On Sunday 09 January 2011 22:54:14 walt wrote: > This mess goes back to IBM's decision to use the Intel 8086 CPU in > their shiny new PC
What? Little-endian hardware? Crackers: backwards thinking, which Americans seem to me to be prone to. And yes, I did spend two years working in Minneapolis 20 years ago. In the predecessor of that project we had to write common code to run equally well on a GEC machine, with a hardware limit of 8KB of process space but a highly efficient scheduler, and on a Ferranti Argus 700 in which a process could be any size but you couldn't have too many of them. The project failed of course, having been specified by the hardware department: yet another stupid decision. It was replaced with another project that bought a system in from another continent. Anyone remember Empros? Defunct, after gargantuan efforts by all concerned. Whose interest was that in? > and then hire Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write/steal DOS. Just about the worst decision ever taken. And that includes politicians. All of them. > The result was a brain-dead booting scheme which has been holding > back the Intel/x86 world to this very day. (But they all made a > huge bundle of cash along the way.) Capitalism? Greed in another word. (Why use one syllable when 5 will do?) > Meanwhile we have a truckload of hacks like lilo, grub1, grub2, > syslinux, not to mention M$ boot loaders, which morph with every new > release of Windows. Come on, why don't you tell us what you think? Don't hold back - I haven't. -- Rgds Peter. Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23.
