🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep2.065315.19027@zooid.guild.org> ross@zooid.guild.org (Ross Ridge) writes:
}kennu@mits.mdata.fi (Kenneth Falck) writes:
}>So, the question remains, why don't the Microsoft programmers bang
}>their brains together and rewrite MSDOS to be fully re-entrant and
}>all the routines to use dynamic memory allocation instead of static?
}
}Well the reasons why this wasn't done for MS-DOS 5 and earlier releases
}is fairly straight forward:

Where have you been?  It's been done already....  MSDOS 4.00 was multitasking,
but practically nobody ever got to see it.  (Note: this was a version that
came between 3.2 and 3.3; the mass-market MS equivalent to PC-DOS 4.0x was
MSDOS 4.01).  And if you're open to buying from a Microsoft competitor, you
can get Digital Research's DR Multiuser DOS (former versions were called 
Concurrent PC-DOS, Concurrent DOS, and Concurrent DOS/XM).

MSDOS 4.00 allowed one foreground and up to 30 background tasks (limited by
conventional memory), with interprocess communications, semaphores,
scheduling, etc.  And it supported asynchronous device drivers, where the
split into strategy and interrupt routines actually meant something.


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