dosread.c again

[Peter da Silva]

In article <5182 at uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> webb at uhccux.UUCP (Thomas Webb) writes:
> Also, those
> of us on tight personal budgets can get a complete DOS development
> system for about $1500, $1000 for the machine and $500 for a very
> complete set of development software.

Fiddlesticks. (I'm saying that a lot lately. It's a lot more polite than
what I'm thinking)

You can get an Amiga development system for about that, and you get a real
operating system with a message-based kernel, multitasking, windowing, and
a decent base of commercial programs (yes, only a couple of the spreadsheets
are 1-2-3 compatible. Shucks). Or of you don't care whether you can run
commercial software, you can get your IBM-PC or an Atari ST with MINIX (have
a look at the first group on the newsgroups line again). You will soon be able
to get MINIX for the Amiga, though why you'd want to I don't know. For a
little more money you can get a Macintosh, with a vast array of commercial
software. The system software is pretty psychotic, but it's a hell of a lot
better than DOS.

> BTW, it isn't easy to learn to program in DOS, but it is even harder
> to program in 'real' operating systems at the OS level.

No, it's not. The DOS system calls are a proper subset of the UNIX system
calls. The names and calling arguments are, in most cases, the same within
two decimal places. Just about everyone (Microsoft included) has discovered
the UNIX programming model by now.

> Anyway, my feeling is that people who hate DOS are comparing it to
> OSes that cost a lot more and run on more expensive platforms.  This
> is an apples and oranges type problem, not a class struggle.

No, it's an apples-and-apples comparison. There are plenty of low-cost
alternatives to DOS, even on 8088-based machines.
-- 
Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Biz: peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter at sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-'
"ERROR:  trust not in UUCP routing tables"                                 'U`
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