HDD installed OS/2 on a separate HDD, and reconnected the main one. I installed this package on the Windows installation and it recognized OS/2 without any problems.

[@Longlius]

BTRON was the consumer OS offering as part of the TRON initiative which you can think of as being kinda like Japan's take on POSIX just without the Unix. The idea was to have a single operating system standard to ensure compatibility. The successful part was ITRON for industrial control systems but there was also an attempt to target home and business computers with BTRON. The problem was that NEC was the largest PC maker in Japan by marketshare and their consumer PCs already used a modified version of MS-DOS so adoption died pretty quickly due to BTRON not supporting MS-DOS software. Microsoft also lobbied against it as part of the general US-Japan trade spats of the late 80s/early 90s. By the time this product came out, BTRON was basically dead although a few workstations still shipped with it. It was popular as a development platform for companies targeting ITRON systems.

[@gblargg]

3:20 It could modify the partition tables at boot to point to the OS you're booting into, so that the others were hidden away in a reserved partition. This would also support the claims about installing them without affecting the current OS.

[@gummy0worm]

i watched this entire video while working on a windows server 2016 file sharting error as part of a trial by fire for an interview. heres hoping i get the job and can help to support more videos like this and more

[@KOTYAR0]

Good luck, hope your employers ain't bastards

[@CathodeRayDude]

best of luck! hope you get it!

[@eDoc2020]

I don't know if that's a typo of sharing or if Windows is sharting on files, either one works.

[@robokotkin-8793]

Thanks for the video! Intresting as always

[@guyonearth]

This is a product I used back in the day, that I really liked. It might be kind of hard to understand what the purpose of this was from a modern standpoint, but back in the day most people only had one hard drive, and experimenting with multiple operating systems was tricky, especially with Windows 95 as your main system, because it was really intended to be a sole OS, and didn't recognize any other system. I actually preferred the version 1 of SC, it had a much simpler look to it, but less options. I was successfully able to juggle Windows 95, NT, 3.1, BeOS, and Linux on a single hard drive, mainly as a proof-of-concept, because most of those systems weren't very useful to me, as I didn't work in software development or anything, I just liked to tinker. I'll agree that this program has some pretty obtuse documentation that I found confusing at the time. Boot managers were a thing for a few years, but I can't remember any other one being sold as a standalone boxed program. There might have been one, but I can't think of it at the moment.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

Yes, also at the time, computers were much more likely to randomly crash due to accidents like accidentally deleting the . file int he directory which would somehow trash the entire filesystem.

[@boredincan]

This is the sort of video that made me subscribe to you in the first place. Speaking as an authority of being a geek in the 90s, knowing exactly what your limits of knowledge are, and deferring to other people when you come up short in your knowledge, and telling an interesting story that you're passionate about. Maybe your appendix was holding you back

[@Stealth86651]

Love these really niche software stuff. A lot of this stuff no one cared about when it was actively sold, it's always nice to do a deep dive on stuff like this and learning more about it.

[@KeiNova]

I actually remember System Commander. My school gave me a binder full of CDs when they were switching out computers, so I got a computer and a load of software like this and productivity stuff. As an 8-year-old, I had no idea what it did. But I constantly installed everything and tried it out. I remember when everyone thought Linux was going to replace Windows, and there were laptops that supported it at the store. Crazy.

[@renegeeder]

Wow, I always wondered what the old PC my uncle had was running way back when, I started with Windows 95 and never really experienced MS-DOS, but when I visited I had a blast exploring what the PC contained, old simple games mostly, MS-DOS Shell made it easy for me to explore what the PC had on it. (Granted I never really searched for it, but fun the see it here!)

