From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Fri 29 Jun 2001 - 10:50:50 IST
On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 11:10:27PM +0100, Paul Jakma wrote:
> things could be so much different if one of the giants, eg HP IBM or
> DEC had decided to chase the mass-market. Eg, if IBM had gone to some
> kind of Unix by subcontracting out the development of an entirely new
> 32bit, multitasking, OS with GUI to a unix house instead of MS.
ibm *did* decide to mass market - they came up with the ibm pc.
the original pc was ill-suited to run unix. my understanding was that
there was no memory management unit on the 8088/8086 and no such thing
as kernel mode on the chip. so you couldn't offer memory protection
between processes. dos was about the best you could do (not surprising
since it was based on the most widely used micro os of the time - cpm).
of course ibm could have picked a better chip, but intel got them to
use their inferior chip so that ibm could get access to "bubble memory."
or at least that's what i've read - and i notice i haven't heard about
bubble memory since then.
otoh, the motorola 68k *did* offer a full set of features. the first
sun workstation used them. but apple chose not to use those features in
favor of a single-tasking computer. this later evolved into cooperative
multi-tasking (baaaaad idea).
kevin
-- kevin at domain suberic.net "linux is a cancer" --steve ballmer fork()'ed on 37058400 "released 25 august 1991, linux is a virgo" --me meatspace place: home linux, not just a star-sign: http://suberic.net/~kevin http://www.linux.com/
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