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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?'"
What kind of crack-rock shit is that?
;)
Apparently you've not been keeping up with Sting over the last 10-15 years. Par for the course, really.
The Nietzschean purpose of MS-DOS was to survive long enough (1981-2001) that the faint rumblings and beginnings of an artificial intelligence operating system (AI-OS) could emerge from the decaying corpus delicti where MS-DOS had gone before.
Choose your battles, is an ancient dictum. Back in 1978 at a meeting of the Northwest Computer Society here in Seattle, a call went out from the podium for anyone who would be willing to work on the newsletter of the society. Very truly yours Mentifex here shrank back, unwilling to work on anything but a Theory of Mind for AI. To the relief of all us AI and non-AI slackers, a certain historically immortal Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products spoke up and volunteered to work on the computer society newsletter. Such a quiet, unassuming fellow -- and yet Tim Patterson turned Bill G*tes into a multi-multi-billionaire, because Tim Patterson was the author of Quick-and-dirty-DOS, or QDOS, which Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products for fifty thousand dollars ($50K) and foisted upon the world as MS-DOS. My only real gripe about MS-DOS was the weirdness of Paul Allen in declaring that henceforth all users should use a backslash (e.g., C:\mind.html) path-separator instead of the Un*x forwards-slash separator, as in http://mind.sourceforge.net/alife.html -- the way G*d intended computers to work.
Now, are there any ankle-biters who would like to follow up here with posts about how the slowly emerging AI OS is somehow off-topic to the passing away of MS-DOS? If so, fire cowardly away.
Why is it that this guy writes a message with a blatantly incorrect premise (that Windows XP won't have a command prompt) is corrected by several people and yet his score is much higher than those of the corrections? Slashdot isn't just a place where misunderstandings are created and perpetuated. They are even rewarded!
C:\
C:\dos
C:\dos\run
C:\dos\run linload.exe
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself