Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uupsi!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (peter da silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Will NeXT survive? Grow with the times? Message-ID: Date: 7 May 91 13:08:47 GMT References: <1991Apr29.144421.19819@oakhill.sps.mot.com> <1991May6.232136.17257@dsd.es.com> Organization: Ferranti International Controls Corporation Lines: 19 In article <1991May6.232136.17257@dsd.es.com>, rthomson@mesa.dsd.es.com (Rich Thomson) writes: > the set of hardware you have. This is because everybody codes > directly to the hardware instead of some abstract interface because > the latter is "too slow". Remove the quotes. MS-DOS' "device handling" is so abysmal that you really can't go through it, or even the BIOS, and get decent speed. For example, I wrote a terminal emulator for MS-DOS, for the 8088 PCs. Going through DOS or the BIOS, the fastest I could reliably get characters from the serial device was < 300 baud. I had to install a replacement driver, and of course my program didn't run on the AT. For screen handling, I went through the BIOS and by doing heavy curses-like heuristics I could generally keep up at 2400 baud. "cu" under IBM-Xenix 1.0 on the same machine could keep up just about to 9600, and that's running separate processes for input and output. MS-DOS and the IBM ROM Bios really *is* too slow. CP/M was better. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' peter@ferranti.com +1 713 274 5180. 'U` "Have you hugged your wolf today?"