On Aug 4, 11:40 am, Udo Kuhnt <048321887-0...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Day Brown wrote:
> > Just to letcha know, its been working well for me.
>
> Thank you! Most people only write when something does *not* work. ;-)
i dunno if you've been following the comp.os.msdos.programmer
postings, but I think some enhancements of text mode are possible, and
extremely useful. Not only is it fast, but I dont see how you can
embed sabotage software in it. And so much of what the other operating
systems are doing to promote multi-media is adding clutter and getting
in the way of using a computer to actually work with data. To, of all
things, "compute".
I know there are systems out there to run two monitors at once, but
now, I wonder if the new wide screen wouldnt be more convenient if you
could split it into two DOS terminals. In a time of increasing energy
awareness, the single LCD would use 25% of the power of two CRT
screens. In a time of increasing energy awareness, the dos text mode
can provide faster performance on far fewer watts with much cheaper
hardware.
Part of what's going on at my website, http://www.dc-pc.org
are
experiments in the dos text mode user interface and the effort to
produce a platform that will run as long as possible on backup
batteries. It looks like energy consumption will become a big issue. I
run DRDOS regularly on the VIA series of socket 370 CPUs which work on
less than 10 watts. The socket 370 mthrbds are cheap, but draw 40
watts all by themselves.
I've tried the mini-ITX, but there are hard drive recognition problems
with them, and they dont really save that much energy. I spoze there
are laptop boards that use less, but I look for open architecture,
with at least PCI slots. There's a lotta data acquisition apps out
there that'll run off DOS, and do it forever if there's a PCI slot,
and do it the longest on whatever the backup battery banks have.
But, for instance, being able to see the output from the app on one
panel and monitor the registers on the other, would be useful
debugging.
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