28 May
2024
28 May
'24
3:23 p.m.
From: ben <bfranchuk(a)jetnet.ab.ca>
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: [cctalk] Re: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
The third thing is a real OS. Nobody has one, as a
personal computer.
CP/M and MSDOS does not handle IRQ's. Unix for the PDP-11 is real
operating system but not personal as it requires a admin,and a
swapping media.
This an auld refrain among *nix partisans of the ESR type, but I've yet
to hear someone offer up a real defense of it. Even putting aside what
"handles IRQs" means here (yes, strictly speaking the IRQs on the IBM
PC are handled by the BIOS and/or add-on drivers/utilties, but DOS most
certainly makes use of the facilities provided,) why does that make it
"not a real OS?" What does PDP-11 Unix provide which MS-DOS doesn't to
make one "real" and the other not?
Certainly, nothing about a single-tasking single-user text-based
environment *requires* interrupt-based I/O, even if it may smooth out
performance in some aspects. And there's little if any call for a
security system that'd require an administrator account in such a
model; if one user "owns" the machine, whatever they decide to do to it
can be Considered Legitimate. Virtual-memory capability may certainly
enable the user to do more than they'd otherwise be able to, but it's
hard to make an argument for it as a *requirement;* even *nix can run
without swap, and in point of fact DOS can be support virtual memory
with a protected-mode extender.
Or is it multi-tasking capability itself that makes the difference?
Can't see why that should be the case; it's definitely convenient, but
as one person can only be doing so much at any given time, it's also
hard to see that as a *requirement.*
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and why?
28 May
28 May
3:38 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On May 28, 2024, at 3:24 PM, John via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
From: ben <bfranchuk(a)jetnet.ab.ca>
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org
Subject: [cctalk] Re: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
Is RT-11 a "real operating system"? What about RT-11 SJ? I would consider it
to be one.
For that matter, what about OS/360 PCP? That's a single task OS, just like RT-11 SJ
only much less efficient.
Is FIG-FORTH an OS? What about POLYFORTH or ZeptoFORTH?
The picture gets particularly muddled when you look at RTOS. For example, it's well
known in hard real-time OS that using interrupts is not necessarily a good plan. A very
successful storage system I worked on ran on a dual core MIPS system. One core ran
NetBSD; the other ran a home-grown RTOS called QRQ that used a polling loop (and no
priorities) rather than interrupts. The benefit of such a design is that its time bounds
are easy to establish, unlike interrupt driven systems where that is certainly harder and
not always possible at all.
I'd say an OS is a software system that runs on bare metal (or equivalent, like a VM)
and offers a set of services intended to make creating and running applications easier.
In that sense, RT-11 SJ or OS/360 PCP are operating systems, just as Linux is. QRQ is on
the edge (it's written for a single application). Similarly, I would not call
FIG-FORTH an OS, nor those other FORTH systems, though admittedly it's also a bit
fuzzy.
paul
The third thing is a real OS. Nobody has one, as
a personal computer.
CP/M and MSDOS does not handle IRQ's. Unix for the PDP-11 is real
operating system but not personal as it requires a admin,and a
swapping media.
This an auld refrain among *nix partisans of the ESR type, but I've yet
to hear someone offer up a real defense of it. Even putting aside what
"handles IRQs" means here (yes, strictly speaking the IRQs on the IBM
PC are handled by the BIOS and/or add-on drivers/utilties, but DOS most
certainly makes use of the facilities provided,) why does that make it
"not a real OS?" What does PDP-11 Unix provide which MS-DOS doesn't to
make one "real" and the other not?
Certainly, nothing about a single-tasking single-user text-based
environment *requires* interrupt-based I/O, even if it may smooth out
performance in some aspects. ...
Or is it multi-tasking capability itself that makes the difference?
Can't see why that should be the case; it's definitely convenient, but
as one person can only be doing so much at any given time, it's also
hard to see that as a *requirement.*
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and why? 
5:49 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
Paul, you said:/
/
/I'd say an OS is a software system that runs on bare metal (or
equivalent, like a VM) and offers a set of services intended to make
creating and running applications easier. In that sense, RT-11 SJ or
OS/360 PCP are operating systems, just as Linux is. QRQ is on the edge
(it's written for a single application). Similarly, I would not call
FIG-FORTH an OS, nor those other FORTH systems, though admittedly it's
also a bit fuzzy. /
If the file system and basic I/O functions drivers are in ROM what is the difference
between a BIOS and an Operating System.
