Re: Xywrite on PC DOS

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:

> ** Reply to message from "Thomas J Hawley"  on Sun, 10 Nov
> 2002 13:19:25 -0500
>
> > Unfortunately,
> > somewhere down the road, there will be no more hardware or operating system
> > support for 16 bit DOS.
>
> Uhh, how do you know this? There's still support for CP/M. There's huge
> support for DOS games. There's FreeDOS, Caldera (DR-DOS), all kinds of DOS.
> Enterprising programmers looking for a niche. Emulation in every OpSys.
> Thunking any CPU to 16-bit operation is trivial. Even if your machine doesn't
> run it, you'll run a network copy off some server somewhere. DOS won't
> disappear.

I believe you are correct, Robert. There even seem to be computing communities
keeping Amiga and Atari alive . . . at least to some extent. For that matter, if
you want to go a level further removed into obscurity, there are Amiga and Atari
game emulators for OS/2 (plus some other much less well known old formats) ! And
if we had a quarter for every time OS/2 has been pronounced officially dead over
the past several years, we could probably purchase several Fortune 500 companies.
That hasn't stopped programmers in Germany, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Japan
from putting out a steady stream of new OS/2 software (some of it ports from
Linux, admittedly, though plenty of it original), **with no real market, economic
model, or even the faint hope of remuneration.**

I think the bigger threat here is at the cpu. If I remember correctly, about 3
years ago (?) Intel had announced plans that the P7 chip (whatever that turns out
to be) would be their last to follow the x86 instruction set. After that, they
were going to turn the corner from CISC to RISC cpu's. This was going to be a big
fork in the road. At the same time, AMD announced their projected plans, which
was to maintain backwards compatibility. A clear choice of path, it seems. I
really haven't closely followed what transpired in the years since -- whether
Intel merely delayed the plan they announced, or were compelled to scrap it due to
market resistance. But if this plan went forward, it could imperil the ability to
continue running "legacy" software, including, of course, the opsys.

Other factors can appear, as well, to kill off the option of running older
software. The pretty good OCR program I used to use would no longer run once the
processor exceeded 200 mhz. This turned out to be one of those cases that was
non-patchable. There is a slowdown utility I could use, but in the limited
testing with it that I've done to date, it seemed to render the whole process more
trouble than it was worth.

Jordan