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MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP
Biedermann writes "This is not exactly hot news, just a quick reminder to count the last days: A table in this article tells us that MS-DOS (as well as Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and NT 3.5x) reach their "End of Life" (as defined by Microsoft) on December 31, 2002.
Come on, even if you loathed them, they were good for jokes at least."
I thought MS-DOS died a long time ago, but honestly will they ever really get rid of it? Doesn't Windows 98/2000 simply run on top of or at least use MS-Dos?
-- Powered By Linux
I wonder how different Id be if I had been brought up on *nix terminal rather than MSDOS....
DOS wasn't that bad of an OS. That's no bullshit. It has its high points, and has been around *much* longer, and been magnitudes more popular than nearly everything else that rose to compete with it.
...I grew up on that thing :) Ever since my uncle plopped me down in front of his 386SX to play Doom shareware (I know, I'm a youngin), I've been a computer geek ever since.
:/
:\
Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit
Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu
Lordfly
hookers and grits.
DOS is still in Netware. Perhaps we should add Netware to the list too...
Someone you trust is one of us.
Mine were already dead a lot sooner when I switch'd to Linux/BSD.
"You're dead to me now. Go."
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
Erm /. at least do what they ask:
'To link directly to this page, please use http://www.jestsandjokes.com/show.php3?name=dos.co mmandments'
*tut-tut*
You never know, that page may forward the user to their slashdot proof server rather than battering the meagre normal one.
...but its legacy lives on.
You won't be missed. I used DOS in 1986 - 1993 and in Windows 95 in 95 - 00, but I'll let it go without any bad feelings.
DOS IS DYING WITH BSD!! DOS STOLE BSD'S GRA...
*OOMPH!!@!@!!11*
Holy shit. That's one hell of a LART.
(blargh, I'm avoiding the Lameness filter caps thingy...)
Good riddance I say. MS-DOS was intended only to be a stopgap until Xenix was completed but unfortunately that never happened. Its a shame that a version of the braindead DOS command line lives on in modern versions of Windows and hasnt been replaced with something closer to what Unix has.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Here's the DOS jokes:
DOS Commandments
1. I am thy DOS, thou shall have no OS before me, unless Bill Gates gets a cut of the profits therefrom.
2. Thy DOS is a character based, single user, single tasking, standalone operating system. Thou shall not attempt to make DOS network, multitask, or display a graphical user interface, for that would be a gross hack.
3. Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need that much space anyway.
4. Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After all, it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy this 640K of RAM, and clutter it not with device drivers, memory managers, or other things that might make thy computer useful.
5. Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory path. Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears on no typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where that character is located on a computer keyboard is right out.
6. Thou shall edit and shuffle the sacred lines of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT until DOS functions adequately for the likes of you. Giving up in disgust is not allowed.
7. Know in thy heart that DOS shall always maintain backward compatibility to the holy 2.0 version, blindly ignoring opportunities to become compatible with things created in the latter half of this century. But you can still run WordStar 1.0.
8. Improve thy memory, for thou shall be required to remember that JD031792.LTR is the letter that you wrote to Jane Doe four years ago regarding the tax deductible contribution that you made to her organization. The IRS Auditor shall be impressed by thy memory as he stands over you demanding proof.
9. Pick carefully the names of thy directories, for renaming them shall be mighty difficult. While you're at it, don't try to relocate branches of the directory tree, either.
10. Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy saviour on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart that everyone reboots their OS to solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.
Common sense is not so common.
MS-DOS is dead? What will MR-DOS do without her?
:'(
RIP TSR's...WOLF3D will miss you
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
For all the M$ bashing we (and that includes me) do, MS-DOS at least had a few honours in it's favour...
.ZIP file and *bam* done.
1) It was secure. Since you could never get it to network to anything, it could not be hacked from the Internet
2) It ran. With a 15 second reboot even on my old machine, a freeze was no more than a minor annoyance
3) (This is a serious one) For all the hassle of having to configure this and IRQ that, anyone using MS-DOS had to have at least a working knowledge of computers.
4) Reinstall took less than 10 minutes. Just keep a boot disk handy and copy the whole DOS directory from your
5) No SPAM!!!!!
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I want to note that in all these years no group has been able to completely replace dos.
www.freedows.org doesn't even work anymore
www.allos.org as has been shutdown
Those projects could have gotten somewhere IMHO if they had better organization and actual code.
I guess with the home version of XP they really do mean it this time?
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Laugh all you want about the poor unsupported platforms but they are quite old. I believe redhat 1.0 and 2.0 are from this time frame.
This leave another question. Do any of you still run old distro's?
Now, how many people still run Windows 95 or NT 3.51 at work?
http://saveie6.com/
I agree with microsoft... MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, NT 3.51, and Win95 are all unsupportable. They're much too unstable and feature-poor (or useless, in the case of MS-DOS). THey sucked when they were on the market - and they suck even more today.
The newest Windows OS I support is Windows 98. That's right, my sister, my mom, and my dad all run Windows 98, so I support them. My brother-in-law and girlfriend run Windows XP, so they're out of luck. (No, they didn't blow $200-$400 on XP - it came for """free""" on their Dell & Fujitsu laptops.)
Popularized in the 80's beyond academic circles due to the exploding popularity of the IBM PC's and the ability to make cheap, compatible hardware, MS-DOS has lost marketshare steadily throughout the decade of the 90's.
Since the release of Windows '95, more and more powerful computers have been required to run the "latest and greatest software," and as a result, older computers often get tucked away in the attic with old Apple IIe machines.
Those that are still in use are generally used by part-time hackers and developers, who use modern UNIX-variants, such as *BSD (also dying) and GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as Linux), which have had support for 386-based machines for over a decate.
It's time we accepted this simple fact: MS-DOS is DYING.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Time for the obligitory "Reference some obscure MS page, discuss a random chart" link already? The most bittersweet indication that it's Sunday and my weekend is rapidly drawing toa close. Ah well, at least my pain will be qualmed by 1000 geeks poking fun.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
You guys deally have to wait for Windows ME to die before you can proclaim DOS dead.
The one date companies are concerned about is the non-supported date for NT4, which is this coming June 2003.
Since Microsoft is going to stop supporting these products altogether, would it be too much to expect that they make windows 3.x open source (for posterity). If it is open sourced it may live on, at the heart of kind of windows/*nix abomination.
Actually, I used to use the fabulous CONED program, which allowed you to create a bunch of autoexec/config files and switch between them. This, coupled with the even fabulous-er Xtreegold meant my DOS setup was pretty much unbeatable.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Windows 98 and ME still boot off of DOS. In the case of 98 you can still boot it into pure DOS mode if you like, it is rather better hidden in ME but with some hacks it can also be done. So we have a couple of MS end-of-life dates to go before we can say its really dead.
