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From: steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Hastings)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: When will the 8088 die?
Message-ID: <59765@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 90 19:41:17 GMT
References: <90335.202651F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> <3360005@hpsgwp.sgp.hp.com> <1990Dec4.014539.13773@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> <1990Dec4.160730.15617@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <1990Dec5.152318.7316@cbnewsl.att.com>
Reply-To: steveha@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Hastings)
Distribution: na
Organization: Microsoft International Products Group
Lines: 19

In article <1990Dec5.152318.7316@cbnewsl.att.com> rbr@bonnie.ATT.COM (Bob Rager) writes:
>But who cares, isn't MessyDOS the real culprit that determines this
>stupid architecture.  Is it not M*DOS that puts the BIOS and video RAM
>at the "top" of memory?

Umm... no, it is not MS-DOS that arranges the hardware in a computer.  IBM
did it, when they designed the PC, and they had seemingly good reasons at
the time.  When they first made the IBM PC, 16k was standard and 64k was a
lot of memory.  640k seemed enormous.  You can't blame them for this.

You can safely flame IBM for the design of the BIOS, though.  The BIOS
functions were too slow, so everyone wrote straight to the hardware.  Thus
if you want to run MS-DOS programs you need an exact copy of the PC
hardware, or a good emulation thereof.  In some strange, alternate universe
where IBM's BIOS was written better and everyone used it, all you need to
run DOS programs is a faithful emulation of the BIOS and the CPU.
-- 
Steve "I don't speak for Microsoft" Hastings    ===^=== :::::
uunet!microsoft!steveha  steveha@microsoft.uucp    ` \\==|