[HN Gopher] Idle DR-DOS
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       Idle DR-DOS
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 99 points
       Date   : 2023-05-13 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
        
       | PreInternet01 wrote:
       | I continue to be amazed by Michal Necasek's ability to deeply
       | care about things that literally nobody has even _thought_ about
       | for decades. Kudos!
       | 
       | Power management under DOS on early x86 laptops was downright
       | primitive. There were no standards of _any_ kind (I 'd never even
       | heard of the DR-DOS $IDLE$ device until now, but it doesn't seem
       | like that gained any kind of traction at the time), not even
       | BIOS-based abstractions. Just vendor-provided 'drivers' (in name
       | only: it's not like DOS made any distinction between system and
       | user code) that directly communicated with the hardware.
       | 
       | Unsurprisingly, that all broke down as soon as you did anything
       | even remotely interesting. Run QEMM386? No power management for
       | you! Have a certain PCMCIA card inserted? Ditto! And shipping any
       | kind of updates took forever at that time (literally FedExing
       | floppies...), so getting a working system was pretty much
       | impossible.
        
       | bradneuberg wrote:
       | This is pretty epic work, nicely done!
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-13 23:00 UTC)