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Peter Tattam Of The PetrOS Project Talks To OSNews
Eugenia writes: "Trumpet Software is mostly known for their Internet communications software package, Trumpet Winsock, which has been adopted by the Internet world back in 1995, at the times where Windows 3.1 and Win95 did not come as standard with full internet connetion capabilities. But the main product these days for Trumpet Software is PetrOS, a 32-bit Operating System, which has the goal to be compatible by all means (binary and API compatible) with Microsoft Windows. OSNews is interviewing the main architect behind the project, Peter Tattam, who talks in depth about PetrOS, and also there is shown an early screenshot of the PetrOS GUI, which is still under heavy development." And it's been (not surprizingly) under heavy development for a while. Building a Windows-compatible OS from scratch surely isn't easy, but from this interview (including screenshots) they're having quite a go of it.
It's an interesting goal and everything, but it's a moving target, as far as I can tell.
Every few months I get a new copy of the MSDN library (basically documentation for all Microsoft's APIs), and every time it's a bit different from the one before.
Of course I don't want to tell anyone how to spend their time, but if it were me, I'd spend my energy on building something new, rather than just trying to be compatible with something that'll just be obsolete by the time I'm done anyway.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
you're right. (cough) DR-DOS. (cough)
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
There has been a whole string of books published since the early 90's with the titles "Undocumented DOS", "Undocumented Windows", etc...
See Undocumented Windows
I am only really familiar with "Undocumented Windows", but it goes into detail about some of the "reserved" API hooks Microsoft used in its own applications around the Windows 3.1/3.11 days.
Microsoft used these undocumented API features during the early days of Microsoft Word and Excel to crush and consume most of its word processing/office suite competitors. Remember Lotus 1 2 3, Wordperfect, Quattro Pro? In part, they died the death of Microsoft's hidden API.
Borland Object Pascal doesn't allow pointer arithmetic without casts.
Not entirely true.
Pointers to bytes and chars may be manipulated with simple arithmetic.
Other types of pointers can be incremented/decremented by the size of the structure being pointed to with the Inc() and Dec() procedures.