15 Oct
2012
15 Oct
'12
12:05 p.m.
On 10/15/2012 02:55 PM, David Riley wrote:
Highly talented programmers, yes.
Highly talented program managers were (and remain) hard to find.
True. Suits will ruin everything if given the chance. Thinking
people just need to start treating them like the overhead expense that
they are.
Those systems also all had virtual memory subsystems;
the Mac and
the PC didn't have MMUs until the 68020 and 286, respectively (and
even then, the Apple/Motorola PMMU kind of sucked, and 286 Protected
Mode wasn't quite real MMU action). All that is not to say that
doing multitasking without paged MMUs in a small memory footprint
is impossible, since plenty of OSes did so, but it's a barrier to
the lazy programmer.
Very true. I do multitasking all day long without an MMU, on ARM7s,
with (on the big ones) 64KB. Works great here! I see no *real* excuse
other than laziness. There were some highly talented programmers back then. A related interesting tiny multitasking OS that
I've worked on a
bit (currently stalled) to add Coldfire support is AtomThreads.
The primary implementations are on tiny 8-bit machines, and it's
been a nice codebase to work on.
I've not seen that one. I will check it out!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA