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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 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.
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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.
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!
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.
They didn't subcontract it -- they bought it (it was made when they bought it).
:-)
And they licensed it to IBM something like 12 hours before they actually bought it...
MS actually does a surprisingly small amount of development. You see their names associated with a lot of software products, but frequently they're just the publisher, they purchased the product, or they subcontracted out. Take MS's excellent fonts (ah, Verdana, thou art equalled only by Espy Sans upon my screen). Subcontracted. Their wonderful Close Combat war sim series (those games are *great*...if WINE ever supports them fully, I'm going to go nuts) are only published by MS. Bungie made Halo...but they were a company that did incredible stuff and had tons of work on Halo done when Microsoft purchased them. Hotmail was purchased.
Office and Windows, the two core MS products, were both done in-house, however.
And both are among the flakiest products in their lineup.
Also, in response to the people talking about DOS, DOS is still and has been used for some time for a real-time OS. Linux isn't really that great for doing a real-time stuff (well, vanilla Linux isn't great for real-time period) when you have very tight resources available.
It's also still the only way most people let you flash your BIOS...someone needs to make a mini-OS just for that.
May we never see th
If Microsoft really wants to deny new DOS-licenses, this could be a real problem for a couple of companies.
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
It was bad.. what few interfaces that existed were so slow you generally had to do everything manually
Most of my old dos programming books have instructions on how to read and write the MSdos disk format directly.
If you did anything 32 bit the general idea was to disable MSdos entirely and getting back to 16 bit was *ugly*
When your apps are doing that many things manually it becomes a limmiting factor and we saw this when the disk formats became too big for the orignal structure and they came up with ugly hacks to extend it. It's also a bit twisted when any app can corrupt the filesystem. 1000 places for possible bugs instead of 1 (the OS).
Still.. it had it's fun times and a part of me will miss programming for it.
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
Basically, an operating system is the software responsible for managing memory, cpu, storage, devices and input/output. It is the software that lets you run other software on a computer.
s te m.htm
You are lost if you think DOS was not an operating system.
http://howstuffworks.lycoszone.com/operating-sy
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?
This is all biased opinion but it's MY biased opinion:
/dev/fda or /dev/hda tells me exactly what it is and where it is. a: or c: or q: doesn't tell me shit other then that is what was setup. Only by knowing the established naming convention do I "know" that a: is a floppy. And D:? is it my CD-ROM or my second hard drive or my second partition on my first hard drive. In this *NIX is logical and superior.
/dev/hda I'd say neither got it quite right. "Format" is sure easier to grasp as a newbie but we still got that "what kind of drive is C:?" problem. While the other command defines the file system and the exact type of device being delt with. I'd have to say *NIX is better.
/ I've seen plenty of people get confused over the \ that is used in dos based directories and the / used all over the net. DOS did it wrong.
C:/> or $ Sorry DOS wins here. the C: prompt tells me my location. The $ don't. In both cases, of course, you can modify the prompt to be more informative. But the "default" setting dos wins - though not by much.
dir or ls. No winner here both are not obvious what they do if you are newbie.
format C: or mke2fs
And you didn't mention \ vr
Go ahead. Mod me down. I'm not just a Troll. I am OGRE and you better call me "Sir" when you say that.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
You can use the Windows 2000 CD to boot into the "recovery console" which is a CLI on top of the Win2k kernel. You have to log in as administrator, but then you can start various services, access the drives and use doslike commands and have some extra tools like fixmbr and fixboot. It takes forever to boot it up, though, because it loads all the drivers it thinks anyone might need, like all scsi drivers and such.
It doesn't compare well to Linux or DOS boot disks, but the capability is there. I don't think NT has this, but I bet XP does.
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.
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 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!
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?