Technically speaking, for some, the BIOS offers a hardware abstraction level to some more
generic software that runs on top. BIOS means Basic Input Output System. Is that
restricted to the console only? Some systems run their entire "Operating
System" out of ROM?
Let's take a very simple computer, the HP-41C Calculator. The internal 12K or ROM
handled all of the keypad I/O, display I/O, math functions and programming functions.
Each device added contained all of it's drivers in ROM. There was never an
"Operating System" to load but with additonal hardware/software modules even
reading and writing to floppy disks and mini data cassettes was supported. The 12K main
ROM and how the expansion hardware/ROM integrated into it was definitely an operating
system.
On the IBM-PC most boards (that were not just multi I/O or RAM boards) came with their own
drivers in ROM as well and were even called bios extensions. The big difference between
the PC and the HP-41C that the PC needed to load the file system handler (and others as
time when on) from disk to run. Whereas the HP-41C never needed to "bootstrap"
from some kind of media.
By your definition many BIOS's are really operating systems. And if I really want to
pick nits, what you defined as an Operating System is really an application that uses the
BIOS Operating System. Yes, I know, not all BIOS's have enough functionality to
qualify as an operating system.
To spark even further debate, does an operating system require file system capabilities.
Many do not. This furthers my supposition that the BIOS is really the operating system
and what you are calling an operating system is merely an application using the BIOS API
for the required services.🙂
My comments are not intended to inflame but rather to cause further discussion.
On 5/28/2024 2:38 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On May 28, 2024, at 3:24 PM, John via
cctalk<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
From: ben<bfranchuk(a)jetnet.ab.ca>
To:cctalk@classiccmp.org
Subject: [cctalk] Re: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
Is RT-11 a "real operating system"? What about RT-11 SJ? I would
consider it to be one.
For that matter, what about OS/360 PCP? That's a single task OS, just like RT-11 SJ
only much less efficient.
Is FIG-FORTH an OS? What about POLYFORTH or ZeptoFORTH?
The picture gets particularly muddled when you look at RTOS. For example, it's well
known in hard real-time OS that using interrupts is not necessarily a good plan. A very
successful storage system I worked on ran on a dual core MIPS system. One core ran
NetBSD; the other ran a home-grown RTOS called QRQ that used a polling loop (and no
priorities) rather than interrupts. The benefit of such a design is that its time bounds
are easy to establish, unlike interrupt driven systems where that is certainly harder and
not always possible at all.
I'd say an OS is a software system that runs on bare metal (or equivalent, like a VM)
and offers a set of services intended to make creating and running applications easier.
In that sense, RT-11 SJ or OS/360 PCP are operating systems, just as Linux is. QRQ is on
the edge (it's written for a single application). Similarly, I would not call
FIG-FORTH an OS, nor those other FORTH systems, though admittedly it's also a bit
fuzzy.
paul
The third thing is a real OS. Nobody has one, as
a personal computer.
CP/M and MSDOS does not handle IRQ's. Unix for the PDP-11 is real
operating system but not personal as it requires a admin,and a
swapping media.
This an auld refrain among *nix partisans of the ESR type, but I've yet
to hear someone offer up a real defense of it. Even putting aside what
"handles IRQs" means here (yes, strictly speaking the IRQs on the IBM
PC are handled by the BIOS and/or add-on drivers/utilties, but DOS most
certainly makes use of the facilities provided,) why does that make it
"not a real OS?" What does PDP-11 Unix provide which MS-DOS doesn't to
make one "real" and the other not?
Certainly, nothing about a single-tasking single-user text-based
environment *requires* interrupt-based I/O, even if it may smooth out
performance in some aspects. ...
Or is it multi-tasking capability itself that makes the difference?
Can't see why that should be the case; it's definitely convenient, but
as one person can only be doing so much at any given time, it's also
hard to see that as a *requirement.*
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and why?
7:39 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On May 28, 2024, at 5:49 PM, Mike Katz
<bitwiz(a)12bitsbest.com> wrote:
Paul, you said:
I'd say an OS is a software system that runs on bare metal (or equivalent, like a
VM) and offers a set of services intended to make creating and running applications
easier. In that sense, RT-11 SJ or OS/360 PCP are operating systems, just as Linux is.
QRQ is on the edge (it's written for a single application). Similarly, I would not
call FIG-FORTH an OS, nor those other FORTH systems, though admittedly it's also a bit
fuzzy.
If the file system and basic I/O functions drivers are in ROM what is the difference
between a BIOS and an Operating System.
Technically speaking, for some, the BIOS offers a hardware abstraction level to some more
generic software that runs on top. BIOS means Basic Input Output System. Is that
restricted to the console only? Some systems run their entire "Operating
System" out of ROM?
