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

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

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.

                                  -- Adam