ICC OS

This is a real oldie, and the oldest piece of software I have made.

While in secondary school, Ian obtained for us two laptops, one of which was a Toshiba T1000 (pictured right), which I used. It had a whopping 7Mhz 8086 processor, and wasn't capable of running Windows 3.1. This is where ICC OS came in. We wanted a "graphical" shell for our laptops to replace the DOS command line.

I'm not 100% on the actual year ICC OS was made, based on the time stamp on some of the source files, I can take a stab at around 1994, which would makes us 11 years old. The only problem with this is that I'm pretty sure I didn't meet Ian until I was at least 12-13.

What I do know is that it consists of roughly 3,000 lines of QBasic code, and ultimately ended up too large for the QBasic compiler to compile into executable form. It ended up having to run inside QBasic as a permanent thing. Quite how it is using 3,000 lines of code is beyond me. It's really not that complicated a piece of software.

Screen Shots

To get screen shots of ICC OS, I need to setup a virtual machine and run it inside that, otherwise I can't get a screen shot due to the display mode QBasic uses. I'll do this in the next few weeks once the new SR site has settled down a bit.

The UI

ICC OS consisted of 3 main "windows". The first, the main area is where you would start programs and run commands. The other two provided information about the system, one showing the name of the floppy disk that is in the drive.

Download

Somehow ICC OS has stood the test of time, and I still have a copy of it. Due to being developed by 12yr olds, it's not particularly useful, and must be installed from a floppy disk. It uses set paths for A:\, so unless you want to get down and dirty with the code, you'll need a floppy drive.

iccos.zip (0.2 MB)