D is for DOS 

F is for FORTRAN Over half a century old. Still used for financial applications to this day, I was at university studying Actuarial Science and had to learn it. Started out with 80 columns wide for punchcards, and is part of the reason why, to this day, PuTTY has a 80x24 default size. I could go on but it will always be dear to my heart even if you don't pick it for the spotlight.

Gary Kildall also co-hosted The Computer Chronicles, an excellent tv-program about the news in the computer-industry. I never knew about it when it ran, but most episodes are available here on RU-vid, and they provide an excellent insight into both computer-history and the clothes and hairstyles of the 80s :) Highly recommended!

A good TLA for F might be FAT. Something everyone probably has heard of but not how it works, why 8.3 why limits to file count in root directory, why we have FAT12, FAT32, ExFAT etc.

FTP is the most interesting out of your suggestions but maybe other comments have some good suggestions

FFT for the Fast Fourier Transform, the algorithm that literally prevents nuclear war

If you cover DLL (which I’d love if you do!) there should be a mention therein of .O (objects) and .SO (shared objects) from the non-Windows side of things. They all serve similar purposes, just taking slightly different approaches. The non-“shared” ones just being linked and incorporated once, at compile-time, and the “shared” ones being the rough equivalent of DLLs. Loving the series thus far; thanks!

I vouch for the fast Fourier transform. Also, I'd love to see a video on dlls. I love your channel. It's everything that I thought Dave's garage would be, but didn't end up becoming. You explain things in a very interesting manner, and do not talk for too long on other unrelated topics, and I love it. Honestly, your channel should grow, not to increase the revenue, just so more people would see your content, that is made purely from your love of the topics.

From my personal experience the NDA was indeed Draconian, and we played a similar game with them. I should also say that DOS major advantage over CP/M is that it didn't try to be a full operating system so we had direct access to the underlying hardware.

The most significant F for me has to be FFT, the fast fourier transform. Opens up the world of digital audio, images and video.

F is for FAT and FDD, surely. The history of the floppy disk from booting an IBM Mainframe to the last gasp of the LS-240.

I'm fascinated by regular expressions and their somewhat 'complex' set of rules. FSM all the way for me please! ;-)

Really enjoying this ABC series! I am an old school geek so a lot of these stories overkap my early computing days.

Whether as a part of this series or otherwise...I'd like to hear about FSMs. Your geeking out about text encoding taught me almost as much as Dave Farley's book on modern software engineering!

A note regarding interpreting the libel ruling -- it isn't just about whether the statement is false. It's also about whether the defendant was negligent* (or worse) in making the statement. So the court could have concluded that the defendent had adequate reason to believe the claim to be fact, rather than concluding that it actually *is* fact. Also, standard of evidence is a factor, so you can have two parties make contradictory claims about each other, sue each other for libel, and *both* have their cases dismissed, even if one was truthful and one was lying. It's not that likely un civil court since, for most intents and purposes, the standard of evidence is effectively "there at least a 50% chance the plaintiff is right" The actual court documents probably say which of these possibilities it is, but I'm not digging those up. *If the plaintiff is a "public figure", the standard is stricter -- reckless (or worse)

Don't care what TLA you choose for F, but please, give an honorable mention to FOO (and BAR, and thus FUBAR ;-) )

F could be for Files/Floppies/FAT, FPU and FLOPS and talk about performance, Forward Error Correction, or a FAQ and cover questions received in the comments so far ... or Freedom and FOSS.

I remember getting a set of disks with the newest DOS (6.22) in a middle eastern country where copyright was not something anyone gave any attention, only to realize that it was infected with a virus. When I told that to the person i got it to he was not happy. He ended up spending a lot of time reinstalling DOS on many computers

F is for FORTH, which isn't an acronym, but a contraction (i.e. the U was removed). It's use was widespread back in the 8-bit days, as it was an operating system, programming environment and philosophy all-in-one. Forth is a different paradigm to all other Algol-derived languages and is what might have happened if Microsoft hadn't been so successful with BASIC. And it's still being used today by many enthusiasts, especially in the embedded space.

The history of DOS... based on a Greek tragedy. The first machine I actually owned was a Unisys 286 with 1M memory and a ridiculously massive 20M disk.

That's like when I was around that age and my family bought a computer sold by a local university. One day I noticed there was another hard disk partition taking up room and I tried switching that one to boot. It wasn't DOS and I was obligated to boot from floppy to switch the active boot partition back again. But we didn't have a boot disk floppy lying around so I had to make one from the computer at my dad's nearby office. Parents weren't pleased at the time...but I certainly tried to reassure them that it'd all be fine in a few minutes.

A DLL video would quickly descend into a mad rant, like when Tom Scott tried to explain time zones.

