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MS DOS: A Eulogy
roadhog95 writes: "Love it or hate it, I'm sure everyone's got a love story or traumatic memory of the infamous MS-DOS. Byte magazine reports on the passing away of DOS in light of the recent Windows XP launch. Even Regis Philben stopped by to pay tribute: 'Bill... Is that your final command prompt?'"
This just sounds like a Microsoft publicity stunt more than anything. A sort of "We have evolved beyond needing prompts, and are now fully graphically inspired."
Still, I'd be willing to argue that the removal of legacy DOS functionality isn't always a good thing. You break functionality with code that used to run on previous MS Operating systems. Furthermore, I'd imagine everyone who's been working in computers for awhile has watched the Windows GUI break, and then need the command prompt to fix it.
Now on the other hand, this may be a plus. Microsoft might actually believe that Windows is stable enough that you don't need the DOS prompt anymore. Stability is always good. But even on the most stable platform in the world, I'd still rather not have something crippled from my operating system just because MS doesn't think I need it anymore.
But back to this little tid bit of a story...just a marketing ploy, not really news.
With the creation of the 32-bit Windows OSes, Microsoft had these relatively unpleasant hacks involving wowexec and system/system32 folders. I suppose they were relatively necessary (although I'm sure folks here could have thought of a better way, but we have the benefit of hindsight).
Now they're finally leaving 16-bit behind, only to introduce similiar (if not worse) hacks between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes. Instead of following their old design (which at least would have been consistent), they opted to use the system32 folder to hold 64-bit stuff, and to have another folder (is it system64?) hold the 32-bit stuff.
Confused yet?
Oh well...
And so it goes.
I can happily say that my life has been minimally affected by DOS, its coming or its going. I started my career on VAX's and Macs in the 80's, moved to Unixen in the late 80's, and to LiGNUx in the 90's. I pity the people who have been stunted technically by using DOS.
So Bill Gates typed "exit" and (wow!) the prompt closed, no more DOS, no more unreliable crappy OS's, just XP and .NET - hurray!
It all began with DOS and DOS will end it as well, or something very much like it - GUI's are overrated. Sometimes you just want a Quick and Dirty Operating System that goes well with scripting, say changing your entire folder of mp3 to use a standard name or just organizing images, perhaps you need to do something that the GUI cant handle. There's nothing a prompt cant handle!
Long boring story short -> DOS as we know it is dead, but Quick and Dirty Operating System's are the future.
Long live DOS!
--
Anataka suki desu. Itsumo. Itsumademo.
There is still the problem of having to wait for each stage of the pipe to finish before the next can begin, but there is definately life in the old DOS yet and I'll be using JP's shells long after COMMAND/CMD has gone the way of the dodo.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
And I'm sure you'll find lots of bios update utilities kindly requesting you boot into dos - and Amishly shunning such technologies as emm386.
Besides, I rather liked dos. I never installed windows until 98 was released (sure it restricted my games, but Win3.11? Come on. And by the time I'd been convinced by 95, 98 had been released.)
And at least the command prompt is still here, and getting more and more powerful; in Win2k there's a proper grep utility, and even a poor man's version of awk. It isn't a full programming language, but it allows you to parse a stream token by token - type 'help for' to see what I mean.
Still, I'm glad to be mostly rid of 8/16bit code.
True that. I remember spending hours learning the various ansi escape sequences (ansi.sys? anyone remember?) to have a fancy command prompt and colors on my little batch file menu system.
Somehow I don't think DOS is as dead as they make it out.
Agreed. Another comment I'd like to add here is that the 8086 processor and related (that includes 8088, 80186/188) did not have the concepts of (a) Multi-tasking and (b) kernel space vs. user user space. Thats why the processor was so damn cheap, as compared to the others available "Out There".
So you should really be thrashing Intel for making a processor that did not support VM, Multitasking, Task Switching (Interrupts are just that, but a lame form) or kernel/user space differences. Not DOS. Dos was really cool, for the time it existed primarily.
However, Microsoft *SHOULD* have migrated to 32bit dos with the advent of the 386 processor from intel.
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
typed "edlin" and it wasn't in the install (Windows 95?).
