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PDOS-generic (Announce)

posted by marcov, 02.11.2021, 19:42

> Something else occurred to me.
>
> 1. Would it have been feasible for MSDOS to have
> been written in C instead of assembler, and (with
> the benefit of hindsight) waited for compilers to
> become better and RAM to become cheaper, and
> possibly distributed multiple versions of the
> product with different memory requirements.
The first Dos systems had 64kb. Even when there was more memory the space occupied by nested shells also needed to be minimized.

Low memory directly affected the apps that you wanted to run, it was a different time.

Only with the more 386 oriented 5 and 6 versions that could have changed, (e.g. 4dos had very low shell overhead by using XMS).

> With the benefit of hindsight, the 80386 was coming
> out in 1986. 32-bit OS/2 2.0 was released in 1992.
Note that in 1992/93 286s were still sold new, and 386sx (and DX even more so) were still high end.

> Assume people have the application source code in C
> available, and that a 32-bit C compiler was also
> made available in a timely manner, and that people
> are happy to produce 2 versions of their software
> for people who have memory constraints.
A good, industry wide solution for 386 apps in e.g. the early nineties would have been welcomed, tools inclusive.

> By 1985, 512K memory was US$210, which is probably
> a point where you shouldn't be making design
> decisions based on saving m*oney on RAM.
I would take msdos 5 as more logical point at which a change should have been forced. By then, new machines routinely were 1MB or more, and 386s started to penetrate.

> Another consideration is that the C standard wasn't
> actually ratified until 1989-1990, so there is some
> difficulty exporting a C library to applications.
The C standard has nothing to do with any of this.

> With the benefit of hindsight we know what the C
> standard is, and it is something that could have
> been written in 1980.

Before the standard, there was K&R, ..... if you were an Unix workstation programmer. But in Dos, C was only emerging. Apple and Microsoft (both Unix licensees and vendors!) switched to C, but the application programmers despised it, because it too often was combined with abstraction layers that were considered useless overhead.

> Let's assume that we had the
> C standard and appropriate compilers and libraries
> in 1980, and we were just waiting for someone to
> authorize the writing of MSDOS 2.0 with a fresh
> API, to be delivered in 1983.
> Hold the use of the 8086 and the 80386 constant.
> Hold the C90 standard constant, but backdated to
> 1980. Hold memory prices constant. What could have,
> or should have been done, with the benefit of
> hindsight, and flexibility in software choices?
> ie what options did humanity have available, but
> missed?
Maybe it would have had an impact on Unix fragmentation, but I doubt it would have affected dos that much.

I do think maybe 32-bit could have emerged as the norm for applications earlier (than 1995+ with win95), but that is only weakly correlated with C.

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