Well, sure. The memory used is irrelevant to what the software does (other than
details like mutability, so if you have ROM you have to separate the R/W data from the
rest, while if it's all in RAM that isn't necessary). Operating systems have been
found in ROM, RAM, drums, tapes, and any number of other memory devices.
Let's take a very simple computer, the HP-41C
Calculator. The internal 12K or ROM handled all of the keypad I/O, display I/O, math
functions and programming functions. Each device added contained all of it's drivers
in ROM. There was never an "Operating System" to load but with additonal
hardware/software modules even reading and writing to floppy disks and mini data cassettes
was supported. The 12K main ROM and how the expansion hardware/ROM integrated into it was
definitely an operating system.
On the IBM-PC most boards (that were not just multi I/O or RAM boards) came with their
own drivers in ROM as well and were even called bios extensions. The big difference
between the PC and the HP-41C that the PC needed to load the file system handler (and
others as time when on) from disk to run. Whereas the HP-41C never needed to
"bootstrap" from some kind of media.
By your definition many BIOS's are really operating systems. And if I really want to
pick nits, what you defined as an Operating System is really an application that uses the
BIOS Operating System. Yes, I know, not all BIOS's have enough functionality to
qualify as an operating system.
A BIOS is more likely a helper, providing bootstrap services and some I/O support.
That goes back to the first BIOS, around 1958 in the Electrologica X-1. In fact,
that's an interesting one: it was written by Dijkstra as his Ph.D. project to abstract
the then very new and daunting problem of dealing with interrupts. The BIOS would do
this, and other code could then use those APIs to do I/O more easily without worrying
about asynchronous pain.
It also contained a simpler assembler/loader as well as operator console services.
To spark even further debate, does an operating system
require file system capabilities. Many do not. This furthers my supposition that the
BIOS is really the operating system and what you are calling an operating system is merely
an application using the BIOS API for the required services.🙂
Does something need file system features to be an OS? Certainly not. Many RTOS
have plenty of stuff in them to be judged an OS without much debate, yet are used in
embedded products where a file system is not needed.
For that matter, one of the first and properly famous operating systems, Dijkstra's
THE operating system that gave us semaphores, ring design, and various other things, did
not have a file system.
My comments are not intended to inflame but rather to
cause further discussion.
paul
8:06 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On Tue, 28 May 2024, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
"DOS est omnis divisa in partes tres: BIOS, BDOS, Command processor"
In CP/M, MS-DOS, there are three layers of the OS,
BIOS is the hardware management layer.
It consists of ROM(s), supplemented by files loaded at boot time (IO.SYS
or IBMBIO.COM) ROM VS disk file(s) is irrelevant; Poqet (MS-DOS 5.00) and
Atari Portfolio (Atari imitation MS-DOS) put the entire OS in ROM.
Different hardware requires a different BIOS, but not necessarily changes
in the upper layers.
BIOS also includes the initial layer of the bootstrap code, that loads
the boot sector of the disk into RAM and sends control to it.
BDOS is the file management layer, and the central/core layer of the OS
(MSDOS.SYS or IBMDOS.COM)
Many BDOS functions (Int 21h) call BIOS functions.
Command processor (COMMAND.COM) communicates with the user, parsing
commands, rendering messages, launching programs, and calling functions in
BDOS.
In theory, all communication between user and OS or hardware is through
COMMAND.COM, or running application programs.
In actuality, "going through channels" as a "well behaved program"
isn't
adequate performance, so many/most prograams bypass one or more layers of
the OS.
MS-DOS/PC-DOS documentation included explanation of what was required to
write your own replacement for COMMAND.COM!
Windows 1x, 2x, 3x took over the functions of COMMAND.COM.
Windows NT, 9x, etc. blurred the boundaries of the layers.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
If the file
system and basic I/O functions drivers are in ROM what is the difference between a BIOS
and an Operating System.
Technically speaking, for some, the BIOS offers a hardware abstraction level to some more
generic software that runs on top. BIOS means Basic Input Output System. Is that
restricted to the console only? Some systems run their entire "Operating
System" out of ROM?
Well, sure. The memory used is irrelevant to what the
software does (other than details like mutability, so if you have ROM you have to separate
the R/W data from the rest, while if it's all in RAM that isn't necessary).
Operating systems have been found in ROM, RAM, drums, tapes, and any number of other
memory devices.
