From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,6192a34d0c9ffe5b X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!l14g2000pro.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Adam Beneschan Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 15:40:09 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <7f53de8e-2400-4c87-a818-0b389e117c42@e21g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <2aeab5d1-fa6d-47de-ab53-9a8e6ab5f27a@h9g2000pre.googlegroups.com> <3a6f1fc2-3ae0-42d9-b483-d16cf7ab1566@x8g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <991499fb-bc24-4d7e-baf6-a9c0e16333e6@k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com> <291504a4-ec55-45f1-bf7f-13078bf71c3e@m10g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <4dcbf260$0$6992$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <3bae2d75-31b0-4a88-b655-bd657921d15c@z7g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <4dcc5c75$0$6891$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.126.103.122 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1305240010 16542 127.0.0.1 (12 May 2011 22:40:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 22:40:10 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: l14g2000pro.googlegroups.com; posting-host=66.126.103.122; posting-account=duW0ogkAAABjRdnxgLGXDfna0Gc6XqmQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618; .NET4.0C),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:19243 Date: 2011-05-12T15:40:09-07:00 List-Id: On May 12, 3:17=A0pm, Georg Bauhaus wrote: > > For one thing, DOS effectively ruled out a number of design > patterns: =A0you need something on top of DOS in order to > operate(!) these patterns. =A0Such 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