On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 21:02:48 -0600, David Maynard wrote:
Gary H wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:

snip

BTW, Mr. Gates gives more money to charity each year than most of
you will
earn in a lifetime... I suppose some of you will consider that to be
tax
evasion....

I'm still not sure why my freaking clock runs slow...... lol....

Good day...

He should give a goddam sight more than he does.

None of your business what he gives nor does it matter what you think he
'should'.

S.O.B. got rich by
stealing CP/M and rewriting it slightly and calling it MS-DOS.

And CPM was 'stolen' from Digital Equipment Corp RT-11 right down to pip
but if you think MS-DOS looks like CPM then you never used CPM.

On the other hand one wonders how he ran the 'stolen' 8 bit 8080 CMP code
on 16 bit processors.

He didn't have to. IBM and Intel were kind enough to provide him with the
ever-popular 8088, which once they got the assembler written, could cross-
compile 8080 code and execute it. I once had an opportunity to play with
a very expensive S-100 computer that had both and 8085 and an 8088, and
could run the native code of each, but not simultaneously. I had some
great fun writing interprocess communications stuff in assembly code,
and trying to invent file locking on a "MP/M-8/16" OS. It was based on
CP/M, but was "multi-user", in that it supported several ASCII serial
terminals, but not "multi-user" in any real sense.

Anyway, at the time Intel came out with the 8088, everyone with half a
brain or more wondered, "If they're segmenting memory to get an effective
20-bit address, with two overlapping 16-bit address registers, why didn't
they just multiplex it to 32 x 16 right on the spot, and not worry about
"segmentation," but start right out with flat memory? There's really
no excuse for making a processor as crippled as an 8088, other than that
everybody already had an 8080, and all of the peripherals were 8 bits,
and the bus was 8 bits at the time; but why not just for the time being,
ignore the unused 8 bits on the 16-bit bus, go ahead and have 16-bit wide
memory on-board, and so on?

But nOOOOOooo! They graced us with the 8088 and all that has followed.

Oh, well - hindsight is always 20-20, and I think I have a ... Nah, lemme
check: Heh. AMD Athlon, but I have no idea if it's 16 or 32 bits - call it
a brain fart. Blame it on rant endorphins, thanks. :-)
/rant

Cheers!
Rich