On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:10 AM Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 23:37, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC > > v20 CPU. The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better > > microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup. It had 640K RAM and two Seagate > > ST-225 MFM HDs. I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another > > megabyte of RAM. AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk, > > 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could > > use it. (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used > > apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things > > that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up > > Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could map unused video RAM > > to DOS. I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be > > mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM. > > Performance was acceptable, thank you. > > That sounds like a *very* seriously tricked-out XT-class machine! Wow!
I had fun with it. I had a Unix machine at home before I got the XT clone. I was Tech Support Manager for a small Unix systems house that resold AT&T kit when AT&T was in the computer business, and an AT&T 3B1 joined the family. The 3B1 was the beefier sibling of the UNIX-PC, an early attempt at a single user Unix workstation. It had a 10mhz Motorola 68010 CPU, with up to 4MB RAM (mine had 3.5MB) and a 72MB MFM HD. It ran Unix System V Release 2. There was a well crafted GUI called FACE that could be used on the mono console (and a character mode version that could run on attached terminals. The keyboard had a variety of special keys that did things when pressed. One of the things I wanted was compatibility between apps I used on the 3B1 and on the PC. I was able to compile Daniel LAwrence's MicroEMACS "out of the box" for the 3B1, and had fun writing an ME macro that examined KB input and would do the appropriate things when I pressed one of the special keys. Because I started as a Unix guy, I wanted to make the XT clone look as much like a Unix machine as possible. (I also got my SO a 3B1, and she thought DOS was a brain damaged Unix. Well, yes. As of DOS 2.X, MS adopted a hierarchical file system, tree structured directories, I/O redirection and other Unix concepts, but implemented thyem very differently.) After looking at an assortment of freeware and shareware versions of Unix commands, I bought a commercial package called the MKS Toolkit. The toolkit was a product of Mortice Kern Systems in Canada. They were consulting engineers who wrote it originally for internal use, and released it as a product when it was sufficiently developed. It became the tail that wagged the dog, and their principal business. The toolkit implemented full versions of all Unix commands that made sense in a single user, single tasking environment. The selling point for me were complete versions of the Unix vi editor and Korn shell. (The Korn shell had everything save asynchronous background processes because DOS didn't *do* that.) Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, when the PC was booted, CONFIG.SYS got processed. It loaded the RAMdisk, cache and mouse drivers that were common to everything. But instead of COMMAND.COM as a boot shell, the Toolkit's INIT.EXE was loaded. INIT printed Login: on my screen. Enter a userid and (optional) password and INIT called LOGIN. LOGIN looked for the ID in a Unix compatible /etc/passwd file. IF it found a match, it changed to whatever directory was specified as that ID's home directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's shell I had IDs that ran the Korr shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, and DesqView. Exit those programs and INIT was reloaded. I could switch environments *without* rebooting. When I was booted into the Korn shell, you had to dig a bit to discover you *weren't* on an Honest-to $DEITY Unix machine. (And I was able to craft an equivalent of the Unix lp print spooler using the DOS print command and Korn shell scripts and aliases.) The Toolkit stayed in use when I got a 386 and started running Win 3.1. The shell for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but you could substitute something else. What was used was defined in the SYSTEM.INI file. I had custom SYSTEM.INI files to run different shells, and Toolkit IDs that copied them over the real one so Win3.1 ran the one I wanted to use. But because Win3.1 was a multi-tasking shell on top of DOS, I could choose not to run it, and boot into COMMAND.COM, 4DOS, DV, or the Korn shell. Lots of fun while it lasted. > MS OSes were always a work thing for me. My own computers went > Sinclair -> Amstrad PCW (the last new CP/M computer) -> Acorn > Archimedes. Right. You were in the UK. I'm aware of the stuff you ran, but never have a chance to play with it here. > For £800 – probably under $1500 at the time – I had an 8MHZ RISC > computer with 1MB of flat unsegmented RAM in 1989. And none was used > for the OS, because it ran from ROM chips. Er, the OS might actually reside on ROM chips, but I assume there was at least some RAM usage when calling OS functions. The OS might be in ROM, but OS routines would need scratch space in RAM. (And the DR DOS variant of DOS originated from requests by Digital Research customers for a ROMmable DOS. MS had not seperated code space and data space, so MSDOS c0uld not be put in ROM. DR DOS could.) > When my Archimedes died, I got a 486DX 50MHz notebook -- not a DX/2, > just DX -- and I ran OS/2 2.0 on it. Even though it only had 8MB of > RAM, it ran well. I have OS/2 here, but never got to install it on anything. OS/2 was technically superior to Win3.1, and could still be found in kiosk applications not that long back. I had OS/2 Warp on a specialized telephony server at an employer. It was a black box. It just ran. If it hung, reboot it. I never had to dig into OS/2 itself. I had 8MB on the 386 running Win3.1, watched my Unix machine run rings around it, and looked at Redmond, WA, and said "What are you *doing*?" I still say that on occasion. > > The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an > > automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz. It has 20GB RAM, and boots and runs > > from a 256B PAnasonic SSD. Performance is lovely. There are faster > > machine out there, but since I'm not doing things like heavy video > > editing or compiling a large application from a source tree, it's > > more than adequate for what I do. > > That is a pretty good spec! O_o There are bigger, faster boxes out there. A friend who is an architect at an ISP talks about machines using nVME being "wicked fast". So they are, but you get a machine specced to use it with it pre-installed. Everything I've seen says "Good luck on trying to upgrade to it after the fact on older kit." The fascinating bit for me is that the distinction between RAM and disk is steadily blurring. Things like nVME make it possible to have what works like RAM but is non-volatile storage whose content will survive a reboot. We are just scratching the surface here. > Yes, I find that since the point at which quad-core CPUs were > affordable, performance no longer matters much. I buy used kit if > possible, mostly laptops now, according to things like keyboard > quality and screen resolution. So long as it has, say, a Core i5 and > enough RAM or the RAM is cheap to add, it will do. I still have some > Core 2 machines in use; they're fine for light use, despite being over > a decade old. Most consumer machines, as mentioned, are I/O bound, not compute bound. And hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper. My desktop was a refurbished, off lease, ex-corporate workstation. It came with quad-core CPU, 16MB RAM, and 256GB SSD as purchased. It cost me $250. I added a coupel of SATA HDs for local storage, and dongles to add WiFi and Bluetooth. IT Just Runs, is a pleasure to use, and can cold boot to a Win10 desktop in about a minute. Windows Updates are painless because the system won't be unavailable very long when they get applied. > Koomey's Law has truly supplanted Moore's Law now. Indeed. Moore never really intended it to be a law, only an observation, and we are approaching physical limits on what can be done. (Can you say "Quantum Tunneling?" :-p) > Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
