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Let's Make a DOS BBS in a offensively modern way (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 20.04.2024, 12:57

I forgot to mention a few things:

Pascal on CDC 6400 used a 6-bit character set and could "pack" 10 chars in one 60-bit "word". There was no lower case.

Modula-2 on AMD 29000 (and ports to Motorola 68000) focused on 16-bit words and didn't supports bytes. (I think even VAX only later got cpu extensions for that.) Classic C89 allowed for chars larger than 8-bits, but nowadays a lot of software just implicitly assumes 8-bit bytes. Since it was originally targeted at 16-bit cpus with small address spaces, Modula-2 supported the CARDINAL (unsigned) type.

Oberon had SYSTEM.BYTE and assumed ASCII, unlike Pascal (which was even more restrictive character set than C and only four precedence levels vs. C's 12). No one cares for EBCDIC anymore. And since Oberon was for 32-bit cpus, they did away with CARDINAL and just used (32-bit) INTEGERs for everything.

Times change, computers change, but people lose interest in supporting older (no longer functional or sold, "obsolete") machine setups. What I'm sad about is that it gets narrower and narrower with each revision. They assume way too much and thus support no one else, which is (IMHO) pointless.

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