Hi, On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Travis Siegel <tsie...@softcon.com> wrote: > > Actually, opendos version 7.01 (or caldera dos depending on when you > purchased it) > did have multitasking, and it worked fairly well. The problem was, setting > it up and > getting it to run properly was a bear. I did finally accomplish it, but it > was a tough nut > to crack, and I didn't use it long, due to other issues with hardware, but it > went far > beyond msdos 5.0 task switching, and actually allowed full-blown multitasking.
OpenDOS 7.01 wasn't very "open". It was short-lived, born and died in 1997. It didn't even have all the Novell fixes (AFAIK). It was non-commercial only. I had thought it was kernel and shell only, not sure. I don't think they released much more than that. (See Udo Kuhnt's EDR-DOS if curious.) DR-DOS 7.03 (from 1998) is still the latest version being sold (by a different company, since they've changed hands a lot over the years). FYI, it normally identified itself as IBM PC-DOS 6, for compatibility reasons. I'm not sure when the various multitasking parts came into play. I think DR-DOS 6 had some very limited support, but it wasn't until Novell DOS 7 that full pre-emptive multitasking came along. You could do task switching on a 286, but 386 was needed for the pre-emptive stuff. It was a very good DOS, more or less, but multitasking was not for me. I only tried it a few times. It wasn't what I'd call interesting enough. (Almost no developers ever targeted their API.) I don't think it ever allowed me to do much compiling with DJGPP in the background. That was almost the only use case I could think of. Of course, I was only using it on my (old, half-dead) P166 with 32 MB of RAM (with some eaten up by NWCACHE and TDSK), but it was still (by design) limited to like 64 MB per task, no matter what HIMEM you used. IIRC, there were hidden bits (VXDs?) inside its EMM386, which also relied on its internal DPMI server (now 32-bit since 7.02 or such). All I remember is that something in TDE's (new) keyboard driver conflicted, so I always had to temporarily disable DPMI when editing. Other than that, there wasn't much (major) improvement or advantage to using DR-DOS at all, compared to the various alternatives. It might've been better than MS-DOS, but not by too much. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
