On Fri, 1 Aug 2025 22:14:56 -0400, kaladorn wrote:

>Which colour was your VT-220? Yellow or Green text? :-)

My days of using a VT-series terminal were back in my first attempt at
University, and they were connected to a FEP that talked to an IBM 3033.
Most of the terminals on campus were direct-wired 3270-compatibles
(including a few that had the APL character ROS). All of them, 3270 or VT,
were green screen, and even the emulator for the PC lab (IBM 5150 with dual
floppy, PC-DOS 1.0) ran green-screen, even though we had CGA in them.

>A lot of folks don't even know that Windows came out of IBM and the
>earliest version of OS/2. And a lot of today's coders have never had to be
>careful which column your content works (FORTRAN). And back far enough back
>that you had to do your own allocations and deallocations and do things
>like pointers of tables of pointers. And sometimes you had to be very
>limited because your memory all together was 8Kb. And they were so short of
>letters, 'creat' was used... (LOL!).

Nope, Windows prior to NT (Windows 1, 2, 3.x) was NOT based on IBM code for
what eventually became OS/2; it was an own-code attempt at mimicking what
some 'softie saw at Xerox PARC, and was built as a "shell" for MS-DOS. The
co-project with IBM based on what would eventually be released as OS/2 was
initially released on the Microsoft side as Windows NT (although there was
also eventually a simultaneous OS/2 release, "MS OS/2" and "IBM OS/2", with
some subtle presentational and "packaged utility" differences), and wasn't
really ready for prime time (surprise surprise). A lot of that was in fact
back-ported into what MS released as Windows 95 (built as a DOS shell),
Windows 98 (a transitional product, originally a DOS shell, later (98SE) a
'bare-iron' release with DOS as a pseudo-VM), and Windows ME (bare-iron
with embedded DOS), but the first real "OS/2-based" Windows was XP, built
on the NT core. Microsoft abandoned the co-project, which is why there
isn't a MS OS/2 any more; the IBM side of the project made it to version 4
before being moribunded.

While I never really had a problem with it, the biggest complaint about DOS
and Windows prior to the release of Intel's iapx386 CPU (OS/2 was
originally designed for the iapx286,but I seem to recall it being delayed
and reworked when Intel announced the iapx386 and that it would have linear
addressing available) was that the addressing model was non-linear
(sector-base-address:offset) and a segment maxed out at 64K. It wasn't a
limitation of DOS or Windows, though; it was a limitation of the chip's
addressing model, and affected any OS that was built for those chips,
including Xenix, CTOS, CP/M-86, and the very earliest versions of Linux,
plus DOS clones like DR-DOS and DOS shells like GEM and VisiOn.

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