-=> On 29 Jan 97  07:01:56 Clem Clarke wrote to All:



 CC> then went on to write CP/M, which was the first grown up

 CC> operating system for personal computers.

And it supported up to 5 users wich had access to their 

own directories only!

 CC> The urban myth (for such it is) has it that when IBM

 CC> was looking for an operating system to put onto its

 CC> soon-to-be-launched PC, it sent a party to visit Kildall's

 CC> company, Digital Research, but Gary was out flying his light

 CC> aeroplane. The IBMers left in a huff and so an almost

 CC> unknown hacker called Bill Gates got the contract and the

 CC> rest is... 



I can live withe Gates, but what follows is teh real disaster:

 CC> For me, a much better game is 'What if IBM had chosen

 CC> the Motorola  68000 instead of the Intel 8088',





Why did all the others choose voor the Motorola?

Appel-Mac, Amiga, Atari ST.....

Well, they all have a 32-bit flat memorymodel since 1985,

a processor with 8 full-purpose dataregisters and

8 adressregisters.

And they run on frequenties under 50 MHz. 

 CC> The segmented Intel architecture has corrupted two

 CC> whole generations of programmers, forcing them to dwell on

 CC> clever memory-mangling tricks rather than secure programming

 CC> practices (you can spot the one's; red-eyed, chewing

 CC> frantically  from caffeine abuse wearing red dwarf

 CC> t-shirts. hanging around on Cix corners).

 CC> It hindered the introduction of GUIs to IBM hardware

 CC> for years.  and it blighted the chances for advanced

 CC> programming languages like LISP and Prolog. Worst of all, it

 CC> was almost certainly responsible for the commercial triumph

 CC> of the C programming language, a disaster from which the

 CC> software industry may never recover.

 CC> There was a time in the early 1980s when, though it's

 CC> hard to believe now, PascaI and C were trying for a place as

 CC> the application programming language of choice (Windows

 CC> still contains an archaeological relic of those days in its

 CC> Pascal function calling convention). Macho programmers have

Pascal function calling is a little bit faster, and they needded

that for their GUI.

 CC> always preferred C because it allows them to roam unfettered

 CC> through the hardware, strewing their mallocs where they may

 CC> fall, whereas Pascal was designed to stop you doing foolish

 CC> things and help you to write correct programs.

 CC> Nevertheless, Borland's Turbo version demonstrated that

 CC> you could do almost anything in Pascal that you could do in

 CC> C but note that 'almost'. The one thing that C had over

 CC> Pascal was that it supported bizarre memory models with

 CC> names like 'large', 'huge'  and  'incredibly vast',  that

 CC> allowed you to write programs larger than 64Kb on the

 CC> benighted Intel 8086 processor; end of contest.

Before I started programming for the Intel-platform I h've never

encountered those Large, Huge, Far, Near.......

 CC> What prompted this particular outflow of spleen was

 CC> reading the 'Report of Inquiry Into the London Ambulance

 CC> Service (Feb 1993)'.  On 4 November 1992 London lost all

 CC> effective ambulance cover because of a catastrophic crash of

 CC> its new computerised dispatching system.  This software  was

 CC> written in a mixture of Visual Basic and C, running under

 CC> Windows 3 on a network of 486 boxes.

 CC> The inquiry team concluded that the crash was caused by

 CC> a memory leak - I quote from para 4039: '...the programmer

 CC> had inadvertently left in the system a piece of program code

 CC> that caused a small amount of memory  within the file server

 CC> to be used up and not released'

Programmers must still know what they are doing, that 's not the

case today when you are using "VISUAL" devlopping symtems and if

you base your programms on C++ classes for someone else.....

 CC> In my alternative What if... universe that system might

 CC> have been written in Oberon 2 (the current descendant of

 CC> Pascal featuring an automatic garbage collector which

 CC> prevents memory leaks) running under Bortech Windows 11.0 on

 CC> a 250MHz PowerPC 9064.



 CC> Copyright Dick Pountain     JULY 1995 PC Pro



    Greetings,



      Raf

--- Blue Wave/OS2 v2.20 [NR]