[@AndrewsOSLab]

I'd heard of all the obscure OSes on there besides JexeOS, and have all of them running in emulation (besides Pick, although I do have install images of a PC version). I'm planning to release a Linux VM of basically my entire collection soon, all 1500+ images, 600+ distinct OS variants, and 250+ platforms of it, all tested and nicely sorted. At some point I'm definitely planning to make videos on at least some of them (I've already made one on a version of QNX from a few years after this version of System Commander). BTRON was the desktop OS part of the TRON project, which as someone mentioned earlier was a Japanese project to develop an open standard for OSes that could scale from microcontrollers to supercomputers. It feels quite alien compared to just about anything else. The desktop is object-oriented and basically follows an "everything is a compound document" model. Documents may contain other files within them as if they were folders, and these sub-files may be either displayed inline or as just a name and icon. The BTRON equivalent of a folder (a cabinet) is just a document that has no content of its own and is just a container for other files. Actually, files don't technically contain other files, but rather hard links to them sort of like in Unix, although since every file is basically a directory, managing them is a bit trickier because you can end up with cycles. Also, for major applications, you don't launch them directly, but instead you launch them by clicking on a document template and creating a new file, similar to LisaOS and Xerox ViewPoint/GlobalView (there's also a concept of "utility" programs that don't create documents). There were actually two different BTRON OSes. 1B a.k.a. BTRON286 was the first BTRON OS and was probably also the last commercial OS targeting 286 protected mode, with the last version being released in 1996 (development had begun in the late 80s, but for some reason they kept it 16-bit until the end). 1B's 32-bit successor, B-right a.k.a. Chokanji, started out on a rather obscure PDA before being ported to PCs a bit later. Active development of B-right/Chokanji more or less stopped in the late 2000s, but the last version is still available and receiving a few minor patches. CTOS was one of the first commercial typical microkernel OSes. It isn't really a mainframe relic (it started out on non-PC-based x86 machines before being ported to PCs), but it does have a sort of mainframe-ish feel to it because it uses lots of TUI forms and menus. It also seems to have some influence from Xerox's workstation OSes like the Alto OS and XDE/Pilot (the path syntax and some of the commands are similar). Pick OS is one of several multi-user Business BASIC OSes common in the 70s and 80s (other examples of these types of OSes are Thoroughbred OS and BlueBird SuperDOS). It has a database built into the system, unlike some other similar OSes.

[@CathodeRayDude]

that sounds like a monstrous project, i'm really excited to see the result! can I ask - what are your basic criteria? i was going to work on a much smaller project just for personal use, but I was asking myself: do I install every minor release of each Linux distro? starting when, and ending when? when it comes to commercial OSes, what about betas? just "major" betas or every single one you can find? so on and so forth. there's a thousand ways to think of it, would be interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you for the info on the other OSes, a few other people have told me I should check them out at some point and I think I should.

[@AndrewsOSLab]

@@CathodeRayDude My collection basically covers everything from the very first stored-program computers and OSes to the present (the first very primitive OSes appeared only a few years after the first stored-program computers), although I stop at the mid 2000s with stuff that's still currently mainstream (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux). I've been collecting OSes for 20 years, and I'd always had vague plans to release it publicly, but only got serious about it recently. Generally my policy is to focus more on breadth than depth, including representative versions/variants, the definition of which varies based on the particular OS. For instance, with Windows betas, I've got them for every RTM version I have (except 2.x since none are available for it), selecting builds that have a significant number of changes between them, whereas for classic Mac OS I just have betas of 1.0, 7.0, and 7.7/8.0 because the other betas are more like release candidates and tend to be closer to the RTMs. For Linux I currently don't have much depth when it comes to versions, although I do have at least one version for most major distros (I should really install a few more). For some systems like CP/M I've got quite a few OEM distros but with a bit of a preference for ones that have unique enhancements or applications available over the more generic ones.

[@SirBlade666]

I I recall correctly, it's been a few years after all, when you used drivespace/doublespace your actual drive was given a different driveletter and only contained a few dos files and a huge file that contained the data from the original drive. That file was then mounted as C:. The uncompressed drive mentioned refers to the drive that has the virtual hard disk file on it.

[@imtiredtoday]

This feels like a VHD manager, combined with a bootloader...

[@gstcomputing65]

It was certainly a different era. If you watch old shows of the Computer Chronicles, they talked about software packages that were $89 back in the 80s that most people wouldn't spend 99 cents to buy in the app store today.

