🚀 go-pugleaf

> >They're still playing catch-up with DR-DOS.  People have been saying
> >that DOS 7 multitasks and breaks the 640K barrier.  I claim it'll
> >never happen.  There have to be other people here who remember way
> >back when DOS 3.x was king, and DOS 4 was going to "Have multitasking
> >and break the 640K barrier!" 
> 
> In fact, there were two completely different DOS 4's.  One was released only 
> in Europe, and did do multitasking.  The other was developed by IBM, and 
> didn't.  Only descendants of the IBM version were ever released in North 
> America.

The only problem with multitasking DOS is that you almost need 286 protected
mode to do it well.  It's not necessary, but to get any type of acceptable
throughput, you need it.  This creates two problems:

  1) There are people, like me, who still use 8088 crap machines.  Any
     use of protected mode pretty much leaves us out.

  2) The bigger problem, since the XT base is growing smaller all the time,
     is all those real mode DOS apps out there.  Since protected mode
     doesn't use seg:off, but selector tables, you'll have to re-write
     all your software.  Try telling Lotus to re-write 1-2-3 for DOS.

Of course, you might come up with a nifty switching scheme that ran in
swapped programs to and from lo and high memory, then let them run in
low memory.  Of course.  This would require swapping all segments, making
use of all available EMS/XMS and disk space, and being able to restore all
the registers.  Also, don't count on making too many intersegment calls
with all this swapping going on, nor can you count of DOS to be in any
stable position, although it might be fixed in lo mem somewhere.

And what about TSR's and device drivers?  Where would they go?  What if your
TSR is swapped out, and you hit the hot key?  Your program would get
swapped, the TSR comes into lo mem, executes, gets killed, gets swapped
back up, then your original program comes back in.  Unless you've goit
hi memory, the disk swapping would be unbearable.

My opinion - forget having DOS multitask, ever.  If you need mutli-tasking,
write your own code to swap your own program, or use Windows.  (sorry)

J.L. Fincher, Warlok