Sender: crough45 AT amc DOT de Message-Id: <97Sep15.120832gmt+0100.11649@internet01.amc.de> Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 11:13:32 +0100 From: Chris Croughton Mime-Version: 1.0 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: 32bit DOS Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Precedence: bulk Your Mother wrote: > I was wondering why they would do something dumb like this as > opposed to having it right-side up, but then I realized that early > technology most likely dictated that the CDs had to be upside down, and > we've been stuck with it since because we have to remain standard. No, that's not backwards compatibility. That's doing something just because that's how it was done before. There is no reason why your CDs wouldn't work just as well the other way up (in fact that's how they are in all CD players in HiFi systems I've seen recently; at least one car autochanger has them the right way up as well, and at least one has them vertically). Backward compatibility is something like supporting tapes as well as CDs. I wouldn't get a CD-only player for a car, because most of the things I want to listen to while driving are on tape rather than CD (and those I have on CD I can easily put on tape anyway). In the same way, I wouldn't bother with a 'DOS' which couldn't run my existing applications. It wouldn't be DOS. It might be 'better' in some ways, but would also be useless. > In wanting to get rid of some backwards compatibility, I don't > mean we'd have to move to a completely new sytem, like DATs or > MDs, but rather just fix the little things that bother people. Like the CPU, you mean? That seems to be most of what people complain about in DOS... A 32-bit DOS would have to maintain some way of running an 8086 style program to be compatible, and that will cause bloat and likely still not be fully workable (many DOS programs access hardware directly, for instance, particularly for comms and video). Chris C