When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.
I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).
It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src/MESSAGES.
At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.
They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.
I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS/COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).
It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src/MESSAGES.
At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.
They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.