XPost: comp.os.linux.advocacy, comp.os.linux.misc

On 2024-09-20 10:41, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

DOS is still used in a lot of industrial kit ...When all you want is
to load a single tasked application that talks to custom hardware...

On 25/09/2024 08:57, Carlos E.R. wrote:

Makes sense. I worked in that sector in the 90's. The only problem
with MsDOS was the small memory available. We had to use overlays in
the software, or load/download programs with a stub.
Well you could in theory kick the processor into 'large' mode and use a
lot more memory

In the mid 1980s, my group was building a small communications
appliance. We built a single-board PC and used a DOS clone as our
bootloader. But booting from floppy was slow as molasses, until I wrote
a small TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) extension that hooked the BIOS
read call and buffered a track at a time. Simple and efficient.

Later, we built at larger, modular system. We found it more economical
to buy a Taiwanese PC motherboard than to roll our own system package.
We put a DOS Extender to good use (80386 in 80286 protected mode). The multitasking part of KA9Q was in there somewhere.

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