From: bloc1469@ee.ee.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: CBM mention on 12/11/92 Computer Chronicles
Date: 5 Jan 1993 20:37:26 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Dept. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.89.2.33

In article <1993Jan5.180450.25151@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>UNDER MY CONDITIONS?!  You're out of your mind, or you just forgot to read
>everything I've said during this thread.  Under my conditions, DOS is
>certainly NOT a modern OS, simply because it doesn't provide support for
>modern applications.  Windows does, and is.

(ducking) Ahh, okay.  See, you never defined "support" as being OS
applications support.  Actually, it sounded as if you meant support in
the form of the existence of applications and support from the
company.  Sorry.  :)

>You're still ducking from the issues we're discussing.  You cannot provide
>a single iota of evidence for any of your claims: the claim that Windows is
>not an OS, the claim that Windows is a bad OS, or the claim that Windows is
>not a modern OS.  Apparently, you'd rather add useful bits like "Get a life"
>to the discussion.

You have a wondrous way of getting on my nerves, you know that???
Alright.  (breathes deeply)  I said if Windows made no use of MS-DOS,
then it could be considered an OS.  As an experiment, someone might
want to try writing their own program-loader (rather than MS-DOS) and
try booting windows from IT.  I still hold my claim that Windows makes
use of MS-DOS code, which makes it little more than a hack on top of
MS-DOS.  As to the claim that Windows is not a modern OS???

>Fine.  You've been saying lots about what a modern OS is not.  Why don't you
>tell me what it is?  Why do I strongly suspect that AmigaOS will qualify,
>and everything else will not?

Actually, OS/2 is an extremely good example of a modern OS...  NT is
an even better one.  Mach is a teriffic modern OS.  There is always
some type of kernal or microkernal.  Modern OSes have either
lightweight threads or something similar (the Amiga in this case ONLY
has lightweight threads...), they generally multithread within the OS
itself (90% of modern OS's, I'd guess).  Modern OSes generally strive
for a well-defined hierarchy of OS levels.

Why am I doing this?  You said this once:  Take a class on OS design.

>I think it was Dan who talked about Underworld, not me.

Oops.  Sorry.  :)

>You just contradicted yourself.  There is no graphics hardware retargetting,
>and that's why you need to do two different things to output the same
>graphical object to two different devices, for example the screen and the
>printer.  See the inconsistency yet?

Ahh, but under AmigaOS, a printer is a device.  Graphics are a
function of a display, and are considered differently.  Printers fall
under devices like the serial and parallel port, etc...  RTG will
retarget graphics, but it will not bring device independence, because
RTG will only work for displays.  It's quite simple, actually.

>This is absolutely false.  The API has to be at a high enough level that the
>implementation can work on simple hardware as well as advanced coprocessors.
>Placing the API at the level of blitters and Copper lists is exactly what's
>biting C= in the ass.

And they haven't.  It's people that bang hardware that bring the
incompatibility, nothing else.  RTG will fit invisibly into graphics.library.

Greg


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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.graphics