daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) (01/04/88)
In article <442@pcrat.UUCP> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes: >> From Jan BYTE: (Jerry Pournelle) >> "I must say that as I watch the OS/2 story unfold, I do begin to >> wonder: if UNIX is ever made stable enough to be put in ROM, so that you > >I gave up Byte years ago. Pournelle should stick to SF. Why would >you want to put *Anything* into ROM (on a PC). Stability? Yeh... we got it ... >the bugs are stable, they're in ROM. Well, a friend got me to put Canadian-French diacritical-character handling into the ROM of his series of PC-compatibles... to eliminate the cry of: "my system, she has crashed and forgotten her accents again". One puts in ROM what must work all the time, and in RAM what one isn't sure of. For the case of a small manufacturer, who has a customer base which will happily allow him to do "free upgrades", putting as much in ROM (well, eprom) as is stable makes sense. He'd happily put Unix in ROM if I'd swear to maintain it (:-). --dave -- David Collier-Brown. {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind) CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.