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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?'"
While it was around I could always use this joke..."I know DOS backwards...it's SOD". I guess I'll need to find/think up/steal some more material.
Just because xp doesn't use it, doesn't mean I am not going to use dos.
Yet another reason NOT to go to Microsoft for new software.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Hopefully FreeDOS and the DOSEmu will live on!
I bet this is not "First Post."
If I never have to rename my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to play Wolfenstein again, I could die a happy man. You know, there's a reason they called it the dosHELL.exe =)
~Aaron.
student of animation and the fine arts
In lieu of flowers, we respectfully request that you make contributions to the charity of your choice.
Good plan! Let's donate to open source projects in honor of the death of DOS.
Mmmm... irony. Good stuff.
They are both at their respective .org
FreeDOS
DOSEmu
There is a lot of info on the net too, just google it.
I bet this is not "First Post."
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.
Where are my Karma Points when I need them?
DOS wasn't licensed from Gary Kildall (who actually was the father of CP/M), but from Tim Paterson.
You would have known this if you had read the article you're commenting on.
Sure - try DOSEMU with FreeDOS ripcord.
If it doesn't work, try dosemu with DR-DOS - not open source, but at least $0.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
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.
here @ freedos.org
I have used it for formating and fdisking fat16
and fat32 filesystems, or to remove linux
partitions without a linux bootflop or bootcd.
And i know people using DOS for there daily
programming, creation of Embedded Systems and
ofcourse webbrowsing and chatting....
Quazion.
From "Microsoft the Company"
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html
* 1982 - Digital Research sues Microsoft and IBM - Wins - . It was obvious MS-DOS and its PC-DOS variant were simply rip- offs of Digital Research's CP/M operating system. It remained only to prove it contained DR code. DR's Gary Kildall sat down at an IBM PC supplied by IBM and, using a secret code, got it to pop up a Digital Research copyright notice.
It's case won, Digital Research received monetary compensation and the right to clone MS-DOS. This is why Microsoft never sued DR over DR-DOS, but used every other means to destroy it. The settlement was under a strict non- disclosure agreement, so few even know DR sued, never mind that they won.
Digital Research was purchased by Novel and destroyed by neglect and mismanagement. The products now belong to Caldera, which has filed suit against Microsoft over predatory practices used to destroy DR-DOS's market.
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!
Is it too much to ask the slashdot editors to check things like this before posting ? This troll is not even worthy of inadequacy.org
What I always found funny was that when a certain DOS program went bezerk, EMM386 thought to jump in and save your ass with... that's right, shutting down the computer before you could save _ANYTHING_, showing words similar to:
"EMM386 has shutdown your computer to prevent loss of data".
Thankfully these days are over... o wait, nv_disp.dll just went into a stop 0xea
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Calling MS-DOS an operating system is stretching the concept quite a bit.
DOS was nothing but a glorified interrupt handler. It wasn't unstable, since there was practically nothing to be unstable with.
It didn't protect itself from userland programs, which is generally considered a bad thing. Granted, this gave the programmer freedom to completely work around the operating system, but at the same time allowed said programs to royally mess things up.
From a single-task, single-user system, it was quite good, provided the programs behaved nicely. DOS Extensions even provided it with protected memory, making life a bit easier.
New command interpreters, like 4DOS, injected new life into the system.
If you accepted it as a single-user, single-task enviroment, it was adequate.
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
[Bil Gates] stated, "It's the end of the MS-DOS era," referring to the exorcism of 16-bit code from the Windows code base.
What, again??
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
Ummmmm?
Start->Programs->Accesories->Command Prompt
Or
Start->Run->cmd.exe
Seems like it's there to me. But who knows. It might all be a figment of of my imagination.
S.t.e.v.e.
In announcing MS-DOS's demise, Microsoft founder Bill Gates typed "exit" at the MS-DOS command line during the launch of Windows XP.
A prize to the person who provides an explanation for how Billy Boy typed "exit" at a command line that doesn't exist?
I haven't had a chance to get at an WinXP machine to check, but the command line must still be there. There's too many reasons that it's necessary, e.g. SQL Server has loads of command-line utilities. Just because MS have taken it off the start menu doesn't mean that it can't be accessed by someone with half a brain.
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.
Oh yes -- those could old times :) I was first called a 'hacker' when I found out how to break into somebody's password protected filemanager (simple hitting Ctrl-C inside the menu-shell was enough) :))
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.
People keep complaining about DOS all the time... about autoexec.bat, config.sys, and what not. IMHO, DOS was and _is_ one of the best and cleanest operating systems to learn about the intel architecture. Where else can you issue BIOS interrupts, and play around with system memory? Linux doesnt let me do that unless I compile a kernel module, and what not.
Trey, DOS wasnt the best desktop/server/handheld Operating System, but it surely was a great learning experience for all who used and programmed for it.
I still use TurboC on DOS when I need to try out some small program, and dont want to wait for linux to load.
Another point, I dont think you can ever have a successful operating system without any command prompt. Copying and moving files can never be as easy using a dumb GUI file manager.
Don't Panic
Please mod the parent down. It isn't insightful.
Gates liscensed DOS from SCP. SCP based their product on CP/M, originally written by Gary Kildall.
