From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ches@cheswick.com (William Cheswick) Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 08:47:01 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] MS-DOS In-Reply-To: References: <0f57f9d8248db61cba34372814d2f45e.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> <2c674075-db86-827b-fd97-30921757e9ae@aueb.gr> Message-ID: <7C35A731-84A0-4B9F-AEE6-8D9D1A06B315@cheswick.com> >>​...​why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS? ​>I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed then and still do). MS-DOS was a better choice at the time than Unix. It had to fit on floppies, and was very simple. “Unix is a system administrations nightmare” — dmr Actually, MS-DOS was a runtime system, not an operating system, despite the last two letters of its name. This is a term of art lost to antiquity. Run time systems offered a minimum of features: a loader, a file system, a crappy, built-in shell, I/O for keyboards, tape, screens, crude memory management, etc. No multiuser, no network stacks, no separate processes (mostly). DEC had several (RT11, RSTS, RSX) and the line is perhaps a little fuzzy: they were getting operating-ish. It all had to fit on a floppy (do I remember correctly that the original floppyies, SSSD, were 90KB?), run flight simulator and some business apps. MSDOS lasted a decade, and served the PC world well, for all its crapiness. Win 3.1 was an attempt at an OS, and Win 95 an actual one, with a network stack and everything. >I agree with 90% of what he says, but not about Algol 68. He obviously >has a strong preference for small languages: it would be interesting >to see his uncensored opinions of C++, the Godzilla of our day as Ada I’d be astonished if he had anything good at all to say about C++. He’s still around…you could ask him...