2 Oct
2001
2 Oct
'01
11:19 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Glen Goodwin once stated:
Tony Duell wrote:
INT 18h on the Data General/1 (an 8088 based laptop computer, from 1984)
would dump you into a built in application that included a terminal program
(ADM-3A if I recall correctly, and which I used extensively when I traveled
because the serial ports were based off the USART 82C51, and thus not
compatible with the general 8250s in use on other PCs, so I couldn't use
programs like Procomm or Qmodem), a word processor and maybe some other
cheesey programs like that.
-spc (And it's a common (programming) mistake to assume that INT 19H
will reboot the machine ... )
Since they never did provide BASIC they had to
make INT 18 do something
(remember an application program could, in theory, call that interrupt).
Since that interrupt should have entered ROM BASIC, the most sensible
thing to do was to print that there was no ROM BASIC and then halt the
CPU.
Since "they never did provide BASIC" then there was *always* "no ROM
BASIC." That's like stopping the machine with a message stating "no
printer." Why not display something understandable to a common user, such
as "no bootable device?"