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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.
:/
:\
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.
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.
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.
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You would be able to easily see Windows for what it is - a toy.
Seriously, my first experience with computers was on some old SGI workstations that a teacher at school let us play with after school. We hacked away, not knowing what in the hell we were doing, but happy to have the opportunity to learn.
Alas, the fun ended when our local warez BBS was discovered and the SPA shut us down... Luckily, we didn't have to spend time in juvenille hall, and the hi-jinks didn't end up on our permanent records!
Stop corporate
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.
Windows NT/2000/XP do not run on top of MS-DOS. Windows 98,95, ME do though.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
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.
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.
One time when my good computer died I went back to DOS. Using TSR programs I was able to play games (duke 3d and arena, niether of which I can get to run now) and listen to CD's at the same time. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Now in Windows there is no way to listen to music and play games without getting a noCD crack with every version of a game to be released. Of course with XP (and maybe 2k) you can rip your CD's and listen while you play, but until then my DOS had win so obsoleeted.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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,
Does this mean we'll get BIOS-update tools for modern operating systems?
MS:DOS:
Celebrating 21 years without a remote root exploit!
Take that OpenBSD! =)
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.
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.
Huh? I'm pretty sure UNIX with bourne shell has been around longer than DOS and (considering it and its direct descendents) are still in wide use I would venture that is also more popular overall. Here's a link to bourne shell's history.. Here's another.
Unless, of course, you were only referring to psuedo-shell-like things that ran on Pee-Cee's.
They bought it lock, stock and barrel from a guy called Tim Patterson. IIRC, it was called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and was a shameless CP/M "tribute". Patterson went to work for MS and is wheeled out on special occasions -- you can spot him shaking hands with Gates on videos of the Win95 launch.
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...
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
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.
Just a little more culture lost it the mists of time.
Well, DOS was hardly an OS in the first place.
Most of the stuff that is part of OSes simply do not exist in DOS: sound drivers, GUI, system services, etc.
Is there really anything DOS could do, except launch programs?
I'd like to see a change in the copyright laws: "five years after any software product that is
no longer sold or supported, whichever comes later, then that product becomes a part of the public domain"
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.
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. They are part of the OS. Granted, DOS is minimal. It's not even a multitasking OS, I think. But still, it did what it was called upon to do, and was stable. It is still around, in various forms, on boot disks and such. Doesn't NetWare run on it or something?
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
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
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
Word and Frontpage were bought. Possibly other parts of Office as well. Plus, various parts of Windows were purchased. I'd say that Word has been totally rewritten, though (it was a text mode app when first written, and even through some early MS releases)
--Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
Comparing a server OS (in 1981) and workstation OS to something written for puny, and comparatively inexpensive desktop machines for consumer use is soentirely bogus that it's a shame that I have to point this out.
That's not valid. And reread it: the word "NEARLY" appears in the original, you've neglected to mention that. It was not an absolute statement for the very purpose of placating the frothing legions of fools. Unix, in the manner which you use it, is not a cohesive operating system, but rather a generic term used to describe operating systems with UNIX (tm) as their base.
Indeed. I have always wondered what would have happened if DR DOS wasn't eradicated by microsoft.
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.
Still running PC-DOS 2000 (I've actually never run MS-DOS, PC-DOS was what came with my PC, and later on PC-DOS had more and better utilities) here, needed for some games like Privateer2 and other VCPI games.
My first PC-DOS version was 2.0. It supported fixed disks (harddisks) and directories. Also it was the first version that supported file handles (stdout, in and err, handle 0, 1 and 2 respectively). Saw another one here claim that DOS didn't support stderr, but that's wrong. Before 2.0 DOS used FCBs (like CP/M) to open files. DOS internals really showed off it's CP/M heritage.
What was good about DOS was that you had 100% hardware control... what was bad about DOS was that you had 100% hardware control. By many definitions, it wasn't even an OS, as it didn't do everything an OS should do. But it was a single-user system from the start, and as such it was good enough, with low overhead -- important in an age where 16K was the entry PC memory size... and 64K was a lot.
That reminds me... 2.0 also was the first version that supported 180K/360K floppies, with the new support for 9 sectors pr track (up from 8).
Lotus 123, MultiMate word proc (actually, and OEM version kalled WriteIT; and integrated package with CalcIT, KeepIT and several other apps), TurboPascal compiler, SideKick "PDA", Norton Utilities... later Norton Commander (still one of the best file managers).
