[fpc-devel] Multithreading under DOS

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 09/26/2013 11:33 PM, Tomas Hajny wrote:
> 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.
Well, if you go into details, there's not much use in using DOS at all, 
even without multithreading and multitasking. I'm using it for the fun 
factor mostly.
>>> 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.
Actually, in 386 enhanced mode the multitasking was preemptive for DOS 
applications, but Win16 applications used cooperative multitasking. But 
Microsoft later made a DOS extender that supported full preemptive 
multitasking and multithreading. They called it Windows 95 :)

Nikolay