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NOTMDOS.ARK
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2006-10-19
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52 lines
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The following comments come from Clint Pulley
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[the transcript in question was a conversation between my self (J.STRICHERZ1)
and Jeff White (J.WHITE28) concerning the possible replacements for MDOS and
the SYSTEM/SYS loader in the Geneve eprom]
I read through your transcript and have these comments :
- I've known about SYSTEM/SYS for quite awhile. I was involved with the Geneve
prototype back in '86. It had an 8k command line interpreter in SYSTEM/SYS and
used external DSR's (those that worked, that is).
- I am TOTALLY opposed to using external DSR's as they now exist. The thought
of going back to VDP RAM for all I/O is extremely distasteful. Also, not all
on-card DSRs work properly - some interrogate the 4A's keyboard CRU lines
which is a nogo on the 9640. I feel that the best part of MDOS (pre 1.14FU)
is the file system in a floppy environment, although I've wondered why it is
so large. I suspect that each device type has its own DSR instead of using
common code for everything but physical access. As an aside, MDOS isn't that
big - look at OS2!
- In my opinion, the worst things about MDOS are the video functions (slow,
huge, and far too generalized - why not restrict TTY type output to text
modes, for example), and the CLI (wouldn't you just die if FORMAT and
DISKCOMP weren't resident!!) which eats up about 32k all by itself. Even
MSDOS loads COMMAND.COM, FORMAT, etc. when needed and allows multiple
copies of COMMAND.COM to run.
- My suggestion for .NOT.MDOS is to throw away the CLI, video and math parts,
keeping file I/O, memory management and utilities, and possibly cleaning up
the keyboard input and interrupt handling (quite inefficient - do you know
that the mouse is read on each video interrupt, unconditionally?). With a
modular CLI (please, not Unix-like, it's too awk-ward!!), efficient video
and math, and a keyboard input that knows about ALL the keys you might have
something with a reasonable effort. Then take it one more step and break the
whole thing up so that SYSTEM/SYS is only a startup bootstrap and OS segments
are loaded based on a user-specified config file . I don't know how much time
I'd have for a project like this, but I am quite willing to adapt the c99
run-time environment to whatever operating mileu you people might come up
with. Anyway, enough soapboxing.
Oops, gotta get back to work.
Clint
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