22 Feb
2006
22 Feb
'06
11:14 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated:
On 2/22/2006 at 1:15 AM spc at conman.org wrote:
Well, the 286 only supported swapping (no paging) (now I see what is being
discussed).
Also, on the 8086, sequential segments were 16 bytes apart and many
programs relied upon this behavior. I know that OS/2 included support for
sequential selectors but one had to call a function to get the offset
between each selector. Not that I used such functions---just that I recall
seeing them in the documentation.
I belive OS/2 1x did this. IBM insisted on OS/2
supporting the 286
while
Microsoft wanted to skip it and support the 386
and above (this was one
disagreement between IBM and Microsoft that lead to the split between the
two).
I can believe that OS/2 swapped segments, but it'd be pretty surprising to
me to find out that they'd defined a fixed page size. I've still got OS/2
1.1 and 1.2 kicking around somewhere, complete with the SDK stuff--all
printed, bound material. A wonder of careful technical writing. IIRC, if
the SDK docs say something works a certain way, it does.
When I worked at IBM, I remember most of my desk being taken up with OS/2
1x programming documentation and it being quite complete. At the time, most
of the programmers in the department were using Charles Petzold's OS/2 GUI
programming book (mostly for handling of dialog boxes), which included
routines to handle radio buttons, check boxes, etc. I was amazed to
discover that OS/2 would handle those things automatically and subsequently,
the code I wrote to handle dialog boxes was about a tenth the size of my
fellow cow-orkers.
Microsoft SDK/DDK documentation was a rude surprise
after that.
Fortunately, never did any Windows programming.
-spc (Really liked OS/2)