Re: E-waste
- Posted by CoJaBo2 May 03, 2013
- 5545 views
I'm curious to see if anyone has a valid reason why anyone should devote time to adding DOS support.
I'm curious on this as well.
Well, there are folk in other countries still using DOS. And there are folk still using DOS in emulators, like DOSBox and BOCHS.
This brings up an interesting point- there is a (huge) difference between using DOS and programming for DOS.
The last time I installed a legitimate MS-DOS system was about last month, on a label printer at a machine shop that broke after 2 decades of use.
The last time I programmed a DOS application was over 15 years ago; and it was intended mostly as a recovery environment to fix Win98.
Clearly, people still run DOS, as doing so is simpler than porting legacy systems, many of which the source has been lost and require ISA-based hardware, to modern platforms. But, outside of demoscene and people maintaining emulations for those lecacy applications, who is creating new programs to run on pure DOS? And, why?
if someone put a DOS version on their 3Ghz P4 i'd expect it to also run the same.
Actually, it would appear that modern machines cannot run DOS; first, the BIOS won't even recognize a USB floppy drive. Second, it wouldn't boot from a drive with DOS already imaged onto it. I could've probably set up an emulator, but it turned out to be much easier to acquire an old drive to fix the old machine than to order a PCIe serial card and setup a VM for the new.
Of course, all of this is likely to soon become irrelevant, because-
As far as I can tell, there's not a lot of enthusiasm for programming *any* platform anymore, except for phones and tablets. IOW, computer programming is quickly going the way of "fixing your own car".
If you want to develop a cross-platform application today, you have two options-
You could write a native platform app for Windows 8 in .NET; you wouldn't want to use Euphoria, because licensing restrictions may forbid you from doing so, either now or in the future. .NET obviously won't run on Android, so you need to create a Dalvik ("Java") port for Android devices. You luck out on BlackBerry, which now runs Android apps, but you're on your own with WebOS, Maemo, Symbian, Series40, MeeGo, and Bada. Apple doesn't permit VM-based languages, so you also need to create an Objective-C port to target iOS devices. Be sure your application doesn't compete with any by Apple (either now or in the future), or you'll get rejected. Oh, also, Microsoft and Apple charge large per-sale royalties (also, submission fees, etc), and you cannot circumvent these. These platforms are, of course, exclusive, so you need both a Windows machine and a Mac to do development for everything (best go with the more-expensive Mac, since you can't [legally] run OSX on a PC). Started on Linux? You still need to buy both.
Or, you can write a webapp, and support all of these at once (and also ChromeOS/FirefoxOS, which don't support anything else), without paying any fees…
