Thanks for the reply. Glad some of you see things in a way similar to I.
Remember the OS on the Amstrad Family Computer. I guess that's what I'd
like to see for a user interface for FreeDos. Perhaps a little more grown
up for modern Intel boxes. It was a small tidy GUI style OS. Task
switching but not multi-tasking. Not a lot of code or effort to create
that OS by modern standards. Although I think some of the features were in
the firmware on that box. Brings back the remark one of you made about
roll your own BIOS.
Ah its all coming back to me now. The Adam Home Computer, the Commodore
6060 (BASIC OS like the HP Workstations). Man I spent a lot of my life
wrestling with flaky boxes and compilers. Hard to believe I got any other
work done at the various jobs I've worked at. Don't have a lot of patience
left for flaky overcomplicated overreaching OSs and apps.
Could the leftover RAM on a modern box be used for a disk cache or virtual
drive? FreeDos can do this right. I used to create a virtual drive and
then copy my menu app binaries and directory to it at boot. Significantly
improved performance with a disk cache as well on my old 12 MHz 286. Just
an example of how unused RAM can be used creatively to improve
performance. There's likely more. Could you write a ghost BIOS, copy it
to RAM and then redirect BIOS calls to it? Maybe not all the BIOS calls,
just the required ones. Writing BIOSs used to a bit of voodoo and a black
art dealing with hardware timing and such.
Oh wait before I go, there's good reasons you can't divy up gene sequence
files into smaller chunks. Each segment would need header with even more
info than the original header. Bioinformatics is kind of messed up now
with all the wankers focused on the IT and not the biology. All kinds of
needless screwing with file formats, file structures, compression and so
on. (Some wanker got into the game way way way back in the day and we've
been stuck with that Big Endian Small Endian crap ever since.)
Later peeps!
CB
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Charles Belhumeur
> <chbelhumeur2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm new to the whole FreeDos intitiative. If I might be allowed to add
> my
> > two cents. I'm working on an application for bioinformatics research.
> The
> > search for the best OS for this led me to FreeDos. Although I did end
> up on
> > picking Windows XP SP3 for the large user base and significant work to
> date
> > debugging the OS. I nixed FreeDos because the gene sequence files are
> too
> > massive, some in the area of 300 GB.
>
> XP's NTVDM works better (IIRC) than its successors. Despite some of
> XP's bugs that were never fixed, DJGPP worked around 'em (for 2.03p2
> and 2.04), so it works well there. Though I don't have any working XP
> machines anymore, sadly. (DOSEMU and native FreeDOS have different
> quirks and bugs, esp. regarding GNU AutoTools.)
>
> Though that won't help you with big files. DOS itself usually only
> supports 2 GB (e.g. FreeDOS) with some variants (e.g. Win9x)
> supporting 4 GB files with weird hacks (that aren't universally
> supported elsewhere). I guess you could (non-commercially) use EDR-DOS
> with FAT+ (and manually call the API), but I've not tried.
>
> I don't see how having one big 300 GB file is necessary. Just use 200
> files of 1.5 GB each. ;-)
>
> > The problem with Windows and LINUX for science work is they're kind of
> like
> > the family station wagon. Trying to be all things to everyone. Maybe
> even
> > worse they my be an RV monster will all the amenities including the
> kitchen
> > sink. This makes these OSs too big, glitchy and they require far too
> much
> > maintenance and support. All of which gets in the way of scientific work
> > and adds layers of needless difficulty for scientific workers. The
> > biologists who do grad studies in bioinformatics seem to have a bad time
> > with all the arcana. It stalls their careers and research for at least
> two
> > years. Cures for diseases and death for all us are similarly stalled by
> the
> > overcomplicated IT.
>
> Trying to keep backwards compatible while adding every new feature is
> difficult. x86 has been around for 30 years, so that's a lot of cpus!
> Even Windows 8 only runs with later-model P4s or newer. Everyone keeps
> (re)inventing every tech in incompatible ways. (And keeping up with
> constant kernel upgrades in *nix is annoying.)
>
> > When I was a student we had these HP workstations based on Motorola
> chips.
> > The ones I used had an OS based on Berkeley BASIC. They were powerful,
> > single tasking, big disks, lots of RAM in flat memory model, rock solid
> and
> > spit simple to use. In many ways ideal boxes for scientific and
> engineering
> > work. The Rocky Mountain BASIC compiler was spit easy for application
> > developers. No need to malloc, compartmentalize like C++ conventions
> and so
> > on. Just DIM and use the standard BASIC conventions. I knew engineers
> who
> > wrote a complete GUI under this scheme in a few months.
>
> For whatever reason, developers think differently these days. They
> overdo everything and use heavyweight solutions.
