Being kind to 8086 users - was: Re: msdos perl

[wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill_Stewart(HOY002)1305)]

The discussion on porting perl to MS-DOS led to the following comment:
> >*requires* access to extended memory.  There is approx. 300+ Kbytes of memory available
> >           ^^^^^^^^
> Which means a 286, not a 386.  If there are a lot of people out there on
> 8086 machines, sorry.  People with that particular problem are going to
> have a hard time running most modern software, let alone Unix ports.

There's one part of the market that's still heavily populated with 8086 machines - portables.
Especially cheap, lightweight portables, and palmtops like the HP95LX,
which people might use to do their private email from, or carry around to exchange PGP keys with,
or use as a smartcard for digicash and remote access to networks.
Another part is DOS emulation running on real machines - I think lots of that is 8086-like.

640K RAM is a hard limit to live with, and sometimes you just can't do it,
but it's nice if people don't *gratuitously* make their software not fit here.
There's lots of real work that can still be done on them, and really patient people
can even run Unix-like operating systems such as Minix.

				Bill Stewart