> However, most people don't care about standards, and even the ones who > do don't really think anything "useful" can be written in them. Which > is untrue and a shame.
It is only recently - perhaps only a few hours ago - that I started to have confidence that it was untrue. Ok, so an entire toolchain plus OS plus fullscreen editor can be written - what definition of "useful" is being used? That's enough to quite literally rebuild the world. Well - I haven't yet proven that you can start with say an 80386 toolchain and build an x64 toolchain. Someone once told me that for bootstrapping you need something that matches what you already have, and that I would understand once I tried to build my own compiler (which I haven't really done). > There are way too many competing languages, > too. Something else is always "newer", shinier, more practical, more > elegant, more popular, etc. Yeah, I'm not really trying to compete in that field either. Once I have the entire toolchain (just the C compiler is sort of missing - SubC is only a subset of C90), then I am happy, in principle, to start again from scratch in Pascal or Rust or whatever. But so far I haven't even completed the "C venture" - even to the point of answering the above question about migrating from one bitness to another. > It takes two to tango. Most people don't care about ultimate or > theoretical portability. While I 100% agree with and sympathize with > you, it's not interesting to them. Sure. I'm not really attempting to corner the mass market. Maybe that will happen later, but it isn't priority at the moment. I'm more interested in an 8080 (8-bit) OS, now that I have a NEC V20. >> But I'm expecting to burn the latest UC8086 onto a CF >> and boot it on my Book 8088 later today. It does work, but there was an anomaly. Clearing the screen doesn't work. I took a look at how that is done, and it is done by doing a scroll up. I suspect the bios in the Book 8088 doesn't support that. I haven't yet confirmed it. >> I don't think I can >> even do that with the Freedos distribution I use as I think it >> has a dependence on an 80386 processor. So for an >> alternative to UC8086 I will be using MSDOS 6.22 and >> ANSIPLUS. > The kernel should have an 8086-friendly build. The latest shell might > be 8086-friendly too (although the old 2006 stable one was 186). I didn't really understand this comment, so I simply burnt my Freedos 1.3 onto a CF. It said "Loading FreeDOS" and then it beeped continuously for 1-2 minutes, then it started making a clicking noise, which I let run for 15 minutes or something before switching off the computer. > What else did you rely upon? I don't understand this question. > I would definitely not bother with old MS-DOS. I don't understand what you are proposing as an alternative. ie how do I make Freedos a viable alternative? I assumed that I needed to rebuild everything myself, which is not something I really wanted to get involved in. MSDOS 6.22 is sitting there ready to go. I have to add various things to it, like Microsoft C 5.1 (I have recently purchased a huge amount of mainly Microsoft software from ebay - I can't remember what bill I have racked up - maybe US$5000 or something horrific - e.g. Win95 full version - not for a new PC - was something like US$400 plus postage plus import duties alone). BFN. Paul.
_______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
