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[OM] Re: Old computers - Geeks and nerds

Subject: [OM] Re: Old computers - Geeks and nerds
From: "Leandro DUTRA" <leandro.gfc.dutra@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:35:14 -0300
2008/3/23, Ian Manners <oice500@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>  > That was the 80186.  The 286 was very useful, and would have had a
>  > much longer life had MS not discarded its plan of migrating everyone
>  > from MS DOS 3 to MS Xenix.
>
> I could be talking only from the Australian experience, I know about
>  the 80186 but no one I know even saw one in the wild here in Australia

It was only used in a few PCs and some dedicated hardware such as
ATMs.  No big loss.  Never saw one in Brazil neither.


>  as the 80286 was released to quickly afterwards for people to bother
>  putting the 80186 into production here. The 80286 lacked much in the
>  way of innovation, being a faster 8086 from a 'general' hardware point
>  of view, guess the same can be said of the 80186 but I had actually
>  forgotted that chip altogether due to never having seen one.

That was true of the 80186, but the 80286 was actually a protected
mode processor.  What killed it was DOS: OS/2 (and later MS Windows)
needed it to run DOS real mode programs under virtual mode.


>  So I guess I would also agree with your comments about the 80186
>  though to my knowledge MS Xenix was aimed at something different
>  that taking over MS-DOS. Mind you, different MS people always
>  gave different answers to the same question back then :-)

This is well documented.  MS DOS 2.11 even had a CONFIG.SYS switch
confusingly called SWITCHCHAR or something the like to enable one to
use '-' as the command line switch character instead of '/', so you
could use '/' instead of '\' for directory separation in path names as
you do in POSIX.  That was supposed to become the default in MS DOS 3
as a step to Xenix, but in the way to v3 MS realise it needed the
proprietary lock in and thus OS/2 was born.  I have an article
somewhere… here it is, http://br.geocities.com./lgcdutra/prop.en.html
— but it is an old automatic translation from Portuguese, I really
need to go back to it.

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