From: rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu (RICHARD HOFFBECK)
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Reply-To: rwh@moose.cccs.umn.edu
Organization: Colon Cancer Control Study, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 16:11:00 GMT

In article <1992Dec28.223507.0200901@locus.com>, lowell@locus.com (Lowell Morrison) writes:
> >Really, and exactly how did CP/M-86 deal with the presence of the video
> >memory, disk controller ROM, BIOS ROM and ROM BASIC in the area between
> >704K and 1M? Sheez, the 640K limit is a problem with the IBM design, not
> >a decision by MS.  MS-DOS on the old Victor 9000 left something like 800K
> >free because the ROMs were all squeezed into the upper part of the 1M
> >address space of the 8086.  Keep in mind that the address registers on the
> >808x are only 20-bits wide providing for a maximum of 1M of addressable
> >memory.  As one who worked with the old Osborne shadow ROM BIOS, I was glad
> >that IBM at least left their ROM in an easy to access location.
> >
> It has been a number of years, but the techniques of Shadowing the Rom
> and/or Jump Tables has been around for a lot of years.  I remember a 
> CP/M System on a Z80 addressing 12 megs of ram without any problems
> in 1980, and that is supposed to be impossible if you talk to some
> "Experts" in Z80 technology. Yes, Adam went and did a number of things
> with the Osborne that were less than wonderful.  Of course, I remember
> some people who gave it Graphics, when that was impossible also.

Bank switching is nothing new; afterall, that's the basis for the EMS memory
standard.  Before EMS it was used on mini and mainframe computers.  But I've
never considered EMS or EEMS to be solution to the 1MB memory limit and if you
consider that to be an acceptable solution it been around since DOS 2.1. 

Shadow Rom will only get you an extra 200K of so of memory.  Again, this is
basically what QEMM's Stealth mode does, but the step from 640K to 800K is not
all that helpful when you need a couple of megs.

> You just need to look at the fortunes of Digital Research (thank god Novell >
> finally purchased them).  

Exactly how did MS threaten DR-DOS.  I used DR-DOS briefly last spring.  I had
a couple of problems with the DR-DOS/QEMM/Windows combination and out network. 
Both MS and DR provided helpful technical notes that eventually solved the
problem. Can you be more specific.

Now Novell owns DR-DOS and they just bought UNIX from AT&T.  So we'll have IBM
pushing a Mach kernel version of OS/2, MS pushing a quasi-Mach kernel NT, NeXT
pushing NeXTStep, Sun pushing Solaris and now Novell pushing a DR-DOS/NOS/Unix
solution.  Doesn't sound too uncompetitive to me :-)

> And you already asked for information from 
> one gentleman about how MS littigated or at least threatened his company 
> into submission.  

And he declined on the grounds of non-disclosure. I can accept that, but it
still leaves us short of an example.


> P-System Bit the Dust (USD) in large part because of MS-burrying them 
> with advertizing. 

Nonsense! I used P-System on Apple, Osborne, Corvus and on the original IBM PC.
P-System was a dog of an OS, and by its very nature made it impossible to drop
into assembler to widen the bottlenecks in our code. I wish it would have been
usable since the California educational system was heavily into Corvus at the
time ('83) and the extra sales would have been nice. But P-System died by its
own hand not by such a devious tactic as advertising.

--rick


Xref: sparky comp.os.os2.advocacy:11006 comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy:3464