DOS was advanced by the standards of microcomputers of the day. CP/M's 16-bit version, CP/M-86 wasn't ready when MS-DOS 1.0 hit the market, and by the time CP/M-86 did ship, MS-DOS already hit version 2.0. Version 2 had neat-o features like subdirectories and a Unix-like C API that pushed it ahead of CP/M. CP/M eventually did surpass DOS, but it was called DR-DOS by that time.
Of course, DOS was well behind most all versions of Unix, including Microsoft's Xenix. Peter Norton once wrote that Xenix might have been the "operating system" of the future. Unfortunately, Mitch Kapor wrote Lotus 1-2-3 to run under MS-DOS rather than Xenix. In those days, people bought PCs to run Lotus. The operating system was just the black screen with gibberish text you saw before Lotus booted up.
it still has 'edlin' -- whoohoo!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It's a publicity stunt, but it's also slightly wrong:
at least on XP RC2, you can easily get to the command line.
I use it for Perl stuff sometimes, and ping and things. It might not be full DOS (oh, the loss of that extreme power will be sorely felt), but it is a command line.
Does Byte still exist as a print mag? I don't remember seeing it in any bookstores recently. Last I remember, it was a pretty thin excuse for a magazine where once it was thick with articles and advertising. :-(
at a Msft sales, uh, 'technical presentation' here in '96. The showman said, and I quote, "Lets have a moment of silence for DOS... " altho what he was refering to was dropping support for DOS as a seperate product.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Somehow I don't think DOS is as dead as they make it out.
I guess this means we will now never know the correct answer to -
Error reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?
Even better, start->run->cmd.
Better shell with tabcomp and the like.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
cmd.exe is NOT DOS. Let's not even get into the fact that even command.com isn't DOS either. cmd.exe, if you examine the header, you will find it to have the letters 'PE' in the header, signifying that it is a Win32 console application, rather than a DOS application.
:)
cmd.exe is a Win32 console application that is designed to somewhat emulate DOS. But it is no more DOS than Wine is Windows.
And as for command.com, command.com is no more DOS than bash is Linux. command.com is a DOS application that gives you a shell to work in, much like bash, when compiled on Linux, is a Linux application that gives you a shell to work in. Sorry, I lied, we did get into it.
My journal has hot
Here's my reality... and I'm not kidding about this, but feel free to mod up to "funny".
I work for a software company, maintaining 15 year old DOS Software. The company is owned by older people that can't move fast enough to be in this industry... but somehow, we're still managing to sell this software to unsuspecting people.
We have 2 applications... both of which are touted as "high-end", mission critical apps. A typical installation could cost the client somewhere around $50,000 USD, sometimes more. Here's what they get:
1. A nasty DOS app written in Qbasic, using a Btrieve database on a Novell Server, all running over our favorite protocol, IPX.
Sounds good? Well, its my nightmare!!!
When win2k was released, a lot of little things in our DOS app stopped working. Our company's president refused to believe that MS-DOS was anything less than cutting edge. Now that XP was released, and more things are broken, our company's president refuses to believe that microsoft would abandon DOS.
Anyway, enough rambling about this. Its a sad fact that there are companies STILL working with DOS programs. Sad. Even worse, is that I'm typing here, rather than working on that Qbasic crap.
c:\> del *.*
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
MS-DOS could have survived, if back in the early 90's, Microsoft had wanted to continue developing it. They made it obsolete by choice... I'm sure they could have easily turned it into a multitasking, 32 bit, networked OS, and still could have put a GUI on top of that.
It just wasn't in their best interested to do so.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
bash != linux
bsh != unix
cmd != dos
The death of DOS does not mean the death of the Microsoft CLI.
Even through I now solely use Linux I will miss DOS. It was my first operating system and my lifeline whenever the users on the network screwed up with their Window$ boxes.
With DOS and Doom I learned syntaxsis, options and commands. It gave me the challenge and the boost necessary for me to head towards an IT career.
So long DOS, you were Window$ last hope!
Writing: no longer done with the fountain pen, now done with an eraser.
XP in fact adds a pile of extra commands for the command line.
Built-in task list and killing, for example.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Duh. Nobody ever said it was. It's the command-line/batch interpreter for Win32.
And it's not designed to emulate DOS . . . it's designed to emulate COMMAND.COM in 32 bits. The DOS emulator is called NTVDM.EXE (that's NT Virtual DOS Machine), and also runs as a 32-bit application.
Furthermore, Win32 still has COMMAND.COM. It is a 16-bit application (and therefore runs under NTVDM.EXE). And I'm sure it's basically legacy code recompiled with new version information.
So, in closing, you're a dumbass, your OS sucks, and, uh, my granny can code better than you.
The water is getting muddy, here, so let me explain for those who are lost in the buzzword-bingo:
First there was DOS (well, not really, but that's where my story begins). DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others).
When MS decided to build a graphical interface, they did so on top of DOS. DOS was still there as the core interupt handler, but Windows was how the user interacted with the system.
This posed some problems. Windows was not a multi-tasking OS because DOS was not. Windows faked it by giving applications library routines that let them manage their own time-slices in a cooperative multitasking framework. Any app that wanted to take over the system simply avoided calling those routines, but that would be considered bad form.
