Slashdot Mirror
Dr. DOS Still 'Doing It' At 8.0
An anonymous reader writes "Believe it or not, DOS -- DR-DOS, no less -- is still alive and kicking after all these years! Devicelogics, a company founded by former executives of Caldera and Lineo in Utah, says it has begun shipping version 8.0 of DR-DOS today. The company says the most significant enhancement in the latest version of this long-lived (and 'stable') operating system is support for FAT32 large partitions, enabling DR-DOS 'to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms.'"
msdos really didnt multitask at all, unless the application you were running would let you spawn off a shell.
drdos had 2 different multitasking options. i barely remember the differences between them other than one would stop all other apps you had open except for the one you were in currently, and the other would actually give all the apps a slice of cpu time. this is if i am remembering correctly.
this is dos we are talking about so any form of multitasking is going to be a kludge.
No, the 'current' incarnation of CP/M would be CP/M-86, which still has some enthusiasts involved in it's use and continuing development. It has patches that allow it to (wow!) access hard drive partitions larger than 4 MB, which wasn't possible with the Stock CP/M-86 that I have in a boxed set on my shelf.
DR-DOS was a derivative product from Digital Research.
And Digital Research's problem with signing NDAs came out of the hippy culture the company grew up in. That never really changed enough for the company to survive.
---
this is dos we are talking about so any form of multitasking is going to be a kludge.
How so? Since DOS is such a simple collection of services, it runs great in little virtual 86 compartments. In fact, the whole protected-mode scheme from Intel was designed in a way that DOS would be able to run in 'virtual 8086 machines'. DOS applications run on a multitasking environment like NT or OS/2 quite well, and quite well in 'emulation' (really not emulation') with the Free Software dosemu package.
---
> PC-DOS released version 8, yeah I know different, along time ago.
AFAIK, IBM only released PC-DOS 7, and later PC-DOS 2000, which was just PC-DOS 7 with some Y2K fixes.
The problem was that the DOS function calls were not re-entrent (is that the right word?). So if an app was in the middle of a file save and another app interrupted it to do a file save, the first file save was toast. Or keyboard read, or whatever. Apparantly they didn't quite get that fixed, so they dropped the multi-tasking version. The others (desqview?) got around that by basically doing what Windows did -- they took over the DOS functions and did them themselves, using DOS just get things started in the first place. That's why Microsoft starting calling Windows an operating system -- because it really was doing everything DOS was supposed to do.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Well, a stripped-down version with a broken installer. The FreeDOS people warn against using this CD for anything other than flashing a corrupted BIOS. Those who try to install FreeDOS from this CD may end up with a trashed boot sector.
Dos is not dead, it's just gone embedded. My camera ships with a version of DOS as an internal OS, but you wouldn't know it from use.
Hidden, Dos plots it's revenge.
The ______ Agenda
I've talked to the DrDOS guys a few times... they're pretty cool and are very pro-Linux. They were pushing their Drlx product that lets you use Linux device drivers in a DOS environment to get things like USB support which is nice.
:-)
Anyone who thinks DOS is dead does not work anywhere near the embedded world. It's very much alive and kicking in little boxes all around you and new products are still being developed based on it. Problem is that nobody is putting out device drivers for "new" technology like USB for DOS so unless they find a way to utilize existing drivers they're in trouble as older standards like ISA fade. Linux to the rescue.