On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:13 PM, Carl spitzer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Afterall most appliances are in technical terms rather simple and though > some like model trains get by with TinyOS others might get by with DOS and > more complex things can be left to Linux. I rather doubt it. One thing that gets a *lot* of attention lately is the Internet of Things, where the underlying assumption is that all manner of devices that humans don't deal with directly will be able to communicate with each other over the Internet, using TCP-IP. This is possible because increasingly, devices that might do this use 32 bit microprocessors. Hardware is *cheap*. You can put a 32 bit CPU and enough storage to hold an OS including a full TCP-IP stack, application code and data into a *very* small package, and do so inexpensively.. The Raspberry Pi is an example. Given that you *can* do that, why run a 16 bit OS? The short answer is "You don't." Those 32 bit CPUs may not run Linux - depending on what they do, the nod may go to a real-time OS - but they won't run DOS. Among other things, the CPUs may not be x86, but rather based on ARM or MIPS designs. And given that the hardware will support it, the devices may well require a multi-tasking OS. DOS has roots in the days when hardware was expensive, and was designed to run in limited resources. For the most part, those constraints increasingly don't exist. The niche that DOS was designed to fill has been progressively shrinking. > think of the software world as a pantheon with Winblows as the villain. It isn't, really, but that's a different discussion. > CWSIV ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
