🚀 go-pugleaf

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?

ross@zooid.guild.org (Ross Ridge) writes:
}Well the reasons why this wasn't done for MS-DOS 5 and earlier releases
}is fairly straight forward:

[ MS-DOS is single user, single tasking and big enough ]

ralf+@cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) writes:
>Where have you been? 

Not Europe.

>It's been done already....  MSDOS 4.00 was multitasking, but practically
>nobody ever got to see it.

I'd forgotten about this, but I imagine the reasons that practically
nobody saw it are pretty much the same as I wrote above.

>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.

Do you think any of MS-DOS 4.00 will make it in to a future multitasking
MS-DOS or will they just ignore it?

							Ross Ridge

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