But then there is FreeDOS, which looks to be alive and well, and being GPL'd free software, is unlikely to stop being so any time soon.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
There was talk of trimming down NT to run on desktops at home, and what a benefit that would be... imagine a home computer that runs all 32-bit software and really has preemptive multitasking and all that "advanced" stuff. But that didn't happen until now, when the average new home computer runs at 10x the clock speed of those hot sexy machines we used to use for NT4.
For some reason I find that amusing.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
If you're really upset, there's always FreeDOS
MS-DOS TSR's are not dead, she changed her name to 'Services' when she married NT...
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
7 Years is a short life for an operating system. I guess that's what happens when you make disposable operating systems.
*DrugCheese rants*
Does DOS really mean "disk operating system"? No, I think not:
DOS -- Denial of Service
DOS -- Dumb Operating System
DOS -- Dumb Obese System
Any other ideas?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Whilst we're on the subject, remember that old PCs are still very useful (especially for Grandma, or as a drone off a more powerful server of some sort ala XTerm/terminal servers) and although Microsoft are going to stop supporting these products (since when did anyone ever turn to Microsoft for support anyway?), they're not going to go away.
We're still going to be asked to fix problems for Nana's computer, and we're still going to install Windows 95 on Pentium-class PCs for people who aren't quite ready for Linux on the desktop.
Does this mean changes in copyright restrictions on these products? I'm fairly sure that under New Zealand copyright law, you're allowed to make copies if the company doesn't make a reasonable effort to sell you the product, and if they're not supporting it I'm sure they won't be selling it any more.
(looks at framed MS-DOS 6 box on the wall) The disks come in a "You're important to us, please register" plastic bag. How ironic.
Does this mean we'll get BIOS-update tools for modern operating systems?
Does that mean that these products are now free to distribute since Microsoft no longer sells/supports them? Are they public domain? Can a school install 500 copies of Windows 9x across a bunch of donated computers and not worry about the MS Schutzstaffel XP raiding them?
I think not.
This is only Microsoft leaving plenty of customers high-and-dry without any compensation wahtsoever.
I don't even know why this is front-page worthy. Of course, it gives Microsoft more exposure. I find it interesting that the last FIVE articles I've read here had big, Microsoft advertisements on them. Way to Sellout Slashdot.
Why bother.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MS:DOS:
Celebrating 21 years without a remote root exploit!
Take that OpenBSD! =)
The day DOS will truly die is when MS no longer bothers to give Windows native ability to run DOS programs.
For great justice.
Much more than that. I could write an application for DOS, start it running on a dedicated PC, provide a UPS, and reasonably expect that it would still be running a month or a year later. Doesn't happen with any version of Win I've used. With the potential exception of XP (which I don't use for other reasons, mostly privacy and security), Windows just can't be used for mission critical applications.
The total amount of down time, both human and system, that has been wasted because Microsoft decided that frequent crashes were good enough for it's customers is truly criminal. How this can happen and Bill Gates still becomes the richest man in the world amazes me.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
at schools where much of the hardware is donated, and since licenses aren't transferrable, we have to install whatever m$ will let us.
recently, a friend in an elementray school that feeds my junior high tells me that they get 20 donated pentium 2's, with 64MB ram. okay, but guess what? all they can buy are xp licenses.
support isn't the issue. they just don't sell the os's any more, and that is the real problem. why is it necesary to have a p4 with 256 MB to do EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS that i did on a p2/64mb system a few years ago.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If Microsoft really wants to deny new DOS-licenses, this could be a real problem for a couple of companies.
MS-DOS (as well as Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and NT 3.5x) reach their "End of Life" (as defined by Microsoft) on December 31, 2002
They're not dead, they're just resting...
I mean, back when I had DOS at home, everyone else had unix, right?
Get a grip. We're talking about HOME COMPUTERS HERE. PCs. Not big unix workstations.
Its a shame that a version of the braindead DOS command line lives on in modern versions of Windows and hasnt been replaced with something closer to what Unix has.
What's surprising is that DOS *hasn't* been replaced by something better and more similar to the shells available under Unix. One of the first things people talk about as being reasons to use UNIX over Windows is the power and flexibility of the shell.
At the very least I would have expected something more sh(1)-like, even if it did choose to include a lot of older MS-DOS commands. At the most I would have expected something that was *compatible* with sh(1) with a lot of the extensions from bash or zsh that people have come to expect, along with the kinds of things that would make it useful in a Windows GUI environment, like some *very* basic GUI dialog features that could prompt for yes/no or single line input without a invoking a cmd shell, but no complex windowing behavior or event-driven programming.
MS has responded with the "improved" features of the NT command shell and Windows scripting (which I presume is a VB script derivative), without realizing that DOS batch file compatibility isn't terribly helpful and complex VBScript and GUI interaction won't get used.
People, especially admins, want a fair amount of power (loops, variables, substitions, output redirection, etc) and no complex GUI interaction or dependencies. But they want security and stability, too, and MS hasn't always made it a priority to deliver those features either...
When I look at the roadmap for their O/S's to expire from support? And then I get a sneak preview of "Longhorn"? If the current pace of Linux development continues............. they will be selling Longhorn in shoe stores by the time it comes to fruition!!
Nice Try M$!
IS it even possible to flash BIOS without dos?
Who needs DOS, when we have IBM's PC/DOS? :)h tml
http://www-3.ibm.com/software/os/dos/psm952a.
Only $50 last I checked, get them while they're hot!
sigs are dumb.
I liked DOS on my old machines. You could do amazing things with it, and it would just keep going. Program to snoop passwords on old Netware systems? No problem. Hook up int09, wait for someone to enter 'login' and record the next 30 keystrokes. Want to make a cooperative multitasking system out of it? Took less than two weeks of coding, and basically just involved reprogramming timer frequencies and wrapping int13 and int21 to provide primitive reentrancy. Oh, memory lane is a good place to visit :-)
Win3.1 was fun to play with, but died on me way to often for my liking. Win95 was better, but started to get in the way too much...
Don't get me wrong - I like my Linux box. And my new W2K box at work. I can do fun stuff with them too. I just don't get the same great feeling of control with them, since the OS will NOT move out of the way. Hmm - maybe I should become a kernel hacker instead :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
DOS Commandments
1. I am thy DOS, thou shall have no OS before me, unless Bill Gates gets a cut of the profits therefrom.
2. Thy DOS is a character based, single user, single tasking, standalone operating system. Thou shall not attempt to make DOS network, multitask, or display a graphical user interface, for that would be a gross hack.
3. Thy hard disk shall never have more than 1024 sectors. You don't need that much space anyway.
4. Thy application program and data shall all fit in 640K of RAM. After all, it's ten times what you had on a CP/M machine. Keep holy this 640K of RAM, and clutter it not with device drivers, memory managers, or other things that might make thy computer useful.
