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From:	"Matthias Paul" <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
To:	<opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Subject:	Re: palmdos?
Date:	Mon, 4 Feb 2002 17:10:46 +0100
Organization:	University of Technology, RWTH Aachen, Germany
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On 2002-01-22, Jim Stevenson asked:

> What does that program do?
> Where can I learn more about it?

DR PalmDOS or NetWare PalmDOS 1.0 (alias "Merlin") was
a Digital Research/Novell OEM product in 1992, which was
based on DR DOS 6.0, but with large parts of the kernel
being rewritten to be more DOS compatible and for a
minimized resource footprint to run on early palm-sized
computers.

PalmDOS was the first incarnation of DR DOS which featured
the "new" BDOS architecture, the internal version number
reported by INT 21h/AX=4452h was 1070h, that is "CP/M-86 7.0".
However, one of the goals was to strip out any original CP/M
functionality. Earlier issues like DOS Plus 1.2 - 2.1 and
DR DOS 3.31 - 6.0 issues were still kind of a CP/M kernel
coated with a DOS API emulation, while the new BDOS genuinely
used DOS compatible data structures instead of only emulating
them for DOS applications. IIRC, while earlier DR DOS issues
pretended to be a mixture of IBM PC DOS 3.31 and Compaq MS-DOS
3.31, PalmDOS 1.0 reported a DOS version of PC DOS 5.0. The
later Novell DOS 7 reported PC DOS 6.0 (or 6.1 if you like).

Other PalmDOS features were a PCMCIA 2.0 Socket Services &
Card Services stack, improved facilities to boot and run out
of ROM, file system access in ROM- and Flash-based systems,
and dynamic idle detection for power saving in mobile applications.

I am not completely sure about this, but combining info from
various places I think, the PCMCIA stack was partially written
by one of the founders of the former Poquet Computer Corporation
(now Fujitsu), who developed one of the first battery powered
SRAM- and Flash-based x86-PC with a tiny LCD display and not
much larger than a bigger pocket calculator back in 1989, and
who was one of those who originally initiated the PCMCIA
initiative a few months later, so that SRAM and Flash card
technologies became standardized. Well, maybe other members
of this forum, who certainly know for sure if this loose
connection between Poquet and PalmDOS existed or not, can
shed some better light on this little trivia story?
Anyway, Poquet no longer existed when PalmDOS was developed,
and also the famous Hewlett-Packard HP 200LX palm-sized PC
had a ROMmed version of MS-DOS 5.0, not Novell´s PalmDOS in
it, unfortunately.

PalmDOS had a mini-version of the task switcher TaskMAX,
sometimes called MiniMAX, which could run only 10 tasks, but
worked out of the ROM itself and could run not only usual
DOS executables like BAT, COM or EXE files (with a small
built-in directory browser), but also PIM (Personal Info
Manager) and XIP (Execute in Place) applications directly
stored in system ROM or on plug-in cards and which became
available from the task list without a need to search for
them "on disk". One of the differences compared to the
normal TaskMAX was that it provided some display primitives
for window drawing, and that the actual task manager was
more or less a stand alone program executed on demand and
not part of the resident task switcher TSR.

PalmDOS also formed the base of the DOS kernel for DR DOS 6.0
"business update 1993" (BDOS 1071h), the later Novell DOS 7,
OpenDOS 7.01 (BDOS 1072h), and DR-DOS 7.02+ (BDOS 1073h).

So, the only thing really missing in DR-DOS 7.03 is the
PCMCIA stack, but after all these years it would require
a serious update, anyway, and as we have seen a few weeks
ago, other PC Card/PCMCIA stacks are still available for DOS.

Greetings,

 Matthias

-- 
<mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org

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