Re: new DOS source
- Posted by useless_ Jul 07, 2013
- 4223 views
Or those who use smaller computers like Arduino, who might consider a dos machine as a step up.
Might being the opperative word here. I suspect that it'd not be the case for most users, who would use the Arduino for very low level operations (like emulating an SID chip or acting as a microcontroller) that a full fledged DOS computer, with its clunky BIOS requirement and need to have some kind of random access hardware (flopy or hard disk) would be ill-suited for. Again, though, there's no accounting for individual taste.
What do you mean by "clunky"? The arduino has a bootloader in it's avr,
The BIOS is required to boot DOS. For the Arduino, a bootloader is optional and it can be removed in its entirety.
Also, the Arduino bootloader is only 2K (and can be shrunk to 0.5K http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,38002.0.html ) while a typical modern BIOS can be as big as 1024K (e.g. http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/check-bios-version-linux/ )
and both dos and Eu insulates the programmer from the bios unless the programmer wants at it.
Agreed. But you can't get rid of it completely if you don't want it/need it - at best you can just bypass it after DOS has finished booting. That level of total control is denied.
But who cares about the bios anyhow, it's there on the motherboard when you buy it! You do not need to get rid of it. Use it directly or not, your choice.
And "modern" is also an operative word, meaning a small ramdrive of some flavor as C:\.
How is this modern? Ramdisks have been around since the time of CP/M. Linux/GNU has had support for using ramdisks as the root since virtually the beginning.
You had previously said :
and need to have some kind of random access hardware (flopy or hard disk)
Which as you now admit, isn't true.
useless
