tcamp@ecsvax.UUCP (06/17/87)
We need a public-domain, or at least shareware, operating system. I work in an academic setting in which the illegal copying of soft- ware appears to be out of control, and I suspect that this is true in other academic institutions. Students can use pc's at clusters throughout the campus (this is quite legal), and they copy software, including DOS, with great abandon. The university has attempted to encourage students to become familiar with computers by providing the pc clusters and by copying p.d. and shareware programs. In this situation, DOS becomes a major problem, since the university cannot provide software on DOS system disks, and students do not seem inclined to purchase the product legitimately. I realize that, for the time being, we must encourage students to do so. But wouldn't it be possible to develop a relatively simple operating system (say, in C) that would run programs intended for IBM DOS 2.0 and above? Since the ROM BIOS on pc-compatible computers provides the bottom- level routines, what would be necessary besides (a) a bootstrap loader, (b) a command shell (plenty are already available in the public domain), and (c) functions that would emulate the DOS BDOS functions? Is this so difficult? I am quite an amateur, but have already had to write replacements for some of the DOS BDOS video-handling interrupts. A public-domain or shareware operating system would be a real dream for academic computing: we could supply programs on bootable disks, perhaps even exercises for class work, etc. Any interest in developing such a thing?