Eventually, MS build may kludges into Windows to allow memory protection and something resembling premptive multi-tasking. These are good things, but 95, 98 and ME are all still DOS-based.
With NT (2000 and XP are NT versions) MS wrote the whole OS from scratch and did a fairly good job at the low levels (yes, NT is a nice OS down near the hardware where you never interact with it). At the higher levels, they just took the miserable waste of system resources called Win32 (MS' port of Windows to a 32-bit environment) and pasted it on top of NT. Win32 has grown and become more NT-friendly over the years, but it's still the vestige of a DOS-based windowing environment on top of what is arguably a fine OS.
Woefully, the dream that MS engineers had of creating a flexible mircrokernel platform was also squashed. NT was supposed to have several smaller sub-systems to support many types of application access (the POSIX subsystem is a demonstration of the dismal failure of that plan). In reality, all NT, 2000 and XP apps have to go through Win32 to be useful, and Win32 is what most folks think of when they think Microsoft OS.
In the end, the recent press about DOS disapearing is actually misleading. DOS may be gone from NT, 2000 and XP, but the legacy of Windows remains, and will continue to taint MS products for a very long time.
I worked on a box that ran Windows for Pens. It was Win 3.11, IIRC, with some extra APIs grafted on. The machine itself was nothing special, a GRiD laptop with a pen attached. GRiD had been sold by that time, but I can't remember who bought it. The laptop was probably a 286, so you'd have to work to shoehorn Linux onto it.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
MS DOS may now have gone away, but in the land of PC-104s TinyLinux and RomDOS will continue to have practical applications. Any system that needs to continually chug along, fit into a peanut sized Flash ROM and otherwise work happily ever after will have a need. MS may be out of the market, but who cares? :)
You say you want a revolution?
Edlin wished it had the intuitiveness and user friendliness of writing in your own blood using the stump of your foot for a pen.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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 can understand why they offer it -- there's probably still a few places where legacy DOS apps are in place, and IBM has a long history of never ever backing away from a technology it's made a "strategic commitment" to. Still, it's funny to click on the "System requirements" link and see "Intel 8088/8086, 512K RAM, 6-18MB hard disk space". Kinda takes ya back, doesn't it? (snif)
-- Jason Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
My solution was a set of batch files that ran when the CD was inserted. The "installation program" was interactive, including a menu with several options. The program did things like selectively copy files, changed permissions from read-only to read write (files copied from a CD were read-only by default), verify network shares and copy files to other computers, and even updated DLLs if necessary (reboot required). It took about a week to develop, but simplified the instructions a great deal (Close program on all PCs, Insert CD, Select 2, Reboot all PCs when done).
Is MS-DOS really gone, or do they have the same kind of MS-DOS emulation that WinNT has? And, if it is gone, does anyone know of a free scripting language that would perform like DOS Batch files? I'd hate to think if there was a hardware failure I'd have to buy an installation software suite, or convince the customer to install a nationwide secure network...
Im serious :) who is making games with *great storytelling* like the old dos games?
...
...
Dos games were great because the graphics SUCKED so you *HAD* to tell a good story to keep anyone interested
IMHO, 3d was the worst thing to happen to games. Kids buy games for "Awesome graphics" (tell me what that means someone)... because people are too stupid anymore to tell presentation from content! If you wrap a pile of shit in pretty box they'll pay for it
(end rant)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
"Keyboard error, press F1 to resume."
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
Mods. Funny. Now.
You must not have been a CP/M user -- that's Kildall's fault, not Allen's. CP/M used the "/" for options, as in "program/opt1/opt2", and DOS was first and foremost a CP/M workalike.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.
Edlin is more accurately a clone of ed, the line editor upon which vi is based. I'd bet that edlin predates vi.
This is a classic example of how nostalgia can be stronger than history. MS-DOS was terrible, so terrible, in many ways. It has nothing to do with the 16-bitness of it, or even driver memory crunch hell, but simply that the command prompt side of it was an embarrassment from day one.
It took over ten years before there was any kind of command history (with doskey, you could finally hit the up arrow to recall previous commands). There wasn't a real alias mechanism until doskey either. And heck--and everyone forgets this--you couldn't even properly edit the command line until doskey came along. File completion was never standard. The batch file commands were braindead and severely limited.
Sure, some third parties walked in with their own top notch command processors--most notably JP Software with 4DOS, which is still better than every UNIX shell I've ever used--but even with over a decade to work on it, the largest PC software company in the world couldn't manage to write decent command processor given years to do so. And the worst part is that it was so easy it could have been a high school project. Dr. Dobb's Journal even published the source code for a bash-like shell that replaced command.com.
I think the likely answer here is that Microsoft could have written something better, but they spent a decade trying to beat down MS-DOS and replace it with something else. Remember, Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985. So for all that time, MS-DOS users were stuck with an intentionally inferior product. It's difficult to forget the pain of those days.
Come on, don't you remember all the OS/2 vs. NT 3.1 articles when NT 3.1 shipped? NT 3.1 was a flop, mostly used as a testing ground for people interested in keeping up with MS's new plans.
NT 3.51 was the first successful version of NT. NT 3.51 SP 5 was amazingly stable... it would be interesting to put an NT 3.51 SP 5 machine up against a Windows 2000 SP 2 (NT 5 SP 2) machine and compare.
