On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Rugxulo <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 8:06 PM, dmccunney <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 8:35 PM, Ralf A. Quint <[email protected]> wrote: >>> At 05:12 PM 1/9/2013, Louis Santillan wrote: >>>>An interesting historical note, early versions of the FreeDOS kernel >>>>(DOS-C kernel) were portable to the 68k architecture. See >>>>(<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Villani>http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Villani). >>> >>> Well, you noticed that in that reference, it also clearly states: >>> "This move to a completely different target platform, while losing >>> binary compatibility with existing applications,..." >> >> Which is your fundamental problem. Even if you move DOS to a new >> architecture, what do you run under it on that platform? There isn't >> anything, and there isn't a lot you can do with DOS all by itself. > > You'd have to port stuff to it. The easiest would be "strictly > conformant" ANSI C stuff (or similar), just a recompile away. If you > add a POSIX layer (like many do, and even PatV briefly considered for > future endeavors), you get that too. So you could recompile things > like gcc, vi, sed, awk, etc. Other older "legacy" stuff would have to > run under an emulator (a la AROS).
> It's not as useless or impossible as it seems, but then again, I don't > expect this to happen (any time soon or if ever ...). "Just use Li^H^H > ... POSIX" (sigh). Neither useless nor impossible, but who will bother? There are simply too few folks with a need for it. It might happen a bit like Unix did, where some of the commands were programmers at Bell Labs scratching personal itches because *they* wanted a tool that did that and could create one. But while you can arguably do useful work (if you're a programmer, at least) on a bare bones Unix system with the standard utilities but *no* third party apps, DOS isn't in the same league. What can you do with *only* DOS and *no* apps? Not enough. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
