Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down

[Rugxulo <rugxulo@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On May 12, 9:44 am, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:
> On 12.05.11 15:28, Rugxulo wrote:
>
> > On May 11, 7:45 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> > Then again, DOS isn't cool anymore.
>
> Has DOS ever been cool?  I mean cool?  

At one time, it was very very popular and available on almost all home
PCs. Lots and lots of commercial DOS games were produced, and most of
these are still sold (e.g. Gog.com). Many DOSes and emulations exist,
actually, so somebody thought it was worth keeping (if not you,
obviously).

> Rather, adopting DOS seems quite
> frankly the most far reaching mistake that computer dependent
> industry has committed,

Why, because of the dependency on the evil BIOS? Or because it made MS
our evil overlords?

DOS was used because of the extremely low RAM of the day (16 to 64 kb,
I think) on the original IBM PC. Well, and also CP/M-86 wasn't ready,
so they just used the cheap clone with identical API called PC-DOS (MS-
DOS).

> the consequences being loss of both
> software quality and---far worse---a collective loss of any knowledge
> of what quality software might be!

Not true. Quality software can be written on any OS. "A poor carpenter
blames his tools." Many successful things have been written for DOS,
not the least of which are Lotus 123, MS Word, Turbo C++, Turbo
Pascal, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and a bunch of ports of GNU
tools.

> >> Or a security nightmare waiting to happen? Same with "call the BIOS".
>
> > People always find a way to breach security anyways. But yeah, DOS has
> > pretty much none anyways, always "root".  :-)
>
> Is DOS's privilege system different from what you get with
> typical µ targets?

It's just minimal, meaning it's not all baked into the kernel, for
good or bad. You can add layers to it, of course.

> OTOH, this all has little to do with Ada Tutor web site
> shutting down. ;-)

Well, I was primarily pointing out that Ada is still supported for DOS
(barely) via GNAT/DJGPP. Then I was discussing compatibility re:
Janus' old 32-bit DOS offering. Hey, it's probably the most traffic
you've had re: Ada usage for DOS in years!