15 Mar
2001
15 Mar
'01
11:15 a.m.
From: "ajp166"
<ajp166(a)bellatlantic.net>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: The DOS 10 Commandments (fwd)
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 21:24:13 -0500
Reply-to: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org
From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner
<spc(a)conman.org>
>It was thus said that the Great Peter Joules once stated:
>> 3)
snip
That's a
BIOS limitation; talk to IBM about that one---they only
allocated
10 bits for sector number in the INT 13h disk IO
call.
Wrong. 1024 was a hardware limitation of the early MFM controller cards
and the bios honored it. FYI it was CYLINDERS not sectors. 1024 sectors
would have only been 512k! > 4)
> Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After
all,
Other non -PC hardware such as Rainbow went out to 896k and some of the
S100
based machines did the full meg using shadow rom.
Don't forget the >640K hack on many Zenith XT machines.
> 10)
> Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy
saviour
> on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart
that everyone reboots their
OS to
>> solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.
>
> Isn't that more of a Windows thing than an MS-DOS thing? DOS being unprotected could crash, usually after the
application
wiped it from memory like CP/M! Any unprotected OS would be
vunerable to being smashed by a runaway app.
Correct. Even I can lock up that Eazy PC with one of own DOS command
found in that dos directory, remember those / by 0 error in 40
columns due to quirky V40 cpu in that thing.
Experience with DOS 3.11 and 5.0 is that for an
unprotected OS
it was fairly solid and not inclined to kill itself. I have two systems
that live as DOS with uptimes measured in months.
Correct again, when programs is done to quality standards, DOS is
utterly stable.
Allison
Wizard (old dos user)