>
>To be fair, not one of these items is a fault of the OS, nor were any of
>them Bill's idea.  These were all detils of the original IBM design for
>the PC.  In fact, the original Rev.1 design had a theoretical 640K
>physical address limit, but I don't think it could actually accomodate
>more than 512K (which was an unthinkable amount of memory then).

I guess I implied that it was (which it wasn't), but I would argue that it
is now.

Who else could have forced the move to a platform that actually works?


>You have to remember historical perspective, too.  In '84 my boss bought a
>machine with *TWO* floppy drives, 128K and graphics on a green monitor.
>Cost him about $2500 with a printer and DOS 1.0, and it was awesome, way
>ahead of anything else you could buy -- which is to say, Apple ][+ or 64K
>CP/M machines.  Besides -- you're bitching about only two serial ports and
>640K of RAM on the PICLIST???  You got a bigger PIC than that??  8-)

<soapbox>

At that time, I had a dual system Z-80 machine running ZCPR, with a pair of
serial ports on one machine, and four on the other. Both machines
interfaced to a single HD through a multi-initiator SCSI BIOS that took up
all of 8k.
(It's not called Small Computer System Interface for nothing..)

This is what I ran my BBS on, while I was also using the machine
(multi-tasking, multi-user)

BTW, multi-initiator is part of the ANSI spec for SCSI, and you can't buy a
SCSI implementation for the PC that supports it at any price.  There's also
the original W95 implementation of SCSI, where microsoft just decided to
not implement logical unit numbers.. (Folks, if it's an ANSI spec, then
it's not a Chinese menu. You implement it all, or you can't claim to adhere
to the spec. IMHO, every PC implementation of SCSI I've ever seen,
including adaptec, is basically "some wierd thing we thought up that sort
of acts like SCSI".)

</soapbox>

I've got an AVR supporting eight serial ports full duplex at 4800 with
settable hardware or Xon/Xoff handshaking, plus it's uart at 115200, while
it does 7200 vector math operations every second.. No external ram.

Roughly 200,000 ints/sec, and it's not even breathing hard yet.

I've done 300k in another system, but it wasn't so complicated.

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