I was just looking at some of the links for Pascal operating systems and ran into blue bottle. The question that I have is why?

I eill clarify that. In reading over, it mentioned that the boot partition had to be in the first 8 Gig as well as all other partitions so far as I remember.

What I don't understand is why an OS that is 4 years old and as mature as to run web servers would have this issue. The code to break this limit is quite simple(just use LBA).

Menuet also falls in this category. It is also 4 years old and yet rather that loading the files individually, it loads one big image(including free space).

My OS is in it's infancy and yet it supports even LBA48 DMA access.

The ATA routines are well documented and we have examples, so documentation wouldn't be a reason.

Here is my guess. I think we prefer fun stuff to hard work. Building an OS is a huge task and sometimes we need to do the fun stuff just to get motivated. However, it looks like in a lot cases that is all we do. We get something kind of working, and then because we can get it kind of working we move on to the next thing to get kind of working without making what we have got already working optimized and complete. I am sure this is one of the reasons why linux is the way it is.

That is my guess anyway, anybody else have any other ideas?

That's one of the advantages of Open Source. You could take your great ideas and knowledge and add some value on Menuet and friends

My guess is that everyone have the focus fixed in some fields rather than others in a particular moment.

RetroForth/Native still uses CHS for hard drives.

Seriously, most hobby OSes aren't aimed at the mainstream. My box has a 10GB hard drive. I only use the first cylinder for storage (which is wasted space anyway). As long as I don't touch the MBR, I have 10-15MB of space that I can use freely. Unseen by other OSes.

I don't support mice or most other hardware either. I can handle PCI and some AGP video cards if you use VESA screen modes instead of 320x200 VGA resolution, but I'm comfortable in 320x200 or 320x240. I only really use a keyboard, screen, and hard drive. It doesn't make sense to do more -- there aren't enough people who want a ForthOS for their PC's to make it worth extending.

Like most hobby OS developers, I focus on what *I* need/want before dealing with the wants/needs of others. I have a limited amount of time; I choose to do focus on what's fun and practical (e.g., the hosted versions of RetroForth) rather than the low-level driver stuff that only I'll ever make much use of.

To me the reason why menuet is like that, is that the maker made a conscious decision to keep it small, so people can understand the whole os.
I may be wrong.
But what starts out as a small os can grow in to bloat ware.
But by keeping the image to a floppy this restrict the size and you are not encouraged to use the hdd, because once you start moving to the hdd your on the bloatware slope .

To me i would take this " KISS" futher and say what is needed in a OS, is a bootable pmode program loader with built in functions to help programmers, like a pmode dos.

ASHLEY4.