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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."
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The DOS command line sucks. It has a handful of useful features (pipes, output redirection, etc.), but does them poorly, since it lacks multi-tasking. Furthermore, batch files suck. Quoting sucks, no command line history, horrible inconsistency on intrinsic commands versus separate executables, and so forth.
./configure scripts and even a package management system -- can be done using shell scripts.
Guess what? The DOS command line is a stripped down, sodomized version of most *nix shells. If you liked DOS, install your favorite UNIX variant, and try out bash. (Feel free to use ksh or csh to your liking.) You get pipes that work in parallel, input and output redirection (plus separating stdout and stderr), wildcard expansion, tab completion, and a consistent quoting syntax. Also, very complicated pieces of software -- including
DOS is well and good, but it's a poor substitute for a Real Command Line (TM).
"What's surprising is that DOS *hasn't* been replaced by something better and more similar to the shells available under Unix."
You mean like 4Dos or the version of bash they ported to win32?
Just because you can't get them from MS doesn't mena you can't get them.
Ok, a definition for you:
OS: Operating System
DOSDisk Operating System
Now, to tear you apart like a hungry lion on a small lamb...
DOS wasn't that bad of an OS. That's no bullshit.
Well, DOS was hardly an OS in the first place.
See above definition
Most of the stuff that is part of OSes simply do not exist in DOS: sound drivers, GUI, system services, etc.
I hate to destroy your perception of things, but... System Services = Bloat
Sound Drivers = Multimedia Support (Which was actually available in MS-DOS)
GUI=Graphical User Interface... (known as a UI not an OS, the UI is a *part of an OS, but it has nothing to do with it either being or not being an OS)
Is there really anything DOS could do, except launch programs?
Actually yes, many things... I know of companies that still use DOS for many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other important tasks.
Now, other than that... I will admit that programming programs to use only 64k of memory was indeed a challenge, but hey it's the challenge that what makes things worth doing.
Now which is more intuitive /dev/fda /dev/hda /dev/hda
/dev/hd*
On the other hand, how big of a pain in the ass is it to be limited to having each physical drive mapped to a different drive letter? In unix, any number of physical drives can be mounted in the same directory structure. So my home directory can be on a completely different drive than yours, but they will both be accessible from /home/.
As for your prompt, it can be anything you want it to be. Also, dir vs. ls is as simple as alias dir="ls -al" (this is what I use on our solaris box at work). Linux even has a dir command out of the box, so to speak.
a: or
c: or
c:> or $
dir or ls
format c: or mke2fs
Those are all pretty stupid comparisons. Obviously any partitions would be mounted somewhere meaningful and not used from
Since you could never get it to network to anything
Hey, just yesterday I used an old DOS Netboot disk to copy some files over to a machine I was setting up.
Microsoft can obsolete DOS, but as of yet they haven't introduced a replacement that can get a machine on the network with a single floppy disk. I doubt they'll ever get a version of NT working from read-only media.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So I'm gonna have to wait 3 years before someone can get the performance they had back in 1984?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
every system call was documented,
Someone should have told that to Andrew Schulman and his co-authors, and they wouldn't have wasted time writing Undocumented DOS (Addison-Wesley, 1990).
Face it: DOS is a very, very primitive OS. Even in 1981 when it was released, it was already outdated.
Do you judge Windows 2000 / XP today by how outdated Windows 1.0 was when it was released? After all, it didn't even have overlapping Windows! That's just holding a grudge, wouldn't you say?
A decade later, when it was still shipped on most PCs, it was even more outdated. multi-user, multitasking... As a die-hard Microsoft user you probably don't know, but those existed long before Windows - and also before DOS.
It would really depend on how you define "primitive", and how necessary those (often bloated) "advanced" features are. If the user doesn't really need more than what DOS offers, no multi-tasking, no bells and whistles, runs a large collection of existing software, then does it really matter how old it is? A battery-powered, 5 speed Model Uber-2000 screwdriver would still be passed over today by most people for a simple philips that fits neatly in a small toolbox.
DOS still has its fans today. See the FreeDOS project. If such a project can improve DOS (I've been under the understanding that it stands for Direct Operating System) to a 32-bit operating system that does many of the things that modern operating systems do today while still maintaining the simple and efficient elements of older DOSes, why should it ever "die"?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh