Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

bare-metal OS.

code base.

So did DOOM, that doesn't make it an operating system.

--
?? 100% natural

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Actually in modern PC's there is an increase in BIOS use. Windows and other

32bit protected mode operating systems stopped using the BIOS as the BIOS vendors never wrote protected mode friendly code. A modern PC with an ACPI BIOS provides a bytecode that can be executed in the OS kernel to do chipset specific operations in an OS neutral way. ATI also do a similar thing in their video card ROMS for certain setup operations as well. Suspending and resuming a modern laptop is done this way as are a lot of the motherboard device discovery/power managment.

This bytecode approach gives the OS vendor a way of controlling the processor mode and leaves it up to the OS to make sure the bytecode interpreter is suitable for the OS environment. These BIOSs are not without their bugs but the situation is getting better especially since newer versions of Windows don't tolerate bugs in these bits of code.

Makes you wish they had done it this way in the first place although I'd imagine the performance penalty on even a 486 would be shocking.

Mike

But it didn't have a mouse ball.

/BAH

Not really. He's writing the same old shit he spews in other newsgroups.

/BAH

And, after that, it was NT underneath.

/BAH

Sigh! Proprietary meant that the formats were not published. To translate that sentence for you, it meant that nobody knew what the formats were and, thus, could not write code to read those formats unless they were ble$$ed by MS.

/BAH

Right.

/BAH

But I can certainly order a car that doesn't have them, I may just have to wait longer (it will often be cheaper as well unless the dealer really wants the one with heated seats off the lot and is willing to eat the cost of them to do it).

I actually have heard several childless people complain about safety features aimed at children driving up the cost. -- Joe

--
Joe Thompson - 
E-mail addresses in headers are valid. | http://www.orion-com.com/
"...the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals..." -- Derek Lowe

Even the published ones require reverse engineering to implement. Have you looked at the scandal that is OOXML, Barb?

--
Roland Hutchinson		

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger  ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

Are you sure?

--
Roland Hutchinson		

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger  ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

There have been ages since I couldn't read a document. It still happens all the time that it formats strangely. But that happens on other MS installations as well; where the setup for the details is different from what the original author intended.

I meet this all the time as a consultant, working with customers and customers' customers that have all sorts of different layouts.

And I am often chosen to be the one that generates these "microsoft" documents, because whatever is generated when the open tools save as "windows" formats and prints well on all the windows and mac platforms. I just use ooffice, koffice, abiword or pages and save in "windows 97" format.

If you need more formatting than what the windows 97 format gives you, then you need another tool, like a typesetter (TeX), or an editor for clip-art(inkscape) or an image editor (gimp), or a pdf (hundreds of tools).

There was a change in this tide around 2006. This was when Microsoft got tangled in their own web of proprietariness and incompatible formats.

The defining moment was when I plugged a MICROSOFT brand mouse into debian, and debian asked 'new mouse "Microsoft ..model" detected. Do you want to make this your primary pointing device? (Y/N/Defer)' [1] but the next to latest windows model gave a "unknown hardware detected. Insert hardware diskette" (and none was found in their packaging). [2]

[1] And the mouse was perfectly functional, it just took second fiddle when multiple mice were moved. [2] And the mouse did NOT work.

We have come a long way. Primary thanks to the EU commision who have forced MS to publish detailed specifications into the public domain for every bit they force on us.

This should have been the US Judge, but someone padded the coffers of some politicians.

-- mrr

Jasen Betts wrote

bare-metal OS.

Only for booting, not for normal ops once booted.

Irrelevant to what did the work once 9x was booted.

And even NT, XP etc use a relatively primitive system for the boot phase that isnt used once they are booted.

So does *nix.

Jasen Betts wrote

bare-metal OS.

code base.

Yes, but the others clearly are OSs.

phase now.

Not to anything like the level seen with DOS.

They stopped using the BIOS for a lot more reasons than that.

And there arent all that many chipset specific ops to do with normal ops.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed.

And thats why it wasnt done that way.

jmfbahciv wrote

Heavy breathing aint gunna save your bacon.

Duh. NTFS support etc is perfectly possible anyway.

were

How odd that plenty managed to work them out anyway. It aint rocket science, stupid.

by MS.

How odd that so many did anyway.

Try again.

Joe Thompson wrote

You can order anything you like, and some manufacturers refuse to supply the car without that and certainly dont give you a price reduction.

It wont ever happen with some manufacturers.

And thats just as true of a laptop that comes with Win.

Corse some fools whine like that. But you cant order the car without that, you get to like that or lump it, just like you do with laptops that come with Win.

And you can certainly get a chinese laptop that doesnt pay MS a cent for anything anyway.

re:

Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in Londn

regarding Melinda's pages with some mainframe historic documents moving ... there was some comment that princeton was removing her pages because of possible hate crimes issues ... over her comments about MVS.

she had a multi-file postscript version that was many tens of megabytes (with lots of pictures) that I converted to PDF (4mbytes) and did an awz/kindle conversion. frequently kindle conversion becomes smaller file ... but with all the images, the kindle version is twice as large (9mbytes, as pdf).

other of the PDF files with figures that are line-drawings using characters didn't convert nearly as well (and converted to smaller files) for kindle ... with the characters in the drawings being "flowed".

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

phase now.

Actually, probably even more so. Sometime you should try to broaden your horizens and spend some time looking into SMM. The SMM handler which is part of the BIOS executes _very_ frequently (and invisibly) while Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, et. al. are executing, particularly when the power saving features of the system are in use.

And most operating system interactions with the hardware platform are handled by the ACPI bytecode as others have noted.

scott

Scott Lurndal wrote

phase now.

Wrong with normal ops like reads and writes to the drives etc.

into SMM.

No need, I know what its about.

Pity the drive ops aint. Video in spades. Comms in spades. Etc etc etc.