Re: OT: hard drive limits Q

Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Mon, 25 Dec 2006 17:56:37 GMT) it happened "Michael A.
Terrell" <mike.terrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<459010EF.B82A252A@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (25 Dec 2006 10:25:38 GMT) it happened jasen
<jasen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <emo8v2$v2s$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

On 2006-12-24, Michael A. Terrell <mike.terrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:

Just give up on MS DOS, it is of the past.


What if he needs it to run legacy software or hardware? Then Linux
won't do a damn thing for him.

that depends on the hardware most mainstream stuff and popular specialist
stuff is supported.

Bye.
Jasen

Well he should just set aside an old 486 and small HD for true MS DOS.
Hell, people are still using reindeer too, while anyone who can buy so many
presents should have a 747.

But truly MS DOS (or DR DOS) is quite dead, do not use it on a new system.
Today I just did read Vista is full of fatal holes too.
Installed new firefox on Linux yesterday, seems to work OK.
(That is an important security fix).



Yeah, its dead, till you have to use an EISA card that only runs
under DOS 5.0, or an automated test system that only runs under windows
2.0 because it would cost several hundred thousand dollars to replace
the dedicated hardware.

One of my jobs in the 80ties was to design ISA cards for the IBM PC.
Would you believe some drivers were simply originally written in BASIC,
to do the IO, and then when all worked translated by the programming team
to asm....
All on MS DOS of course.
I am not 100% sure, here is the whole source code issue again, yes if
you have no source you are stuck porting the soft.
If the hardware uses only ISA cards... hey I have a Tyan mobo
with 1 (one) ISA card and the rest PCI and AGP (lookup Tyan S2390B).
but MSDOS will _not_ boot from it with a 120GB harddisk.
But I still use it with an old ISA video card :-)


We still had stock of some very early programmable logic chips, and
the programmer wouldn't run on anything faster than a first generation
XT. The programming times were counted down from the system clock, so
faster boards didn't blow all the fuses, no matter how many times you
tried. They ahd another advantage. The old machines had no NICs, and
only had 5.25" floppy drives, so people couldn't bring an infected disk
in and corrupt the computer.


There is a time were redesign is needed, I have protested myself in the past,
but you cannot stop it.
Say NASA could rebuild Apollo for the moon trip.... from the old drawings.
But they made a new designs and senbd some people to peek at the museums how
Apollo (Von Braun) did it.
This is really true.
The old parts cannot be made, the old electrical systems are no longer
available etc..
If you play that right you can design the new system! Write the new drivers
and / or applications.


the automated test software that ran under windows 2.0 was written by
another company for their in-house use. They lost a lawsuit for patent
and design infringement. As part of the settlement, they were allowed to
continue to sell their product, but the company I worked for was to take
over the manufacturing, since it was basically our designs. They shipped
the test computer and interface cards with a list of the required GPIB
interfaced test equipment, but failed to deliver the source code for the
software, or information on the programmable logic used for the
interface cards. It would have required more time and money to reverse
engineer and build a newer system than it was worth. We only made a few
dozen radios to finish the contract, then one or two a year as spares
for previous customers. The rest of the time it was used for
troubleshooting field returns built by the first OEM. The entire
product line was handled by one tech, and one assembler, part time.


It is all a dynamic thing, things keep changing.
Old things will no longer be made (like 8GB harddisks), so here is an
other case for full open source so things can be ported to newer environments.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
.

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