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I made my own DOS implementation (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 08.04.2024, 03:19

> I just find it weird when a software developer, who doesn't even write
> assembly, suddenly says that someone else's computer is "too old" or "too
> slow" and must not be "supported" anymore. If we consider that that
> "someone else's computer" is a turing-complete machine that has enough
> memory to run the program in question, and has enough computing power that
> its owner does not consider it "too slow", the software developer should
> not have the right to say that it is.
The CDC 6600 mainframe from 1964 was a 60-bit processor at 10 Mhz up to 982 kb of memory (almost a meg??) running 2 MIPS. It cost $2.4 million (equivalent to $23 million today).

Wikipedia says:

"Many minicomputer performance claims were based on the Fortran version of the Whetstone benchmark, giving Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS). The VAX 11/780 with FPA (1977) runs at 1.02 MWIPS. Results on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1 CPU 2007) vary from 9.7 MWIPS using BASIC Interpreter to 2,403 MWIPS using a modern C/C++ compiler."

In fairness, you shouldn't have to be a systems engineer with a PhD just to use or program a computer. Having said that, choice of OS, compiler, and algorithm make a big difference (depending on the requirements). It's NOT true that everyone born before 1990 was a rube who knew nothing, nor that their machines were incapable of "real work".

> The job of the software developer is to just maintain the program, and
> generally when we are speaking of relatively high-level userspace programs
> or their libraries, they compile to older x86 hardware just fine, unless
> something is actively preventing it from happening.
C is much better than assembly for portability, but it's still VERY flawed. A skilled developer can work around most of that, but most people don't care. It is NOT "strictly conformant by default". No amount of "standards" or warnings or lints or libraries can hide all of that for you. You just have to "test test test!" and work around any problems you find (whether preprocessor macros, patches, separate modules, libraries, external tools, etc).

So-called "UNIX" or "UNIX-like" or "POSIX" or sticking to GNU tools or Ubuntu LTS does not save you from portability problems. There used to be a saying: "all the world's a VAX!" (see the Jargon File). VMS and Windows NT were both from Dave Cutler and somewhat considered anti-UNIX in philosophy. In other words, OS-specific code is nothing new. (And yet Cutler insisted that Windows NT be portable from the beginning. Too bad most other cpu makers like MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC couldn't compete with Intel.)

EDIT: You may prefer to hang around more sympathetic people (e.g. NetBSD or OpenBSD) rather than Linux.

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