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3 Nerd-Its
RE: Then Everything Must Be Free
I didn't know that - I thought IBM had it's own brand of DOS. There were dozens of DOS's running around for awhile.
yeah check it out
How the empire was built on DOS alone is quite amazing.
Actually, its quite simple...DOS was sold to businesses. People went to work and used this crappy OS for 8 hours. Naturally, when the desktop interface came out, they wanted an interface they were used to...thats why everyone keeps saying silly things like, "Mac's aren't compatible with anything!" and "Macs are too hard to figure out, and use." People are drones, and they're drawn to go towards what they're used to. That doesn't make it right though.
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RE: Then Everything Must Be Free
Bill Gates signed a contract with IBM that put a copy of DOS on every computer on their assembly line.
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/pc.html I didn't know that - I thought IBM had it's own brand of DOS. There were dozens of DOS's running around for awhile. And once loaded, most programs didn't even need it aside from needing to access the filesystem easily. But even then, a lot of programmers resorted to calling BIOS interrupts instead of DOS's 21h interrupt.
To which I see the point that ...
I contest that Microsoft should never have existed...
When I began assembly programming on the hardware (pre-Win95) I really didn't see the point of DOS at all. How the empire was built on DOS alone is quite amazing. And people used to think "Oh! DOS 6.22 is so much better than DOS 6."
A prime example of software not relying on DOS were games. A lot of games utilized their own memory extensions or used the Flat Memory model to access the RAM above 1MB. As soon as that happened, DOS was as useless as the BIOS. Remember having to customize each game to the soundcard?
I think a lot of the interfaces that exist now (like DirectX or OpenGL) should not be software interfaces as much as they should be firmware interfaces. Then you have a plug 'n play system where the processor on board the hardware interprets what the code wants. The problem is getting hardware vendors to want to do that. It's been shown before that graphics cards would cheat in benchmarks by making use of the CPU and having the drivers do some of the work instead of strictly the GPU.
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