On 01/31/2012 08:38 PM, Michael ODonnell wrote: > >> Anything old will have its share of historical accidents, to be >> sure. But there's reasonable design failings, and then there's >> design by the infinite monkey method. > You have insulted an infinite number of monkeys. IBM used to > publish the source codes for their BIOS in the little 3-ring > binder full of docs they supplied with each PeeCee. Let's be > charitable and just say that they were clear evidence that > the author(s) had little (if any) experience with assembler > language programming or the 8088 architecture. At best (we > surmised at the time) they were an attempt to more or less > blindly translate fragments of CP/M code from 8080 to 8088. > Naturally, that glop was enshrined as a global standard... We are still living in the shadow of the 8080. Limited registers (even the x86-64). (I learned assembler on the PDP-8 :-) Basically the PC-DOS was a hack in itself. There are many stories about how Digital Research missed the boat there.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
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