On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:19 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:34 PM, Thomas Mueller <mueller6...@twc.com> wrote: >>> >>> Maybe that was because DOS is not really made for large RAM. >> >> Editors I'm aware of that ran under DOS and edited really large files >> used spill files, keeping what would fit in memory in RAM, and the >> rest on disk, swapping to disk as required. On DOS machines, that was >> *slow*. > > Most pmode editors (esp. 32-bit) don't need to swap at all if you have > the available RAM. So it's not slow at all.
Now, yes, if you have protected mode. Back then, you didn't. > And just saying it's always "slow" is wrong too. You can buy faster > HDs now than ever. Not to mention obvious workarounds like UDMA, > software cache, RAM disk. Once again, I am referring to the Old Stone Age, when you *didn't* have that stuff, and if you had a hard drive, it might just cost as much as the rest of the PC combined. (At the bank I worked for in the 80's, one of the officers in my department got a PC with a <gasp> *5MB* hard drive. As I recall, it cost about $5K, and half of the cost was the HD.) >> DOS wasn't made for large RAM. The 8088 CPU machines on which it ran >> had an address space of 1MB, and 640K of that was usable by DOS. If >> you had more RAM than that installed, you needed it seen as EMS or >> XMS, and accessed by convoluted programming. > > No, many compilers make it totally transparent to the end user. So you > don't even have to write any non-portable code (usually). And this > goes even beyond obvious "32-bit DPMI" DJGPP-based ones (GCC, GPC, > FPC, FBC). They do now. They did not then. >>> Still, I prefer to switch to Linux, FreeBSD or NetBSD to edit anything >>> serious, using vi. >>> >>> Apparently DOS, including FreeDOS, works better on an older computer than >>> on a modern computer. >> >> Yes. It was designed for older machines. It simply can't use most of >> what newer ones offer. > > No. "Some" things can still be supported (e.g. SIMD). But out of > those, only a few get done because of lack of developers and testers. > The other things are either mutually exclusive (one or other, not > both, can be supported) or totally incompatible with a > single-core-only OS (e.g. EIST). The really heavyweight stuff would > need an entire team of professionals, though, and we just don't have > the means to attract them. Since you *have* Linux, BSD, and even Windows, which support all that out of the box, why should anyone *bother*? ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
