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.'"
I know DOS is archaic but I still use it. It's useful for apps when you want limited stuff in memory. Linux and windows can't compete with 100k kernal. Plus I use it whenever I want a new os. I just format in DOS mode then install from there. PC-DOS released version 8, yeah I know different, along time ago. I wonder what the actual differences are between PC 8 and DR 8. Does anyone call DR-DOS "doctor-dos?" I always do. Of course I don't call MS-DOS, "missz. dos," like a possibly-married female.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
I downloaded some utilities for a Western Digital HD. It make a boodisk with - to my surprize - DrDOS as the base. First thing I thought was "Hey wow, haven't see that in awhile!"
It makes sense, though. DOS will run on just about any x86 based machine out there, insuring a very wide compatability, it's something most people are used to (ie: DOS, as opposed to a linux based bootloader, which fewer people are accustomed to) and I'm sure the licensing is a mere fraction of MSDOS - or at least it would be if MS still supported it.
Makes you wonder about things like FreeDOS... maybe it's still a bit unrefined for these uses? Maybe buyers actually do want a "real company" behind the products they use?
=Smidge=
And you might have mentioned, for those who think that the only OSs are Windows, Linux, and MacOS, that DR-DOS is the current incarnation of CP/M -- the OS that would have been the OS if the folks at Digital Research hadn't been so paranoid about NDAs.
Just because somebody once worked for a company which, after a change of management, went on to do bad things doesn't implicate them in any way in that.
Look here, buster. We're short on two minute hate subjects today and you're trying to defend a known villain?
Silence!
Interesting, the buy icon at the bottom has only a 5-licence pack for $200. The previous version is $29 for a single user licence.
(I must say the site isn't very professional. It lists DPMI/DPMS in two bullet points and multi-tasking in three.)
Wouldn't they have to pay a royalty to Microsoft due to the patents on Fat32 in embedded devices?
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.
... and they say that BSD is dying! ;)
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.
---
FYI, when you buy an ASUS motherboard, its utility cdrom boots FreeDOS.
Nope, they shipped version 4.0 twice. The second version of 4.0 didn't really offer anything over 3.3 (and was really buggy), so most people just skipped from 3.3 to 5.0 (I still have the manuals :-)
You can see the timeline at the bottom of http://www.maxframe.com/HISZMSD.HTM. There is also a timeline at http://www.nukesoft.co.uk/msdos/dosversions.htm
Since we are playing nostalgia, I should also mention that I used MS-Windows 1.0 once. I was really impressed that it had a Paint program, and went to save my work of art. In those days, standard file dialogs didn't exist (you had to wait till Windows 3.1 for them). It brought up a dialog with a textfield asking for the filename. I started typing, and then wondered how long a name it would let me enter. The answer is that it let me enter a really really long name - I mashed the keyboard until I got bored. I click OK, and the screen froze and the hard disk light blinked every 5 seconds or so. I eventually rebooted the machine to discover most of the root directory entries had gone. Ah, the joys of buffer overflows! A quick session with Norton Disk Doctor got them back. I didn't touch Windows 1 again, but was an avid user of Windows 286, and then 3.0 and onwards once Windows became more mainstream.
I remember supporting Novell DOS 7 circa 1993
~ multitasking (stable)
~ DPMS memory management
~ peer to peer networking w/ snmp, security
~ disk & file compression
~ antivirus & backup
Oddly enough, Windows 3.10 was the only unstable app on those systems.
Words to men, as air to birds.
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.
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.
I've been using DrDOS (Caldera OpenDOS) 7.03 for many years now; it came with Caldera 1.3 Linux' DosEMU package and a free for individual use license, so I have installed it on all my boxes (it uses Lilo to dual/triple boot) as I still use several DOS programs, and it runs under DosEMU in my Knoppix 3.2 hard disk install as well.
And, yeah, I would call version 7.03 stable (although 7.0 and 7.02 definitely were NOT stable when using DPMS.) I have never had an issue with it, uptimes rivaled Linux.
Some DOS programs are irreplaceable (Dragmax and Pipemax for auto racers, several truly great astrology programs, and my favorite scientific encyclopedia -- Compton's original CD. The Windows versions of it do not have as much content unless you count "movie clips" as content.)
So it's time to upgrade so I can read/write FAT32 partitions, as well, I guess. I just hate to see a "free" (as in beer) license go commercial, though.
to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms. ..... because you can't buy 2GB drives anymore :-)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.