[@AminoJack]

*I won't watch an hour video about old software * 50 mins later......hehe, your presentation style is so great man, just the right amount of humor and emotion come through. It's like you're the voice in my head of me back in 99 trying to do this, keep it up!❤

[@mrfrenzy.]

There is a similar product which is still updated "BootIt Bare Metal". I have a license and still use it today. It lets you mix any number of operating systems on the same drive. For example I have a laptop with four copies of XP and several copies of Windows 7. Any OS can be tricked to think it's the only operating system on the drive and that it is booting from it's own primary partition. It works great for example when you use different diagnostic software for PLC programming, automotive or construction machines. It includes partitioning,resizing, cloning and backup etc.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

There's a few boot managers still out there, but GRUB seems to be the one people have heard of. Personally, I tend to hate Grub2 just because of how unnecessarily complicated it is. I think that's been addressed in the time since it was first released, but these days, I don't bother dual booting, I just run extra OSes in emulators when I need them.

[@averytrashmouth]

I imagine this was designed for IT departments with over-inflated budgets. This could be useful if you had licenses for some Unix program, but you want to move your environment over to Windows. This would explain the password system, making it so only an admin could make changes to the partitions. It would also explain the complicated documentation.

[@SilverX95]

a look at System Commander 2000 would be a cool video, plus you can see what they improved over the older one, in terms of what it can do and if they corrected that one false bit and other stuff.

[@Crusader1089]

Listening through to this again for the umpteenth time I wonder if the DOS 98 is some way that system commander works behind the scenes. If it knows that files with a four digit date are files it created it would prevent them from ever accidentally trying to pull on a DOS command which is corrupted or broken incompatible. Having then developed it they thought why not give it to the public as well

[@RichardFraser-y9t]

As an Australian once said, Can you believe nobody brought this.

[@vjcodec]

It’s a bargain and so easy to use!

[@cmjones01]

I remember seeing JexeOS from Toshiba at a CeBIT show some time in the late 90s. It was running on a Toshiba laptop and the point was that it did some kind of just-in-time compilation of Java programs so they ran faster. The demo was a really useful real-world application: drawing lots of larger and smaller rectangles. The standard laptop (maybe under Windows, I'm not sure) drew the rectangles quite slowly. The one running JexeOS did it more quickly. I wasn't all that interested in drawing rectangles so didn't investigate further, and I never saw any trace of the product after that.

[@kFY514]

Just a quick side note: you absolutely could have more than 4 OSes on the same HDD even in the 90s. The Windows NT family only required the bootloader to be on a primary partition (which could coexist with DOS/Win9x) and could otherwise boot from a logical volume on the extended partition. Or you could even try installing NT and 9x on the same partition in a pinch, that was discouraged but supported. LILO could boot Linux from a logical volume too, and there were various chainloaders, like loadlin that booted Linux from DOS. You could go crazy trying to configure it all, but it was possible even without any third-party boot manager or multiple HDDs. Not that anybody had disk space for that many OSes though...

[@ruthlessadmin]

I tried to resize a partition once in the late 90s with (most likely) Partition Magic. It locked up halfway through and I nearly lost my 10GB MP3 collection. Don't remember how, but I was able to recover it. I still have that collection. There are over 4,000 songs and to this day, I'm not 100% sure there is no corruption, since I doubt I've listened to even a fraction of them.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

That's bad, I tried transferring my MP3s from one computer to another using SMB, and at some point, the buffers got full and started scrambling the tracks. These days, I have programs like dvdsig that can quickly tell me if the files have changed or gone missing so that I know without having to listen through all of them.

[@jp-ny2pd]

VirtualBox is great for quick and dirty dev work. Shrinking a partition after a new OS install was pretty easy compared to a system that had been running for a while. The OS installer would install everything at the front of the drive so you could just truncate the tail end of the partition to shrink it. It's very likely this is what he was doing to shrink a partition.

