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Reg article on CUA

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Dave Yeo:
Somewhat interesting article on the CUA at the Reg,
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/

JTA:
It *is* interesting, in more ways than the CUA interface aspect. It points at another "Register" article (16-bit DOS), which says:

"ms removed the 16-bit compatibility layer from x64 Windows OS's of the time, and you could no longer run 16-bit apps. Developers responded with DOSEMU", and many other flavors of DOS emulators. To this day, you can run such emulators to get at the many versions of DOS OS and applications, "on x64 Windows & Linux".

That's an OS that is older than OS/2, and if it can be emulated and survive & thrive to this day, there shouldn't be any reason why OS/2 (all variants) can't be emulated as well, and prosper long into an x64 world.

Lars:

--- Quote from: JTA on January 25, 2024, 01:26:40 pm ---It *is* interesting, in more ways than the CUA interface aspect. It points at another "Register" article (16-bit DOS), which says:

"ms removed the 16-bit compatibility layer from x64 Windows OS's of the time, and you could no longer run 16-bit apps. Developers responded with DOSEMU", and many other flavors of DOS emulators. To this day, you can run such emulators to get at the many versions of DOS OS and applications, "on x64 Windows & Linux".

That's an OS that is older than OS/2, and if it can be emulated and survive & thrive to this day, there shouldn't be any reason why OS/2 (all variants) can't be emulated as well, and prosper long into an x64 world.

--- End quote ---

An X86 CPU can be emulated so that it will run OS/2. But OS/2 exploits almost all HW features of that chip, in contrast to DOS and Windows-16 bit (DOS only runs in real mode and therefore all "protected mode only" instructions are irrelevant, it also only supports 16-bit segments/operand and address sizes). And that will make the emulation incredibly slow.

Neil Waldhauer:
Can you be clearer about "incredibly slow"? We are running 1990s programs on 2020s hardware. How slow could it be?

Martin Iturbide:
Thanks for the "heads up" about this article.

I also took the opportunity to update a little bit the CUA article on the EDM/2 wiki:
- www.edm2.com/index.php/Common_User_Access

Regards

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