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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.
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.
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! =)
If Microsoft really wants to deny new DOS-licenses, this could be a real problem for a couple of companies.
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
"What's surprising is that DOS *hasn't* been replaced by something better and more similar to the shells available under Unix."
You mean like 4Dos or the version of bash they ported to win32?
Just because you can't get them from MS doesn't mena you can't get them.
Ok, a definition for you:
OS: Operating System
DOSDisk Operating System
Now, to tear you apart like a hungry lion on a small lamb...
DOS wasn't that bad of an OS. That's no bullshit.
Well, DOS was hardly an OS in the first place.
See above definition
Most of the stuff that is part of OSes simply do not exist in DOS: sound drivers, GUI, system services, etc.
I hate to destroy your perception of things, but... System Services = Bloat
Sound Drivers = Multimedia Support (Which was actually available in MS-DOS)
GUI=Graphical User Interface... (known as a UI not an OS, the UI is a *part of an OS, but it has nothing to do with it either being or not being an OS)
Is there really anything DOS could do, except launch programs?
Actually yes, many things... I know of companies that still use DOS for many things to this day for accounting, customer tracking, or other important tasks.
Now, other than that... I will admit that programming programs to use only 64k of memory was indeed a challenge, but hey it's the challenge that what makes things worth doing.
Now which is more intuitive /dev/fda /dev/hda /dev/hda
/dev/hd*
On the other hand, how big of a pain in the ass is it to be limited to having each physical drive mapped to a different drive letter? In unix, any number of physical drives can be mounted in the same directory structure. So my home directory can be on a completely different drive than yours, but they will both be accessible from /home/.
As for your prompt, it can be anything you want it to be. Also, dir vs. ls is as simple as alias dir="ls -al" (this is what I use on our solaris box at work). Linux even has a dir command out of the box, so to speak.
a: or
c: or
c:> or $
dir or ls
format c: or mke2fs
Those are all pretty stupid comparisons. Obviously any partitions would be mounted somewhere meaningful and not used from
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.