5. Thou shall use the one true slash character to separate thy directory path. Thou shall learn and love this character, even though it appears on no typewriter keyboard, and is unfamiliar. Standardization on where that character is located on a computer keyboard is right out.
6. Thou shall edit and shuffle the sacred lines of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT until DOS functions adequately for the likes of you. Giving up in disgust is not allowed.
7. Know in thy heart that DOS shall always maintain backward compatibility to the holy 2.0 version, blindly ignoring opportunities to become compatible with things created in the latter half of this century. But you can still run WordStar 1.0.
8. Improve thy memory, for thou shall be required to remember that JD031792.LTR is the letter that you wrote to Jane Doe four years ago regarding the tax deductible contribution that you made to her organization. The IRS Auditor shall be impressed by thy memory as he stands over you demanding proof.
9. Pick carefully the names of thy directories, for renaming them shall be mighty difficult. While you're at it, don't try to relocate branches of the directory tree, either.
10. Learn well the Vulcan Nerve Pinch (ctrl-alt-del) for it shall be thy saviour on many an occasion. Believe in thy heart that everyone reboots their OS to solve problems that shouldn't occur in the first place.
Say my regards to BSD
Just a little more culture lost it the mists of time.
I grew up on MS-DOS too, starting with DOS 2.0 on my dad's Intel 8088 Toshiba laptop. I still, to this day, use the command line to do file operations, even in Windows XP/.NET, such as COPY, MOVE, and FORMAT.
now I need to get off my ass and upgrade my DOS box to Linux.
The jokes are /.ed and Microsoft's site is fine. Maybe this article was sponsored by M$ so that they would bring down their enemies? It wouldn't surprise me :)
--Quentin
As long as I want to the original versions of games like Arkanoid, Doom, Quake - DOS is NOT dead. There are also plenty of games which exist only on DOS and have not been ported to modern OSes.
What's the chance that MS will release the source code for MS-DOS?
/me ducks
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
has been around *much* longer
Hate to burst your bubble, but UNIX has been around a hell of a lot longer than DOS. As for its high points, even M$ who has the lowest standard of quality ever seen on this planet has disowned DOS.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows. Yeah I know you can run some comands from the start menu. But is there any sort of scripable command line interface that is analogous to the UNIX terminal prompt?
And what about a real-time interface for controling equipment? Is that now all gone from windows now? Unix was never much good at it (you had to use special pseudo-unix things like vmworks to get true real time interfaces, regular unix just was not built with that in mind)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I fondly recall the days of spending an hour tweaking the computer to get that extra 2k of ram available for programs. Hey, because when programs had to fit in conventional ram, and we're talking the 640k that should be enough for anyone, it was a challenge getting the programs you wanted, plus the 15 or so TSR's all to fit in ram. Don't forget about himem. You can stash stuff up there, make more room. And if you really got desparate, video memory was available too. :)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Unix is user friendly, it's just more picky who it's friends are.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I'm now happily running Linux kernel 0.01 and lov'in it!
It was originally QDOS, before Microsoft bought it, which stood for "Quick & Dirty Operating System". So, it stands to reason that MS-DOS stands for "Microsoft's Dirty Operating System". :)
I had a Packard Bell Legend 2000 which was a 486 SX 25mhz, 4MB ram, windows 3.1. It was that computer that allowed me to run Wolf3d and some other games I can't remember. I wish I didn't throw it away because I probably could have souped it up and played some of my oldgames I have. Right now I dualboot MS-DOS 6.22 and Win2kPro. My SBLive has decent dos support but the games don't feel the same because I'm on a 17" monitor...back then I think the monitor I had was 13" or 14" lol.
But it's evil soul still lives on in all microsoft products.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
MS-DOS was meant to supplant the ever-growing CP/M (and MP/M) hordes. IBM was afraid of 'em -- DOS, after all, was _IBM_'s choice, so to speak, not MS's. And Xenix _did_ get finished, just not by MS: it's called SCO.
Not, mind you, that I would have shed tears to see DOS be supplanted by a *nix, even one as dain-bramaged as SCO.
Windows NT was never based on DOS. It contained (and still does) the virtual machine, Windows on Windows (WOW.EXE) for running 16 bit DOS and Windows programs. WOW is a far family member of SoftPC, an early PC emulator from Insignia running on the Mac and some UNIX environments.
I wonder how 98 and NT4 feel... The grimreaper is jus'round the corner :D
_________ Help me get a PSP!
No, Windows has had scripting available for years. That's something that most OSS zealots like to pretend doesn't exist so that they can say "there's no command prompt support, and no way to do scripting in W2K!", but it's there, and it's been there for years and years.
I always took a small ammount of misguided pride in being able to manage my ram by hand. "This TSR goes in LOW-MEM, this TSR in the HMA, shuffle this one, move that one, change this CONFIG.SYS line, edit that AUTOEXEC.BAT line. Reboot, reboot, reboot, and voola!, an extra 3K of memory.. now this game will run" No MEMAKER no QEMM auto-optimize, just my nerves of steel and iron gut! fly by the seat of my pants baby!!@$#@@#! Ahhh.. the good old days... WTF am I saying.. good riddance...
These first posters make me puke :)
Anyway, dos was pretty good in its days (at least every system call was documented, a fine tradition that windows seems to want no part of) and it is still used wherever PC's and total reliability are a requirement.
MP3 Search Engine
What makes you think that mozilla doesn't run on Windows 95? About a month ago while my real computer was down for repairs, I was using my old computer which had Windows 95 installed, and mozilla ran fine. It was a little slow, but I think that that is more easily attributable to the fact that it was a 166 with 32MB of ram[Phoenix which is the same general code base for a lot of the back end ran fast enough to be nicely useable].
You gan still get DR-DOS for free (beer) here, besides there are Free (speech) and Open DOSes around too.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If you look a C:\WINDOWS, you'll notice that most files still have 8 letters or less. It's like in the new Harry Potter movie, technically the evil is dead but it's memory is enough to still give you the willies.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
"Jokes that are only funny to 'tards" for $100, Alex.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mad props to all my OSes that didn't make it. Lots o' good kernels were undone on the streets of Compton.
Yup, really
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have always wondered what would have happened if DR DOS wasn't eradicated by microsoft.
Actually, it hasn't been eradicated. In fact, it's back again! Check this out...
DeviceLogics
It's too bad we never had a Publishing of Source clause in all those Printed licencing agreements we all agreed to by opening up the boxes to see the licence..
But sadly microsoft still insists on being lazy and re-using their broken code to create new more broken applications. Then when they break, they just make a glorified bugcatcher to prevent them from looking like the asses that they are for not actually getting real people to test their programs.
