Sometime around 1987 when I was about 20 years old, someone advised me to program in C if I wanted my program to last forever.
C was standardized internationally in 1990. I was there, waiting to see if ISO was going to change anything that ANSI had done, but they didn't. Finally we had a decent standard language.
I was using BBSes at the time, and I wrote BBS-related public domain (not GPL etc) software, and in 1994 I started writing my own version of MSDOS.
I have mainly focused my efforts on "what made sense in 1990" especially with the transition from the 8086 to 80386. I want to know, with the benefit of hindsight, what should have been done in 1990 and even earlier, from a programming perspective. Especially I wanted a 32-bit version of MSDOS, whatever that looked like.
27 years after I started, I am now armed with PDOS/386, a 32-bit version of MSDOS (my vision) and also a mini Windows console mode clone. You can get it from http://pdos.org
There is another version of PDOS, called PDOS-generic, which is designed to run under some other OS, so e.g. you can have an MSDOS-like environment running on an Amiga, using 68000 instructions. That is still in proof of concept stage, but you can get it from the bottom of the same place.
I have been developing some concepts, e.g. if 16-bit MSDOS software had been written without assuming segment shifts were 4 bits (and generated code typically doesn't), the segment shift could have been emulated as selectors such that you could have 16-bit software that had an address space of 512 MiB on an 80386 (maxing out the selectors in PM32), while the same executable, unkludged, could have run on an 8086 with its 1 MiB address space.
If anyone else would like to join me in making 1990 as good as it can be, please let me know!
C was standardized internationally in 1990. I was there, waiting to see if ISO was going to change anything that ANSI had done, but they didn't. Finally we had a decent standard language.
I was using BBSes at the time, and I wrote BBS-related public domain (not GPL etc) software, and in 1994 I started writing my own version of MSDOS.
I have mainly focused my efforts on "what made sense in 1990" especially with the transition from the 8086 to 80386. I want to know, with the benefit of hindsight, what should have been done in 1990 and even earlier, from a programming perspective. Especially I wanted a 32-bit version of MSDOS, whatever that looked like.
27 years after I started, I am now armed with PDOS/386, a 32-bit version of MSDOS (my vision) and also a mini Windows console mode clone. You can get it from http://pdos.org
There is another version of PDOS, called PDOS-generic, which is designed to run under some other OS, so e.g. you can have an MSDOS-like environment running on an Amiga, using 68000 instructions. That is still in proof of concept stage, but you can get it from the bottom of the same place.
I have been developing some concepts, e.g. if 16-bit MSDOS software had been written without assuming segment shifts were 4 bits (and generated code typically doesn't), the segment shift could have been emulated as selectors such that you could have 16-bit software that had an address space of 512 MiB on an 80386 (maxing out the selectors in PM32), while the same executable, unkludged, could have run on an 8086 with its 1 MiB address space.
If anyone else would like to join me in making 1990 as good as it can be, please let me know!