[@halliard1117]

CTOS was a Unisys system that was used by the military or at least the Coast Guard in the late 80s and early 90s. The machines were not like the typical computer. It was different sections known as slices. You had the CPU slice or unit. The hard drives, floppy drive, tape drives, etc, were different slices. Each slice had a power rating, which meant that after so many units, one had to plug in another power brick. For example, if a power brick (I forget if it was a number rating or amps) was labeled 15 and you had a CPU with regular green font as it was all text based rated at say 5, a floppy slice rated at 4 and two tape slices both rated at 6 you would have a power brick plugged into the CPU slice and another brick plugged into the first tape slice (unit). They would all snap together in a row. If your unit had a guy like me, you might have got a colo graghicr slice and maybe the rarer modem slice to get onto a BBS, aka internet. The color slice was 8 or 16 bit color, It was pretty much like DOS with a simple shell. Your choices were limited to tabing up and down (or arrow keys) to an email program, text editor, and a few other software as deemed by the administrator. Oh, and logout was the other option. The user login was a simple page that linked the program name to an exe file for the most part. I would have a fake user interface startup file in which every program ran the logout command. When a certain person was being a jerk, I would point his user to log in to that file. Wait for a call, swap back to the nor normal profile, and then go see him and have him show me the error. Of course, it would work fine. Or I would have mail open the text editor, etc. It was not a very difficult program. Basically, if you knew Dos, you could use CTOS. I thought BTOS was the precursor to CTOS by unisys.

[@XanthinZarda]

Of course, the military would yuck it up with their own operating system with their own command structure. :B

[@subtlewolf]

This gives every impression of something that started off as an internal tool of a software testing team.

[@willeyex]

I feel like I need to give some props to this application. I was a application dev back in this time and this tool was truly amazing . We had no virtualization back in the day and testing across multiple platforms was a nightmare and netware was so important alongside windows versions. We also used we BeOS and loved it. So as a Pascal dev back in the day this was game changing.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

Alright, took me a while to watch the whole thing - loved it! Has it really been three years since your last software review? (Yes, Norton Desktop was February 2021.) Of note - I did use System Commander at my job at the time. I worked tech support for a company that had to support their product on multiple OSes, and they were too cheap to actually have separate computers in their "test lab" (a row of a few computers any tech could go use to try something out,) so they had a couple computers with System Commander with *ALL THE OSES!* Windows 3.1, 95, 95b, 98, NT3.5, NT4, OS/2 3, OS/2 4, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. No Linux at the time, I remember that much. I don't remember it ever failing to work as advertised. I didn't remember that's what it was called until I saw the "boot OS selector" with the "text mode icons" for each OS. Plus one then-brand-new jellybean iMac. It arrived the day the iMac was available. It was a big deal, because apparently the last Mac in the test lab had broken at least a year before I started working there, and had never been replaced. So before the iMac showed up, the support team had no Mac to actually test/troubleshoot on. We had to pass it up to the engineering team if reading from the internal knowledgeable wasn't enough. (I was one of very few techs who actually knew the Mac at the time, so many of the Mac calls got routed to me.)

[@GenoppteFliese]

Great video with impressive dedication to the subject at hand. I'm also impressed with the background knowledge the SC guys had. I once wanted to reactivate a DOS backup I created with Linux ( a tar file ) and I couldn't make it work because I couldn't find out what the dos command "sys a:" or "sys c:" really did to make the target a working boot device. Like you said in the video it had to do with io.sys ( and msdos.sys?) and how they are located on the FAT file system. At that time I didn't know which one had to be first and second and I had no "low level" tools or knowledge to inspect the FAT FS in such a low level way.

[@Mhaakify]

This is pretty interesting. You can see the complete disconnect between the software-engineers, who wrote the instructions, and some marketing guys who tried to sell it as black magic on a disk, to people who would most likely brick their system with it.

[@Just.A.T-Rex]

Now this is og Gravis. I didn’t realize I needed one of these videos but I did. Thank you.

[@stephenjones5051]

I used this software back in the day. I had a laptop with every Microsoft Operating System avaliable, OS2, and some Linux distros on it. It was handy for testing before virtual machines. In those days many companies had their own DOS. Microsoft's version just happen to be the one that became dominant. While outdated now, it was good back in the day.

