98 fixed most of this so it stopped grinding the disks an crashing so much. Also, hardware mostly had caught up to it. This was the crowning jewel of the in betweens, before security locked it all up so you could hack on it and make it do all kinds of stuff without it trying to fix itself or blow a fuse, you could make it run really fast and hot for the games that were starting to demand a lot more for 3d and graphics and sound and all. For the same reasons, it was a security nightmare at work. |
The 9x kernels were so insecure. Can you imagine what it would have been like if they had survived into the age of the Internet? The example I always cite is when I did something equivalent to this in QuickBasic:
1 2
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for (char *p = 0;; p++)
*p = 0;
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and crashed the entire system. Yeah, you could freely read and write anywhere you wanted.
On the subject of hacking things together, up until XP you could still do a lot, because you could load unsigned drivers without booting the system in developer mode or whatever it's called, so you had easy full access to the system if you wanted. I wrote a prank for a friend that had a normal program and a driver.
The driver could receive two commands from the user mode. It could either hide a specified process from the system's process list by removing it from a linked list (some madman reverse-engineered the kernel memory where the list is located and found how to deterministically reach it from a known location), and thus would not appear on Task Manager, or it could crash the system by performing some illegal action.
The program would call the driver to hide itself and then would monitor the audio output using the loopback device. When it detected continuous sound for a few seconds it would signal the driver to crash the system. I believe it also monitored for certain processes and killed them after a few seconds.
My friend wanted to prevent a coworker from playing annoying music on a work computer.
Since Windows Vista there's been no way to do anything like that stealthily. You have to boot the system in developer mode each time, and it puts a watermark on the screen. I suppose the easiest route would be patching the kernel to remove the signing check and turning secure boot off. I don't know if anyone's done the reversing work to do that.