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PCI phased out? (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 16.02.2011, 19:18

(combining replies here):

> I've been co-sysop at a Desqview(later /X) BBS and Fido hub for years.
> Very stable, and fairly fast. DVX - SBBS (later RA) FrontDoor - FMail
> was a fairly common combination in those days.
The Desqview/X SDK was written with DJGPPv1 (and is still on the mirrors). The problem with a lot of DOS software is that it disappeared (abandoned, deleted, no longer sold), not (only) that it was commercial and had weird licenses.

Also, it really is hard to rewrite everything from scratch. I guess I don't have to tell you (BSD fan). Worse is when it's undocumented, which makes things almost impossible. At least FreeDOS (free/libre) "mostly" does everything we need, which is no small feat given all the efforts that went into it.

> Hey, I downloaded this disks from Lineo official site before many years
> when it was freely available so I have it perfectly legal. I didn't know
> that they mfkrs started to selling it now for such (high) price...
$35 is far from a high price for any software. And it's been that way for quite a while. I bought my copy online in 2004 for the same price. But Novell DOS 7 (buggier DPMI) was like $125 in 1994. I think even PC-DOS 7 was similarly priced (and I even saw that on eBay recently for like $50). So, relatively speaking, it's a bargain (assuming it works for your needs, of course).

Ownership has changed hands a few times, and obviously the license too. OpenDOS wasn't "open" except very very barely (non-commercial for you but they can use your changes), and even that was only (I think?) kernel and shell, not auxiliary tools. Even that one wasn't with all the Novell fixes due to version control issues. With 7.02/7.03, it went back closed source, but at least they did make some improvements (e.g. less buggy DPMI, now DJGPP friendly). They (Caldera?) allegedly used the income to fund their Linux businesses, oddly enough. But Caldera / Lineo doesn't even exist anymore (does it?). It then went to DeviceLogics and then spun off DR-DOS, Inc. Yeah, I've read rumors about DR-DOS being free for non-commercial use, but I'm not sure that was ever true (or else they changed their minds later). I think it was "commercially try for 90 days or reasonable period for home use", but I dunno anymore. At least as of 2004, "Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 = $35 for single user at home", and their website still says similar, so I guess nothing's changed.

> 2x fast only due to 64bit if used same MMX/SSE insctructions both on
> 32bit and 64bit CPU?
64-bit is not faster. Not at all. Only in very rare cases. It really is almost a waste to pretend otherwise. None of us home users need 64-bit unless we're doing something weird (which we never needed to do in the past 20 years) using huge amounts of RAM. It's easy to say nobody needs it because nobody used to have it!! How can you "need" what you don't have?

Why did they not implement V86 under long mode? Dunno, probably because commercially MS and Linux don't need (nor want) it, not in the slightest. Or maybe there was some unknown (to us) technical limit like only a certain amount of transistors could fit on limited die space (extremely blind guess, I'm no hardware engineer). Or maybe they were lazy, who knows.

Win8 (two years away) will probably be 64-bit only, even for home users. Okay, that's kinda lame, but it's not that surprising or the end of the world. Even though I like DOS, I don't reasonably expect anybody else to. My issue is that it's a slippery slope, and I don't ever (!) want them to remove 32-bit compatibility. It's very easy to imagine them forcing us to make all our binaries PE64, which would be very very short-sighted, IMNSHO.

> I didn't want to compare their performance just point that 8-bit HW
> (C64, ZX...) are much easier than PC. Also the strictly HW standard of
> these computers is big advantege for programing kernel and drivers. PC
> is generic glued from many different parts so it's not such easy...
Yes, modern PCs are crap. It's great that they're cheap and powerful, but they're too complicated, somewhat horrible licensing (and patents), too many incompatible APIs, binary formats, OSes, etc., and honestly we've even lost functionality because of incompatible hardware. It's a far cry from the 486/586 days when everything was "easy". It's not that I want us to go back or lose "modern" functionality (eh?), but it was indeed a simpler and better time in some ways, no worries about all these complicated, broken modern things that (almost) nobody needs.

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