Ah, the memories....
//TheToon
MSDOS was never popular. It was ubiquitous. It was ubiquitous because from the very beginning nearly every consumer and business PC shipped with MSDOS installed. So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time. So ubiquitous that it single-handedly enabled MICROS~1's rise to power despite the terrible quality of the product (not to mention the terrible quality of most MS software from the 80s). So ubiquitous that, if you consider Windows XP to be Microsoft's first non-MSDOS-based consumer OS, it took Microsoft 21 years to ditch it. Competing products never had a chance.
MSDOS was many things, but it was never popular, and it was never good at anything, ever.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
The best part about banging your head against a wall is when you stop.
So is using windows.
The best part about banging your head against a wall is windows?
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
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.
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 i named my dog DOS, would HE be the definition of an operating system as well? What an absurd argument.
Jeremy
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!
DOS can do accounting and customer tracking?
It's amazing. If it's from Microsoft all 3rd party-effort (like accounting or customer tracking applications, or in the case of Windows drivers.) all of the sudden is credited to Microsoft.
Face it: DOS is a very, very primitive OS. Even in 1981 when it was released, it was already outdated. 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.
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
Mad props to all my OSes that didn't make it. Lots o' good kernels were undone on the streets of Compton.
i think the guy who started it graduated from grammar school...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
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
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.
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 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.
It's primitiveness and simplicity is what made DOS popular. Remember that. Your average user didn't want to dick around in a UNIX environment or have to purchase hardware that was ridiculously expensive so they could point n' click there way through a myriad of windows and menus. They memorized a couple key commands and they were set. Thats all that was needed. The average joe didn't need multitasking either. How many people do you see typing in a spreadsheet and browsing the web simultaneously? None. TSR's running in the background were as much multitasking as the user wanted to deal with (despite the fact that it wasn't even multitasking). They want to type in a command and get something. Its like a question and answer kind of thing.
This is why DOS was popular: It followed the KISS philosophy - keep it simple stupid. People like that.
So my home directory can be on a completely different drive than yours, but they will both be accessible from /home/
In defense of Windows 2000 (I can't believe I am typing this...) you can mount partitions as folders as well.
MORTAR COMBAT!
No, the original poster is correct.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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
I believe the world would have been worse off, not better, if a more sophisticated OS had been used on early PC's. Of course, it did outlive it's usefullness. By 1985, much superior alternatives were available that were practical even for the consumer and small business class of machines. Maybe the world would have been better off switching to a more sophisticated OS then. But by that time, it had a significant installed base. He seems knowlegeable enough. He quite likely is aware of that. But as a die-hard Microsoft basher, you apparently would rather assume otherwise. I personally loathe Microsoft. But this kind of gratituitous bashing of anyone who grants MS any credit at all, only gives the MS apologists more ammo to use against the rest of us.
"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.
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
Some of these have been EOL for over a year...and NT is good thru mid-2003....this info seems a bit questionable.
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
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.
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.
Unix doesn't exactly win any prizes here either in many cases. All
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
One of the biggest things I miss from DOS is the ability to do something like this:
copy *.cpp *.bak
You can do the same thing in Unix by various methods, but it's not nearly so easy or intuitive.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
DOS just launched that application and does no work at all. In fact because DOS doesn't even know multitasking, it isn't even active when some other app runs.
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.
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.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
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
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is OS/400 in the NT kernel.
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is VAX VMS in the . . . . oh wait.
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)
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?
Having the keyboard processor reboot the 286 into 16 bit protected mode (it didn't really do 32 bit) was just a messy slow kludge. I could be wrong about the details. I skipped directly from the NEC V20 to the 386. It was a while ago.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
They also spent at least a million$ to "buy" Anders Hejlsberg to develop C# and .NET stuff from Borland, plus whatever they settled with Borland.
You can do these things with a magical ingreediant, cash, lots of cash.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd like to think that any remaining 286 boxes have been shoveled (it's a Sabbat thing). However, I've seen requests here for 286 Unixish OSs in the last few weeks. Lordy, 486s were dumpster fodder years ago. *sigh*
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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 . . . (:
>> So ubiquitous that developers would choose to patch or work around MSDOS altogether rather than consider using any of the much better alternatives available at the time
What were those alternatives? Any that would work on an 8086 with 512k of memory and no hard drive? And support the commercial programs that people actually wanted to run?
