On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:07:42 +0000, (Robert
Bonomi) wrote:

In article ,
patriarch patriarch wrote:
"Swingman" wrote in
:
snip

I've probably owned 6 laptops in the past 12 years, and that is the
first one I've not bought used. Personally, I've gone back to using a
desktop in a, likely out-of-step, effort to return to more Luddite
ways.

This commment shows, I guess, how far we've come, when a desktop user feels
he's a Luddite. ;-)

So, what's the proper OS for a Neander computer user? ;-)

I'm going to have to dig up my copy of the product announcement for "OS/VU"
'virtual universe'.

It was noted that start-up was _slow_. the IPL of 'sys1.god' took seven
days to complete.

System calls to 'non resident galaxies' had a large latency problem.


As for the Neanders -- *what* operating system?? In the good ole days, all
programs ran 'stand alone'. There *wasn't* any such thing as an operating
system -- either the functionality was embedded in your application code,
or it didn't exist. Many shops came to have a 'standard library' of routines
for basic device functions, that you could merge to your code, as needed.

The true Neander is going to 'program on the bare metal' producing direct
machine-executable code, handling all required functionality internally,
without benefit of an operating system, or even an 'assembler' to do
instruction translation.

Don't laugh. I've _written_ code under those conditions, myself.



We used to call them "executives"; small continuous loops that polled
various hardware locations and/or waited around for interrupts. Simple,
efficient, and relatively easy to see what was going on with a piece of
hardware so programmed.