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nuclear war (Miscellaneous)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 09.11.2022, 18:15

> Hello kerravon,
>
> > > Well, to me the thing is this: If "let's standardize 16-/32-bit
> > computing"
> > > is the answer, then what is the question?
> > > I am pretty sure that, in a event of a nuclear war — or for that
> > matter,
> > > a large-scale conventional war, or some other large-scale disaster —
> > > people who want/need computing power will want it for some
> concrete,
> > > practical purposes. What will these be?
>
> > I have my own answer too - I don't really care what computers are used
> for.
> > I know that early computers with very little memory were used for
> designing
> > aircraft, which apparently requires lots of calculations to be done.
>
> But how do you get from "we might want to do lots of calculations to design
> aircraft" to "let's standardize 16-/32-bit computing"? How exactly does
> this "standardization" help anything at all?
I like to code to a standard for my own code.

Normally that is C90, and I have gone an awful
long way with just C90.

But at the end of the day, I need to be able
to do a "dir", and that involves, for me,
at least currently, using PosGetDTA, PosFindFirst
and PosFindNext.

And although C90 can hide lots of things from a
programmer, as a C90 library author myself, I
don't get hidden from that, so even though the
need for "dir" doesn't exist in C90, I do need
PosOpenFile.

Maybe I'm the only person in the world who wants
a standard API, but I'd be surprised if that was
the case. Why did people come up with POSIX if
no-one needs a standard OS interface?

I can't use POSIX myself, because that is full of
crap like fork() which is not suitable for a low
end machine like MSDOS ran on.

> Standardization might be useful, methinks, in times of peace when people
> are eating tofu
> (to
> borrow a turn of phrase). In times of war or nuclear disaster, not
> so much.
We're currently at what counts as "peace".

And I'm interested for historical reasons anyway.
We were at nominal "peace" in the 1980s which is
when this should have been done. The ARM CPU was
in fact available in 1985. The computers that
used it should have been running an MSDOS clone
that allowed source mode compatibility due to the
standardized API.

For whatever reason that wasn't done already in
say 1981, in preparation for the possibility of
the ARM, or 68000, but I don't particularly care
why it wasn't already done, I just want to do it
belatedly.

I was programming in C in about 1987, and I coded
to the ANSI C draft, which meant I couldn't do
things like directory traversal.

There were other things I realize I should have
been able to do as well, like use ANSI output
and have the OS have an option to bypass the
BIOS so that it was fast, instead of every
single fullscreen program doing exactly that itself.

And get ANSI keyboard strokes, not just ANSI output.

I'm basically trying to reconcile the problems I
had when starting in 1987.

BFN. Paul.

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