Hi Eric, Well, your argument is compelling, but I think it sort of misses the point. FreeDOS is a system for legacy hardware - I mean - really legacy. My oldest laptop is 15 years old, and even that has hardware that is 'too new' and not supported by FreeDOS. I'm currently trying to nail a Packet driver together for its Broadcom Nextreme NIC, but if that'll work is a matter of 'we'll see'.
I think you're asking two implicit questions here: a) Should we abandon 16 bit hardware as nobody has any, which would mean FreeDOS goes 32bit. The second question is: What is it for? If you have 32bit hardware in the first place, And except for a few stray early pentiums we're talking about machines that can run dosbox at reasonable speeds, why FreeDOS? I mean, you can run just about every DOS Software on a puny littleRaspberry Pi. Not trying to get too philosophical here - I like FreeDos for he nostalgic fuzzies - but that group is a rather small one.I think FreeDos needs to find its main purpose and then adjust course accordingly. sorry for the rambling, it's been a long day... On Tue, 1 Dec 2020 at 23:30, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > Danilo, > > > First of all, if the idea of an 80x25 single file editor frightens you, > > you're either a wimp or too young to have done any programming when that > > was the norm. May I introduce you to Turbo Pascal 3.0? 80x25 text is the > > best there is. > > Tom is neither, but you could argue that he could use more modern, > more advanced editors for DOS, with higher text mode resolutions. > > On the other hand, his impressive FreeDOS development track record > shows that cross-compiling from another system or using DOS in a > window while using another host operating system for the rest of > your activities does not keep you from being productive DOS-wise :-) > > I think it is an important point that ancient machines are no longer > widespread. There is little use in having a 640k, 16-bit scandisk > or defrag for FAT32, if nobody has managed to connect a large disk > to such ancient hardware. So it is fine for me that dosfsck needs > a 386 to check FAT32 partitions. > > People today seem to be more worried about the other end of the > spectrum: Why is DOS limiting them to 2 TB disk size or 3 GB of > RAM, running on only 1 of their 16 CPU cores? Not that I would > know ANY application for DOS which would need that kind of power, > I agree that people wonder whether DOS *may* use it, now that the > 2020 PC on their desk has it anyway :-) > > Cheers, Eric > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel >
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