From: commodorejohn@gmail.com
On Fri, 19 Jul 2024 18:43:13 +0800
"Paul Edwards" wrote:
> Sure - but why not make it available anyway? What's the barrier
> to someone doing that? No-one is interested? Too much work?
> It didn't need to be Microsoft personally. And it can be written
> in C to make things easier. Or even some other language - e.g.
> CP/M was written in PL/M I think.
Well, 35 yrs. ago, x86 wasn't even a thing in the "mainframe" (by which
we presumably mean "large-scale, heavy-duty business computing") space;
in 1989 e.g. CompuServe was still entirely a PDP-10 shop, IBM had just
rolled out its AS/400 line, and the IA-32 architecture was still four
years away from even going superscalar. Others here have far more
direct knowledge of the "mainframe" space than myself, and can feel
free to correct me, but AFAIK x86 systems didn't see broad acceptance
in truly heavy-duty business computing 'til the mid-'00s.
And while MS-DOS can certainly be used for classic batch processing, it
has practically no support for multitasking, which was already a thing
in the mainframe space all the way back to the '60s, because any given
batch job will not *necessarily* make maximal use of the computer, and
at large scale it makes no sense to leave available resources idle.
It's possible to set specialized utilities running as TSRs in DOS, but
the system as a whole is not designed for more than one "real" program
to run at a time - so sharing the system between large numbers of
individual jobs in a generalized way simply isn't possible.
So, in short: there was no mainframe hardware platform that it could be
ported to back in the day, and it's not well-suited for that use case.
One certainly *could* get it running on, say, a large x86 cluster as a
novelty, but it's not a huge surprise that, thus far, nobody has been
thus inclined.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
