Re: DOS as a modern OS

Day Brown wrote:
> Natasha Portillo wrote:
> 
>>Ok...
>>
>>Let me think...
>>
>>DOS is hardware independent, but is dependant of BIOS...
>>
>>Is possible to make a portable BIOS, that works to the DOS kernel as the
>>HAL to the Windows NT kernel?
> 
> Lessee, since the Basic Input Output System is burned into the CMOS
> chips of an x86 and copied or 'mirrored' into DRAM during boot, I
> spoze you could rewrite just about anything except the stuff like
> the video ROM addresses of various peripherals. 
> 

Do you  mean something like this?
<http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/>


  OpenBIOS will be a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is 
to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) 
compliant firmware. Among it's features, Open Firmware provides an 
instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot 
the operating system from expansion cards without any native binary 
code. Thus it is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like 
x86, Alpha, x86-64 and IA-64. Additionally OpenBIOS targets the embedded 
systems sector, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal.
Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are 
several commercial implementations from SUN, Apple, IBM, CodeGen and others.
More information on OpenBIOS is available on the About OpenBIOS page.


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