> Not that convincing rationale considering rather modest overhead necessary.
Recall that FreeDOS isn't just about having a FOSS alternative to MS-DOS for
modern machines (where you're really better off just using Linux and DOSBox),
or for your early-90s 486 retrogaming machine, it's also meant to be an
alternative to MS-DOS for the very oldest PC hardware, all the way back to the
original IBM 5150. The core software might therefore be expected to work in
very little RAM. As I recall, the minimum configuration for the 5150 had only
16k of RAM. A decent laptop these days will have more 16k blocks of RAM than a
minimal 5150 had *bits* of RAM. So for FreeDOS to work on such machines, it has
to treat kilobytes like young whippersnappers like me treat gigabytes. 500 or
800 bytes starts looking pretty expensive at that rate. _______________________________________________
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