2008/3/23, Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> On a 286, protected mode and real mode are incompatible.
[…]
> It's the reason that Bill Gates was quoted as saying the
> 286 was a "brain dead" processor.
Bear in mind he was trying to protect his proprietary lock-in, which
revolved around running real mode applications. Had he stuck to the
original open-systems plan around Xenix, the 80286 would have been a
perfectly good processor.
> Fortunately, my boss had some serious sessions
> with Intel early in the 386 development cycle so the 386 was better than
> it might have been.
Now you got me curious, who was your boss?
> However, we never did convince them that the 386
> ought to have hardware support for true virtualization.
Perhaps at the time it would have been too expensive and give Motorola
and AMD too much time in the market.
It would all have been well had the AIM team got its act together.
But Apple killing the clones and sticking to a proprietary fork of
free software effectively sealed the market for Intel, and so we are
here, helping global warming by running inefficient OSs on inefficient
processors. Even GNU/Linux is relatively inefficient compared to what
could have been.
> > ...so you
> > could use '/' instead of '\' for directory separation in path names as
> > you do in POSIX. That was supposed to become the default in MS DOS 3
> > as a step to Xenix, but in the way to v3 MS realise it needed the
> > proprietary lock in and thus OS/2 was born.
> >
> Sorry, but the OS/2 guy who knows full well that OS/2 (contrary to
> popular belief) is an IBM conceived and designed product says.... huh???
Come on, OS/2 wasn't conceived in a vacuum. It was originally (MS/PC)
DOS 4, intended to succeed DOS 3 as a protected mode product and
developed by both companies. Then IBM decided MS Windows had to go
and chose its own, much better Presentation Manager, giving MS time to
mature their proprietary lock-in so IBM was expendable, and thus it
was forked and MS Windows was grafted back so MS didn't need IBM for
its Presentation Manager. The MS DOS 4 which actually saw light was
there only as a stopgap measure due to OS/2's delay and DR DOS's
competition; then OS/2 was to have been born as MS DOS V (five) until
finally being named as it was, and thus DOS was left alone.
The last I knew of the unified development was a demonstration of 'MS
OS/2 v3 NT for the Intel 80860' RISC processor, still with
Presentation Manager.
Remember, the odd version numbers where mainly MS' responsibility, the
even ones IBM's. The actual OS/2 v3 lost the NT parts because, being
an odd-numbered version feature, they were MS'; it still had Workplace
Shell because it was an improvement (a huge one) one v2's IBM
Presentation Manager.
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