[fpc-devel] Multithreading under DOS

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, September 26, 2013 21:03, Nikolay Nikolov wrote:
> On 09/26/2013 09:41 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
>> Nikolay Nikolov schrieb:
>>> On 09/26/2013 08:24 PM, Leif Ekblad wrote:
>>>> DOS extenders are even worse candidates for multitasking than DOS.
>>>> And if you aim to use 32-bit anyway, I see no reason to use an DOS
>>>> extender over a real multitasking OS.
>>> Low resource usage perhaps. How well does Linux run on a 386 with 4
>>> MB of RAM? What about 2 MB? :)

How much does the 386 CPU with 2 MB of appropriate RAM cost today? How
much power and cooling does it need? How much reliable would be the HW
compared to more up to date alternatives (let's say ARM or MIPS with 512
MB RAM and an SSD running Linux)?

Anyway, as I mentioned - I can imagine that it may be fun (similarly to my
attempts to keep and improve the OS/2 support which is also used very
rarely by others at best ;-) ), I just wanted to understand if there was
any idea how it would be used in reality.


>> My first notebook had 4 MB RAM, and Win3.1 and Word 1.0 worked very
>> well on it :-)
> Yes, but windows 3.1 is a DOS extender :)

Yes. Moreover, an extender not featuring multi-threading and even the
multitasking wasn't preemptive if I remember correctly.

Tomas