> The BIOS idea (separate, in ROM) was invented by Gary Kildall, right? Not sure about that, but the concept of a "BIOS" -- a "layer" between the hardware and the OS itself -- still exists today. The difference is that it's no longer isolated from the OS. MS used to call it the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). I'm not sure it's called that any more, but it still exists "inside" the OS.
> There was also (DR) Novell DOS 7, which supported 286 task swapping > and 386 multitasking. Task Swapping and Multitasking are not the same thing as re-entrancy. As an example, one of the things a modern OS does is manage all the memory of the computer. If you want some memory for something, you need to request it from the OS. With a re-entrant OS, the OS probably wouldn't manage the memory any more. The model could be something more like "Bring Your Own Memory" (BYOM), where the memory management came from somewhere else and you could request a "new" OS to be spawned and just tell it which memory to use. I realize this is a radically different way of thinking and will be hard for most people to even grasp. > ... > It's hard to blame MS for everything. DR clearly had a lot of good > releases, but many of them never caught on. I'm not blaming MS for everything, but they certainly were ruthless in their tactics. Some good things were a result and some bad things as well. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