FTP was quite important, we also used the server-to-server FXP transfer to mirror files from other dumps. That was file sharing deluxe.

D is the first letter of the magic DEBUG crafting table to build powerfull spells for DOS to level up as a Wizzard of DOS. I put all basic ingredients to craft a new spell into a batch file and the batch file have to start with some more special ingredients attached to control the crafting to make a specific spell.

Since we're doing history: FLV (Flash Video). You could segue from there to video compression/streaming or -- instead -- Flash/ActiveX/JavaScript, etc.

Given all the talk of IBM and Microsoft, maybe F should be for FUD.

F is for FIR, the Finite Impulse Response DSP filter architecture. Even more than the FFT, it's the FIR filter and the Z-Transform underpinning it that enables modern fast digital audio EQ, at a performance cost hardly even greater than the cost of just shuttling audio sample data around in the first place.

F is for FORTH, the best small computer language

Thanks for the video! Great story about upgrading dad’s PC 😊. Talking about DOS, it's worth mentioning first one - IBM DOS/360 (’66) and later ones in the ‘70s - CBM DOS, Atari DOS, Apple DOS etc. BTW, Garry was flying that day, that’s true, but he was flaying with associate to attend another meeting w IBM in their building, after which he returned to the meeting in DRI office.

F for FLV maybe? The first widespread video format on the internet

FMV: Full motion video. In point and click adventures like Phantasmagoria.

Honorable mention for F on the hardware side - FPCs, Flexible Printed Circuits, are probably the second largest contributor to electronics miniaturization, after Moore's Law and ever-increasing silicon density.

Definitely voting for FSM. I can't pass up the chance to hear about RegEx!

"Hello Mr Beattie, this is Officer Warner from the O/S Police. We've been re-examining some cold-cases and with new information coming to light about an incident at John Lewis in August 1991, we'd like you to come down to the station to help us with our investigation."

A nice DOS "Clone" was the late PTS-DOS (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTS-DOS) which was blazingly fast and had some nice additional features built in, for what you normally needed dedicated drivers. BTW: F should be "f000:fff0"

Cool series. A very interesting concept, and F should definitely stand for FAT as that's a pretty interesting and broad topic.

Yep, deleting those two poxy .sys files would brick it good. Still happened in the mid-/late 90s when I did tech support for the evil empire. For some models, though, they had an easy solution, known internally as the 2mbr: The two-mouse-button reboot. This worked for all the systems (not that many to be fair) which had PCDOS4 on a ROM chip. You could update your own DOS, and then it'd use that, but if you needed to reset, hold both mouse buttons down and switch on the machine.

I just love this time in history - and how right now we are descendants and beneficiaries.

I saw that someone else mentioned FAT as an option for the letter F. I think it's certainly deserves a mention as it's so ubiquitous. Every device under the sun will happily read your FAT formatted SD card as long as you can find a way to plug it in.

someone i knew a while ago had a shirt that said "bad decisions make good stories" and i have a funny feeling 12-year-old dylan would be in agreement

F is for flash and the flash animation and gaming culture

Kind of expected a passing nod to the original DOS from 1966.

FAQ including its NASA origins. Talk about mailing lists, Usenet and general netiquette. Go into the history of modern incarnations like Experts Exchange and Stack Overflow.

I vote for FSM, having just read an upcoming TUGboat article about their application to optimize the performance of the CWEB macros that I maintain.

I would like to see the DLL video

I dont get it - why do we skip "E" ?

D is for Delegation! The ability to delegate some of your authority to someone you trust to fulfil it is a keystone of civilisation. Some security models try to prevent you from sharing your authority, however, if the choice is between getting your work done and obeying arbitrary restrictions from some distant, faceless IT admin team, you know exactly what wins. Your boss is going to write down their password on a piece of paper, and by the 3-5 business days it takes to have your access added to that important company drive, you've already completed the task at hand. The lesson is clear: don't try to prevent delegation, it's not possible. Make it easy to do, and easy to audit. Honourable mention for DCCS, the Distributed Capability Computing System, an early network protocol that directly supported capability security, by Jed Donnelley in 1976.

F for Formats, you could mention the different kinds of format and competing standards (disk formats, file formats, date/time formats, number formats, compression formats...)

F is for Fortran, of course! And the associated histories of numerical and scientific computing. One could also cover it as one of the original imperative languages, and, perhaps, its relation to punch cards.

Some honourable mentions for F:- FDDI FPGA (Hindsight suggests it was less valuable than expected but it's different) FFT (Would be a surprisingly solid entry since it's used in modern comms systems) FILO (Data Types! Put it on the stack) FLAC FPS (Because Id has to surface again... ok maybe not) FQDN (Get started on DNS even before TCP) FSF (Probably better off with GNU but it is an option)

F is for FUD!

