Mail Archives: opendos/1997/10/30/15:56:08
> From: sb1 AT sisna DOT com
>
> Marc Perkel wrote some ideas about the future of DOS back in 1991.
> He basically said make an int that would tell the system when called to
> run the new dos features. Then create API that would let us have an
> open architecture with emulators for other os etc.
> Also if the int was not called to inable the new extentions it would be
> just like good old dos.
That sounds reasonable. Of course a lot of people will want just a
good DOS (perhaps because they run on lean hardware), and that is
fine... OpenDOS already has some good extensions (which could be
further developed) which don't take up lots of RAM the way they do in
Win95 or Unix. But to go much beyond traditional DOS we need to start
with a clean sheet of paper and come up with a new API (even if we end
up borrowing from Java etc). Win95 is one way to mesh old and new;
Linux with Dosemu is another (and, I think, better in concept as well
as implementation).
> Hopefully we can get more of the power of unix with the ease of use like
> dos.
It amazes me why we haven't seen a really new text interface
(command.com, "CLI" or "shell" in Unix-speak).. they are all ports or
modifications of old ones (command.com came from CP/M, which was
heavily influenced by old PDP11 stuff; bash, ksh, tcsh all trace back
to old Unix shells, and back to Multics. Not only is there a need for
a new nice command language (that makes it easy to use voice input, and
other new technology) the very act of taking an old standard and
modifying it means you loose standardisation. I don't particularly
like old Unix idea of abbreviating commands to two letters (mv for
move, cp for copy, ls for list) - I prefer to have sensible names and
let the user alias the ones they often need, but it is worse having
*some* commands heavily abbreviated and others using long names with
different Capitalisation depending on what was in fashion at the time
of writing.
> Will we ever get to run windows programs from the DOS prompt?
I guess it is up to Wine, Wabi, bochs, twin to do this part. I guess
we could start on a sister project called "OpenWIN" but Sun beat us to
the name! OS/2 (v5) is likely to be the best way to go if you want to
run Windows programs; I think a good policy stance is to run a thin
X11-compatable client alongside OpenDOS... with an applications server
elsewhere on the net.
> Will we ever be able to use the win .dll files etc?
> What about winsock for the net?
There have been very few new programs, especially in networking, that
use the old DOS-based standards... it would be nice to take advantage
of new program development work. Shared libraries and DLLs have a big
attraction, but often they are part of huge apps that would be
unattarctive to most OpenDOS users.
I firmly believe the answer is to create a compiler system that
generates programs easily (=can get a 1Mb zip file for free and start
creating programs at home after 15 minutes reading) that work
natively/quickly under OpenDOS but also work under Win 3/95/NT, OS/2
and of course under Linux within Dosemu. I am tempted to say this
should involve Java somehow. I think the world still needs a good
popular compiler, not Visual BASIC or Delphi or C++ but something as
small, easy and importantly: respected as Turbo Pascal used to be. Have
it automatically create programs that run really well under OpenDOS
(and pretty well under other operating systems - in the same way that a
program might detect if you have a numeric copro and emulate it if you
don't). Coupled with this, Caldera could pay the authors of the best
editor, mail program, etc created using this (so long as they are a
superset of the previous distribution's standard) to be included in
each revision of the standard commercial OpenDOS distribution.
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Mark Aitchison, \_ Phone: +64 3 364-2947 home 337-1225
Dept of Physics & Astronomy, </ Fax: +64 3 364-2469 or 364-2999
University of Canterbury, /) E-mail: phys169 AT csc DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz
Christchurch, NEW ZEALAND. (/' www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physmsa
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