"A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. -- S. C. Johnson"
Nice fortune at the end of the page. Could the DOS designers have foreseen Duke Nukem ?
Ok so yeah, blah, sad day, DOS is dead, 6.22 was a classic etc. etc., but what no-one is considering much is that 95 will be dead too and there's lots of offices still using it!
graspee
P.S. I liked the way the story almost nearly did the Steven King is Dead troll thing.
End-Of-Life = abandonedware, so they're going to make it public domain, huh! Thanks guys!
At work for us, we turn over machines every three years. We will continue to have to support Win95OSR2 through the end of 2003 at least until the last older hardware is still in service.
We've never supported 98/ME or NT on the desktop.
We started W2K on the desktop officially last year.
We have no plans to support XP. We will have to spend bucks to get even our bare bones suite of internal apps to run on it.
Does anyone know why the MS alert says XP Pro will have 2 years more life than XP Home?
one *must* admit that Windows 3.1 is a very, very bad operating system.
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Are you for real? Or do you just troll here on /. to post your Website link in your .sig? You realize that geeks at all levels of ability laugh at you every time you post garbage like this? And you have posted this same line multiple times btw.
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Windows ME, no matter what Microsoft says, still has a DOS core left to it. DOS is still there no matter how many ways Microsoft trys to hide it. Also dos was just fine about 10 years ago. Some folks still use it today.
Gorkman
DOS did little more than provide a way to execute programs, and a way for programs to get at the hardware. That's exactly why I liked it. I used DOS exclusively for a long time. (Sorry - I didn't have a *NIX at my disposal) I didn't start using Windows 3.1 until Windows 95 was gearing up for OSR2. I had to switch to a GUI because I just had to try this "web browser" thing I kept seeing on BBSes for download. Did anyone ever have DOS freeze up the computer? I mean DOS by itself, without anything else running? Even Linux, my OS of choice, can do that. And Windows is known for it.
Anyway, the whole reason I wrote this is to say that as long as I still have a use for Ghost, I will still have a use for DOS.
There are plenty of single floppy Linux Distros out there that will get you up and networked with just a boot.
Hal-91, tom's RTBT, and many others.
Hal will even read NTFS files, to help rescue your poor NT box.
There are a lot of older pieces of equipment in the controlls industry that are still running under some form of DOS.
Why fix what isnt broke, thankfully there are free alternatives like freeDOS.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... how will Strong Bad answer his e-mail on his COMPY 386?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I still spend a lot of time in DOS on my WinME machine. My primary text editor is still DOS-based! When I do computer work for people they always boggle about how I go into a DOS prompt and start typing in commands instead of pushing a mouse around.
I grew up on DOS systems. In high school it was all we had: WordPerfect 5.1, Borland C++ 2.0, etc. You had to know DOS to get any work done!
DOS had its faults of course but it had many strong points:
1) The command line syntax was clean and easy to learn.
2) The set of commands was small enough to hold in your head. On Unix I often forget the commands for stuff because there are so many of them, and there are a bunch I still haven't learned.
3) Graphics in DOS programs were easy; almost trivial by today's standards.
4) You can play with whatever part of the system you want and not have to jump through hoops. In fact, the hardware course at my U is still using DOS because it's so easy to do hardware programming for.
5) Quick! No multitasking => No overhead.
Dead or not, I'll probably still be using DOS for many years to come.
dos was able to mangage memory (very badly however), didn't manage the cpu at all (no multitasking or anything else), did manage storage, did not manage devices (name one device, outside the hd/floppy, that was managed by dos. none), and input/ouput was managed by the bios (textmode). sorry, not much of an os.
it was more like a sucky shell with the ability to allocate memory than an operating system.
How is this garbage? Does the WSH really not exist? Does it not work? Am I imagining things? Is that a fake URL? Please, educate me, oh great one. The *last* thing that I would want is for someone as great and powerful and all-knowing such as yourself to laugh at me! I kneel before the great, unemployed OSS zealot kids everywhere. Forgiveness, please.
Ass.
Within it's design limits, DOS wasn't that bad... I still have a copy of DOS3.1 here. There's a few other OS's I'm going to miss, too, such as the CP/M for the Kaypro II and Atari's ROM BASIC. Why will I miss them? Because I had to wait until Linux came out to make my computing experience interesting and enjoyable again (meaning: hackable, customizable, and educational.)
With all that in mind, how about doing a "reverse-interview" with M$: instead of interviewing ppl, we send this entire discussion thread, webpage and all to ppl at M$ in memoriam to DOS as a gesture of last respects for it?
C|N>K
"Oh no... my master drug dealer won't support the stuff anymore, now I better migrate to Linux
to get my daily kick." said Fred, a diehard MS DOS freak. You can see the emptiness in their
eyes... Their illusions are shattered. "This is the end... our civilization is doomed..." said one guy.
"Why do they do this to us???" was the most common remark.
I suspect the reason that manufacturers use dos tools are that they are avoiding any kind of race condition and that there really aren't a lot of things that can go wrong when you run a dos program.
... that Windows XP Pro is going to outlive Windows XP home? Way to go M$! Screw the average consumer out of their hard earned money by forcing them to upgrade more frequently than the corporates. Simply more proof that big business loves big business and cares nothing about the average person.
Un-news
Some of these have been EOL for over a year...and NT is good thru mid-2003....this info seems a bit questionable.
Wohoo still good to go:
Windows Millennium Edition December 31, 2003 December 31, 2004 December 31, 2005
Windows 2000 Professional March 31, 2005 March 31, 2007 March 31, 2008
If any of you wonder why I still run Me, its mainly for more hardware support, and the speed of 98SE for playing games. Call me crazy but I like the thumbnail and open with features of Windows Me... Me is just one of those OS's you have to whip into shape... And by whip I mean change just about every setting.
> zealots like to pretend doesn't exist so that they can say "there's no command prompt support, and no way to do scripting in W2K!",
There may well be a comand line prompt and a scripting facility but you have completely missed the point:
If the required utility does not accept command line parameters and only takes input from menus and dialog boxes then there is 'no command line support' for _that_utility_.
For example in Win98 there is no mechanism for using the NET, or any other utility, that will create a share. It can only be done using menu and dialog box. If the requirement is to create a share then regardless of what command line prompt is available, regardless of what scripting is available, THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE SUPPORT.