Win32s was the backwards port of the core of the Win32 API to Win3.1. The two goals were:
1) Get new applications written against the Win32 API so NT (the future) would have some applications
2) Break OS/2 Windows compatibility layer... they kept changing Win32s until they broke OS/2, then they released apps for Win32s.
Windows 4.0 (Chicago AKA Windows 93 AKA Windows 95) was the version that combined DOS/Windows (to stop the DR-DOS onslaught) and introduced the Win32 API as the standard API. Win95 resulted in the Win32 apps that allowed NT to show some success on the desktop. NT 3.51 had some success as a server (very useful environment for managing Win3.1 desktops without the cost of Novell).
Win95 had some new APIs, which were mostly ported to NT 4 (except DirectX > 3 APIs). When I was at Citrix (MS Blocked WinFrame 2.0, then basically bought it to become Terminal Server), we couldn't support newer versions of IE because WinFrame 1.x was based upon NT 3.51, and IE required Win95/NT4 APIs.
Cairo was supposed to be the end of Windows with NT 4. Two years late and without a lot of functionality, NT 4 had (and still has!) some good server-side support and corporate desktop standing. When NT 4 lacked a lot of the functionality, MS declared that Cairo was a set of projects, not a release, and that some of them would be in NT 5. NT 5, two years late as Windows 2000, finally made a nearly API complete NT to match their home desktop dominance.
Windows XP appears to use a nearly identical system, focusing on a new user experience based on MacOS's improvements.
Microsoft has finaly achieved its 8 year goal of eliminating DOS support, ME was the end of the DOS based Windows, and it looks like all the old DOS games are finally dead. MS kept promissing better support for DOS apps/games in the next version of NT, but never delivered, instead stalling on their demise. Oh well.
Interestingly, NT 3.51 (I don't recall NT 3.5) was extremely portable, commercially supporting 4 processor families (this continued until NT 4, but the other platforms failled to take off).
The DOS support in NT, the NT VDM, emulated a 286, albeit much faster. This is the reason that you couldn't run fancy things in the DOS emulation, if it was a protected mode DOS API (386 DOS app), the NT VDM couldn't handle it.
Hopefully a better solution than VMWare (overkill, complexity, etc.) will exist to run old DOS games in emulation. My brother bought me the commercial version of Abuse (at one time a favorite) as a present, but I got it about 2 weeks after I migrated to NT 4 fulltime. Well, my new HTPC (home theater PC, just for gaming, I got me a progressive scan DVD player already) is going to be 98SE or ME based for gaming compatibility, so I guess I'll be able to play the old classics there.
Alex
I havn't used XP yet but I'll be surprised if these DOS features have been removed:
Directory structures starting with a 'drive' letter
Text/Binary open Mode for files (the notorious ^Ms)
The inability to delete a file which is open
File types based on .xxx extension
OS compontents still using 8.3 filename format
From 1990 to 1993, I had the unique opportunity to work closely with Gary Kildall.
By that time, Gary was already in the process of separating himself officially from Digital Research (did you know it was originally named "Intergalactic Digital Research"?) to pursue other interests, but was still in touch with the company on a personal level.
It was a great experience and a wonderful way to start a geek career. I originally was hired to help build and test wire-wrapped prototypes (for an internet appliance no less! in 1990!). Quickly from there Gary recognized my coding abilities and I was writing embedded code within a few weeks of starting.
Microsoft had just released Windows 3.1 and boy was Gary pissed - apparently Microsoft had intentionally modified Windows since 3.0 to specifically not work on DR-DOS (and yes, that's Digital Research DOS, not "doctor DOS"). MS claimed otherwise, but it was enough to pretty much kill DR - DR-DOS never reclaimed the lost market share (the first killer-apps were beginning to hit big in Windows at that point) and you all know the rest of that story.
Now for some ancient history - I was always cringe when I hear the oft-repeated story that IBM chose MS-DOS over CP/M for the PC because Gary was out flying his airplane when they showed up or some variation thereof. This is at best a half-truth.
Gary was already a wealthy man by that point. CP/M was licensed by a variety of manufacturers and DR was doing reasonably well. At that time, there was no reason to think that one single computer architecture would rise to completely dominate the industry - you had Osbournes, Kaypros, Apples, Commodore PETs, and a host of other machines all with loyal followings.
When IBM was designing the PC, they didn't want to merely license a DOS from another company they wanted to own a DOS. This put Gary off, he viewed CP/M as having a future and he didn't want to completely sell out to IBM. Microsoft had no such reluctance. Microsoft sold PC-DOS to IBM and continued to produce MS-DOS - hence MS-DOS vs. PC-DOS. It was a happy relationship for a while, but we all know the rest of that story. DR did go on to license CP/M-86 to IBM as an alternative, but by that time, it was too little too late.
Also, I wanted to comment on the story that during a visit with IBM, Gary typed in some code on MS-DOS and made a Digital Research copyright notice appear - I'm pretty sure this is just an industry legend. Gary never accused them of stealing actual code, just stealing ideas.
DOS was never present in the NT kernel. That's one of the reasons it's so much more stable than any of the 9x kernels, because they don't have to support old code.
