Vista could not be done that effecient, nor could any modern OS with a
graphical interface with the same features as Vista. Even with basic
features such as memory managment, I/O devices, modern video drivers,
etc... It just couldn't be done. Not saying it's impossible, but it'd be
too difficult for pretty much any programmer to even attempt to tackle.
But, that's why we have GB's of RAM. Cheap, too. I can buy 2 GB of DDR RAM
for ~$100. I bought 1 MB of RAM for $100 a little over 15 years ago (damn,
seems like yesterday!) just so I can play some game.
I do understand where you are coming from, though. But, with all the
resources available, why shouldn't they use them? Push Intel for better
compilers, or push the colleges to teach more assembler. I remember
programming old machine language for the Commodore 64. That was with 64KB
of RAM. Some of those games were phenominal. Like previously mentioned,
every byte taken was precious. Even in the more recent DOS days, with 512
or 640KB of RAM, we had to tweak our config.sys and autoexec.bat and run
memmaker and try to get as much available RAM as we could just to play
games!
A complete and total rewrite would be necessary, with totally new concepts
and ways of doing things. From the ground up. The R&D on a project like
that would take 10+ years just to get a base going. It would be great,
though.
