6 Dec
2011
6 Dec
'11
8:01 a.m.
On Dec 5, 2011, at 9:41 PM, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
not quite true. OS/2 extended edition included a TCP/IP stack as early
as
v1.1 iirc.
I think that it is fair to include an operating system which has
distinct device drivers for all hardware as having built-in support
for that hardware. For example, support for MSCP (or SCSI)
hard drives first became available under RT-11 around 1985.
Note that DEC itself did not have a SCSI host adapter at the
time - CMD produced a 3rd party Qbus host adapter. But
SCSI hard drives could be used. The other PDP-11 operating
systems each had their DU device drives.
Just because the DU.SYS device driver was a separate file
should not preclude fact that the operating system did not
have built-in support for SCSI hard drives - even though DEC
did not support SCSI hard drive use until the RQZX1 host
adapter many years later.
As far as I know, no PDP-11 operating system had support for SCSI. They may have
supported MSCP drives, and SCSI may have been a popular implementation pathway for MSCP,
but the underlying operating system had no knowledge of anything to do with SCSI. RT-11
will work with an RQDX3 (not a SCSI controller) as well as it will with a CQD-220.
I'm not as familiar with VMS, but I assume it probably had more direct interfaces with
SCSI than just MSCP (totally a guess, though; VAXen and Alpha machines had built-in SCSI
and it seems like it would be prohibitive to build in MSCP-serving hardware just to drive
the SCSI chipsets).
John Willis
wrote:
madodel wrote:
> And what was the first operating system to have builtin support for
> internet access? Did Windows for Workgroups have this or was that just
> LAN networking? OS/2 Warp had dial up internet access for IBM's ISP as
> well as a SLIP dialer for other ISPs, when released in 1994, but not a
> full TCP/IP stack until Warp Connect in 1995.
> Likewise, my opinion is that the PDP-11 (and probably
other DEC systems) could be said to have internet access
via a device driver which handled ether net or in some cases
other software using dialup modems. The question of an
TCP/IP stack is not software I am familiar with, but again,
just because that software was in a device driver (assuming
that to be the case) should still not prevent a user from saying
that there is built-in support for the internet.
That's a tougher nut to crack. If you wanted, you could call a VT100 "Internet
compatible" because you could dial up a modem with it (assuming you are able to type
protocols, which is something of another matter). I think the presence of a working
TCP/IP stack (whether it's an add-on or not) is probably a more appropriate
definition.
Another metric is whether it was available at the time of the system's release (or
within a relatively short time). You can retrofit an IP stack onto lots of things; hell,
you can do it on an Apple II if you're running Contiki, but no one is going to say the
Apple II was released with Internet support.
- Dave