Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 5/13/11 12:40 AM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> On May 12, 3:17 pm, Georg Bauhaus<rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
> wrote:
>>
>> For one thing, DOS effectively ruled out a number of design
>> patterns:  you need something on top of DOS in order to
>> operate(!) these patterns.  Such as programmable auxiliary
>> tasks doing background work.
>
> I may respond to other parts of the post, but... you do remember that
> this was originally for an 8088 processor, right?  Not a Pentium.  I
> may be wrong, but my recollection was that a lot of the task/process
> functionality of the chip was added to the series later (80286?), and
> wasn't present in the 8086/8088.  It may not have been good enough to
> support virtual addressing/paging, either, I don't know.  I know it
> didn't have straight 32-bit addressing.  So please, before you bash
> DOS too much and talk about what a mistake it was to choose it, please
> consider that this may have been the best anyone could have done
> within the hardware constraints.  You can't really judge what should
> have happened in 1980 based on the technology we have available in
> 2011.

Extending the set of examples of how people rolled their own,
-  Minix is a more elaborate OS for the IBM PC (with Intel 8088),
-  Coherent OS is, too.

If I understand correctly, then a TI MSP430 is not much
different in some respects.  You get a number of operating systems
for it, including �C/OS-II which can also run on a Zilog Z80.

I'm mentioning these because, with some effort, you get
software whose qualities differ from DOS's.