It's not just closer. Someone wrote an x86 emulator with CSS (it uses JS only for clock to make it more reliable). https://lyra.horse/x86css/ . So, CSS is officially Turing complete (which is a bit scary IMHO).
Someone wrote an x86 emulator with CSS (it uses JS only for clock to make it more reliable). https://lyra.horse/x86css/ . So, CSS is officially Turing complete (which is a bit scary IMHO).
Yeah, I think this is always the case. We get more powerful tools that do the same thing in 5th amount of time, now we are asked to do 5x more. Capitlalism.
Back in 2004 my PC RAM was 256. My relative's laptop had 128. That's crazy when a modern CPU cache can theoretically host an OS (or even multiple OSes) from early 2000s.
The Power4 MCM had 128 MB cache in 2001. The G4 TiBook sold the same year came with 128 MB of system RAM base, and OS X supported 64 MB configurations for a few years after this.
The RAM prices are so high and the storage is also getting more expensive every day, so we're forced to fit everything inside the CPU cache as a solution! /s
Several processors support this by effectively locking cache lines. At the low end, it allows a handful of fast interrupt routines without dedicated TCM. At the high end, it allows boot ROMs to negotiate DRAM links in software, avoiding both the catch 22 and complex hardware negotiation.
It's partly because there are layers of abstractions (frameworks, libraries / runtimes / VM, etc). Also, today's software often has other pressures, like development time, maintainability, security, robustness, accessibility, portability (OS / CPU architecture), etc. It's partly because the complexity / demand has increased.
If I'm not mistaken, 16-bit x86 software cannot naively run in 64-bit mode anyways. It requires an emulator, like DosBox. Wine uses WineVDM. CPU-heavy 16-bit programs, or programs that are sensitive to timing, can be noticeably slower.
The thing that you're missing is that Microsoft used to ship that emulator with Windows. Then they stopped doing that.
AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.
"DOS support" is tricky inasmuch as a lot software from that era - especially larger and more complex packages - interacted with hardware directly. In a sense, they weren't really DOS applications so much as they were bare-metal PC applications which were booted from DOS. It'd be difficult for WINE to support those, and other projects like DOSbox / 86box / etc do a better job of it.
There is also a port of Wine’s VDM back to Windows called otvdm or winevdm that is able to run 16-bit programs on Windows. It is surprisingly capable, I was able to run a 16-bit VB program that used a serial based optical modem without issue.
Yes, I have also read / heard that Windows is actually very well engineered at the low level (despite the claims), and even surpasses Linux in some aspects. For example, Windows handles low RAM situations much better than Linux. During swapping Linux can become so unresponsive that even the OOM killer can fail and the only solution is hard reboot :(. But all I see people claim about Linux's superior memory management, which I think is believed largely because of the memory overcommitment. It can reduce the average RAM consumption because Linux, by default, maps the allocated pages to a read-only zero filled shared page, and allocates actual memory only when page faults occur during page writes. But this can make the worst case scenario much worse when no physical RAM or swap space is available.
Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI. Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems started from Windows 10.
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