Wow - memorabilia!

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Brendan
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Wow - memorabilia!

Post by Brendan »

Hi,

You wouldn't believe what I found after a silly web search - original documentation for an OS I wrote back in 1998... :)

Looks like it's being hosted on a "Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University" server in Poland, in an employee's web directory.

I'm not sure if I should be proud that someone thought it was worth keeping, or saddened that they couldn't find something that actually is worth keeping.... ;)

Still, it's nice to be reminded of the "good 'old days" now and then...


Cheers,

Brendan
For all things; perfection is, and will always remain, impossible to achieve in practice. However; by striving for perfection we create things that are as perfect as practically possible. Let the pursuit of perfection be our guide.
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Dex
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Post by Dex »

Nice work, it looked promising, why did you stop ?.
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Post by Brendan »

Hi,
Dex wrote:Nice work, it looked promising, why did you stop ?.
Mostly, I stopped because it looked promising... ;)

That specific version was single-CPU 32-bit protected mode with plain paging only. Device drivers were more like kernel modules (ran at CPL=0 in kernel space) but used messaging like a micro-kernel. The messsaging was limited (4 dwords per message). The scheduler didn't scale well (the scheduler's overhead became insane with more threads), and it used hardware task switching. IIRC there was also some TLB invalidation bugs, where it worked OK on Pentium and older computers but had erratic behaviour on newer systems.

It was good enough to encourage me to go further, but not good enough for me to continue the same version. This is how I've been doing things since I began - design the OS, implement a varying amount of it, then use what I learned to design a newer/better version with more features.


Cheers,

Brendan
For all things; perfection is, and will always remain, impossible to achieve in practice. However; by striving for perfection we create things that are as perfect as practically possible. Let the pursuit of perfection be our guide.
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Dex
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Post by Dex »

Cool, thats what i hope Dex4u OS, could be used for, testing new ideas, before implementing them in a more desktop type OS.
But you custom build, your test base, which means you learn more, but lengths the time to know, if your idea has merit.
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kataklinger
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Post by kataklinger »

You know how they say:
If at first you don't succeed, you must be a programmer.
;)
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