MS-DOS was born in August 1980, in Tukwila, Washington, the creation of Tim Paterson and the Seattle Computer Company. Initially called QDOS 0.10 (short for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"), MS-DOS was a lifelong resident of the Seattle area. In late 1980, nonexclusive rights for 86-DOS 0.3, as the operating system was then known, were sold to Microsoft. In July 1981, as Paterson recounted in a June 1983 BYTE article entitled "A Short History of MS-DOS," Microsoft bought all rights to the DOS from Seattle Computer and changed the name of the operating system to "MS-DOS."y t20011028s0 001/1029_editor.html
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1437/b
ACK NAK RST
Nobody remembers, but hjkl were the arrow keys on an ADM-3A terminal. So VI was written using the arrow keys for one of the glass tty's available at the time.
It was developed 100% in house, and was intended to be the premier application for the Apple Macintosh.
Me think that someone should advise all those motherboard makers that DOS is dead.
They will have to work overtime to come up with new BIOS flasher versions.
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
But it wasn't done by the O/S, it was done by the linker that was shipped with the O/S. You could group modules together and the linker would link in a swapper that would swap them in and out into memory on demand.
I've always said it. M$ are murderers.
:-).
No software from the FSF is ever murdered. (GNUstep, HURD). Some are even kept vividly alive by means of iron lungs (emacs
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
You can not possibly be talking about MS-DOS, the subject of this discussion. Perhaps you are talking about some other DOS.
C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
One could compute what was the difference between Windows 3.01 and Windows 3.0 by subtracting 3.01-3.0 on the calculator from Windows3.1.
The result shown was 0 instead of 0.01!
If you still have the old Win3.1 around, you can check it for yourself. I had a very good laugh back then.
And it wasn't part of the OS, it was a tack on. I wrote the beginings of a multi-user BBS in DOS, but that didn't make MSDOS a multi-user OS. Oh the joy when I installed Coherent! (Linux wasn't an option back then, I switched when networking was stablized.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just because you sometimes use a command prompt doesn't mean you use DOS.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Just the other day I had a computer where windows was being a bitch.. (big surprise!) Boot disk then:
c:
deltree c:\windows
deltree c:\progra~1
del *.*
cd win98
setup
And hey, it worked.. Also good for when windows dies and you need an emergency backup before format..
xcopy c:\mydocu~1 d:\ etc etc etc..
First off, I never commented on Win 98. Win 98 is a piece of shit. I'm commenting on W2K, MS's best OS currently, and the only one that I'm using right now, which does have a good bit of scripting support, including the ability to create shares via the command prompt.
Secondly, MS has nothing to do with command prompt interfaces of third party utlities. I have several utilities that I wrote for myself, and they all have command line interfaces so that I can fire them with an AT job. Work just fine. If the utility has no command line interface, then that's the fault of the utility. That's like me saying that Mozilla is a buggy, slow, pile of crap, so Linux is too. Makes no sense.
M$ has been trying to pretend DOS was dead since W95a. It still lives on at the core of all the current crappy products. And none of them will ever be as good as a UNIX, M$ should get the M$@!$#! over it.
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows.
/cygdrive/c, not C:) but it comes with tools to help bridge the gap (path conversioon tools, etc.).
Umm, the command prompt? Though the shell is actually quite different under the hood, it does run the same scripting language, the batch shells we all know and loathe.
Cygwin is a port of essentially the entire GNU toolchain to Win32. To get the stuff to run (essentially unchanged source) they have a DLL that emulates much of the underneath stuff of UNIX. You can install ash (Bourne shell compatible), bash, zsh and tcsh from the base setup, you can install pdksh if you want korn shell. ksh93 isn't a part of the standard install (it has so many pieces, many of which that replace cygwin stuff, they don't want to bother) but I hear you can compile it and run it. It's a very UNIX-y style shell (C: is mounted as
The MKS toolkit is a UNIX-y set of tools for Windows. It has a Korn shell, and the shell interface is more Windows-like.
As far as real time stuff, remember that to Microsoft, EOL means no more sales, no more support. Anything pre-existing isn't going to explode and die, taking out your hard drive. If you think you need DOS, go get it now. Or try to look at any of the Free DOS alternatives, or DR DOS.
The Windows scripting host is more of the home for VBScript automation of the Explorer environment and apps, it can't really be used as a command line shell, i think he was looking for something more like that.
WSH is good for spreading viruses tho, and most anti-virus companies say to disable it unless you find you really need it
Would DOSEMU run all those old great tiny .asm demo's? They're unportable and converting them to 10MB .divx'es would just remove the magic.. :/
(Looking at that Microsoft page, their definition of a 'Millennium Edition' is less than 4 years. Now that's devaluating IT)
DOS will never die, as long as there are so many classic old games for it. Just like Apple ][ and C64 won't die for a few decades. I KNOW I'll be trying to run lode runner or Wizardry or Ultima in 2030...
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I'm talking about those little DOS proggies that vendors still put out on their support sites along with instructions on how to build a MS-DOS boot floppy for upgrading buggy ROMs and such.
.iso packages instead the requiring MS-DOS "ownership" or fiddling with arcane building instructions. For FIES (Free In Every Sense) and without branding restrictions too.
With MS-DOS' official funeral finally looming close, wouldn't it make a lot of sense for the hardware vendors to port their utilities to Linux? I mean, Linux offers free floppy-sized bootability, good choice of development tools (incl. compact crossplatform GUIs) and the potential for using one kit for maintaining hardware on platforms other than x86 PCs (Macs, PDAs...).
The *freedom* of Linux would also allow vendors to offer pre-built floppy or CD-ROM
Are there any reasons why Linux shouldn't succeed MS-DOS as the universal boot-time tools platform? Or will FreeDOS now rise to unprecedented dominance? And what does Microsoft have in store to maintain their monopoly of this small but quite important (it's about controlling booting after all!) niche?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
That doesn't sound spectacular today but back then having a 286 with some software and a BASIC comiler was pretty serious stuff... or so I'm told.
Now you can get a 286 running with FreeDOS and do the same. A real single-user machine for nothing (at the current prices of 286's, I think I'm on solid ground when I say nothing).
The Disk Operating System will stay alive in libraries and garages for years... despite MS-DOS's demise. (MS was only one DOS brand).
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Does this mean that most of the computers at my work are suddenly going to die?
If MS-Dos, Win3.1 and Win 95 are dead, there'll only be 2 computers left at work with "living" operating systems.
Yes, we still have a few 486s running DOS or 3.1 doing dumb terminal and data logging stuff. Why upgrade if the tools ya got work fine? (C'mon Billy, answer that one. I dare you.)
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Yes, I agree. I am fondly remembering the days of running that combo (DOS, QEMM, DESQview) and being able to sensibly multitask DOS apps without the crud that was Win 3.x. It was beautiful at the time to be able to run as many apps as you wanted, each with their own environment, with a very low memory overhead. The only downside of DESQview was that it was very choppy, its timeslices were large. But, if you wanted to run a BBS in the background and still use your computer, it really was great. DESQview even had an X Windows server, which was impressive. It didn't use MS Windows at all, it had its own rendering system, along with the multitasking of DESQview.
