🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May6.232136.17257@dsd.es.com>, rthomson@mesa.dsd.es.com (Rich Thomson) writes:
> the set of hardware you have.  This is because everybody codes
> directly to the hardware instead of some abstract interface because
> the latter is "too slow".

Remove the quotes. MS-DOS' "device handling" is so abysmal that you really
can't go through it, or even the BIOS, and get decent speed. For example,
I wrote a terminal emulator for MS-DOS, for the 8088 PCs. Going through DOS
or the BIOS, the fastest I could reliably get characters from the serial
device was < 300 baud. I had to install a replacement driver, and of course
my program didn't run on the AT. For screen handling, I went through the BIOS
and by doing heavy curses-like heuristics I could generally keep up at 2400
baud. "cu" under IBM-Xenix 1.0 on the same machine could keep up just about
to 9600, and that's running separate processes for input and output.

MS-DOS and the IBM ROM Bios really *is* too slow. CP/M was better.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter@ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"