[HN Gopher] Porting to OS/2 (1987)
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       Porting to OS/2 (1987)
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2025-08-07 20:14 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (gitpi.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (gitpi.us)
        
       | joshmarinacci wrote:
       | I notice some unusual spelling errors. Was this translated from
       | another language or scanned with ai?
        
         | cr3ative wrote:
         | Probably just scanned in with classic OCR.
        
       | pavlov wrote:
       | Protected mode on the 286 was seriously flawed. It couldn't run
       | most existing DOS real mode applications without resetting the
       | CPU, and it didn't make it easy to access the new features. You
       | now had a 16MB address space (up from 1MB on the 8086), but you
       | still had to access it through 64kB segments. Protected mode on
       | 286 actually made this worse because it added overhead when
       | modifying segment registers, so accessing large memory areas got
       | slower.
       | 
       | OS/2 1.x was designed for the 286 and couldn't escape these
       | limitations. In theory it was a decent improvement on MS-DOS, but
       | in practice there wasn't enough value to counter the lack of
       | compatibility and the higher price.
        
         | twoodfin wrote:
         | It's kind of wild that neither IBM (who got beat to the
         | hardware punch by Compaq) nor Microsoft (who targeted the NT
         | effort at everything _except_ x86) initially grokked how
         | revolutionary the 80386 was: A "decent enough" 32-bit
         | architecture with a huge preexisting ecosystem that would be
         | able to ride the rocket ship of commodity PC scale.
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-11 23:00 UTC)