That interesting - just did a quick check and found that Win95a, Win98SE and ME DON'T have edlin, while WinNT, 2K and XP DO have edlin. I guess they expected the dos/home line to not need it, but the professional line did need it to support old edlin scripts?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Umm, actually, cmd.exe is starting to approach usability. I actually like it. I am interested to know Bill's response to Regis' question "is that your last command prompt?" If Bill were honest, he would say no, because some little birdies have told me that MS development uses a whole lot of command line utilities.
Well, actually, I suppose Bill doesn't do all that much development any more, so maybe not.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I agree with what you most of what you say, but ....
Don't confuse DOS with the command line. DOS itself was a horrible cludge. The command line (contained in command.com) was not much better, but much better for some tasks than the Windows GUI. Windows NT & 2000 left DOS out long before XP and they both still had a Command Line (not as useful as a bash, but better than nothing).
Ever watch a Novell server boot up (well our server here in the office has been up for 516 days so I have not seen ours reboot in a LONG while). The last Novell 5.1 server I setup started it boot-up procedure by loading Caldera DOS.
Also the company I work for still active sells and supports TWO DOS applications. Both are property management programs. Both have large install bases countrywide. Our main product has finally developed a stable window's version and we are slow converting people, but most of our users are still on the DOS version.
DOS is not dead, it is just being phased out of the M$ OSes. This is something that they should have done long ago, but from the comments I have been seeing and hearing they did not remove the limitations that DOS placed on the windows products. Seems that while they may have removed the DOS code, they have not gotten rid of the bloat that it created. Once again M$ gives us a half-assed version of what Windows could be.
As a VAR we will be telling every one of our clients to avoid Windows XP like the plague, if just for the DOS issue. This is hard to do as for some reason small businesses buy computers with Windows ME and Windows XP Home Ed. We still push Windows 98 and have just now started supporting Windows 2000 and now there is a new Windows OS. I am so happy, now I will get to go to sites with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP Home (and pro may be) and a couple Windows 2000s thrown in. All in time for M$ to come in and audit the place for valid licenses. Ridiculous.
Friendly
Beer pong, the gentleman's drinking game.
I guess not a single one of the readers and posters here has actually used or seen a Windows XP system. Command line access has not gone away. Simply go to Start, Run... and type in cmd.exe, voila DOS lives. Of course you cannot access NTFS or the new encrypted file system from a DOS boot floppy... But you can make a DOS boot disk from XP. It is part of the OS.
It is so typical of this crowd at slash dot that you go on for pages and pages re-iterating material that is quite simply not accurate.
Bill Gate's point was that there is no more DOS code underlying the OS like in Windows 9x/Me. It is all the newer 32-bit OS. He never indicated that the command line was going away. In fact the Windows Script Host is the most powerful scripting runtime you could want!
You guys are too eager to be angry and you don't even understand the issues.
Can't expect old dogs like me to leap on the bandwagon just because there is one. Maybe someone will write an MS_DOS emulator for XP ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I find it much easier to use a gui than a command line when moving/copying/deleting files.
:)
Until you've got to delete a few thousand, when DEL *.OBJ starts to look pretty sweet.
and you wouldnt have a recycle bin to hold those "mistakenly deleted" files...
I hate the trashcan. If I tell the computer to delete something then BY GOD it had better delete it. I hate being second-guessed by an operating system. Mistakenly deleted something? That's why we make backups.
I ran scandisk from the DOS prompt (because Windows would NOT load) and it told me "we found errors but couldnt fix them, run scandisk for windows". Gee thanks...
Moral: Windows can trash your filesystem so hard and so deep not even DOS can save you. Before windows, CHKDSK/F did just dandy.
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
Microsoft has very little experience in creating operating systems: DOS came from QDOS and Tim Paterson, Win3.x, 95/98/ME all sit upon the shoulders of mighty DOS, and NT was written in partership with IBM (back when OS/2 was a joint venture). XP probably still has some legacy OS/2 stuff in the kernel.
</crochety_old_fart>
Thank god I can still emulate CP/M!
even though DOS is pretty much obsolete, i'd like to clarify to all of you that MS has ***NOT*** removed the command prompt from XP.