[@paulalmquist5683]

I'm impressed with your vintage DOS & Windows knowledge. I suspect that it is still of value in some situations that are more than just historical curiosity. I learned DOS basics and switched to Linux in the mid 1990's. I have rarely had a need to do anything with Windows since then. The school where I worked did use System Commander to dual boot Windows and Linux without any issues on about 60 machines. Others did the SC and Windows installs first and then I did the Linux installs (Redhat and later Fedora). Initially each machine was set up separately. In time a single machine was set up and the hard drive cloned to all of the user machines.

[@orangejjay]

Always so happy when the bi-weeklyish CRD episode hits. Gravis, you legit bring joy to this life. I literally get psyched every time and get excited to see what/when you're gonna start crackin' up. You're awesome. You actually do seem like you'd be fun at parties (if crippling social anxiety wasn't a thing 😂). Thanks for being you. ❤❤

[@matthijszeeman5351]

27:46 Microsoft actively promotes using their ui design. When you get the micrsoft development tools it includes a licensed library of icons and images along with instructions on how to use them.

[@ItIsNot1984]

When I saw the thumbnail with the physical switch on the box, I thought "I'd pay for that." I've got an old socket A board with a kt133 chipset. It has agp, pci and more important ISA. I use it to boot pretty much everything from dos up to windows xp. I ended up putting a swappable drive bay in it and since ssd's are so cheap, I treat them like giant floppy disks. Just pop the drive out, stick in another one and now I'm booting another OS with the same hardware. I could use grub and put everything on one disk, but I often reimage these disks so I can get a clean install in order to test older hardware. Thats about all I use the system for really - just testing old hardware.

[@Futuresolidsnake]

I came across this video completely randomly, but it was a very nostalgic ride back to my early days of screwing around with partitions. So I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a lot of the errors that used to scare me when I only had 1 pc that I always was bringing to the brink of death. Ahh, the good ol’ days! I learned how to repair about every possible way a person could crash a machine. Which my roommate actually owned and I’d wait until he was asleep and pray I could get it going again before he woke up. A few times I had to go across town to copy files off my friends PC and hope I didn’t destroy anything vital to operations. Thank you, this really was a treat!

[@bob2600]

The reason why you had trouble with the filesystem after a crash in Red Hat Linux was due to using ext2. Ext2fs does not support journaling, which caused filesystem corruption requring that fsck you encountered on the next boot. Looking at the video, it looked like the version you were using supports ext3, which is basically ext2+journaling. The filesystem journal will help keep things stable in the filesystem if a crash happens upon a write.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Yep, I missed that ext3 was there because I thought I was using 7.0, which predated it. Eyes skipped right over it since I wasn't looking for it.

[@bob2600]

@@CathodeRayDude Ah that'll do it, easy mistake to make. Good video, though. It was kinda fun to see things blow up without any consequences.

[@riffraff60]

I really like the way you did the screens during the demo station. I think it's one of the best you've done for demonstrating software.

[@lpoki8897]

Whew this was a lotta carrying on and hoping to not smell smoke. This was a really great video, I'd love to see more software related stuff in the future. Maybe even a live stream? You're really good at summing up all your thoughts and the weird things you've encountered. This software is surely made by engineering wizards. "So we wanna make a grub like thing for all these OSes but we need some kind of terminal to fall to if needed" "I know like make our own DOS from scratch!" "Also let's make 10 years of advancement in ease of partition management" "Then we can slap our meh OS manager on top" "Let's fucking go!" And since you mentioned Android jailbreak guides I'm gonna go on a little rant that's just for me. It's so fucking annoying that documentation has not gotten a lick better. It's so often a wall of text guide shoved in a forum post, instead of a place where it can be made readable. Tons of inferring knowledge and short hand leaving wondering what BBQv32 means. Download this zip and throw the files in the folder, why and do I even need all the files? "fuck you do it." And all the times I don't know if I need to have the device in normal or recovery mode and then run some program.

