CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Operating Systems

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version of MS-DOS onto a non-Japanese IBM PC or compatible computer. IBM DOS J/V

processed Shi-JIS encoding internally.

e hardware requirements for IBM DOS J/V, as shown in the following list, are con-

sidered amazingly minimal by today’s standards, and for many, some aspects of these

requirements are unknown, and thankfully shall remain that way:

PS/55, PC/AT compatible, or PS/2 computer•

VGA, XGA, or PS/55 display adaptor•

80286 CPU or greater•

A whopping 1 MB of RAM, though 4 MB was recommended•

Today’s soware runs under Windows Vista or other modern OSes, so naturally the num-

ber of users of MS-DOS has decreased signicantly. In my opinion, the greatest achieve-

ment of Microso Windows, which was covered earlier in this chapter, is its ability to

eectively bridge incompatible hardware. For example, there were countless versions of

MS-DOS available, each of which was designed to run under a dierent underlying ar-

chitecture. When you purchased soware that ran under MS-DOS, you had to be sure

that it was designed for the particular version of MS-DOS running on your computer.

When you buy Windows soware, it will run on Windows regardless of the underlying

architecture.

Plan 9

Plan 9—originally designed in the late 1980s by Ken ompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto,

and Phil Winter—is an experimental multilingual Unix-based OS under seemingly con-

stan ...