A92: Re: Shells and assembler

To: <assembly-92@lists.ticalc.org>
Subject: A92: Re: Shells and assembler
From: "Aaron Hill" <serac@lightmail.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 1999 18:10:52 -0700
References: <600ebc45.25312c5c@aol.com>
Reply-To: assembly-92@lists.ticalc.org


I'm sure Ellsworth knew what he was doing.  The TI-92 is a graphing calculator.
That is its only purpose in life--perform mathematical operations and visualize
the results.  David, knowing this, figured that most people would need to use
the calculator for both assembler programs and for its original design.  With
that in mind, he considered how the TI-OS would deal with assembler code.  By
encapsulating assembler inside of "BASIC" program, the TI-OS would automatically
deal with file transfer and file management.

Of course no one is perfect.  David never figured out how to prevent the TI-OS
from re-writing the program if you accidentally tried to edit it.  We just knew
never to open an assembler program.

I don't follow how writing our own OS will help us.  The TI-OS is implemented
in ROM.  Our OS would MOSTLY be in RAM (assume we borrow SOME functions of the
TI-OS).  This will take up our most valuable and most limited resource--memory.
I personally would never want to program file management or file transfer!  It
is hard enough for me to read the stupid keyboard matrix!

. . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .    . . .

I was thinking about my old Amiga 1000 sitting near to my Pentium II 400MHz.
(The Amiga was one of the first multi-tasking systems.)  If we had a multi-
tasking system for the 92, we could simply "console" applications by providing
a "stdin" and "stdout".  The kernel would deal with reading the keyboard matrix
and rendering the text.  Or better yet, one module provides text output and a
different module does tile/sprite graphics.  Your program switches to the other
module to do graphics output.  Since only kernel modules are rendering to the
screen, you can ensure that only the foreground app's graphics are displayed.
The last module you could add would be for 3D graphics.

Assuming this system was already built, would you programmers use it?  Or do
you prefer to do your own I/O?


====
Aaron Hill (Redmond, Wash.)
Electronic Mail: serac@lightmail.com
IRC Nickname: serac (on EF-Net)
ActiveWorlds Citizenship: serac

References:

A92: Shells and assembler

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