;)
Cmd.exe, Command.com, and any other variation is -not- DOS. It never was. Not even in DOS 1.0 was Command.com, "DOS". It was -always- just the commandline interface to the underlying OS which was DOS. Most linux users would understand that distinction between the OS and the UI, but for some reason Windows users don't always grasps this.
Oh, and by the way, Windows XP is mostly just Windows 2000 with a pretty interface.. don't let MS fool you.
Wow. After years and years of "Windows is a buggy kludge running on top of DOS", Microsoft finally kills the beast and exorcises the 16-bit code from Windows.
So what happens?
"We miss DOS, and Microsoft was STUPID to get rid of it!"
Micro$oft can't do anything right, can they?
Let's look at this realistically. How many "ordinary users" out there are still running off the command line with computers that meet XP's installation requirements. Four (more or less). That's not enough reason to keep DOS alive.
Besides, as I understand it (disclaimer - I have no personal experience with this), XP will run DOS programs. As soon as I get XP (when Dell gives it to me) I'm going to attempt to install WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. If that works, then those four users will be satisfied, and I will too.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
According to various articles on the net, MS will ship a version of XP that can run without a gfx-card.
IIRC, they have extended vt100 for that...
So, the cmd-line will be around for some time.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
On occasions I have had to explain to people which versions of Windows really run on top of MS-DOS. It is somewhat confusing because MS changed all the names around. Here is a list that might be of interest here.
The following versions of Windows run on top of MS-DOS:
Windows 1.x
Windows 2.x
Windows 3.x
Windows 95 (Bundled MS-DOS 7.00 that is no longer sold as seperate product)
Windows 95 OSR2 (Bundled MS-DOS 7.10)
Windows 98 and 98SE (Bundled MS-DOS 7.10)
Windows ME (Bundled MS-DOS 8.00, but exiting to MS-DOS is now forbidden)
The following versions of Windows do not run on top of MS-DOS:
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5x
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
Windows XP (NT 5.1)
I can't be the only person who gets annoyed at humongous paths like:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office Too
You aren't the only person, but Win2K has filename and directory name completion. To turn it on, add the "/F:ON" flag when you run cmd.exe. Then, Ctrl-F does filename completion, and Ctrl-D does directory name completion. Don't ask me why the couldn't just use Tab like bash does, but it sure helps navigating those large directory names.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
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 don't know where you get this "CP/M compatibility" thing, it was pretty much a direct copy and some even say it was a direct copy thanks to the Intel assembler translator and CP/M source access. I recall the old QDOS ads in the top right corner of some mag I was reading at the time, may have been Kilobaud or maybe something a little more techie, can't recall).
Oh, Kildall said something about the use of '$' as the sentinel in the output call (9) as being special and that only he could explain it. Anyone know something about this?
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.
Just because Microsoft stops producing it doesn't mean it's dead. My office still uses MS Winword 1.1 on some PCs because it works and that's all they need.
-sting3r
Run cmd.exe and tab works for filename completion just fine. There's a registry setting to enable this in NT3.51 and above but it escapes me at the moment.
Of course you can do wildcards with 'cd' as well (cd \pro* will usually get "Program Files"). cmd.exe is actually a lot better than the original DOS command prompt - you just have to take the time to figure out the syntax required. Naturally it is nothing near bash though...
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
But the Windows 9x Command.com is a far cry from a *good* CLI, like many unix shells provide. I'd be screaming about the CLI in linux if I was stuck with a shell without file completion and decent command history support (not just the up button, but searchable history, DOSKEY not good enough) NT cmd is better, but not good enough...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
FreeDOS, gcc-dos, dosemu, among others...
The great thing about DOS was that it wasn't much of an operating system. (-:
Is DOS dead as in gone, kaput, never to be seen again in Redmond? Or is it gone, no longer there as in a major marketing point for Windows 95?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
> I wonder if most "DOS" applications,
> (including qbasic) will run under WINE?
As a guess, I'd say not. But you can
always use dosemu, which is much more
mature and stable anyways.
Chris Mattern
Windoze98 is just a 32 bit extension of a 16 shell designed for an 8 bit o/s written for a 4 bit procceser by a 2 bit company that cant stand 1 bit of competition!
Sure, I can probably move My Documents and /Windows/Temp without rebooting and too much application reconfiguration but what about /Program Files? When I get low on space again and decide to move /usr/local or some such thing it will be transparent. I'd have to reinstall the applications under Windows (and thats as much an application issue as an OS issue).
Bleh!
Maybe the code is dead, but the API lives on, and will still be around for decades. Even to this very day, I am still getting paid to maintain DOS apps. Nobody actually runs them under DOS, but nobody's gonna pay to have them rewritten, either.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For an application I can see a translator maybe doing half the job, for an OS what you suggest is a joke.
Remember, though, that this "operating system" was pretty much a joke too. Its applications didn't run in an environment any different than the OS's. No virtualization, no interruptions, nothing. I think that a translator that did a halfway decent job with application code would have done just as well with OS code, simply because on that particular platform, at that particular juncture in computing history, there was no difference between the two.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
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 $50,000.
