Re: is Vax addressing sane today

John Dallman <jgd@cix.co.uk> wrote:

 
I see where I'm going wrong: I'm trying to talk about the machines
designed to run MS-DOS and later Windows, not just the CPUs. The vast
range of hardware that all had substantial degrees of compatibility as
regards booting, busses and so on. Those things let their manufacturers
compete for the DOS and Windows market, whereas x86-based machines that
weren't PC-compatible only succeeded in quite specialised niches.
 
Those hardware suppliers did not close off access to the more advanced
features of i386 onwards, because they had no reason to, and that let
Linux take advantage of all that hardware when it came along. That's the
point I was failing to make.

I think this is still misleading.  Not only 386 was _much_ more
ambitious desgin than just "processor for running DOS".  Hadware
manufacturers also cared about running more things than just
DOS.  And "running DOS" is misleading too: for many "DOS applications"
DOS provided just program loader and file system access.  Such
applications could switch to protected mode, use multitasking
and 32-bit addressing.  There were "DOS extenders".  Before
Windows gained market dominance there were competing GUI-s.
There were PC servers, which at some time meant Novell.

So things critical to Linux were also important on general PC
market.  Clearly Linux benefited from availabilty of comodity
PC-s.  But things that made a PC good PC were correlated with
being good Linux machine.  As a litte anecdote let med add that
small sellers frequently used Linux as a tester for PC-s they
were selling, as it was stressing machines more than "typical"
DOS applications.

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                              Waldek Hebisch