>
> > I've often thought these modern Intel boxes had the potential to be
> similar
> > platforms with the right OS. That's why FreeDos caught my eye. I think
> > there's a niche with big potential for FreeDos in science and engineering
> > work. My advice would be, and I don't say this lightly since I know
> what's
> > involved, bite the bullet, write whatever it takes to give users full
> access
> > to all the RAM and disk space under a DOS style interface. It only has
> to
> > be done right once and it will open up a lot of potential on these boxes
> to
> > a wide user base.
>
> DJGPP v2 (DPMI) already is fairly well working with reasonably high
> amounts of RAM (2 GB?). FreeDOS with FAT32 lets you use up to 2 TB of
> disk space for a partition (though only max 2 GB file sizes). No real
> PAE (yet) or 64-bit (ever) support, obviously.
>
> Another good option for FreeDOS is OpenWatcom + HX.
>
> So you can basically emulate subsets of POSIX or Win32 with these
> toolsets, if native DOS (x86 assembly) or pure standard code (e.g. ISO
> C, ISO Pascal) isn't to your liking.
>
> > You may want to approach these people http://www.htbasic.com/ with the
> > possibility of porting their compiler to FreeDos. This is the modern
> > version of the BASIC of the old HP workstations.
>
> I looked at this yesterday. It seems to be a commercial clone of RMB.
> Apparently they already had DOS ports, latest apparently being 6.0
> from 1998. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to acquire it except by
> buying either the legacy bundle or similarly using a newer product's
> serial key to get a compatible older serial number and password for
> it. And they are a bit pricey, to say the least. So I'm not sure how
> useful this is for FreeDOS, "as is", but hey, at least it exists.
>
> (The glib, over-simplified answer would be "Just use FBC" or similar,
> but I suspect that's not as easy or reliable as it sounds, in such
> cases.)
>
> > The old HP workstations had an interesting feature in their graphics
> > hardware. They didn't have separate text and graphic modes. No need for
> > switching. You could dump graphics and text to the same screen in its
> > single mode. This was a very nice feature for app developers. HTBAsic
> > still supports this.
>
> A lot of stuff is forced to GUI these days. You could argue it's for
> technical reasons (fonts for Unicode), but a lot of people (MS?) also
> think everything that isn't using a GUI is obsolete.
>
> As mentioned in other mailing list threads, FreeDOS can use several
> GUIs (mostly as third-party libraries) but doesn't require any by
> default.
>
> > Finally I'd like to comment on "The Wankers". There's wankers all over
> > science and engineering, especially in IT, who think making things
> > complicated and arcane makes them look like geniuses. F**k No! The whole
> > thrust of science is to simplify complicated phenomena into principles
> > everyone can understand and use. I always point out Einstein to the
> > wankers. They hate that sh*t! The UNIX/LINUX crowd seem especially
> prone
> > to "wankeritus". (F**k I really hate the wankers after all these
> decades in
> > science and engineering!)
>
> Managing complexity is not easy, but sadly most don't even try. They
> don't minimize requirements, just stick to de facto standards that are
> too brittle to reliably work (e.g. GNU AutoTools bugs, at least re:
> DJGPP). That really bugs me, but it's too much complexity for me to
> understand enough to (weakly try to) fix.
>
> About Einstein and simplicity, he's often quoted by Niklaus Wirth in
> his Oberon work. Though some people still use Modula-2 or Pascal or
> some variants (or on *nix usually stick to C99 or C++03 or Obj. C v2
> or ...). It's hard to get people to agree on anything: compilers,
> cpus, languages, libraries, build tools, etc.
>
> > The whole FreeDos initiative seems to be a group of people who get
> > this. I can't tell you how refreshing and novel this is after 30 years
> > of watching the simple basic functions of IT get twisted into the
> > overcomplicated mess we now have. Keep it up people! Well done!
> > Do whatever it takes to crack into a significant user base. I think
> > the time is right, the need is there.
>
> I don't know. DJGPP would probably be the best place to enhance
> things, but these days, volunteers are few. Again, most of it is just
> ports from GNU, but their POSIX-heavy tools tend to not work well on
> non-*nix (except sometimes with Cygwin or MinGW).
>
> > (Anybody remember VAX-VMS?)
>
> CWS (of CWSDPMI) always raved about it. In many ways, he helped make
> DJGPP as "rock stable" as VAX/VMS was renowned for. Unfortunately, as
> successful as DJGPP has been, these days it isn't appreciated as much
> as it deserves. (Though DJ works for Red Hat and, for now, still
> supports DJGPP on the side [website, ftp, mailing list] with the help
> of a select few gurus.)
>
>
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