The fact that DOS isn't much of an operating system is irrelevant. It was integral to the development of a consumer market for computers. Without a tiny, cheap OS that ran on cheap hardware, most of us would still be saving up to buy a Unix workstation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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!
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?
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?
- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.
Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001
Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.
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.
> Ok, a definition for you:
>OS: Operating System
>DOSDisk Operating System
MS-DOS was called QDOS before it was bought by MS, which stood for Quick and Dirty OS.
Dirty is a more apt description, as OSes are primarily dealing with interfaces to the CPU, and MS-DOS had no virtual memory requiring page fault management etc, so using "Disk" to describe the "D" in the acronym is pretty stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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...
NTFS does this. Assigning a drive letter is optional to new volumes; you can just set a mount point inside any folder if you want.
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.
Comparing a server OS (in 1981) and workstation OS to something written for puny, and comparatively inexpensive desktop machines for consumer use is soentirely bogus that it's a shame that I have to point this out.
Ok, well MS-DOS sucked ass compared to OS-9 Level 3 for the Tandy Color Computer 3. It was a Multi-User, Multi-Tasking Realtime OS.
Heck even compared to OS-9 Level 1 on a CoCo 1 it still could not hold a candle. The CoCo 1 was released in 1981 also (I think).
--fatboy
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.)
Software written for when you couldn't count on arrow keys or color displays is still useful for those desparate situations where you need to get in and get SOMETHING to work. I don't even know how you'd try to get into a flaky windows box...
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
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?
I know a guy who worked for Sun at the time, who back in 1994 told me that DOS was no good because it didn't support subdirectories. Like, when did you last even LOOK at DOS, dude? 1986??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Forgot to mention in my other reply -- 32bit DOS versions have been around since at least 1989. I've got a 10-user copy of Concurrent DOS 386 (1989) in a box on the shelf -- a 32bit, multitasking, networking DOS. So it's not like it can't be done.
DRDOS's EMM386 has 32bit DPMI support, too. I use it for playing DOOM with one of the DJGPP-built source mods. (By actual test, apps run 10% faster than when using CWSDPMI for DPMI support, and it doesn't leak as much as CWSDPMI either.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, DOS *does* support / but it was made nonfunctional in DOS commands to avoid confustulation with / as used to indicate a switch.
However, for apps that know this, like PKZIP, you can still use / in paths instead of \
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Dos 5 and below used the C> prompt(no directory). Afterwards they changed to C:\>.
To be fair, it's a command-line. It's pretty hard to make a command-line user freindly, just as it's hard to muck it up too badly.
It's been a long time.
I think a generic ATAPI CD-ROM driver should work for any modern CD-ROM drive, and possibly DVD-ROM drive.
It's been a long time.
Actually, DOS supported subdirectories in 1986 too. I think it was at 3.0 at that time, and IIRC, subdirectoies were introduced in 2.0.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Basically, an operating system is the software responsible for managing memory, cpu, storage, devices and input/output.
Exactly. Technically, DOS was an OS, but was it much of an OS?
It didn't do a whole lot of memory management, I'd say it provided hooks that helped programmers to manage the memory of their own apps. And within 640k at that. Extended Memory Management was an add on. Choose a manager from MS, Quarterdeck, Watcom (Pharlap?), etc.
Managed CPU? As in...? CPU time used for different processes? Oops, sorry, DOS was not a multitasking OS, so one process at a time please. There were task switchers like Deskview (?) if I remember correctly. But yet another add-on.
Managed storage (as in a filesystem)? Sure, it had filesystem support. But again, it was bare-bones.
Managed devices? I think the BIOS did most of that in those days. : ( DOS PNP was crap too.
I/O? Yeah, it buffered some stuff and provided some software IRQ's...
DOS was an OS, but the D was the biggest part of the whole OS. It was pretty much a free-for-all, not a whole lot of management going on anywhere.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
C:\MYDOCUME.NTS\BIRTHDAY.PTY\SHOPPING.LST
Then Windows 95 gave us...
C:\MYDOCU~1\BIRTHD~1\SHOPPI~2.txt
Ever tried to script for Win9x?
