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MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the then-it's-the-undead-phase dept.

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."

7 of 543 comments (clear)

  1. MS-DOS is dead... by ymgve · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...but its legacy lives on.

  2. Old products never die by Plug · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:dos and freedows by Etcetera · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    Gee.. maybe if you spelled the URL right!

    It's http://www.freedos.org/, and they appear to be doing just fine.

    --
    Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
  4. Re:Say what you want.... by treat · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you write a program for DOS which needs to read from a disk, get swapped out of memory, read from the kbd or print to the screen, you don't write those services yourself.

    Wrong. DOS does not support virtual memory. The built-in keyboard input and screen output was so poor that it was not used for all but the most trivial programs (and even trivial programs often did not use it). The only point you are right on is that filesystem access is indeed done using the interface DOS gives you.

  5. DR-DOS download site by TeknoHog · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  6. Re:Say what you want.... by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Informative
    Yep, no virtual memory. And remember those tricks to make use of Extended/Expanded memory? Shudder! And the shell game with drivers to maximize the base memory? No multitasking either, unless you count background printing and TSRs. (All those chained keyboard interrupt handlers and the documented undocumented DOSIdle interrupt. Scarey stuff kids!)

    MSDOS, it was fun. Bye-bye! (Come to think of it, I recently used an MSDOS install to bootstrap a Win98 install from a SBPro CDROM. Then I screamed and used that to bootstrap a Linux install. Maybe I'll keep those DOS disks handy just in case. :^)

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  7. Re:Say what you want.... by calidoscope · · Score: 4, Informative
    To set the record straight - they bought it from Seattle Computer Products. Tim Patterson was an employee of SCP when he wrote QDOS and 86-DOS. Tim was then hired by M$ to continue working on DOS (and then went on to start Falcon). The DOS numbering schemes continue from 86-DOS, the last release of 86-DOS was v1.14 (the basis for PC-DOS 1.0) and the first MS-DOS release was v1.25 (PC-DOS 1.1).


    QDOS/86-DOS was designed to make it easy to translate CP/M programs written in asembler and have them run with minor tweaking. This extended to using pretty much the same API for the file control blocks, pretty much the same numbers for the function calls, pretty much the same layout for the first 256 bytes of the transient program area.


    Where 86-DOS differed from CP/M, it tended to be more UNIX like, e.g. copy source destination rather than PIP destination source . More functions were included with the command interperter and the batch files were a bit nicer to use than CP/M's submit files.


    'Course you've got to remember that CP/M was designed to run in 32K of memory.


    The incident with DOS wasn't the only time that SCP got the shaft from M$. SCP was the outfit that designed the Z-80 card for use on the Apple II.

    --
    A Shadeless room is a brighter room.