modern serial terminal

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: modern serial terminal
>   From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
>   Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:48:04 -0800 (PST)
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, ajones wrote:
>> There was never a version of Linux, or UNIX in general, less bloated
>> than Windows 95.
>
>Xenix ran on an 8088 XT with 640K.  The IBM XT hard disk controller could
>be jumpered (undocumented) to handle other sizes of drives other than the
>412 (10MB).  One of those sizes was 26MB, which was just right for a 10MB
>DOS partition and a 16MB Xenix partition (that was how I found out about
>the XT hard disk controller's undocumented jumper solder pads)
>
>
>> [1] Yes, Windows 95 had memory protection and preemptive multitasking.
>
>Are there multiple definitions of "preemptive"?
>Or, is "preemptive" a quantitative, rather than qualitative attribute?
>I would not consider Win95, nor early Mac, to be "preemptive".  Even NT4,
>which is purportedly preemptive has a few two many situations where/when
>it can not be preempted.  For example, when opening a telnet session, it
>often can NOT be preempted until it gets to the point of success or failure.

Time for a topic change.

Is that an OS failure or an application failure?   As I see it and run it
NT is preemtive but applications can block or alter lower priority tasks 
making it possile to do nasty thing like block keyboard task.  I suspect
it's legacy plus the tendancy to make forground tasks the higher priortity
may have something to do with it.


Linux and VMS seem to be clearly preemptive as are a number of other
OSs.


Allison