X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mailnull set sender to opendos-bounces using -f Message-ID: <000201c1ad9a$44b27740$c03dfea9@atlantis> From: "Matthias Paul" To: Subject: Re: palmdos? Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 17:10:46 +0100 Organization: University of Technology, RWTH Aachen, Germany MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id g14GiAC24451 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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 Novellīs 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 -- ; http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org