OS/2 of course was the other option at the time, and it was good as well, but involved a lot more planning and dedication. You really had to "think different" (to steal Apple's line) to get into OS/2. However, it certainly required much more of a system than DOS. I remember trying the OS/2 v2.0 beta on a 386sx with about 4MB of RAM. That was kind of painful.
Is this actually something programmed into the OS that makes it stop functioning? Or is it just Bill saying this so he has to give no reason for refusing to assist people that still USE these oses.
Hell I know people who still use WANG terminals, and WANG DOESNT EXIST. Microsoft exists and they won't support their archaic software..
Even though they haven't updated it for years, they finally wait another 5 to kill them, I think I stopped using all of these operating systems in 1996.
But that doesn't stop me from saying, MICROSOFT IS A BUNCH OF MURDERERS!! Damn you for killing DOS!
RIP DOS, DIE WINNT3.5, DIE WINDOWS95.
[cx]
How can DOS be dead, I'm using Windows 98 right now!
If these products (MS-DOS, Win3.1, Win95, NT3.5) are passed their EOL, then:
1. MS will no longer supply on-line help.
2. They cannot be bought.
#1 means that MS can clean out their web servers, saving tons, since hard drives are so expensive now. Of course with billions of bug reports that may actually be costing MS something. (Now if they could just post a few of the fixes...)
Does #2 means these OSes are in the public domain? Microsoft no longer wants money from them? Isn't the point of copyright that the owner can collect money for the use of the work? Since MS doesn't want money for them, they are free!
Personally, I've already paid for my MS (usually in lost work), and use RH on my other PCs, but we had an article here in the last year about how MS was beating up some charity that was distributing old PCs because they didn't pay licensing fees for DOS. Now they won't need licenses! This is a good thing.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Has Microsoft actually found a way to end all Denial of Service attacks? Cool.
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
The last time I checked, Windows MILLENNIUM edition was first offered at the MILLENNIUM, or 2000! How come it's being lumped in with The older OSes if it's ONLY 2 YEARS OLD??? Class action lawsuit, anyone????
In the tradition of all free software, we will soon see that freeDOS surpasses M$DOS in all ways. Bugs will be fixed, it will take up less space, it will run better. Thanks for the reminder about freeDOS, there's been worlds of improvement since I looked at it a year ago or so.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
DOS dead - the only secure operating system that Microsoft ever wrote - well brought in. Though for those of us privledged to have seen the source - well I shant menion the boot loader by SUN Microsysytems and the blatantly funny comments - something like " well that should be enough but not sure" and the ilk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I guess with the home version of XP they really do mean it this time?
It was more like a long progression of lost functionality and control:
Win3.1 - we give you gui sys32_enhanced and sysedit.
Win95 - we give you better file browser and change a few integer types so that you can see more than 16M of RAM but hide M$ Dos directory.
Win95 revB - we force registry on you, hide what it does.
Win98 - we force IE on you and hide even more. Forget your manual config files, binary non specified or documented registry is now it.
WinME - we not sure, but it looks beter more hidden for no good reason. Your desktop contains your computer, no?
Win2k - we move a few things around to hide more, this is not your big brother's NT. Command prompt moved from prominent position in start menue tree, must run command.com or make shortcut to see it.
WinXP - "Smart Update" is mandatory. We don't care what you see but won't let you anyway. All your base are belong to us. You have no control give up your windoze tax and praise Gates.
I saw voice over IP worked as well as any new DOS implementation run on Windoze 3.1. No new functionality has been added, all control has been removed. IE phone home!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know about 98, but in Win 2K Pro, to create a share from the command line, I can either do it through menus, or type
/remark:"This is a command line-created share." /unlimited
/remark:"My Docs" /unlimited would open up a share on my computer named docs, with unlimited users, default permissions.
NET SHARE sharename=drive:path
to do the same thing. So
NET SHARE docs=c:/docs
Now, mind you, it's an extremely customized version of Slackware 2.1, but . . . (:
MS wanted to include the split command, but were afraid of being accused by the govt. of using their OS monopoly to create a monopoly in split software, or so I've heard.
Vote for Pedro
The company I work for is still selling a product that uses
MS-DOS (version 3.x no less!), desqview, and qemm (among
other things). I think they purchased an unlimited distribution
license for desqview and qemm, I don't know what they did for dos. The product is still being sold. I wonder what legal issues there might be. If they were able to purchase an unlimited distribution license for dos from MS, (and back then MS would probably have done something like that....we are talking
circa 1991 here) I guess things are still status quo.
DOS is still (for some tasks) the perfect OS. I've developed a POS-system for cafes (touch screen, water tight, no harddisk, no fan, networking, standalone operation etc) and it all had to fit in 1.44 Mb (standard size of early flash disks). With bartenders turning it off when done..
For some task like that, DOS was/is the perfect tool. Why should you use an bigger tool then the job requires ??
For what I read as the comments, a lot of things are just incorrect...
And there's tons of more things that can be done in DOS.. You'd really be amazed what you can do with it...(Codepages, ANSIS.SYS, Extreme cool memory stuff, DOSKEY, DEBUG, EDLIN etc)
If one would take the time to look into DOS, if can be a very valueable tool for some problems! Nwer doesn;t make the older things less good for a job. And DOS itself NEVER crashed on me!
All the mainboard and peripheral companies still
require you to boot off a DOS boot disk to run
their BIOS upgraders and firmware installers. Likewise, a number of disk utility and disaster recovery tools use DOS to load their OS independant tools. DOS will still be necessary until these uses get handled by other forms of storage. -Gary
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
with the administration where I work they'll insist on purchasing something, and waiting for someone to mail a physical box to each site.
Then write your own split program, compile it, test it, GPL it, box it, and site-license it to the company, charging for support. That's what I did, using unused computer lab time at my local community college (with permission) to develop Splitoris, a win32 command line file splitting program.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If Microsoft really wants to deny new DOS-licenses, this could be a real problem
No it isn't. IBM publishes proprietary PC DOS 2000, DeviceLogics publishes proprietary DR-DOS, and the free software community publishes free FreeDOS, as numerous other users have mentioned.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft defined Windows 95's "end of life" at October 2002. This is why they added lines of code to Msn Messenger in October to prevent it working when Windows 95 is detected.
Microsoft actively tries to prevent older computers from being used. The simple reason why being that each time someone is forced to buy a new computer, a large bundle of money goes off to Redmond.
There are two ways that a motherboard or adapter maker can design a BIOS that completely avoids fsckups when being flashed:
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nah, it's the current OSes that explode and die, taking out your hard drive...
