4 ms·
Weird title. Made me think this was for the original IBM PC and its clones but it seems to require at least a 686 (Pentium Pro). By that time the term IBM PC co
by Narishma 8y ago
Weird title. Made me think this was for the original IBM PC and its clones but it seems to require at least a 686 (Pentium Pro). By that time the term IBM PC compatibles was already obsolete.
- DC-3 8y agoThis person has made their own fully fledged OS. Discuss that instead of bikeshedding about terminology.
- jchw 8y agoThat would be nitpicking not bikeshedding :) (They do have a point though; IBM PC compatible implies it would run on an IBM PC...)
- DC-3 8y agoIt's a form of bikeshedding, in that it involves discussing the superficial details that are easy to form an opinion about.
- TallGuyShort 8y agoOh my God they're literally bike shedding bike shedding.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DC-3 8y agoI'm obviously gunning for inclusion in webshit weekly :-)
- jchw 8y agoI mean, the term bikeshedding was created to describe a specific phenomena where people in an organization tend to put disproportionate consideration into trivial design issues. Particularly, as an example, the color of a bikeshed. Here someone is just pointing out a semantically incorrect or misleading statement. And we can say that's nitpicky, to a degree. It lacks some of the other nuance of the term 'bikeshedding,' though. If anything that was nitpicking also was bikeshedding, then what's the point of inventing such a term? And yes, I'm being nitpicky about the term bikeshedding, and proud of it :p (P.S.: As far as comparing the word nitpicking to bikeshedding, I think nitpicking already implies disproportionate attention to small details; hence the 'nit' part of it.)
- dTal 8y agoI don't think it's an unreasonable point to raise. I would however reply that, in a world where most people's primary computer is some form of SOC with peripherals soldered to it in god knows what way, the term "IBM PC-compatible" to refer to an x86 system with a BIOS and VGA graphics and the rest of it is still meaningful and useful. The "IBM" part simply means the standard that IBM created, and doesn't have to imply that the software runs on an original IBM PC - rather, it implies that software that could run on an IBM PC also runs on such a machine. Hell, DOS still runs on bare metal on a modern machine.
- Narishma 8y agoThis is hardly a fully fledged OS. It's just the beginnings of one.
- dehrmann 8y agoThe 686 part reminds me that I was able to get the latest version of Debian to boot on a Pentium II with minimal work. 686 and onward has had 20+ years of support.
- ch_123 8y agoFWIW I can think of at least two non-IBM-PC compatible x86 platforms (the NEC PC-98 series, and SGI's Visual workstations) manufactured past 1996.
- kej 8y agoTangential curiosity: what was different about them that made them incompatible?
- Narishma 8y agoThey didn't have an IBM-compatible BIOS and used a different system bus than what came to be called ISA. They also had different and incompatible video and sound hardware, among other things.
- tom_ 8y agoPsion's Series 3 was a non-PC x86 device still available in the late 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 Microsoft released a non-PC x86 device in 2001, the Xbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_(console) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_(console)