Hi people:
I'm new to the whole FreeDos intitiative. If I might be allowed to add my
two cents. I'm working on an application for bioinformatics research. The
search for the best OS for this led me to FreeDos. Although I did end up
on picking Windows XP SP3 for the large user base and significant work to
date debugging the OS. I nixed FreeDos because the gene sequence files are
too massive, some in the area of 300 GB.
The problem with Windows and LINUX for science work is they're kind of like
the family station wagon. Trying to be all things to everyone. Maybe
even worse they my be an RV monster will all the amenities including the
kitchen sink. This makes these OSs too big, glitchy and they require far
too much maintenance and support. All of which gets in the way of
scientific work and adds layers of needless difficulty for scientific
workers. The biologists who do grad studies in bioinformatics seem to have
a bad time with all the arcana. It stalls their careers and research for
at least two years. Cures for diseases and death for all us are similarly
stalled by the overcomplicated IT.
UNIX was originally multi-user on a single box. That's the root of its
multi-tasking capacity. I'm not so sure adapting this architecture to
single user multi-tasking was a good idea and may be at the root of some
problems with LINUX. The need to mount and unmount media is a real
dinosaur relic in this plug and play era.
When I was a student we had these HP workstations based on Motorola chips.
The ones I used had an OS based on Berkeley BASIC. They were powerful,
single tasking, big disks, lots of RAM in flat memory model, rock solid and
spit simple to use. In many ways ideal boxes for scientific and
engineering work. The Rocky Mountain BASIC compiler was spit easy for
application developers. No need to malloc, compartmentalize like C++
conventions and so on. Just DIM and use the standard BASIC conventions. I
knew engineers who wrote a complete GUI under this scheme in a few months.
I've often thought these modern Intel boxes had the potential to be similar
platforms with the right OS. That's why FreeDos caught my eye. I think
there's a niche with big potential for FreeDos in science and engineering
work. My advice would be, and I don't say this lightly since I know what's
involved, bite the bullet, write whatever it takes to give users full
access to all the RAM and disk space under a DOS style interface. It only
has to be done right once and it will open up a lot of potential on these
boxes to a wide user base.
You may want to approach these people http://www.htbasic.com/ with the
possibility of porting their compiler to FreeDos. This is the modern
version of the BASIC of the old HP workstations.
The old HP workstations had an interesting feature in their graphics
hardware. They didn't have separate text and graphic modes. No need for
switching. You could dump graphics and text to the same screen in its
single mode. This was a very nice feature for app developers. HTBAsic
still supports this.
Finally I'd like to comment on "The Wankers". There's wankers all over
science and engineering, especially in IT, who think making things
complicated and arcane makes them look like geniuses. F**k No! The whole
thrust of science is to simplify complicated phenomena into principles
everyone can understand and use. I always point out Einstein to the
wankers. They hate that sh*t! The UNIX/LINUX crowd seem especially prone
to "wankeritus". (F**k I really hate the wankers after all these decades
in science and engineering!)
The whole FreeDos initiative seems to be a group of people who get this. I
can't tell you how refreshing and novel this is after 30 years of watching
the simple basic functions of IT get twisted into the overcomplicated mess
we now have. Keep it up people! Well done! Do whatever it takes to crack
into a significant user base. I think the time is right, the need is there.
Charlie Belhumeur
(Anybody remember VAX-VMS?)
On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 3:21 AM, Steve Nickolas <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Apr 2013, Rugxulo wrote:
>
> > There is almost no practical way to avoid such things. Everything will
> > be obsolete eventually (some sooner than others, even if still
> > useful).
> >
> > What can we do? Roll our own BIOS? Fab our own 486 cpu clones? Or just
> > live inside (buggy, hopefully soon-to-be-patched) emulators??
>
> I believe the former's been done, but SeaBIOS is a mess.
>
> Perhaps the ideal would be to use SeaBIOS just as a bootstrap and
> implement a superior BIOS in a driver.
>
> -uso.
>
>
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