Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Wendin-DOS
Message-ID: <1916@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 88 02:54:03 GMT
References: <460@wa3wbu.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 32

In article <460@wa3wbu.UUCP> john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
>     I just read a blurb in the latest issue of PC Magazine about a new
>operating system called Wendin DOS. It is billing as a multi-user,
>multi-tasking operating system for the 80286 and 80386 that is 100%
>compatible with *all* exsisting MS-DOS programs and also breaks the
>640K memory barrier. All for an un-heard of price of $99.00. Can this
>be true ? 

I have Wendin's OS Toolbox, PCVMS, and PCUNIX.  They are interesting to
look at, and a fascinating example of what happens if one uses VAX/VMS
as a model.  (The versions I have date back to early 1987.  Things
might have changed since then.)

They are great fun to hack around with and modify. But they are not, in
my opinion, suitable for any realistic computing.  Apart from the
numerous bugs, there's also the problem of incompleteness.  PCVMS, for
example, provides no way through its system calls of seeking to the end
of a file.  (One has to know the file size in advance and then seek to
that position, and there is no system call that tells one the file
size.)

However, most MSDOS system calls are trapped by these operating systems
and (most of the time, excepting all the FCB calls and a few others)
either passed on to MSDOS or emulated.

They use MSDOS below them as a layer, so they are horribly slow.

Wendin DOS appears to be an improved version of these, and it may not
live on top of MSDOS.  But given Wendin's track record of using VAX/VMS
as a model and its buggy implementation, I would be careful.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi