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To: Scumbria who wrote (78143)4/8/1999 10:44:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella  Read Replies (1) of 186894
 
This is unfair

It would have been nice to have well written graphics primitives in the early 80's for DOS and 8088 CPU's but there wasn't even a C compiler for quite awhile let alone a decent graphics library for DOS.

Going through the OS and making bios calls with interrupts was no way to do raster graphics in those days. The OS code was awful. You had to write directly to the memory of the graphics adapter if you were going to get any performance out of the system.

As an advocate of structured programming in those days I wouldn't have dreamed of writing graphics primitives and going directly to the hardware but I had no choice and I found ways to write code that isolated the assembler code that enabled us to be device independent with very little modification for several generations of graphics adapters.

Necessity forced these things in the 80's. We had 64K or code and 64K of memory to work with.

Had Microsoft designed a better OS then this wouldn't have happened. DOS was hardly a state of the art OS. It has always been a kludge hacked together. DOS was inferior to every other OS out there at the time. Yet IBM picked it.

Friends of mine had ported UNIX to to a PC-At by late 1984 but MSFT had a lock on the PC OS market by then.

Its MSFT you should point to and not the programmers at the time. They worked with what they had.
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