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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?'"
how Macs now finally have a command prompt (in OS X), but XP has lost it now?
Mac users users used to be the object of derision for their lack of command prompt. Now XP users will be.
There's some cosmic karma in there somewhere.
It's gone! At last! Only 30 years too late; oh- wait it was only 20 years old- no I was right the first time.
;-)
What kind of insane, broken, user hostile, program hostile, PC hostile world did we live in that forced users to use that broken down 640k limited, single tasking, interrupt restricted pile of junk?
Why, when decent OSs had been around for 20 years did Microsoft see fit to impose that pile on the computing public? What unbelieveable sin meant that was what we needed?
Good riddance MSDOG! You will be remembered; but not forgiven
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Granted, I only make little dos games or little utilities. I like to whip out djgpp and rhide and make tools to process data that I then put into programs for other systems, like windows. Since I am personally more familiar with djgpp than MS Visual Chrud, it is what I go for when I want to write a little tool really fast.
Does Gates really want to get rid fo a command prompt? All sorts of tools need command prompts. Most of the free tools on the web use the commandn line, and it is a real pain to make a shortcut that sends in your parameters. It takes a little extra effort, which is a step in the wrong direction.
Dos prompts to scare the 'normal' people though. I can see why Gates would want to get rid of it- he is trying to make computers more like toys. You pop in a disk and the program loads itself. You have big pretty icons to run your frequently used apps. He is trying to make WinXP 'normal human' friendly. To that end, XP just might succeed in making life easier for people who just want to use computers to do a few tasks, and not really learn how the thing works. However, what that means to us is that it will be more of a pain to do some of the wierd things we like to do like play with command line freeware raytracing programs.
Think about it another way. Ultimately, we will find ways to make our toys run reguardless of what Gates does. However, normal people dont help themselves in computer land. If XP makes life easier for normal people, he just made some more sales, so that is a good thing to do. If in doing so it drops a feature we want, he isnt losing much because 1. we already think he bites and 2. we will put that feature back ourselves (ie the WinME command line hack). No sales change. That means that dumping the command prompt could (theorhetically, at least in a way a businessman would believe even if it isnt true) put MS in the green.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Along with Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, Commodore 64, Apple 2e, FreeBSD, ....
:) Anyway, I think DOS has been dead for a very long time. Ever since 98 come along, I knew very few people who even knew what DOS was at that point. DOS was good for the time when I was stupied growing up. Even if there was something else, I might not have installed it. I did however install OS/2 once, which became a nightmare. (This machine was a 286)
:) With that ol' 640k barrier, you had every single company making there own memory management apps. There was one called Quarter deck, wich also dubbed as a crash protection took kit. Which ended up crashing the machine even more then normal.
hehehe, I just had to
The biggest memorys I have back durring those days, was the Wolfenstien days, and doom. I remeber playing over a 14.4k modem against my friend down the street in a death match. Now, I wouldn't even think of doing that, but it was my first multiplayer game.
The way DOS handled things was a pain in the royal ass. Think Linux 2.4 kernel series has VM problems ?
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