🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Martin (si...@MCS.COM) wrote:
: >Jack Sams of IBM discovered that "Gates and his crew
: >obviously new quite a bit about hardware design as well", so Sams
: >"gave him sort of an open invitation to tell us what was needed."
: >(from "Gates", by Stephen Manes & Paul Andrews, page 152).

: I'm sure Gates didn't exaggerate this in any way in his own biography.  I
: find it unusual that monolithic IBM would solicit advice from what was
: basically a pipsqueak software company.

It isn't Gate's "own" biography. He didn't write it. And the quote was
attributed directly to Jack Sams of IBM. In addition, the PC project was
pretty unusual at IBM. 

: The 8086 is 16-bit in some ways; settling on the 8088 just made the design
: cheaper and quicker.

The 8086 is 16-bit internally and externally; the 8088 is 16-bit 
internally and 8-bits externally. Kind of like a 386sx.

: >Sams also contacted Gates regarding an OS, and Gates initially
: >referred him to Gary Kildall of DRI, who was off flying his plane and
: >missed the meeting - probably one of the most expensive airplane rides
: >in history.

: This is the anecdote to which I was referring.

The two events are intertwined.

: >Maybe you should double check your *own* statements before you shoot
: >your mouth off....

: I still don't understand, though, how:

: 1) Intel's flawed architecture does a fine job of running UNIXes such as
: Linux, FreeBSD, and the like

Have you run Linux on an 8088 lately?

: 2) Windows 95 still has a lot of DOS internals

For backwards compatibility. I'll say it yet again: one of the big things 
that Windows 95 does is create a good transition to true 32-bitness. This 
will eventually (sooner than later, I hope) kill DOS off for good. The 
inclusion of some of the old DOS internals was a tradeoff they had to 
make to provide good backwards compatibility, since a lot of people are 
still very attached to their 16-bit DOS and Windows code.

It still astonishes me how little people seem to understand the 
importance of backwards compatibility in the marketplace. 

: There are DOS-mode emulators for quite a few PC UNIXes, and they work
: reasonably well, while allowing the UNIX kernel to still do things its own
: efficient way.  Why couldn't this approach be taken for a new OS such as
: Win95?  You still get better performance under OS/2 or UNIX, on the same
: equipment, in general.

The compatibility is NOWHERE NEAR as good. How do your DOS device drivers 
work under emulation? Your Windows apps? How about Doom? 

Scott