13 Nov
2005
13 Nov
'05
4:40 p.m.
On Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:18:41 -0700
woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
Allison wrote:
My perspective is things that I have seen in my past other than DEC or
IBM or other BIG IRON.
That was mostly 8080's , Z80's and other items advertised in BYTE. CP/M
was the only one
that I know of that you could get source for to adapt to your
computer. Once the PC arrived
open source vanished. Sure linux is open source but who can read or
adpt the several meg
of source to a small machine. Minux was a nice try but it lacked a C
Compiler.
Minix has a C compiler. And you don't have to buy Andrew Tannenbaum's book to get
it anymore. And there are many, numerous other small and 'free' OSes out there.
uCOs, for example.
Open source didn't 'vanish' when the PC arrived. What happened was the field
exploded, and suddenly there were so many different directions to take with things that a
small tight community was no longer possible. With the dozens, hundreds of tools people
were using in the MS-DOS era to develop programs for the PC, it no longer was possible for
everybody to share the same codebase.
Uhm, what about 12bit[OS8 srt-8]? There are few
othter word lenths
than those that are not unobtainium.
Well what about them?
You can
only get the 16 machines easly and resonable source of a OS.
Explain that from your perspective.