Timecapsule to the past...

[Alan Grimes]

In yet another attempt to give this project some direction I came up with the
method of trying to guess what someone in 2020 would want from our system. In
order to do that I will take a look at what I would have wanted done twenty
years ago from 1999. 

1. I would have stuffed a million dollars in the time capsule and sent it to IBM
and told them: DO NOT USE THE X86 CHIP!!!!!!

2. I would have sent a message to microsoft explaining the benefits of hardware
abstraction and given them a system of drivers that would allow programs written
on the driver to use any interrupt controller at all. =)  (32 interrupts!!! ) =P

3. I would have DEMANDED that steve jobs licenced his hardware to everybody...
=\ 

4. No assumptions about the video hardware at all eccept the INT 10 interface
should be made. Additional video cards would be possible because they would
simply reconfigure themselves to use the next int number up. =) ( Goodbye 640 k
barrier!)



Hmm So what does this mean for us:

Hardware abstraction is a MUST!!! Drivers should make no assumptions about the
hardware configuration and detect as much as possible.

most programs of that era were written in ASM, Today they are written in C, In
the future we can't tell yet but our software must use interfaces that are
generic enough to use them... Instead of a call based system that uses a C
calling convention we should use a generic message passing system that would
give a textual message that would then be interprited by the server.

Instructions should be simple and generic so that there is less baggage down the
road...

anyway this is more of a flame against the shortsighted decisions twenty years
ago..



-- 
Pyramid schemes are illegal.
Social Security is a pyramid scheme.

users.erols.com/alangrimes/