> >After playing with BeOS a while something occurred to me. Does anyone remember
> >at what point operating systems stopped coming with development tools? I'm
> >remembering the commodore 64 that came with Basic, and if you typed in the
> >assembler from the manual, you could (at least in theory) write proffessional
> >quality assembly language programs worthy of being sold to others.
On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> Heck, the Apple had its own ML monitor, too, as did the Commodore
> Plus/4, 16 and 128.
PC/MS-DOS, even WINDOZE!, has DEBUG. Not the tool of choice for large
projects, but much less "overhead" than MASM for small tasks. It is by far
the most powerful program that runs on MS-DOS.
On Fri, 18 Jun 1999 CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com wrote:
> Well, CP/M came with a good assembler, MS-DOS didn't. That's where
> I draw the line in my head.
PC-DOS is NOT the same as MS-DOS. Well, the OS is for all practical
purposes the same, but the marketing isn't. And THIS is a situation where
that matters. IBM chose to separate MASM out of PC-DOS. But MS-DOS was
"only available from the manufacturer of the computer" (Yeah, right.)
MASM was apparently available to the OEMs for inclusion or not as they saw
fit. Most of the high profile IBM wannabes, such as Compaq, followed
IBM's example and gouged you for it separately. But some chose to not do
an IBM, so some, like the Toshiba T300 included MASM as part of their
MS-DOS.
Or is this an issue of whether MASM is a good assembler? That one is
debatable. Before version 5.0 of MASM, it was severely lacking in
significant documentation components.
> installed with some version of MS-BASIC, but I (personally) don't
> categorize that as a "real" development tool.
It's not bad as an end-user casual use tool, but it would be somewhat
demented (BTDT) to use it to build any commercial software.
In addition, it was about 10 years ago that IBM stopped including LINK (a
necessary tool for using compilers and assemblers). And, of course, using
LINK from an older version of DOS doesn't work due to the version
checking. The fix is trivial; just look through LINK.EXE for MOV AH,30h
INT 21h.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Fri Jun 18 1999 - 17:47:36 BST