Start -> Other Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt.
not only that, but remember when you upgraded to winNT/2K, and couldn't run those old DOS apps that you loved so much?
XP returns that to you. when i discovered that this was supposed to be the case, i quickly installed one of my old favorites, "Stunts" (by Broderbund software), and found myself happily cruising the old tracks in my F1 racer. since then i've loaded on all my old classic *QUALITY* DOS games (like Doom, id software) and had a rollicking good time with XP.
(sure, it sounds like it should violate NT's HAL, but try it for yourself. it works, hasn't crashed my system, and by god - it's glorious to have those games back again.)
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
"MS wrote the whole OS from scratch and did a fairly good job at the low levels"
*cough*
Back when IBM and MS were all buddy-buddy still, they started working on a DOS-killer by the name of "OS/2." OS/2 1.x came out from both companies much in the same was as early MS/PC-DOS releases. From there, though, differences in coding opinion brought about a code forking in its successors. On the one hand, IBM went on to make OS/2 2.x, and ever onward to OS/2 Warp.
On Microsoft's side of the fork, they were working on OS/2 3.0. They took what they had of the code, put the ol' Windows 3.1 GUI on top of it, and released it. However, instead of calling it "OS/2 3.x," they opted instead to rename it "Windows NT 3.x." Ever wonder why Windows XP can run programs that use older OS/2 instruction sets, or why NT up to 3.51 could read HPFS?
More details are available at a rather interesting article over here.
So, I guess I'm just trying to point out that they didn't do a very good job with NT at the lower levels. IBM did.
That's not entirely true. Before DOSKEY came along, the F3 key would recall the previous command (only one, mind you) and you could edit the command. You could press F2 and a character and the previous command would recall the previous command up to the character, and then you could edit at will and press F3 to recall the rest of the command line.
Crude yes, but it was better than nothing.
My three favorite DOS commands are still more powerful than anything MS has tried to shoehorn into Windows Explorer: XCOPY, ATTRIB, and DIR/S.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
One of the interesting things about most of the anti-Microsoft conspiracies is that they all involve settlements covered under Non-Disclosure agreements. This way there is no way to validate the authenticity of the story.
It makes it rather convenient.
At the time there was no secret that the new MS-DOS was very similar to CP/M-80. CP/M is what people were used to using and seeing, and so Patterson designed his new OS for 16 bit processors to behave similarly. But there were also pieces of functionality that arrived into MS-DOS that were similar to Unix.
It's also entirely possible that it included some similar code. CP/M-80 BDOS could be disassembled and carried in your briefcase. It only took up around 5-7K of RAM and wasn't that complicated at all.
Besides, if MS-DOS had really been a copy of CP/M, wouldn't it have also implemented the PIP and STAT commands?
But the real question is... does it matter?
From everything I've read of Gary Kildall and Digital Research, already at the time IBM first approached them the company was too big for Kildall's liking. He was not a manager, he hated it. But he was also a control freak and couldn't stand someone else running things for him.
One story I read indicated that he often would walk around the office building afraid to go in, and that at one point he even offered to sell the whole thing to a friend of his for $50,000.
One of the realities is that some people are willing to grab success, and others aren't. There are a lot of people in this world who purposefully miss an opportunity because they are unhappy or uncomfortable with assuming the responsibility it might entail.
Kildall was one such person. Obviously Bill Gates is not.
It's that difference in personalities that is really the secret behind Microsoft.
Personally, I know that I'm a lot like Gary Kildall in that regard. But knowing this I also try to not be resentful when I pass up an opportunity.
To me, it's not so much that GUIs are lame, it's that a whole generation of (loosely-termed) "administrators" have no idea that anything can be done without a GUI. They're imbued with complete trust of the GUI - and a near-distrust of CLI. And it's not just administrators, either. The visually-oriented IDEs have spawned the same type of children. I'm not tossing out all IDEs, nor am I suggesting they go away. But to me, it looks just like when my kids want a calculator to do simple arithmetic. If you know how to code, you don't absolutely have to have an editor that prompts you for each argument to a method.