On 2004-04-02, Luchezar Georgiev wrote: >>> Alas, the RBIL has not been updated for the last 4 years, and will >>> never be anymore :-( >> >> did Ralf Brown tell you that? Any other source, other then just >> speculating from having no updates? > > [...] My point is: The more time passes, the > more impossible it becomes to update the RBIL. So I have no illusions that > there will ever be more updates. But all this is just a personal > opinion of mine of course. And as we all know that most things I say > or do are wrong, that's the only hope for an update of the RBIL! ;-) > In this case, unlike the other cases, I'd be glad to be wrong!!!
Sorry, folks, sometimes reality is much different from what we wish it was. When I asked for updates for RBIL in this list and elsewhere in 2002 and before, I honestly meant it. Ralf told me, he planned to release the next issue then, but obviously more important things came across in his life. C'est la vie... Anyway, while I still see huge room for improvement in RBIL, I think it is an incredibly valuable (and most of the time reliable) source of information for FreeDOS development as well as other non-commercial and commerical projects, which should be kept up to date by the community as much as we're able to do so. Also, there are still more than 2 Mb worth of ASCII docs of my own new findings in the queue for several years now and it would be a pity if all this stuff would remain unreleased forever. And I still have alot of (paper) documents still to be processed and transscribed into RBIL style laying around here - actually, the collection is still growing whenever I find something "new" in libraries or elsewhere... :-) Well, I thought about asking Ralf if I could take over maintainership of RBIL at least for an intermediate release and hand the project back over to him when he would have time for it again - in case he does. However, I too haven't had much free time since then, and virtually had not a free hour during the past year, so it would have been irresponsible by me to approach him again with this issue unless I'd know for sure, that I'd have at least two full months to spend on the project again. I can't speak for others, but for me personally, RBIL holds a high historical documentation value of the first two decades of the "PC industry", and I would like to see several facts be put straight before some rumours will finally be accepted as semi-truths, as it is happening more and more often these days. What I would like to see happening is that a team of enthusiasts would not only bring in new stuff, but also try to /systematically/ verify each and any table in RBIL and do new research in order to try to complete whatever is still missing in the tables. This is an enormeous task and it will take years, but nobody needs to hurry as most of those who could take part in such a project will (hopefully) still be around for some while longer and preserving this stuff for generations to come is worth it, I would think. In order to get definitive answers to many still open DOS and PC related questions we would have to re-test alot of stuff in the list with most any DOS version we can obtain, so we can clearly identify since when a specific feature was born, and when it was discontinued (in case it was). Ideally, this will include the more exotic OEM versions of DOS as much as we might be able to track them down, as well as Russian, Far East, Arabic, or Hebrew issues, which have been significantly different in some aspects. At least, this is, what I did whenever I stumbled upon something "new". I would also like to extend the list in regard to hardware specifics of many of the not-so-compatible x86-machines of the early and mid Eighties, old non-standard DOS and CP/M disk formats, internals of alternative x86-PC operating systems, and all such... Most of this hasn't been possible before a couple of years, because a large portion of the material has been researched and written before the existance of the web (or at least while it was still in its very early stages) and thus the focus was on mainstream Western issues of DOS only. Well, also we all have learnt quite a bit new stuff over the years and possibly see things clearer now than we did ten or fiveteen years ago. ;-) Anyway, I won't have time for anything such before autumn, when I hope to finally get a large enough time slot again for some fun stuff and badly needed recreation... Greetings, Matthias -- <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org "Programs are poems for computers." ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
