From: htoaster@yabbs
To: all@yabbs
Subject: unix vs dos
Date: Mon Jun 20 20:21:58 1994

argh...

everyone go learn your unix api's and dos api's and come back then...unix
and dos are completely different designs...yes, dos adapoted the tree structed
file system of unix, but that is about it...the way the two file systems are
laid out on disk is totally different...

if you really want to have this argument i'd reccomend going to your local
university library and getting a book on operating system design...i
personally like "Modern Operating Systems" by Tanebaum (spelling?).  in the
back it has a history of both ms-dos and unix (and cooler stuff like mach),
so read those...

btw, the main problem with dos is that it wasn't designed to scale to todays
computing systems.  its memory managment is designed around the segmented
architecture of 8086's, not the paged systems that most current processors
use (or the paged-segmented system of the 386/486).  pointers are usually
kept in reference to the local segment, and segment sizes are 64k, which makes
dealing with more memory more of a pain (yes, FAR pointers work around that)...
and it just doesn't have a no-brainer interface to accessing more than 640k
of memory.

alex