[fpc-devel] Re: fpc-devel Digest, Vol 112, Issue 32

[Steve Smith]

On 23/08/13 21:50, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>
>> Quite frankly, from what I've seen most Windows users would find Linux
>> simpler than one of the *freely* *available* IBM OSes (i.e. MVS, VM/360
>> "sixpack" and so on).
>
> To avoid ambiguity: that was a typo, and I meant "VM/370 'sixpack'".
>
> As background: it appears that IBM didn't embed copyright notices in the
> source or binary of their early operating systems, with the result that
> older versions of the DOS, OS, and VM lines are now described as being in
> the public domain. There's a hobbyist community that runs these under the
> Hercules emulator, IBM is aware of this but generally keeps its distance.
>
> All of these date back to the era when addresses (certainly per-process, and
> usually system-wide) were 24 bit, i.e. there was a process or system
> restriction of 16Mbyte of "core". Unfortunately, GCC can't compile itself in
> 16Mb, so somebody's created a patch for the Hercules emulator and for the
> operating systems which allows one program at a time to allocate storage
> from "above the line", this is referred to as the /380 hack
> http://mvs380.sourceforge.net/ and hardly anybody's happy about it.
>
What relevance does GCC have? The fact that there is an environment in which 
it may not work isn't regarded, by me at least, as unfortunate.