I'm torn between FSMs & floating point. Will look forward to seeing what you go with.

Has to be FTP! It was such a huge deal for some many areas, and still widely used today.

"E stands for EOL and the ongoing IT/OT-battles about the right time to replace the XP-PC that are still running as part of a bigger system." Maybe in round 2?

F is for File Allocation Table (FAT)

Looking forward to the episode on FOSS - Free and Open Source Software. Would be fitting given the context, doesn't it?

I could use that video on DLLs... then again I could just check the docs. I'm developing a crossplatform ABI (slower than a turtle due to lazyiness but you get the picture) and one thing that I need to overcome is "dllimport" vs "extern" and "dllexport" vs "" that normally needs to be applied in the API just to build on the native system. And since the GetProcAddress function apparently ignores anything not marked dllexport while dlsym just treats everything not explicitly marked hidden as public by default I need to write a custom handler for the win32 case so a vid would be very much appreciated

I'd say there's some perfectly good Computerphile videos on Finite State Machines, but not sure I've seen anything on FTP. Fortran also sounds interesting, as someone suggested. FAT and related are interesting, but not sure there's a great deal to learn about it.

You did buy the floppies. What's on them when you left was just a slightly more ordered magnetic mess

How about a history of FMV (Full Motion Video)?

copying isn't theft, programs are just math, intellectual property is social construct

My vote goes to FAT32 for the history and/or FSM for the geek.

10:47 Amstrad PC 2286? I had that exact model!

Finite-state machines would be awesome.

Would the FSF use an FFI to FTP files from a FAT? We might never know.

Since you've talked about operating systems, why not filesystems? I'm sure you can find some stories behind FAT.

fast Fourier transform (FFT)

F is for FORTRAN. Ok, its not a TLA but boy is it still important for some very important, but niche, use cases.

FFmpeg? It's a rich seam, touching on free software, EFF/GPL/LGPL. Piracy - ripping DVDs without transcoding them was a challenge. Open source - and forks/schisms. It's been around a long time, written in C, is very performant, and has yet to be supplanted...

F is for the Free Software Foundation (unless you planned on addressing the FSF in G for GPL)

Yey, honorable mentions! FFT, FTP or FSM's? Choose whatever you can tell the best story about, i don't want a technical lecture.

Dear Dylan, for F I suggest FAT (FAT32), Fubar, FTP (and the quite obscure FTPS) and maybe F can stand for 4DOS?

F is for firewall

No mention of the other DOS? Denial Of Service.

I vote for FSM. Or, why choose? Touch on all of them. But your target audience certainly knows about FPUs and FTP, but I am sure that there is some interesting history there.

All these different DOSes, and no mention of GLaDOS?

And then I was told about ETLA's.... WTF are they said I....? Extended Three Letter Acronyms... 🤣🤣🤣

Since you made B about BBC not BBS, than F for... FIDO (FTN to be 3-letter)?

Hmmm, maybe FAT and file systems?

F could be for Fortran but FSM sounds better.

F = file. It touches on FS as well, pipes, floppy. We take files for granted today while FTP and Fortran (not to mention Foxpro) are all but dead.

F is for FTP - Though except for the hardy its sftp.

FAT would be something i'd love to learn about from you but FORTRAN is something i love and want you to talk about haha FTP might get clicks from its use outside of computers lol

F for FP (functional programming)!

Hilarious John Lewis story, loved it 😂

F for" FML, I deleted the operating system"

F for (Adobe) Flash, the now-discontinued and disabled animation and game software that was ubiquitous across the web and represented a different model of what web apps would be (Java Applets)

Leaving a comment) P.S. And once again, Q is gonna be about QoS)

F is for FPGA?

F should be for Fucking legend for taking something from microsoft. I love you.

Finite state machines gets my vote

F is for Floppy disk

You wouldn't download a car! 😉

FTP is probably a good choice for the F video.

F for Fortan and he history of Programing (ASM, Basic, COBOL / C, DARSIMCO / DOPE, Fortan) F for Files / FAT / Fat32?

FTP - because if everything else fails, you can still use FTP

FFT and the cold war maybe?

FPS, of course 🙂

I didn't know DR-DOS 8.0 swiped GPL code from FreeDOS before. I just wish you'd used FreeDOS's version of Edlin instead of 86-DOS's because that is GPL as well. (It's also written by a bizarre, craven programmer who wants to take over the world, but I digress.)

So, If DOS started life as QDOS... then perhaps DOS, in this case, stands not for Disk Operating System but for Dirty Operating System. ;) :D :D :D

Seen a bunch of good "F" suggestions, but not this one. F is for FRAMEWORK. (even get to do two stones with the modern laptop company).