Hi, On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Charles Belhumeur <chbelhumeur2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm thinking more and more there's no big niche for FreeDos.
The niche is running legacy software from ye olde days (or similar). > Too many problems trying to get it to do the tasks people > want to do on their boxes these days, surf the web, play media and > games. It all takes sophisticated hardware and Intel chips in real > mode just aren't good with the new hardware. > > I think the mistake LINUX and Windows make these days is loading every > damn driver on the hard drive at boot time and all these other > processes like clipboards, print spoolers, caches etc. Then wankers > who write apps with background update processes and the like. In fairness, I think FreeBSD can customize most things like that in /etc/rc.conf (or whatever). It's got a relatively small footprint and doesn't even come with X11 (installed) by default. Though I haven't tried 10.0 yet. (FYI, I don't think DOSEMU works there anymore, dunno, but BOCHS or similar should be supported via ports.) > Were I to design an OS these days I'd likely go with a 32 or 64 bit > version of a DOS or VAX like OS and design it from the start to be > configurable for different tasks. Keep it simple and load only what's > needed with better integration of the pieces. > > It all boils down to this What do people want to do with their boxes? > Will this OS make it easier simpler for them to do it? A year ago, you humorously said, "I always point out Einstein to the wankers." And I mentioned Oberon. Well, let me quote from Wirth's latest report: http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Oberon/Oberon07.Report.pdf " The Programming Language Oberon Revision 1.10.2013 / 10.3.2014 Niklaus Wirth Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. (A. Einstein) " And the reason I mention this is because he just turned 80, and yet he still updated his _Project Oberon_ book (OS + compiler) to use Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA with his own custom "RISC" processor. http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html Since you like simplicity, you'll probably like looking at that (though I admit to not having tried it myself yet, though I see there's a third-party RISC emulator for running atop Windows now). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Put Bad Developers to Shame Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
