Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!peter
From: peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: OS/2 Anyone? or why the PC and MSDOS are wonderful
Message-ID: <5774@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 15 Jun 88 01:15:14 GMT
References: <1866@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <45900133@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 28

In article <45900133@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>>  - likewise, we will never see a significant amount of free software for VAXen,
>>    SUN, Xenix, et. al.......  [ :-)  added in later posting]
>Actually there is another reason you will see less or no free software for
>those machine and operating systems : they aren't fun to program!
>
>All of them are large, clunky, overprotected operating systems. Programming
>a PC to its full capability is a lot more fun than doing it on a 
>protected-mode multitasking system. On the PC the operating system,
>what little of it there is, never gets in your way.

I have never had much fun programming on a PC (8MHz 8088 klone)
because it doesn't really function as a computer - i.e. non-zero
computation done in finite time. Turbo C takes forever (over a minute
to compile and link a tiny program without a hard disk) and compiled
applications are not much better on speed. The operating system is
non-existent - all it does is manage the file system (not very well)
and load programs.

The biggest aggravation is the lack of protection in both memory and
i/o devices, because that was either a willful or ignorant oversight.
Hackers want to be able to turn off protection, rather than not having
it in the first place. Letting buggy programs halt the machine is
ridiculous and unnecessary. Letting them cause damage - like frying a
monitor or writing over a hard disk - is inexcusable.

				Peter Desnoyers
				peter@athena.mit.edu