You can download IBM's PC-DOS 2000 (7.something) for $50 or buy floppies or a CD-ROM for a little under $70. IBM's catalog page is here.
If they're still selling it, I think it's a pretty safe bet that they still support it as well. That, and it has the added advantage of a full honest-to-God license (there's no such thing as a full, retail copy of MS-DOS, no matter what some fraudulent eBay sellers may try to tell you).
And while you're over there, there's also OS/2 Warp 4.
MS-DOS died when I got a SiS 735-based motherboard. SiS writes Linux drivers but no DOS drivers. I'm half tempted to get a new sound board just for the sake of "legacy" support.
please try cygwin. Cygwin isn't the name of the shell, it's the name of the compatibily thingie that lets you use some GNU apps and other Free Unix apps on Windows. It mostly consists of some .dlls that act as a compatiability layer. You have your choice of shells to choose from on a Unix system. The one that's used on almost all Linux systems is bash, which is a feature-enhanced version of the classic Unix shell. That shell was called "The Bourne Shell" and was named "sh" (or should it be the other way round?). Therefore, it's only natural that the name bash stands for "The Bourne Again Shell".
The catch: In my experience, Cygwin runs much better on NT-based Windozes (NT 4.0, 2000, XP) than on DOS based Windozes (95, 98, Me). But, if you've got lots of processor power, Cygwin should still run quite nicely, even on crufty Win9x. The other catch: all of this sort of assumes that you're already somewhat familiar with the Unix Way. If you're not, it could be quite frustrating. But there are many, many help texts and HOWTos available (Google for HOWTO) and if you're adventurous and you want to know what a command line should be like, then it's out there waiting for you.
Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Another alternative is 4Dos or 4NT. It's available from these people. It's pretty good, except that's it's shareware and therefore commercial and I've had problems with certain versions crashing frequently. Also, there's a couple points where they could've gone for compatibility with Unix but chose to ignore it. (E.g. to not match the characters a,b, or c in a filename, they use [!abc] whereas the proper Unix Way is [^abc].)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Dude, you need to fix your website. There is category for "Anal", and there is
.. or does it have a specific meaning?
another category named "SAnal".
I think the 'S' in "SAnal" is a typo
-banuaba
I don't get it, the "end of life" dates :
Windows 2000 Professional : March 31, 2008
Windows XP Home Edition : December 31, 2007
That's about how long I'll be using Win2k too.
I'm a 2000 man.
So which way was it done? It's been so long since I used DOS, and I don't think I ever piped more than a few hundred bytes of data, ever...
How do you upgrade your BIOS ??
Ever thought about it ? I hit the problem about 14 months ago when I bought a bigger disk and my computer wouldn't recognise it. Asus web site offered me to download flash.exe and a data file. After scratching my head a little bit I downloaded freedos from their website, dd'ed it to a diskette, added the files from Asus, rebooted, flashed the new BIOS, and voila !!
There is an assumption out there that everybody does have a copy of DOS somewhere. And to be honest, I prefer this assumption, than hardware manufacturers starting to distribute MS-Windows utilities... you won't install MS-Windows on one diskette !!!
Yves.
Oh good. Finally Microsoft's best OS ever is dying. They will surely go bankrupt soon and Linux will run the world. BWAHAHA!
It started already dead:
:)
Dead Operating System.
It zombied along for a long time though, eating up brains^H^H^H^H^Hhigh mem you needed to run games
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Actually, I managed to get DOS to multitask using Desqview-386 on an old 386sx-16. I managed to run a networked (Fido) BBS (bullitin-board-system) in the background and keep my machine too. It wasn't nearly as powerful as Linux of course, which I downloaded from a BBS at version 0.95 and installed on aforementioned 386-16 :-), but it did its job and did it OK as long as you were careful to use programs that were multi-tasking friendly under DV-386. (Windows 3.x's multitasking by comparison was next to worthless.)
Acctually, in XP you have DOSx2. There's cmd.exe and command.com which of cause behave differently(and some third bastard that seems to run when I execute a .bat-file off of our Netware network).
Not less... More!
We're a K12 school with about 350 network PC's and half of them still run Win95 (and I wish there were more).
Win95b is _lots_ faster than Win98 due to no-IE-bloa^H^H^Hintergration and since we have to Deep Freeze our hard driver there's no easy way of installing this weeks security patches for IE.
I run Opera entirely from the server so there I've only got a ten minute job upgrading/fixing.
"End of Life" (as defined by Microsoft) on December 31, 2002.
Nah, right day but wrong year. 2099's the end of DOS - well, according to it's 'DATE' command.
Funny how something's suddenly 'dead' just because it got a bit old. I bet you guys won't be so quick to pronounce 'Unix is dead' when it's crystal starts flashing... [Note for the slow: think 'Logan's Run']
Today's new word: Obiturize. (Vb) To write an obituary with the intent of killing the subject.
Or you're a unix bigot with no imagination.
Technology marches on, progress happens. Don't let your fondness for yesterday's tools hold you back.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
...to force Windows XP Embeded on to manufacturers.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
One server and 10 clients at my old Burger King, Cash registers, expediter screens, and cook screens all were networked to the server. Pretty good system, if you ask me.
At the bottom of the jokes page that the poster, Biedermann, links to in his post, we see the following footnote:
o mmandments"
"To link directly to this page, please use http://www.jestsandjokes.com/show.php3?name=dos.c
Slashdotting's kinda as big a direct linking you can get...
- Some PC users whined endlessly about how DOS was useless unless you learned all those crypic commands. Yeah, there were about 10 commands you had to learn, and they were *so* difficult. For example to copy a file, the command was: "COPY" who could ever figure something so difficult!
- It was a cinch to *completely* delete, remove, or backup an application. For example, to completely move dBase from one PC to another, you could just laplink. In most cases, everything would immidiately work on the target PC. In fact, you could move the entire contents of your HDD this way.
- In most cases you could swap a HDD from one system to another and the target system would work with a hitch.
- Many applications would fit on a floppy, even a 360K floppy.
- There was only one place for an application to autostart: the autoexec.bat. Hence, no flood of background applications, starting from who-knows-where.
- Configuation files were few, small, text, and comprehensible.
IMO: it is a shame that nobody developed a good 32-bit DOS with a good TCP/IP stack; before windows became popular.
For instance, my system has a 250MB partition right at the start of the drive which holds FreeDOS and its suite of utility programs. Also on this partition is the GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) which boots my system. So all of my GRUB files are easily modified by booting FreeDOS and editing the menu.lst etc. I have also flashed my system's BIOS using FreeDOS as the host OS. My system hosts 3 os's: Debian 3.0, Windows 2000, and FreeDOS BETA 8. Pretty neato that a 250MB partition is way bigger than what FreeDOS needs. It could easily live in a 120MB partition with plenty of extra space (that with a full install of everything).
