ChrysanthemumIndica

Oh gosh, that's giving me flashbacks to one of my third semester computer science classes at college (Intro to C and Compiler Design).

One of the very early assignments was creating a red-black tree. Thankfully I was already pretty familiar with C, but I don't think that was true for anyone else in class... totally super didn't scar me or anyone else.

... and I literally only just now got the joke, oops 😅 if only we could all be left-leaning red-black trees

Oh god, folks at work started using that in PRs recently, it eats at my soul! Or something less dramatic.

That's fair, and sort of what I assumed, but I don't quite have the experience to say for a fact, so much appreciated!

Ironically I've only done modem stuff when I was very young and also somehow most of last year. But also maybe I get a little paranoid when it comes to talking to devices, and maybe I'm extrapolating my current i2c woes too far 😅

I'd like to concur about reading the receive buffer faster than it is filled!

Hopefully there is some end of line character that can be parsed for, but if not, a timeout should be fine like you said.

Curious what baud rate is being used.

what babe?

Sapphic high five!

Gloop and gleep, heck yeah! Nearly invincible and can turn in to anything.

I'd go with Blip (the monkey), since I'm quiet aside from occasional chirps.

I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!

(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)

Heck yeah!

What sort of sauce base do you like to use?

(I'm pretending like the comic didn't punch me in the face, shhh)

I think all the x86 processors support preemptive multitasking, but yes for sure you need a good MMU to really simplify things. The two almost always go hand in hand for good reason!

The memory management on the 286 was definitely buggier and "lesser" than on the 386, but as I understand it was more than sufficient to run a preemptive OS with virtual memory (Concurrent DOS 286 was just such an OS). The 286 just couldn't run existing legacy 8086 software in this mode out of the box(only through a software emulation layer), so many people simply used it as a fast 8086 running MS-DOS/Windows.

The 386 fixed this by making it much easier/safer to use this legacy software in a protected mode environment, so something like Windows 3.x could run both DOS applications and it's own native 16/32-bit ones at the same time. I'm honestly not sure why you couldn't run Windows 3.11 on your 286, but I'm pretty sure it could be installed on one in standard mode. (I've read that some Compaq machines had an issue with that?) You would have only been able to run native 16-bit windows applications though, no DOS without resetting the system.

Again, I could be wrong (and would be curious to know if I am)! For context, I've worked as a firmware/BIOS engineer in the PC industry for 20 years, and spent most of my teenage years programming in assembly on those systems, and this is all from my direct experience with programming for such things. But also I'm old now and my brain don't always work good...

I do think the 286 also had an MMU (and a surprising 1GB of virtual memory address space!)

However, entering and exiting protected mode (the mode where the MMU is useful) was painful on the 286, and I believe it slowed the adoption of those features. You had to reset the CPU to exit the mode!

The 386 was able to switch modes much easier (and added a virtual legacy 16 bit mode as well), allowing legacy software to be more easily integrated and runnable. Basically, I think it was successful because of "business reasons", especially in the growing IBM PC compatible market. You could upgrade and still continue to run your legacy business software, but now with the ability to potentially run workstation/server level software as well.

But I'm probably biased because my first real computer was a 386 AT&T workstation with 4 megabytes of RAM, a real workhorse that I learned a lot on.

Unrelated but yay someone from my instance here!