On 22/01/2014 04:54 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Next up: Why, in the year 2014, am I still running installers that have
>> 16-bit dithered logos? WTF?
>
> Obviously you need to be able to run it in safe mode...

I didn't think even Safe Mode runs in 16-bit colour any more. And even 
if it does... so make the OS convert from 24-bit down to 16-bit on the 
fly! Sheesh.

> Speaking of which, even though the 80386 processor was introduced
> in 1985 (that's almost 30 years ago), PCs still boot up in 16-bit
> mode. Yes, even the new 64-bit ones.

I got the impression that 64-bit CPUs cut back on some of the really 
ancient 16-bit stuff. (I don't have an actual site for that though.)

> The very first thing that the OS does is to switch to either 32-bit
> mode (if the CPU is that old) or to 64-bit mode. After that it will
> usually never revert back to 16-bit mode ever again.

Ah yes - by toggling line 20 on the address bus. Obviously. (WTF?)

Well, that's only in so-called "IBM PC-compatibles". (How compatible are 
any of these with the 30-year old dinosaur?) I think the Apple Mac does 
it differently...

> Support for 16-bitness increases the CPU complexity and thus its price,
> and is overall just dead weight that has little to no purpose.

Oh, but that's not all.

Did you know that your graphics card starts up emulating an 
IBM-manufactured video board from 27 years ago? And then you have to run 
special driver software to turn off all the pointless emulation and put 
the card into 24-bit, memory-mapped mode at a real-world screen 
resolution. Go figure...

Overall, PCs are just *full* of this crap. (Some of you may remember I 
once set out on a misguided quest to "write my own OS". I read up on 
some of this stuff.) And yet, when somebody produces a technically 
superior system that lacks lashings of backwards compatibility, nobody 
actually buys it...

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