...almost every DOS power user that I knew used a third-party shell like the previously mentioned 4DOS or some combo shell/filemanager like Norton Commander, and almost everyone used third-party utilities to augment DOS's relatively spartan command set.
Besides, there were a number of front-ends which augmented the capabilities of basic DOS. Don't forget about things like PC/GEOS (the preemptive multitasking GUI that was used by Geoworks Ensemble), or GEM, or DesqView. Some of those front-ends were relatively powerful environments in their own right.
Also worth mentioning are TSRs -- the pile of little Terminate and Stay Resident programs and utilities that damn near every power DOS user had in spades. Each of these would hook up to one or more hot keys, and one could pop them up whenever one wanted and flip back and forth. Remember Sidekick, anyone? Or PC Magazine's Snipper?
One of my favorites was a little shareware comm program called Invisible Link. It was a nice ANSI-capable VT100 emulator with a phone book and Xmodem, and it would let you dial a BBS or even transfer files at 9600bps in the background while doing something important (like playing in WordPerfect) in the foreground. So DOS *could* multitask -- you just had to know which tools to use...
I agree that basic DOS was just that -- basic. But most DOS users didn't stay with that, not if they wanted to use DOS for anything other than a simple program launcher...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
"NT, was, MS's real "successor" to OS/2."
An ironic comment indeed, given that NT was a subset to its OS/2 comtemporary in almost all respects...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Know what you are talking about before you start talking nonsense.
And this whole thread comparing DOS to current OSes is complete silliness. I read that someone was complaining about DOS not having multithreading. WELL FOR HEAVENS SAKE, NOT MANY CLI's DID. UNIX is the only thing that comes to mind from that time period and baby, old school UNIX wasn't nearly as easy as it is today. You LINUX users think you know everything don't you?
Lemme hook you up with HP-UX 1.24 (1981) and see how KEWL you are with that.
So, Lotus finally won't run, eh?
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
command.com = sh
4DOS/4NT = zsh
Big difference folks. All operating systems can have more than one commandline interpreter. Just go to JPSoft.com. I do most of my tasks by scripting. I even launch mp3s and such at the command line. It's not hard.
Tab filename completion, aliases, etc.. Hell I like it better than zsh.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
M$ *had* planned to remove DOS and the CLI entirely from Win2K, but there was such an outcry from sysadmin types that they changed their minds.
XP's notion of console mode (recovery CLI) is so crippled as to be of no real use. You're better off to boot to a real DOS diskette.
There are still a lot of things that are just easier to do from DOS. Why the hell would I want to install Windows so I can repartition the system with Partition Magic? Just boot to a DOS floppy, run the DOS versions of PMagic, Ghost, etc. from another floppy -- way faster and easier, with less room for mistakes.
And it's often easier in DOS to fix what went wrong in Windows. Frex, the other day a client accidentally deleted the Windows registry, leading to a predictable "Windows won't start!" So I just had her boot to DOS and copy an archived registry file back where it belonged, and Windows was instantly fixed. Without DOS, her only hope was a complete reinstall of Windows. Why go to all that needless extra trouble??
I will give up DOS when they pry my cold dead computer from around it!!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Car manufacturers do not require you to agree to licensing terms that order you to buy a new car when your car's life cycle has been declared "over".
Why bother.
How many of the new computerpeople (from the IT Boom 1998-2000) actually know anything about Dos or NT 3.51? Like undocumented features such as "Truename" or what the /nomoveexbda switch does. (or even Novell or PC dos!)
I really loved NT 3.51; no ACL's on remote registry, i.e. HKLM\Softw.\MS\Winnt\CCS\Winlogon\Shell = Printman ("Who's box do you want to screw up today"?), sending of files via net send, lousy network security that allowed me to do loads of funny things.
I remember getting my 1st DOS system: a Zenith Z100 with Zdos 1.12. No subdirectories :-) Not PC compatible, but it ran MS-Fortran, Multiplan, MS-Pascal, TurboPascal, Lotus 123 (Z100 version). And even MS-Windows 1.0.
.93 did. I still have DOSemu if I feel I want to go back. I prefer unix :-)
I later got a Z-248 80286 machine. I learned batch programming, 4dos, lots of shareware, aseasyas, PC-Write, vi (elvis, stevie), emacs (freemacs, microemacs), awk, lex, C (turbo C), LaTeX, gnuplot.
I used gnuplot, awk, batch, and C to help lab users graph biotech data on an AT system. It was very useful.
Oh, I also got minix running but the awk, vi, emacs, lex, were not enough to deter me from DOS.
Later, I got a 486 and OS/2. Most of the GNU tools were ported. I finally realized I was trying to run unix, why not get unix?
386BSD didn't boot, but linux
Why not GIVE AWAY copies of the older software, and let folks support them....
XP is SUPPOSED TO BE an "Entirely new OS from the ground up"...supposedly, anyway...
so they wouldn't really be giving up secrets if they gave it and maybe a little source code away....
But I know that's gonna happen when Britney Spears stars in a porno with Dom DeLuise.
Don't you get a DOS shell? At least in Win2K you get a command line where you can do stuff like ipconfig /release or xcopy, I'm assuming WinXP does the same.
So instead of real DOS it may be something that is just a DOS-emulator, but as long as you can get to something that looks and feels like a DOS command line, and does most or all of what DOS does, is DOS really dead? Granted, the machine is not actually running the "Disk Operating System," but it is running something that for all intents and purposes does the same thing (except act as the main OS).
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
We used windows to set up a boot partition for our Novell (3.12) server a while ago.
On boot: shows the Starting Windows95 screen, for a second, then replaced by the Novell console startup.
Worried me a little the first time that I saw it, but works well.
Ian.
Not only are they stupid comparisons, but unices also have command line completion; long file names by desgin, not kludge; and color to help add some sense to to the plain ol' letters on the screen.
vi is a drag to learn, but once you've got it down, it becomes second nature, and has now become my perfered Windows text editor (see VIM).
Don't get me wrong... I think if people were forced to learn DOS they'd be a bit more cluefull about how Windows & their file system work (and I wouldn't have to keep adding "doskey /insert" to people's autoexec.bat's), but that certainly doesn't mean DOS is an easier to use OS than anything UNIX-like.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Who does not have a favorite memory of DOS?
Even those, brought up on the somewhat more functionally elegant *nix have used the Disk Operating System. Whether it was the first time you typed dir to the first time you wrote a batch file, everyone has seen DOS.
On December 31, pause for a moment. Microsoft fans and enemies, unite for one second, for DOS is more than just another program...it is our history. C:\> , you will be remembered.
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp
the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at
a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
-- Joseph Brodsky
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