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To: nommedeguerre who wrote (16823)	1/27/1998 8:31:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>Also, can you imagine the mayhem when programmers who had trouble with single thread DOS tried to right a well-behaved task! We did run RMX86 on Intel's 86/35 card which had almost all the same components as an IBM PC. Context-switching and interrupt latency were CPU hogs that's for sure, but it ran as solid as a rock. One system ran for over 5 years without a reset<<< That was quite an accomplishment. Let's not short the original PC programmers either. Typical early PC setup on an s100 box: First, write a bootstrap loader in machine code. Punch it in with switches. Locate your 32 K of ram. Given that, write a custom version of the CPM core code, including your bios routines. Attach floppy drive... Or one way of writing a game for Commodore 64: 1. First, use rom routines to load your own bios in ram.... ... Switch out the manufacturers ROM... Load your 'OS' into the ram revealed by switching out the system ROM... ... write a primitive gui... ... 97. Begin to write application code. Lots of early PC programmers were old mainframe and Mini/Unix types. They knew how to write things like execution partitions and multi-user applications. Though the kids hogged most all the glory, as it turned out. BTW, it's true that Windows copied many Mac aspects, just as DOS copied many CPM and Apple II aspects. and CPM copied some unix and DEC VMS aspects. (I once had a board that ran CPM-8080 on my apple II, and a board that ran Apple II code on my PC. The same floppy drives worked on all platforms.) But in the end everybody paid Xerox. Chaz