🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (Peter da Silva) writes:

>In article <803377521snz@musical.demon.co.uk>,
>David Webber  <dave@musical.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Nowadays the computer is closer to being the "universal machine" that
>>Turing (I think it was) foresaw that it would become.  But to become
>>that it has had to develop operating systems that the majority of non-
>>expert users can get to grips with - and that seems to mean GUI's.

>Apple and Commodore managed to do GUIs that didn't require 120 MHz Pentiums
>to get decent performance. AmigaOS did useful real-time multitasking on a
>7 MHz 68000 with 512K RAM. MacOS ran in 128K.

Compare the processors and the computer architecture. Once again it
was the fear of incompatibility, that lead to really unsuited comuter
architectures for these modern OSes.

Did you ever wonder, why the Intel platform was the last platform with
NT available? Portabitity is one of the new features of NT. They
learned, they had lots of problems, becaus the architecture the have
to use is over 12 years old. But introducing a new architecture is
almost impossible, where there is no software available.

UNIX went the portable way at about 1975. They soon realized, there
are other computers that PDP-11's. Today, the porting of a UNIX
application form intel based computers to motorolla, sparc or mips
based computers is almost no problem, as long as the programmer always
had in mind, to stay portable.

DOS programmers never had in mind to stay portable. They were sure,
all computers are the same. Now, every PC user has to pay the
price. 16 MBytes RAM, long time to wait for a new OS version, lots of
bugs in the new version, most of them introduced, because they had to
stay compatible with somthing, that is over 10 years old.

Open you eyes for the real cause of todays situation!

It's the damned demand to be compatible to everything. And the
argumentation, if program P runs on A, and it does not run on B, B is
incomatible with A. Noone ever thought of saying P is incompatible with the
standard, A and B comply. There were no standards. MS/DOS was never
accepted as a standard. They always choose weird applications to
test compatibility.

Did you ever use a computer, that was not IBM compatible, but ran DOS?
I worked on a Siemens PC/D, and it run MS/DOS 2.11. It had over 850
KBytes of free memory. But more the 99% of the applications, I tried,
did not work correctly, since they all wanted a PC, not a computer
running DOS. They all were so sure, they know, how to access my
hardware, and they all failed miserably.

The Amiga and the Mac never had these kind of compatibility
problems. In deed, it is really easy to write a program, that runs on
a Mac SE, and not on a Mac quadra. But noone would blame the quadra
for not running this program.

73, Mario
--
Mario Klebsch, DG1AM, M.Klebsch@tu-bs.de		+49 531 / 391 - 7457
Institut fuer Robotik und Prozessinformatik der TU Braunschweig
Hamburger Strasse 267, 38114 Braunschweig, Germany