On Wed, Sep 25, 2019 at 8:02 AM ZB <zbigniew2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2019 at 12:05:04AM -0700, Ralf Quint wrote:
>
> > These are two totally different worlds! The only way you could get FreeDOS
> > to run on a RPi is after installing one of the default Linux versions to
> > install QEMU, which is an x86 emulator and install FreeDOS within that
> > virtual machine. Again, FreeDOS can NEVER run natively on a RPi...
>
> With DOS it would mean too much work - but I believe a group of determined
> coders could be able to port, say, CP/M. Of course it would be "CP/M-like"
> OS for RPi rather than "strict port"
And who, precisely, would do this?
This is another instance of stuff that has come up before, with a
desire for support for things that didn't exist when DOS was still
sold and supported. It might be theoretically *possible* to do it,
but the folks with that level of skill will be professional developers
who get *paid* for writing code. I don't see folks who *can* do it
investing the time and effort for free, when the time and effort could
be applied to work they got paid for.
> Why would they do that? To create much simpler OS for RPI than Linux. Who
> needs that whole complexity on such little SBC? CP/M would do just fine.
No, it wouldn't. Digital Research developed CP/M as an OS for 8 bit
micros like the Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80. They were single tasking
CPUs supporting a whopping *64K* of address space. OS, applications,
and data all had to fit into 64K.
The Raspberry Pi uses an ARM Cortex CPU, with a 32bit address space
and a multi-core design. It can run a full multi-user, multitasking
OS like Linux, and does. And ARM CPUs are often used in Internet of
Things devices. The critical point is the the CPU can run a full
TCP-IP networking stack, and become a node *on* the Internet. A
second critical point is the the costs of such CPUs have dropped to
the point where you *can* affordably use something like a a 32bit ARM
CPU in an embedded device.
Who needs that complexity on such a little SBC? We do. You can
actually run a full Linux distro and Linux apps on a form factor the
size of a cigarette pack, and people are. Everything gets smaller,
faster, and cheaper, and what can be done expands in consequence.
CP/M is *too* simple, designed to work on vastly less powerful
hardware. As an example, early versions of DOS supported Ctrl-Z as
an EOF marker. This was inherited from CP/M, because up till CP/M
3.0, the *size* of a file was not specified in a directory entry. The
OS needed a marker to indicate where the file *ended* when it was
being loaded from disk. IIRC, it wasn't till MSDOS 5 that that
"feature" was deprecated and I could stop trying to tell things like
editors that an embedded ^Z was *not* an EOF marker.
And even if $DEITY works a miracle and someone appears to port CP/M to
the ARM architecture, then what do you do? What will run under it?
Who will port existing CP/M applications to ARM as well, or write new
ones?
If you are savvy enough to try to get FreeDOS running under an
emulator like QEMU on a Raspbery Pi, that "simplicity" of CP/M doesn't
buy you anything.
> As Chuck Moore (Forth creator) once said: "most computer operating systems
> devolving to caveman interfaces ("point at the pretty pictures and grunt")"
And there are folks who want to do precisely that. Those aren't *my*
use cases, but so what? Computers are tools people use to do work or
play. I don't get to decide whether their uses are acceptable, and
wouldn't want to if I could.
> regards,
> Zbigniew
______
Dennis
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