Let's take a very simple computer, the HP-41C
Calculator. The internal 12K or ROM handled all of the keypad I/O, display I/O, math
functions and programming functions. Each device added contained all of it's drivers
in ROM. There was never an "Operating System" to load but with additonal
hardware/software modules even reading and writing to floppy disks and mini data cassettes
was supported. The 12K main ROM and how the expansion hardware/ROM integrated into it was
definitely an operating system.
. . .
By your definition many BIOS's are really
operating systems. And if I really want to pick nits, what you defined as an Operating
System is really an application that uses the BIOS Operating System. Yes, I know, not all
BIOS's have enough functionality to qualify as an operating system.
A BIOS is
more likely a helper, providing bootstrap services and some I/O support. That goes back
to the first BIOS, around 1958 in the Electrologica X-1. In fact, that's an
interesting one: it was written by Dijkstra as his Ph.D. project to abstract the then very
new and daunting problem of dealing with interrupts. The BIOS would do this, and other
code could then use those APIs to do I/O more easily without worrying about asynchronous
pain.
5:44 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On Tue, 28 May 2024, John via cctalk wrote:
Even putting aside what
"handles IRQs" means here (yes, strictly speaking the IRQs on the IBM
PC are handled by the BIOS and/or add-on drivers/utilties, but DOS most
certainly makes use of the facilities provided,)
Installed add-on drivers/utilities become part of the OS.
BIOS??!?
"DOS est omnis divisa in partes tres: BIOS, BDOS, Command processor"
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and
WHY?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
7:29 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On 2024-05-28 1:23 p.m., John via cctalk wrote:
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System, and
why?
I am grumpy about OS's like MSDOS, in that programs kept by passing
DOS to handle screen, and serial IO.
I also favor OS's that don't require one to build a file control block.
7:44 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
> So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating System,
and why?
On Tue, 28 May 2024, ben via cctalk wrote:
I am grumpy about OS's like MSDOS, in that
programs kept by passing
DOS to handle screen, and serial IO.
I also favor OS's that don't require one to build a file control block.
Is it not "Real", if it is just crappy?
It was possible to handle screen through MS-DOS, or using ANS.SYS, but,
you had to go below DOS to the BIOS, or even direct to hardware to get
acceptable performance.
MS-DOS 1.xx used CP/M-like File Control Blocks, and the Program Segment
Prefix contained the content of the command line (at 80h), and unopened
FCBs parsed from the first two command line arguments, at 5Ch and 6Ch
BUT,
MS-DOS 2.xx still had all of that, but implemented unix-like file handles,
so programming could be done without requiring one to build a File Control
Block.
Is it not "Real", if it is just crappy?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
7:45 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On 5/28/24 16:29, ben via cctalk wrote:
On 2024-05-28 1:23 p.m., John via cctalk wrote:
Do you mean like MSDOS (later functions use file handles, not FCBs)?
Been like that since about DOS 2.0...
--Chuck
.
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating
System, and why?
I am grumpy about OS's like MSDOS, in that programs kept by passing
DOS to handle screen, and serial IO.
I also favor OS's that don't require one to build a file control block.
8:02 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On 2024-05-28 5:45 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 5/28/24 16:29, ben via cctalk wrote:
True, but serial IO was never fixed to my knowledge to use interrupts.
On 2024-05-28 1:23 p.m., John via cctalk wrote:
Do you mean like MSDOS (later functions use file handles, not FCBs)?
Been like that since about DOS 2.0...
--Chuck
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating
System, and why?
I am grumpy about OS's like MSDOS, in that programs kept by passing
DOS to handle screen, and serial IO.
I also favor OS's that don't require one to build a file control block.
8:13 p.m.
New subject: terminology [was: First Personal Computer]
On 5/28/24 17:02, ben via cctalk wrote:
On 2024-05-28 5:45 p.m., Chuck Guzis via cctalk
wrote:
There were several device drivers that hooked the BIOS interrupt and
used interrupt servicing. Lots of comm programs simply internalized the
serial i/O driver code, just like the screen display code.
No big deal
--Chuck
On 5/28/24 16:29, ben via cctalk wrote:
True, but serial IO was never fixed to my knowledge to use interrupts. On 2024-05-28 1:23 p.m., John via cctalk wrote:
Do you mean like MSDOS (later functions use file handles, not FCBs)?
Been like that since about DOS 2.0...
--Chuck
So what, then, consitutes a Real Operating
System, and why?
I am grumpy about OS's like MSDOS, in that programs kept by passing
DOS to handle screen, and serial IO.
I also favor OS's that don't require one to build a file control block.
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10 comments
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participants (6)
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