AMD Bulldozer vs. Intel i7-2600 -- I don't get it!
Lennart Sorensen
lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Oct 14 15:38:52 UTC 2011
On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 08:24:08AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> >People wanted DOS compatibility more than they wanted multithreading.
>
> OS/2 DOS compatibility was excellent. In fact, if necessary, you
> could even install an original DOS image or even CP/M-86. It also
> had far better DOS memory management than real DOS & Windows 3.x.
Actually OS/2 1.x's DOS compatibility was terrible. It wasn't until
OS/2 2.x running on a 386 that DOS compatibility was any good. The 286
protected mode that OS/2 used was not suited for running DOS applications
unless they were very well behaved. It could only run one DOS application
at a time, and that program owned the machine and could crash the
whole system.
By the time 2.x came out (in 1992 I believe), windows had pretty much
already won. Certainly Microsoft had stopped caring about OS/2 at all.
I am not convinced IBM ever did care.
"One of the more important consequences of the decision to support 286s
was relatively poor compatibility with DOS applications. It was a miracle
that OS/2 could run DOS applications at all, but the 286 limitations
severely undermined both the compatibility and stability of OS/2. The
386 offered a Virtual-8086 mode (V86 mode) which made it possible to
provide better compatibility without compromising stability, but that
had to wait until OS/2 2.0; in the meantime, the V86 mode was used by
Windows/386, DesqView, as well as several UNIX variants." according to
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?page_id=313
So windows 3.0 with the 386 enhanced mode was vastly better at running
DOS programs it than OS/2 1.x. Especially since you could just exit
windows and do it. Desqview and such also used the 386's V86 mode to
do a much better job than OS/2 in 286 mode had any chance of doing.
Why it took them so many years to get OS/2 2.0 done I have no idea.
--
Len Sorensen
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