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From: sater@cs.vu.nl (Hans van Staveren)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Is programming still allowed?
Message-ID: <8319@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 22 Nov 90 10:15:57 GMT
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Lines: 20

Recent developments with a workstation supplier that shall, for the
moment, remain unidentified, have made us think about the following:

Is it reasonable to assume that if you buy computer hardware from a
supplier that the information needed to program that hardware should be
available to you?

Information like the address of the Ethernet chip on the board, details
about memory management and the like, in short everything you need to
know to write your own operating system.

What is the position of the current major vendors? If they all make the
same fuss about it as the one we are dealing with now the research into
operating systems can only test real systems on strange hardware.  That
can hardly benefit the progress of operating system design.

	Hans van Staveren
	Vrije Universiteit
	Amsterdam, Holland
	The Amoeba Group