One of the realities is that some people are willing to grab success, and others aren't. There are a lot of people in this world who purposefully miss an opportunity because they are unhappy or uncomfortable with assuming the responsibility it might entail.
Kildall was one such person. Obviously Bill Gates is not.
It's that difference in personalities that is really the secret behind Microsoft.
Personally, I know that I'm a lot like Gary Kildall in that regard. But knowing this I also try to not be resentful when I pass up an opportunity.
Amazing, but true. How do you find out the graphics card without opening the box? Using:
........D..R.RIB
..f$.....
.....STB Nitro 3
C:\>debug
-d c000:000
Gives me:
U.@..7400.......
M VGA COMPATIBLE
BIOS.
D (GX) BIOS. Ver
. 1.3..(C) 1996
STB Systems, Inc
Hey, I still use this on unknown dodgy old boxes!
Tom.
Oh arse
And clearly have never used DOS. The actual error message, the bland, high-handed, and uncaring epithet of the insane god of your reality, is, and I quote:
"Bad command or file name."
(bows down in worship)
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I was doing some research this morning and came across this article in Smart Computing from November of 1994, seven years ago.The article? "Is DOS Dead?" It almost sounds just like the eulogy for DOS that this /. post is about.
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Which would have turned it into Windows, surely?
Yes, the GUI would have turned into Windows. Microsoft should have followed through with the OS/2 plan (a powerful OS with task and memory management, support for networking, a CLI interface, and a GUI on top that could be shut off to save resources). Thus, workstations would run "Windows 2000" on top of "DOS 2000" (like the other guys run "XFree86 4.1 with KDE 2.2" on top of "Linux 2.4"), and servers could shut the Windows for more performance.
Did Sony call the PlayStation 2's operating system "OS2" by analogy with PS/2 -> OS/2 ?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's not really a clone of ed either. ed has many quite sophisticated features, such as regex based search & replace, reading & writing of possibly partial files into the buffer and doesn't have any command editing. edlin is based upon command editing, especially for it's rather primative subsitution.
I don't see any mention of that revolutionary MS Bob system that was going to make life worth living. Am i the only one who remembers when Egghead had stores, this was a featured software of hte week thingie in one of their fliers. I remember saying to the wife, that it was a stinker. I think the assistant was Bill himself if I remember correctly.
When a friend of mine was working at Computer City, they had the launch party for Microsoft Bob. The store had preordered something along the lines of 7 thousand copies to meet the anticipated demand. They sold four.
Not four thousand. Four.
And then they were all returned within a week.
(Adding insult to injury, the mylar balloons with the Bob logo were floating around the barnlike interior of the store and setting off the security alarms for weeks.)
Truly a stellar product, eh?
--saint
If it's the end of the DOS era, then how come everything in the WINDOWS\system32 still has 8.3 character filenames under WinXP?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The thing that looks like an MS-DOS window under NT isn't. That's a 32-bit command line interpreter that runs on top of NT, looks vaguely like DOS, but has no involvement with the 16-bit system.
...there was QDOS. This stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating system."
Then, Microsoft bought it, got rid of the "Quick" and kept the "Dirty."
That left us with MS-DOS.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
In my first year of college I had to use Matlab on an i386, under dos, with almost no memory. Once Matlab was up and running there wasn't enough memory to run my editor of choice, edit. I found out that I could run edlin, and became a master at writing Matlab scripts in it. I amazed my friends. I confounded my enemies. I was an edlin god.
I now wonder why it took me so long to switch to Linux. I would have been much happier for it.
The middle mind speaks!
I'm not sure if you can still do...
append backspace characters to your filenames, so no others can access it from the shell?
In a certain sense 4DOS predates MS-DOS. It's actually a relative of ZCPR, a Z80 replacement for CP/M-80's command shell. And, yes, with ZCPR, you got basic scripting, I/O redirection, command line editing, stacking and history.
It was quite a step backward to go from my Intertec Superbrain (a circa 1979 Z80 machine somebody gave me when I was at college!) to a 386-based PC with MS-DOS. 4DOS (and the Norton repackaging of it as "NDOS" helped a lot).
When I ran Windows NT at work, and now that I run W2K at home, I use a descendant of 4DOS called "Take Command/32". Set it up and alias Unix commands to the DOS ones, and it's a livable working environment. (Granted that's not much of a slogan. "Buy our product and Windows becomes livable!")
DOS wasn't much of an OS -- and there are those who have argued, with some fairness, that it wasn't a complete OS -- but it did what it did reliably, unlike any other MS software, and it did it with a tiny smidgen of memory. For some purposes, that makes it a much better deal than Linux, depending on what you need to do.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I prefer: -R -> cmd
Mmmm.. Donuts
I think most of these posts are missing a point... DOS and the CLI are two different things. MS programmers routinly release cli based programs for doing all sorts of things. I think what's dead is the DOS based programs. But for most basic things (copy/ren/del) the cli is still living on strong.
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
By a solid 5 years, as it turns out. At least, vi was written in 1976, while edlin was released with PC-DOS 1.0 in 1981. So unless edlin had been enjoying quiet success as a private utility for a long time, it is newer.
For starters, basic functions of an operating system are to multitask, provide memory protection, and provide an uncircumventable layer of abstraction between applications and hardware. DOS did none of these things. Applications had the computer all to their own, and could even remove DOS from memory if they so wished. DOS did very little; it was in a sense nothing more than a glorified interrupt handler with a shell.
