The discussion on porting perl to MS-DOS led to the following comment:
*requires* access to extended memory. There is approx. 300+ Kbytes of memory available ^^^^^^^^ Which means a 286, not a 386. If there are a lot of people out there on 8086 machines, sorry. People with that particular problem are going to have a hard time running most modern software, let alone Unix ports.
There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with 8086 machines - portables. Especially cheap, lightweight portables, and palmtops like the HP95LX, which people might use to do their private email from, or carry around to exchange PGP keys with, or use as a smartcard for digicash and remote access to networks. Another part is DOS emulation running on real machines - I think lots of that is 8086-like. 640K RAM is a hard limit to live with, and sometimes you just can't do it, but it's nice if people don't *gratuitously* make their software not fit here. There's lots of real work that can still be done on them, and really patient people can even run Unix-like operating systems such as Minix. Bill Stewart
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On Mon, 22 Feb 93 12:42:23 PST, Eli Brandt <ebrandt@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> said:
There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with 8086 machines - portables.
Eli> Good point. Perhaps maintaining compatibility with this particular Eli> archaism is not a bad idea after all. Urk. Second reason for compatibility that I was too sleep-depped to think of this morning in my reply, is that do we really want to assume the position that for the reasonable chunk of possible users out there using 8088 or 8086 processors that we're going to tell them if they don't plunk down the cash for a new system they can't get the anonymity those more wealthy than them can?;> Sounds just a trifle arrogant to me, but then...
Bill Stewart
Eli> Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu CrysRides -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.1 iQCVAgUBK4lWZpSqD+bQ7So3AQHhhgP/TddlrWx4hKQCeudOD3/v11ObegGCyqzj ul3ZrDjcDsr5UTunBwpuN3Dt+UP/LBO3kccDM6o3BWLo4LdlWQR1cHa+UGlBnhon gUkXVaRTSq4J4yz0BH0yYMCgdLeZu9nMl/DwqZX1GUwT85XwwONbp28yky+v5RFp Ok7D259A5q4= =SZ9t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with 8086 machines - portables.
c'est what? you must mean palmtops. laptops and notebooks run op systems like mach, bsd, plan 9, etc. -- they're not running on 8086s. of course, i can see wanting to run on an 8086 if it's guaranteed that it can't run perl. peter
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