Comments on: BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

By: Mordamir

Mordamir — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 20:30:37 +0000

In reply to Gerry. In Spain, Caixa bank and other entities uses os/2 Warp in all country until early 2000s

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 23:31:44 +0000

In reply to Patrick5. GCC can always be rebuilt to include C++ comment styles in the C compiler, so that's not so bad. The 16MB barrier however is something that cant be immediately fixed. I did like how they tagged the system note that they MAY address it in the future, which they obviously didnt. Although if it'd been marketed in the west, and found an audience, maybe the services could have been migrated to win32.

By: Patrick5

Patrick5 — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 20:56:45 +0000

BOW’s limitations, especially in memory allocation and GCC compiler quirks, reflect the fundamental constraints and ingenuity in early Unix-Windows integrations. It’s restricted to a maximum of 16 MB memory due to WINMEM32, and its GCC C compiler can’t handle C++ style comments. These challenges highlight the resourcefulness in early cross-platform development. I’m wondering how BOW would handle more complex memory-intensive applications, given these limitations?

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:44:21 +0000

In reply to Paolo Bonzini. dynamic recompilation quite a few versions I tried from 0.8 to 8.something.. and lots inbetween. dosbox-bow.7z, this is the files from dosbox (which does run it), you can just unzip this into a bootable dos disk and pretty much run & gun.

By: anxietism

anxietism — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:43:23 +0000

cute logo for an interesting product, didn’t now the bsd lil devil was already around in the 95

By: fform

fform — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 07:08:01 +0000

In reply to oPless. ATMs were running Warp up until at least the mid-aughts, going by my experience in banking at the time. Most are probably decomissioned by now but I know smaller banks still had them in service to the early 201xs.

By: Paolo Bonzini

Paolo Bonzini — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 05:44:31 +0000

If it’s not hard to reproduce it, I will give it a shot on QEMU and try to fix it. Were you using KVM or dynamic recompilation

By: oPless

oPless — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 02:33:51 +0000

In reply to neozeed. Agreed. Many places ran OS/2 that were IBM shops. Big insurance companies etc. Heck quite a few banks had ATMs that ran OS/2 I moved a OS/2 Lanman system over to WinNT in the early 90s, and upgrading win 3.11 clients over to Win95 when required.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:09:41 +0000

In reply to Hunter Turcin.

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/073/Q73677/

Perfect that makes total sense! I thought it was funny the more RAM I gave it the quicker it failed, like it didn’t even try.

I guess the next experiment is to see if each console has it’s own address space, or if it’s a system shared pool.

By: Hunter Turcin

Hunter Turcin — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:05:48 +0000

Nice article! The memory limit you describe for WINMEM32 does appear to be an inherent limitation that never got updated; see old KB article Q73677.