And these interrupts are not even any good. The FAT filesystem used by DOS, aside from its obvious deficiencies like lack of support for long filenames, is incredibly slow and wasteful. If you browse through the FAT code in Linux you'll see it's full of pejorative comments (of the sort "I hate doing this, but FAT is brain-dead"). The drive letter system (C:, D:) is ugly and inflexible compared to the Unix system, and it's sad that we're stuck with it to this day. And the memory management ... well, to be fair, this was mostly the hardware's fault, but if you've ever done any DOS programming you know it's a royal pain.
The command prompt supports a half-assed version of piping that isn't well-supported by applications, has a limit of (I think) 256 characters per command, and does not even expand wildcards. A friend who was working with DOS batch files was telling me how most of his time was spent circumventing the limitations of the command prompt, sometimes even writing C programs for obvious, simple things (e.g. an "xargs" equivalent).
I used to be nostalgic about the good ol' DOS days but since then I've come to realize how terrible it really was. Bye DOS, and good riddance :).
Microprocessors are based on 1940s technology, what is your point?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
This is kinda funny... Just as apple introduces the unix command into its products for the first time ever, Microsoft seems to think it is a good time to end it. Well more than 80,000 apple users spent $30.00 on the OS X beta but there are still Windows people who use a four year old OS because everything new that MS puts out if crap.
Does anybody else think it's a bit tasteless to hire a bunch of celebs to sing at the funeral of a shitty software program in the same week that celebs are singing for free at the funeral of thousands of victims of terrorist attacks?
The "you can fly" motto was bad enough...
Get out of your conspriacy cave, man. He said "Alot of software took a shit with it.", and I'll expand that:
DR-DOS sucks, sucked, and always will suck! It's in incompatible piece of shit that doesn't work with barely anything. I could give a shit if Windows 3 worked or not -- the fact is that DR had problems with Lotus and Borland and every other DOS app company on the planet.
I remember when "Novell DOS" (as it was called at the time) had a bug which prohibited NetWare from booting under certain circumstances (something to do with EISA.) Even Novell was telling people to use MS-DOS.
I even tried to download the Caldera DOS Web browswer thing a couple years ago, and THAT didn't even work well on DR-DOS. Switched back to MS-DOS and it was fine. P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C
I'm not one to defend Microsoft -- but they were probably right to ban that piece of shit for support reasons. In fact they were right, because DR/Novell spent the next couple years working all the Windows-related bugs out.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
What I remember best about DOS as a Mac guy is this. From 1984 through 1994, there was no comparison between the two platforms. Ordinary mortals couldn't even install a font on their DOS machines, and keeping either DOS or the almost-DOS Windows 3.x alive required daily screwing around with the autoexec.bat and windows.ini files by skilled DOS maintainers. Applications and peripherals were opaque, balky, and unstable. The Macintosh worked -- DOS and Windows 3.x did not. Every TCO study showed order-of-magnitude gaps between the platforms, all in the Mac's favor.
Yet for all that time, the majority of the people in the industry insisted that DOS and Windows 3.x were superior, and the market share gap in favor of DOS was enormous.
Finally, when Microsoft won its IP battle against Apple and the reasonably usable Windows 95 came out as a clone of the Mac, the argument shifted overnight to say that Microsoft machines were now as good as the Mac, without any admission that they had been inferior for the last ten years. As soon as the revolution could legally be embraced on Intel hardware, it was instantly admitted that the Mac/W95 way was superior. The people admitting this were the same ones who had been insisting the Mac was inferior for ten years.
This historical hypocrisy was a measure of just how absurd and partisan critical standards are in the computer industry, how little the market can be trusted to select a superior product, and how little honesty is involved in platform advocacy. It has a great deal of bearing on current platform advocacy issues.
Tim
There exists a hierarchy in *nix file systems. Programs and libraries placed right off the root are essential for booting. These are contained in /bin, /lib, and /sbin (system binaries or superuser binaries, your pick).
/usr has often been (and continues to be) a remote-mounted file system. Say you had a centralized network server that hosted programs that everyone on a network used. Instead of speanding hundreds of man hours installing Windows and required software at each seat, you can install it on ONE location and have everyone NFS mount the share. Simple. Only one set of programs to maintain. The paradigms for /bin, /sbin, and /lib are similar to those in /usr/*.
/opt file system on other *nix platforms that aren't GNU.
"usr" is short for "user". Meaning this is where user programs are located.
/usr/local, which means "local user files" is a mount point for a local disk that stores programs specific to a workstation. This is incase you want to install software that only you can use, located on your disk. Again, the paradigms are the same. This is very similar to the
Try doing this with Windows. Microsoft has specially designed Windows such that you *have* to buy licenses for each and every seat, instead of buying one copy that everyone can use. I guess if you have N machines, it's better to buy N copies of a program rather than just 1. Spending money is better, right, to you Windows users? It's much better to give your money to Microsoft than to your employees. Sure.
As for where Windows puts files... it sticks practically the entire system in one directory, and otherwise scatters things out across different locations. Why does \winnt have so many subdirectories? Why are some system files in \Program Files? Try figuring out how *your* hierarchy works before you start cutting down on *nix, which has been developed and refined over 30+ years.