I've had scripts that worked lovely for the first few hundred machines and then stumble on one critical machine because the files that should have been under C:\PROGRA~1\MSOFFI~1\ were actually under C:\PROGRA~1\MSOFFI~2\ because there was already a directory that started with MSOFFI before Office was installed.
I can't remember why, but for some reason I could not use quotes to put the full name. So I had to put an "if exist word.exe" to find which bloody directory is the correct one. I think it was because Office 97 preferences automatically (and demanded) the shorter form.
Regardless, it was a joke, the typical kind of crap that makes MS admins stumble every now and then over stuff they should not have too.
Windows 9x should NEVER have existed. Win95 should never have been released. MS should have stuck with 3.11 and then killed it and DOS when they released NT 4.0.
I can't believe we were laboured with 95, 98, 98SE and for the love of God ME. Talk about 90% marketing 1% extra features and an 9% extra bugs each time. 95 was crap, 95b was better, 98 was crap, SE an incredible hide and ME astonishingly shite.
NT was half decent. Comparatively speaking. But then, comparatively speaking, what tastes worse? Dog shit or cat shit?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
lots of cool stuff :)
You REEEEALLY need to get out more.
They usually only call every year or two when some hardware goes bad.
That's the great thing with DOS. Having really only one program running, means that it can be as stable as it can be, since you're most likely doing your own memory management and dealing only with it.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
$P$G was set up to be the standard shell in 6+. Trust me, I have way too much experience in DOS for my own good. DOS 5 had C> (or, more importantly, A> on a bootdisk without any autoexec.bat or config.sys), and DOS 6 had C:\(and again, a:\ on a bootdisk with no init files). DOS 7 and 8(9x and ME) are this way be default as well.
It's been a long time.
Not to mention that none of it is intuitive until you've been trained.
If you have been taught the ls brings you a list of a directory, or what ever, then ls would be intuitive and dir would not.
so his point is even lamer then you thought.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually C:> and $ is wrong.
How do you know what drive you are on? sure, as someone in the know, you know that C is your master HD, but to computer illiterate, they don't know. Hell, they don't even understand why there is no B:>.
and once you get past C, what then? where are you if it says e:>?
both need more info, fortunately both can be changed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ls is easier to type than dir because it has fewer letters AND each letter is typed with a different hand.
cpeterso
I even remember a DOS tool that implemented long file names! One of the good things about DOS's many shortcomings, is the variety of tools to eliminate them.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Being somewhat more specific than I was [g]. Wonder which file it's in, would be interesting to read any surrounding comments. (Yes, M$DOS6 source *is* Out There. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't recall when subdirs arrived myself, since the first that I used were PCDOS3.1 and M$DOS3.2, and both did subdirs just fine. I'd bet this guy looked at DOS v1.0 and turned up his nose at it ever after. Some people don't believe upgrades ever happen except to *their* platform of choice. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Nope. The order was:
Windows 1.x
Windows 2.x
OS/2 1.x
Windows 3.x
OS/2 2.x
OS/2 3.x (became Windows NT)
The IBM/Microsoft joint development started after Windows 1 had shipped and ended after OS/2 2.x and 3.x were in development but before they shipped.
(I worked at both IBM and Microsoft during that time)
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.0 - purchased
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1.1 - developed in house on 1.0 codebase
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 2.x-7.x - developed in house (except for 4.0 developed by IBM and 4.01 developed by MS when 4.0 didn't pass MS testing)
Disk compression - developed in house using well known algorithms (that were also used by everyone else in the industry)
Word - developed in house
Access - developed in house as a simple version of a scrapped DB project
Powerpoint - MS purchased entire company (1.0 purchased, later versions in house)
Windows - developed in house
Game software - mostly developed externally with MS as publisher (typical in game industry)
FrontPage - developed in house after purchase of original company that did "Blackbird" which was totally different
C# - developed in house but they did hire the architect. (What do you think, they breed them internally?)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Windows 9x should NEVER have existed. Win95 should never have been released. MS should have stuck with 3.11 and then killed it and DOS when they released NT 4.0.
:)
Windows 9x was important to Microsoft's wallet and its conquest of the operating system market. If they had waited until NT was up to speed, OS/2 would probably have dominated. Hence "coulda, shoulda, woulda" doesn't mean much to the company that made the software you loathe so much.
If you'd prefer, the whole of Slashdot could go into a "Bill Gates / Steve Jobs should never have been born" rant, but that doesn't do us much good either, does it?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh