DOS ain't dead - R.Loew passed away.

RayeR

CZ,
24.09.2019, 02:08

R.Loew passed away. (Announce)

I was notified that R.Loew, author of very useful patches, drivers and tools for Win9x / DOS passed away recently:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/180215-rloew-1952-2019-has-passed-away/?tab=comments#comment-1170697
Some SW can be found here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Rudolph+R.+Loew%22

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

RayeR

CZ,
11.10.2019, 16:54

@ RayeR

TRIM tool for DOS!

Post reply

Hi, son of R.Loew was so kind to let us share his tools. He even posted some source codes for the TRIM tool that I asked him for.
https://msfn.org/board/topic/180215-rloew-1952-2019-has-passed-away/page/4
Please have a look at code, can you guess what compiler he used? Could Borland C work? I'll try it but maybe he used some other 16-bit compiler. I wonder how many code is in inline assembly, very few standard C functions used, probably only printf. The source doesn't contain any #include statement, thats quite weird...

My goal is to be able to rebuild the code and extend support to FAT16. I also hope it will help me to finish my own TRIM tool that I started to code but nobody could help me with DMA IDE command where I had stucked...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

RayeR

CZ,
12.10.2019, 03:57

@ RayeR

TRIM tool for DOS!

Post reply

Well, the code looks a bit cryptic but it compiles with BC++ 4.52, just to ignore tons of warnings about missing prototypes. This can be fixed easily creating a header file...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Zyzzle 12.10.2019, 23:50 @ RayeR	TRIM tool for DOS! Post reply
	> Well, the code looks a bit cryptic but it compiles with BC++ 4.52, just to > ignore tons of warnings about missing prototypes. This can be fixed easily > creating a header file... I'm happy that you got it to compile. Looking forward to following your progress on this. It will be wonderful to have a TRIM utility for pure DOS. SSDs truly will be useable in DOS systems at that point.

RayeR

CZ,
15.10.2019, 03:04

@ Zyzzle

TRIM tool for DOS!

Post reply

> Looking forward to following your progress on this. It will be wonderful to
> have a TRIM utility for pure DOS. SSDs truly will be useable in DOS systems
> at that point.

You can try to use existing version if you have FAT32 partition. I didn't tested it yet as I don't have spare SSD for testing and I don't wan to risk data loss on my system SSD that is quite full...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Doug

16.11.2019, 18:20

@ RayeR

R.Loew passed away.

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This is sad news indeed. As far as i can tell, he had little presence here, but was a highly-knowledgeable, helpful, and frequent contributor to the MSFN forum's Windows 9x pages (which of course, includes DOS).

Among the useful DOS programs and drivers he had developed are: AHCI CD driver, Terabyte hard-disk driver, MS-DOS v8.0 IO.SYS de-compressor, advanced FDisk and Format, TRIM for SSDs, XFile (CLI file-management utility, very useful in batch files), and others.

Fortunately, his web site is now being re-maintained by his family, and over time, his software (now freeware, including source code) is being re-uploaded:

https://www.rloewelectronics.com/

My thanks to his family for keeping his fine work available, and now available to all.

- Doug B.