[@aeaeaeaeoaeaeaeaeae]

Wow, that was an hour that just flew by lol. Amazing video, it genuinely terrifies me how much stuff this just does with your disk with little or no notice.

[@rojovision]

System Commander is an incredibly useful tool for setting up retro PCs with multiple OS installs. I use it on basically every Windows 9x build so I can at minimum have a pure DOS install on the same machine. I bought an allegedly new copy, but the disks were bad, unfortunately.

[@faeber090]

I used this for a while. If I remember, I had at least two DOS installs with different config.sys and autoexec.bat files, Windows 3.11 and Win 95. It was easy to setup, and I loved it.

[@kFY514]

Another little shenanigan from back in the day: Win9x could natively dual-boot with DOS. (it was largely broken on 95 OSR2 but at least in theory it was there, and it certainly worked in 95 RTM) If you installed 95 on top of an existing installation of DOS, it made backups of your old autoexec.bat and stuff and there was an option in the F8 menu to boot the old OS. And run Win3.x from there if needed, too!

[@aaaalex1994]

The best part is that at some point during the development of Windows 95, there was the option to even run Windows 3.1 on top of Win95. It ran in full screen, with an icon on the background to "Switch to Windows 95", which would simply minimize Win3.1 on the taskbar, just like any regular window. Unfortunately, they removed that ability before shipping Win95.

[@kFY514]

@@aaaalex1994 I've heard that story too. Apparently they *really* wanted people to rely on the native backwards compatibility with 16-bit software instead. If you could run 3.1 from within Win95, it could be read as a suggestion that a need to do so might be anticipated. They also feared that people might perceive it as a more reliable option and do that all the time "just in case". Microsoft was apparently so confident in the backwards compatibility that they intentionally removed the ability to run the entire 3.x session to show off that nobody's ever gonna need to do that because everything shall just work on 95. In OSR2, they additionally removed the ability to run Windows 3.x from a native real-mode DOS 7.1 session as well. There's a trivial patch to IO.SYS that brings it back, so it's quite clear it was an intentional artificial limitation as well.

[@trs80model14]

I had BOUGHT a copy of this at Electronics Boutique, showed it to the sys people at work and they used it to setup training room machines that needed Win95 for one software package and Win 98 for others.

[@Sciman101]

I'm only a minute in but this is making me wish there was some silly peripheral that added a rotary switch like on the box that acted like a physical GRUB interface

[@pinrod1]

Yes, that would be great

[@tehFoxx0rz]

If you were willing to shell out for multiple hard drives in those days, you could have got yourself a Romtech Trios which isn't far off in being a push-button selector, which IIRC CRD has done a video on :P

[@kepstin]

The interesting thing is that this… isn't actually that difficult to build. You need a (relatively) simple ISA card that lets you read an IO port to find out what value an attached rotary encoder is set to - then have the initial boot loader in the mbr read that IO port and pick the partition or OS to boot accordingly. Hey, you could probably even make this work without needing an extra add-in card by having the rotary switch be a potentiometer that plugs in to the PC joystick port.

[@eDoc2020]

@@kepstin The easier way is with the control input lines on the parallel port, that's just a single read instruction.

[@verablack3137]

I used to use this because it was the only way I knew to have multiple versions of Dos, os/2 and Linux. I remember trying to fight LILO and grub and I just found System Commander and it did exactly what I needed

[@MrCed122]

Before even watching the video after the intro : I had to use a third-party bootloader like that a few years back when I had a Pentium 3 laptop and wanted to put every supported Windows versions on it (Windows 98 SE, 2000, Me and XP). All of those don't really want to live together, I had to use BootMagic to make it work, it essentially works in tandem with PartitionMagic to hide the partitions that are not needed when you select an OS, so in my case, Windows XP could only see Windows 98 and Windows 2000 could only see Me. I would guess that product was made for a similar task and judging by the box, for even more OSes. I don't think LiLo or GRUB supported that at the time (and it probably still doesn't since it's really an obsolete way of doing multi-boot). Edit : So, I guess there's a little bit of hiding the partitions, but it seems simultaneously much more complicated and much more simple, that's weird.