So, the original poster is certainly being inflamatory, he's certainly right when it comes to the obvious nature and elegance of *nix. Windows is just a disaster area... much like what happens when a building collapses as a result of building without any real plans in mind.
But you most definitely have to grow up a bit and understand that computers work much better when there is some thought put into their design, rather than marketing gimmicks.
Why bother.
That eulogy is a good one, and it does reinforce my point. Gary didn't miss any chance by not providing CP/M-86 for the PC... he didn't really want that chance. As it says, he wasn't in search of fame and money.
Unfortunately you distorted this point into an insult towards Bill Gates, which is sad. The reality is that you do need people like Gates to lead the market in these directions.
I'm sitting in front of one right now (the people I'm working for are MS slaves and won't even install security updates "until Microsoft tells us to do so").
My first impression of WinXP?
Teletubbies!
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
In the very early DOS days, I knew the basic stuff, changing directories, running programs, using GW-Basic. I didn't experiment too much because the machine I used wasn't mine.
Then in the late 80's, my parents got me a Mac Plus. It was an interesting machine, to learn and use. I had a few games, Microsoft Word and Works, a spreadsheet program, and some disk utilities. I learned how to use hypercard, and learned all the settings in the apple menu.
After about a year's use, I found it to be less and less intersting.
My parents put a modem in their computer and got prodigy, one of the fore-runners to the internet. It was awesome. Two, they got me a programming book, I found it very enjoyable.
I'd wonder, why didn't I have this stuff for Mac, more programs, or even a Hard Drive? They were too expensive and too hard to find.
I soon was given my parents XT. It was fast, and stable. Not this constant editing of config.sys or autoexec.bat, once you set up it is done.
It is true, side by side, the XT was more stable. If it would hang up, you were probably trying out a new program. Just reset, and your back in seconds. If that happened on the Mac, it would happen all the time, with almost all the programs! It would corrupt disks, and the disks were expensive! On the XT, I used 360 KB disks, and I remember only once corrupting a disk.
The reset button for the Mac was funny, because it was removible, and had a debug window, and something else wierd with it I can't remember. The programmible menu had a commands that I knew out of a book I had, but there was never any help for it on the computer, you couldn't use it like even the debug command in DOS because I didn't know what the options were.
Well there are lots of things I can talk about the Mac, but lets finish by talking about a little of what you said.
By the time DOS and Windows 3.x rolled around, I found that they were definately superior. My brother put Win3.1 on his computer, a 386 with VGA, and later bought a sound card. It was the first time that I had seen Full Motion Video with AVI in windows. It was very cool. And it only costed him a few hundred dollars. This was 1992 technology, and I compared this with the Macs at the time. I found them unbelievibly behind. They were still selling Mac Pluses, SE's and Mac II's were way too expensive. You had to buy a Mac IIfx to get any where near what my brother could do.
And another note, Apple sued Microsoft over Windows 1.0, way back in 1985 I believe, so that has nothing to do with Win95.
Conclusion, I've learned both OS's, and I know how they work side-by-side. It is true that Mac's are technologically inferior. They have always been overpriced. And their standards have always leaned on the rest of the industry. Even today, I've admin Mac networks, and it's the same.
The people that compared Win95 to Mac are right when they said they are the same, because they looked the same, but that doesn't have any bearing on the other argument-they always have been technologically inferior. If there was hypocrisy from and DOS person, he doesn't know what he's talking about to start-he's just repeating what everyone else says-But I've have learned for the fact, Macs have always been inferior.
Thing was, CP/M was the business OS. A lot of places used Apples, it was true, and the Canadians fell in love with Commodores at work, but most offices ran CP/M, so the idea was to make the transition as easy as possible, both for users and programmers -- most of the 8080 instruction set mapped almost directly onto the 8086 set, and the OS API was almost identical. This is where com files came from, too -- simple 64K (or less) memory images of a program, just like a CP/M com file.
For some years all my DOS machines had a batch file so that I could still PIP.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
do not work well if I have
filename---
and
filena-
and you just want to access one of them
Anybody who has IE 5 for 3.1 and doesn't want it, or anybody who knows where it might still be available for download, please get in touch with me.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
But is it vi you are using on your linux box.
Or vim?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I still use echo foobar > foobar.txt on a regular basis....
True, neither cmd.exe nor command.com are MS-DOS. Of course, neither is MS-DOS dead, since Win98 and WinMe are still alive (ie., supported by MS) and both are essentially running on DOS.
And I think the original point of both cmd.exe and command.com being available is that most /.'ers seem to be moaning the death of the CLI, not the OS. The CLI is alive and well, and actually seems to be getting more useful with the new MS OS's.
For what it's worth, I'll be glad to see DOS the OS go. It was a great fun in its time, but it's out lived its usefulness and is causing us many more problems than it is solving them. Keep either it or Linux on a boot disk for emergencies, but if I never have to explain to a customer the difference between EMS and XMS memory, and the 640k limit, I'll be a happy man. That, and the Win9x resource issues (a main problem in the stability of those systems) will be a distant memory are enough to wish DOS farewell.