Being kind to 8086 users - was: Re: msdos perl

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

> There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with
> 8086 machines - portables.

Good point.  Perhaps maintaining compatibility with this particular
archaism is not a bad idea after all.  Urk.

> 				Bill Stewart

   Eli   ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu

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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

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> 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