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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.
DOS is still in Netware. Perhaps we should add Netware to the list too...
Someone you trust is one of us.
...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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
MS:DOS:
Celebrating 21 years without a remote root exploit!
Take that OpenBSD! =)
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.