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It would be if MikeOS was meant to be a modern, general-purpose operating system. But it's not; it's a learning tool, and 16-bit real mode assembly is quite simple to grasp.

I agree that real mode is perhaps better to use when starting out, but to call 16-bit real mode assembly 'quite simple' is a bit of an overstatement, with its total non-ortogonalness and weird memory layout. Yes, some asm must be learned to get the thing to boot etc., but a higher level language like C is really better to use as a teaching instrument, to hide all this crappy IA16 stuff.


JAL

you do have to write your own drivers in pmode but staying with the bios, you lose mouse, cdrom, networking, sound, hard drive size restrictions, etc.

the originaly minix 16bit is probably the better educational os out there.

for a 16bit os, you can write it all in c with no asm since you dont need to deal with GDT or anything. you dont even need to write a bootsector you can re-use any old PC boot sector and just rename your os kernel to be IO.SYS on the root of a fat12/fat16 partition.

you make some easy wins really hard. and a 486 requirement for a 16bit os is overkill. a plain old 286 would suffice.

Old approaches aren't always bad ones, and assembly language is sometimes an appropriate solution.

If the assembly is well-documented, and it sounds like it might be in this case, then MikeOS could server as a tutorial for x86 assembly use as well as general OS design, and that isn't a bad thing at all in my book.

If the assembly is well-documented, and it sounds like it might be in this case, then MikeOS could server as a tutorial for x86 assembly use

No, just x86 16-bit, which is really crappy (I know, I've written 1000s of lines of asm code in the old days) and out-dated, as opposed to the slightly better 32-bit version.


JAL