Subject: Re: modern serial terminal
From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:48:04 -0800 (PST)
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, ajones wrote:
There was never a version of Linux, or UNIX in
general, less bloated
than Windows 95.
Xenix ran on an 8088 XT with 640K. The IBM XT hard disk controller could
be jumpered (undocumented) to handle other sizes of drives other than the
412 (10MB). One of those sizes was 26MB, which was just right for a 10MB
DOS partition and a 16MB Xenix partition (that was how I found out about
the XT hard disk controller's undocumented jumper solder pads)
[1] Yes, Windows 95 had memory protection and
preemptive multitasking.
Are there multiple definitions of "preemptive"?
Or, is "preemptive" a quantitative, rather than qualitative attribute?
I would not consider Win95, nor early Mac, to be "preemptive". Even NT4,
which is purportedly preemptive has a few two many situations where/when
it can not be preempted. For example, when opening a telnet session, it
often can NOT be preempted until it gets to the point of success or failure.
Time for a topic change.
Is that an OS failure or an application failure? As I see it and run it
NT is preemtive but applications can block or alter lower priority tasks
making it possile to do nasty thing like block keyboard task. I suspect
it's legacy plus the tendancy to make forground tasks the higher priortity
may have something to do with it.
Linux and VMS seem to be clearly preemptive as are a number of other
OSs.
Allison