hola Andres! donde estas?
> GR>     SqueakNOS: A simple guide to writing HardwareDevices
>
> Nice!  How about a BinaryStorageDevice to mount a raw HDD partition,
> so something like GemStone can run there?  No file system for you
> (alas, a large identity hash is needed for this to work properly)
>   
    Yeah! that'll be the first step (after having low level support for
HD I/O), however, I think we will anyway have something like files on
the hard drive, at least if only to organize different memory segments
or something. However, I never ever looked at the low level details of
an Object Storage system, so I may be 100% wrong (for example, if they
work like a big memory image with garbage collection and everything).
> I liked the alarm example, and it reminded me of dealing with int70h,
> which is triggered by reprogramming the RTC. 
    heh! nice, good memories from the old days coming bacl! :-)

    int 70h in DOS is the handler for IRQ 8 (IRQs for the 2nd PIC are
mapped from 70h to 78h in DOS). In the example in the article we are
using IRQ 8, which is no other than int 70h disguised as an object :-)
> As opposed to the alarm, which is sent until you tell it to stop, int70h will be sent only once
> unless you tell it to keep going.
    Weird... in our case IRQ 8 continued to be triggered until we read
register C from the CMOS/RTC. (which is no other than just an I/O port
reading). May be you were doing this just to check if the IRQ was in
fact coming from the RTC?
>   You can select many different frequencies, and this does not affect the RTC's time keeping.
    That's nice! I was not sure if this would affect the time or not. I
think I'll try to see how many IRQs per second we can handle from Squeak
without loosing any, and without killing the responsiveness. I'll report
back as soon as I do it.

    Nice to hear from you! and thanks for the ideas!
    take care

    gera