Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 20, 2012 16:26 UTC (Sat) by viro (subscriber, #7872)
In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by raven667
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

You are overestimating the effects. Or just forgetting what the situation really had been.

* MacOS had not been thrown out and replaced by a Unix derivative until very late in the game.
* there had been AmigaOS, which was also not a Unix by any stretch of imagination. Might or might not have died off; hell knows.
* IBM mistake of using Intel's design failure (286 protected mode architecture) would still have happened. Results wouldn't have been any prettier than in real history. By the time Intel has fixed the worst of that it was too late - OS/2 interfaces had been deeply affected by that horror and it was too late to fix them.
* Gary Kildall and his pile of garbage. That's the guy you have to thank for the mess, far more than Gates&co. A lot of bitty-box software had been out there and it had been cheerfully ignoring the nearly inexistent kernel. Porting _that_ to anything resembling an operating system would have been slow and painful.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 20, 2012 19:43 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (10 responses)

> You are overestimating the effects. Or just forgetting what the situation really had been

That may be, this is speculative history fiction after all.

The seeds for MacOS were planted when NeXT was founded and successfully created its successor. Apple might have turned out very differently in the late 80's and 90's has NeXT been done in-house. Lets just change one thing for speculation purposes though.

I can see how 286 protected-mode could have thrown a monkey wrench into the design but Xenix was ported to the 386 and available at the time a switch over could have been made from DOS. Compatibility could have been maintained with Merge for example or some other DOSBox-like technology created. Windows could have been designed for Xenix instead of DOS.

The rest of the systems turned out to be small fry or have fundamental flaws either technically or in the management of the companies supporting them. I don't think the winners and losers of the 80s-90s would have turned out differently but there was an opportunity that was missed.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 20, 2012 21:54 UTC (Sat) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (9 responses)

There had been lots and lots of software that would be hell to port to anything OS-like. Unix, VMS, whatever. Nothing short of fully virtualized system would help and that would be prohibitively costly on 286 (not to mention 8086). It didn't have to be written that way; it just had been the common culture on CP/M boxen and it had been transported over to DOS. And no, MacOS of the period hadn't been any better in that respect. And 386 had been too late to really affect that - by the time it had been widely deployed, there had been a huge market and it had been way too late. I suspect that this is what had really doomed any plans of transition to Xenix.

As for 286, I really wonder what would an OS Intel had in mind for that beast look like. Some kind of Ada environment, perhaps? Definitely not something resembling Unix...

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 21, 2012 15:47 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (8 responses)

Aside from os/2 I don't think the 286 was relevant except as a a faster 8086 and the 386 was the transition point. Dosbox shows that the vm route is viable.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 21, 2012 18:43 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

The VM route is viable *with modern hardware*, because its CPUs are much much faster and memory much more capacious than the systems being emulated. On late-1980s and early-1990s CPUs like the 80386 (which was introduced in 1985 and was becoming common in the early 1990s), it is wholly impractical to expect to be able to do instruction-level, let alone cycle-accurate, emulation of even an 8086, let alone a 286.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 22, 2012 5:13 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (4 responses)

The 386 does run 8086 software just fine. Sure some runs too fast or whatever but the CPU has the appropriate guts to run 8086 software in a VM and that feature was in use at the time. For example Concurrent DOS 386.

Of course the rest of this is high speculation as it wasn't what happened.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 22, 2012 15:21 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

I know it does. But if insn-level emulation was required, it couldn't possibly have (i.e. if it had done what dosbox et al do now).

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 22, 2012 17:12 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

Win3.1 with virtual memory enabled and WinNT, Win95 had the same problem so how they solved it should be sufficient. DOSBox does better but that may because it creates virtual video, sound and network devices in its VM. I don't think it does any more instruction emulation/trapping than a WinNT DOS window.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 24, 2012 15:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The two are quite different. Win3.1/NT/95 were all 32-bit systems, so they had the benefit of being able to use VM86 to do 90% of the work for them. In long mode (64-bit mode), vm86 no longer exists, so this approach cannot be used.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 24, 2012 16:27 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Thanks for the clear response, I hadn't thought about that. I'd forgotten about the differences between 32bit and 64bit mode on modern CPUs, and that dosemu and dosbox aren't the same thing.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 21, 2012 19:07 UTC (Sun) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (1 responses)

Remind me, when had 386 boxen become widespread enough? IIRC, in the very late 80s... And overhead of vm86, while nowhere near that of hacks possible on 286, could still be heavy, depending on what the turd running in it had been doing. IRH the things had eventually gone that way, but it took a lot of time. IBM had invested too much into 286 boxen; OS/2 was only the software half of disaster...

AFAICS, there were two critical points in the making of that mess; one in mid-70s, when CP/M had been designed and spread, with resulting traditions of software that assumed it had essentially solitary control of bare hardware and another in the end of 70s, when internal politics in Intel has lead to 80286 design picked. Hell knows what happened in there - at the same time they had an even worse disaster going on (iAPX432) and chances of iAPX286 design to get accepted had to depend on how much could it be internally sold as aligned with iAPX432 one, but details are probably impossible to reconstruct by now.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 22, 2012 5:17 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

In my speculative revised history I would think that the Xenix transition would happen in the early 90's, maybe with Win3.x and instead of developing new kernels for WinNT and Win9x. The result would probably have looked a lot like NeXT.